Hemingway

...But from the moment he began to tackle the novel (in The Sun Also Rises), he found himself adrift in a more complex literary form, whose demands did not permit him to play hide-and-seek with his anxieties so easily...

...But no one before Lynn has realized how central a role his mother played in that drama...

...But the Hemingway the world knows is very different from the man who stares out in poignant vacancy from the dust jacket of Kenneth Lynn's new biography...

...Just to confuse the two children further as to precisely who and what they were—although undoubtedly this was not her conscious intention —she dressed both as boys during family stays at their summer cottage in northern Michigan...

...Not until Ernest went off to kindergarten was the pattern of same-sex dressing broken off...

...No, let it grow a little longer and I could cut mine and we'd be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark...

...How grow...

...But, as the shotgun blast on that July morning proved, the mask could never remake the man in its own image...

...It would be fun...

...The stern but impotent Dr...

...Skeptical readers may well come to the book wondering how anything new could possibly be said about Hemingway after all these years...

...Lynn has studied Hemingway with cool analytical precision and with the imaginative sympathy of a novelist...

...By attending to previously neglected aspects of both life and work, Lynn has transformed our vision of the whole, and in the process laid bare the sources of Hemingway's creativity...

...Such a fruitless and artificial division of opinion could never havearisen, had the Hemingway persona not been so powerfully alive—so powerful indeed that, even from the perspective of the debunkers, it prevented an unhindered view of Hemingway's writing...

...Even at the age of twenty, Hemingway's demeanor caused Gregory Clark of the Toronto Star to marvel that "a more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked the earth...

...This Hemingway is a very different man from the Hemingway of grandiose myth...

...Catherine also says to Frederic elsewhere in the novel that "I'm you," that he should not "make up a separate me," and that she wants only "what you want...

...Androgyny had just come widely into fashion in the 1920s, especially in such avant-garde continental centers as Paris and Berlin, at the very moment the expatriate Hemingway was beginning his serious literary career...

...After Kenneth Lynn's account of Hemingway, however, it will be impossible for any of these explanations to be persuasive, except to those who have a personal or ideological stake in their old position...

...Fancying herself an artist, she disdained the humdrum duties of the Hausfrau, to such an extent that Hemingway's father had to take care of the food shopping and much of the cooking, on top of his demanding practice as a physician...

...Better than any previous biographer, he has succeeded in weaving life and work into a single fabric, and through brilliantly intuitive detective work, has been able to show the complex process by which Hemingway transmuted the events of his life into fiction, and used that fiction simultaneously to express and to conceal his innermost thoughts...

...Nevertheless, he was also bearing witness to a disturbing cultural undercurrent that has only gathered strength as our century has progressed...

...At night we are...

...But perhaps not...

...but it was a wound inflicted far earlier in life, and under far less flattering circumstances, than his mythologists care to believe...

...In this extraordinarily evocative photograph, one begins to sense the fathomless, helpless melancholy of the gifted man who, despite his receipt of a Nobel Prize, worldwide acclaim, and a lifetime's worth of honors, finally turned a twelve-gauge, double-barreled shotgun against himself early on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1961, and blasted away his Wilfred M. McClay teaches American intellectual history at Thlane University...

...It might be nice short...

...Grace often referred to Ernest as her "sweet Dutch dolly," and a photograph of two-year-old Ernest in girl's clothing bears the inscription "summer girl...

...And the manipulative intent he sensed behind Grace's unctuous recitation of shallow Protestant pieties was the true source of the nausea he felt, long before he went to war, when he heard people speak of high ideals...

...His puffy-lidded, exhausted, vaguely pleading eyes attest to a longstanding torment, and a sense of looming defeat...

...What he has uncovered is a powerful preoccupation with androgyny and sexual crossing in Hemingway's work, a preoccupation that manifests itself in countless ways, in virtually everything Hemingway wrote...

...Grace's egotism and self-indulgence, in tandem with her husband's strange submissiveness to her will, would leave an indelible mark on the young Ernest...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 45...

...The key to Ernest Hemingway is not to be found in the far-flung romantic locales of his public life, but in the decidedly unheroic, middle-class environs of Oak Park, Illinois, his boyhood home—a place about which, significantly, he could never summon the courage to write directly...

...So long as Hemingway has been caught in the crossfire between worshippers and debunkers, the advent of that sought-after clarity has eluded him, and the critical estimate of his work has as a consequence continued to sink...

...Contemptuous of suicide as a form of sinful cowardice, Hemingway flushed with shame whenever he thought of his father's weakness...

...So, too, is the Hemingway depicted in the pages of Lynn's biography, one fact which immediately distinguishes it from most of what has been written about Hemingway...

...But Lynn has gone much further than merely to offer striking corroboration of this familiar view of Hemingway...

...Thus, the residue of his strange childhood became incorporated into the persistent imagery of twinhood in his work...

...It's long enough now...

...Unfortunately, it was in those very years that the Hemingway myth began to take root, and its imprisoning effects on Hemingway's creative imagination were already clearly visible by 1932, with the publication of his pretentious ode to the Spanish bullfight, Death in the Afternoon...

...In the end, the power of the myth overwhelmed all, and the mask merged with the face...

...There isn't any me any more...

...The deep creases in his face and the wavy sweeps of his unruly hair and beard converge and swirl, like the whirlpools of angst in a Van Gogh self-portrait...

...There is also evidence Grace may have had a female lover, who lived in the house until Hemingway's father could stand her presence no more and, in a rare display of backbone, ordered her out...

...Just grow a little longer...

...Just what you want...

...Surely, these critics speculated, Hemingway also incurred a profound psychic wound brought on by his disgust for the senseless slaughter of the war, a wound which would account for the haunted imagery of death and destruction and the language of disillusionment which permeate so much of his work...

...Perhaps Hemingway's restless shade will wince to hear such truths told at last...

...Undoubtedly this urge was grounded, as Lynn suggests, in the limitations of Grace's own upbringing—but the psychological damage to Ernest and Marcelline was profound and lasting...

...In his characteristically understated, stripped-down tales of violence and sex, as well as his worldly-wise and unillusioned persona, he captured the imagination of the entire world, for he seemed to absorb fully the brutal underside of life in our time, and offer it up whole in hard, crystalline prose that never dissembled and never flinched...

...The nights are grand...

...We know, for example, that his father