The importance of not being Ernest
Sarah Bradford
HEMINGWAY: A BIOGRAPHY by Jeffrey Meyers
Macmillan, f15.95
raid of nothing', the infant Hemingway would shout when asked what he was afraid of. He would go on shouting the same thing, increasingly noisily and aggressively, through the remaining years of his life, until on a July morning in Idaho in 1961 he proved that it was not death but life of which he was finally afraid. The child Hemingway was already addicted to what his new biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, calls `mythomania', boasting at the age of five that he had stopped a runaway horse single-handed. Aged six, he found a sleep- ing porcupine in a shed and hacked it to pieces with an axe; he was already attracted to the spectacle of violent death, a trail that was to lead through the bull- rings and sierras of Spain, the battlefields of the second world war, and, ultimately, to his suicide.
Hemingway's persona was peculiarly re- levant to his art in that his fiction was in essence autobiographical. In the end the persona interfered with the art as his ego, fed by success, swelled monstrously, im- perilling his balance as a writer and stifling the original springs of his creativity. The strength of Meyers's biography lies in his skilful inter-relation of life and art, as he charts the decline and fall of a 20th-century genius from the eager, innovative Twen- ties, the decade of his masterpieces, through the successful, boastful Thirties, the drunken, barren Forties, and the hol- low renaissance of the Fifties, to the desolate end.
Hemingway was born in the prosperous middle-class Chicago suburb of Oak Park, and spent the rest of his life escaping from it. Europe was his spiritual home, Paris, Venice and, above all, the Spain of The Sun Also Rises. His father taught him to hunt and to box, but the formative experi- ences of his life as a writer, his war wound on the Italian front in 1918 and his subse- quent affair with his hospital nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, his years among the liter- ary expatriates in Paris in the Twenties and his first encounter with the bullfighting world at Pamplona, all took place in Europe. Six foot tall, brown-eyed, consci- entious, shy and diffident, the young
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Hemingway charmed his way round Paris, learning his craft at the feet of the masters. He brought with him a grounding in journalism and an admiration for the tough, he-man sports writers like Ring Lardner. In Paris he polished and fined the style which is his major contribution to 20th-century writing, absorbing the com- pressed, precise Imagist style from Pound, an economy of implication from Joyce and prose rhythms from Gertrude Stein (when Stein later attacked him in The Auto- biography of Alice B. Toklas Hemingway allegedly sent her a cable, `a bitch is a bitch is a bitch'). In 1924 he made his first trip to Pamplona and by 1925, the year in which he began The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway the writer was complete. With the publica- tion of A Farewell to Arms (1929) he reached the pinnacle of his literary reputa- tion.
But success spoiled Hemingway the man, bringing out his aggression, selfish- ness and cruelty, feeding what his friend, Scott Fitzgerald, recognised as a neurotic tendency towards megalomania. He was pathologically competitive, seeing even writing as a kind of literary prizefight, not only with contemporaries but also with writers of the past, reaching a pitch of absurdity when he declared in an interview in 1949: I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr Stendhal, and I think I had the edge in the last one.
This belligerent literary persona first emerged in Death in the Afternoon. The first of his books to meet with hostile reviews, it was also the first time his public image was criticised in connection with his work. Max Eastman wrote of his `literary style of wearing false hair on his chest' which Hemingway took as an implication that he was either impotent or homosex- ual; he later physically belaboured the critic for it. Jealous, suspicious and unable to brook competition, he fought with all his literary friends, except Pound and Joyce, preferring the admiring and uncritical com- pany of the very rich or of inferior hangers- on.
A treacherous friend, he was also an appalling husband, showing himself perhaps at his least attractive in his rela- tionship with his four wives. Zelda Fitz- gerald, with the perception of madness, was the first to find his machismo too good to be true. `No one is as masculine as you pretend to be', she told him and dubbed him 'a professional he-man' (The Sun Also Rises, she said, was about 'bullfighting, bullslinging and bullshitting'). She also called him `a pansy with hair on his chest' which must have been particularly wound- ing since Hemingway was vitriolic about male homosexuals (Tennessee Williams was afraid to meet him, telling Kenneth Tynan that Ernest `kicks people like me in the crotch'). There is, however, according to Meyers, absolutely no evidence that he was a closet homosexual. It is certainly possible to speculate that deep-down he was afraid of women, despite his need for them, and that he was attracted to war and sport because they eliminated women, the source of his greatest anxiety. Subconsciously he may have felt that they threatened his man- hood, which could explain the ludicrous boasting about his sexual potency to which he was given in his later years. He disliked his mother, whom he accused, quite unfair- ly, of dominating his father, of mentally castrating him and driving him to suicide in 1928, and he never recovered from the shock of being jilted by his first love, Agnes von Kurowsky. Nevertheless, he needed women, not only for his creature comforts and to bolster his ego but because he believed, almost superstitiously, that there was a connection between passion and creativity. 'Ernest needs a new woman for each big book', Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Morley Callaghan. `There was one for the stories [Hadley] and The Sun Also Rises [Duff Twysden, model for Brea Ashley]. Now there's Pauline. A Farewell to Arms is a big book. If there's another big book I think we'll find Ernest has another wife . . .' The big book was to be For Whom the Bell Tolls and the wife was to be Martha Gellhorn, the only one of his wives to refuse to be dominated by him and to leave him when he became impossible to live with, something for which he never forgave her. His fourth wife, Mary Welsh, lasted to the end, but only because she was masochistically prepared to put up With whatever he dished out. After For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) the gradual descent in the quality of Hemingway's work which had begun after Farewell to Arms accelerated sharply Edmund Wilson, one of his most per' pient critics, observed that by 1939 he had already passed 'into a phase where he is occupied in building up his public personal- ity . . . Hemingway has created a Heming- way who is not only incredible but obno- xious. He is certainly his own worst- invented character.' The character was `Papa', as he liked to be called, the boastful, hard-drinking, shooting, flail' larger-than-life figure of the Cuban pen In Cuba, where he lived at the Finca V1813, above Havana from 1940 to 1960, PaPas no longer wrote, escaping the fear 0.`.. creative failure in drinking and 0111.e fishing with his aristocratic Cuban friends, with millionaire sportsmen like WulsWil, Guest and a disreputable collection 01 inferior cronies whom Martha Gellhorn.n called `the Cuban zombies'. Gertrude Stoat explained the change in him, writing that `he had compensated for his incred itn): acute shyness and sensitivity by adopting shield of brutality. When this happened he lost touch with his true genius'. In Cuba 11_0' was certainly brutal, indulging in wan._,° killing when black moods were upon flu" At sea on his boat, the Pilar, he would shoot a tern with one barrel then turn the other on its grieving mate, and when a peasant's dog killed one of the swarming, spoiled cats at the Finca, he deliberately shot it in the guts so that it took three agonising days to die. The second world war, which Heming- way called 'the greatest outdoor sport', provided him with the opportunity to fulfil his Boy's Own adventure fantasies, orga- nising an amateur spy ring in Cuba known as the 'Crook Factory', an absurdly Gra- ham Greene-ish set-up which attracted the hostile attention of the FBI (Hemingway called them `Franco's Bastard Irish') and `sub-hunting' with the Pilar. He went over to Europe to kill Germans (although offi- cially a war correspondent), to organise an Informal information service with a band of the French Resistance and take part in the desperate battles in the Hiirtgenwald. He liberated the Ritz, the Travellers' and other Parisian watering holes, became briefly impotent and worried about 'Mr Scrooby' during his affair with Mary Welsh, but there were no 'big books' about the war. Across the River and into the Trees (1950), inspired by his meeting with the Young Venetian aristocrat Adriana Ivan- cich and a sentimental pilgrimage to the old battlefields on the Piave was a deriva- tive version of Farewell to Arms and received a critical battering. Trips to Africa and to Spain in an attempt to revive the inspiration of The Sun Also Rises and 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' only served to underline the decline of the master, while two plane crashes in Africa shattered his health for good. Hemingway was to write only one more good book (I agree with Gregory Hemingway in finding The Old Man and the Sea (1952) to be 'a bucket of sentimental slop'), A Moveable Feast. A memoir of his Paris days based on the lucky discovery of an old trunk containing his papers in the basement of the Ritz which had lain there since the Twenties, it was published posthumously in 1964, and in it Hemingway reached out from beyond the grave to lash at his old friends.
Hemingway's last year makes tragic reading. He was a mental, physical and creative wreck. He had become a chronic alcoholic. Patrick Hemingway said that his father drank a quart of whisky a day for the last 20 years of his life; without it, he was `morose, silent, depressed'. His liver, George Plimpton recorded, bulged out from his body 'like a long, fat leech'. Now he was deprived of alcohol, suffering from hypertension, failing vision and diabetes, liver and kidney disease. Drugs prescribed to cure his hypertension caused depression and impotence. He was 60 and looked 90. In addition to all his physical diseases he suffered from 'obsessions, delusions, para- noid fears of poverty and persecution, extreme depression, inability to work and suicidal impulses' which led to a serious mental breakdown in November 1960, when he was hospitalised in the Mayo Clinic and given electric shock treatment. This did not cure his delusions but ruined his memory. 'What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory which is my capital and putting me out of busi- ness?', he asked. 'It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.' After his release in February 1961 he was invited to contribute a handwritten tribute to President Ken- nedy.. It took him an entire week of effort to write three or four simple sentences and he wept tears of anguish and frustration as he told his doctor that the words would not come any more. In April, after Mary found him with a shotgun in his hand, he was sent back to the Mayo for ten more shock treatments. On his release, a friend found the once splendid physical specimen 'a fragile, too-often-repaired old man . . . broken beyond repair'. Hemingway him- self knew what he must do. 'If I can't exist on my own terms' he had written to Hotchner from the clinic in June, 'then existence is impossible . . On 2 July, two days after he came home from the Mayo Clinic, Ernest Hemingway pushed two shells into his 12-gauge Boss shotgun, put the end of the barrel into his mouth, pulled the trigger and blew out his brains. From his point of view, it was the only way out, but it was years too late. As he had written when recovering from his war wound in October 1918: 'How much better . . . to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shat- tered.'
Hemingway particularly disliked what he described to Wallace Meyer in 1952 as young English professors rattling the skeletons in his cupboard and crawling through his private life to academic suc- cess: `[They all see] gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer'. Jeffrey Meyers, a disting- uished literary biographer and Professor of English at the University of Colorado, certainly hangs out a good deal of Heming- way's dirty laundry, but in the process he has written an illuminating critical biogra- phy complementing the major work by Professor Carlos Baker published in 1969 and bringing up to date recent research on the subject. It lacks the seething life of the Baker biography but is gripping and per- suasive in its analysis of the decline and fall of a great American writer whose influence stretched from Chandler to Kerouac and even to Saul Bellow. Hemingway lives today in the persona of Norman Mailer who, according to Meyers, 'became the hip-pocket Hemingway of our time'. Mail- er, acknowledging Hemingway as the Mas- ter, sees him as a tragic figure, wrestling with destructive self-knowledge of his cowardice and a secret lust for suicide: `What he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible that he carried a weight of anxiety within him which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.'
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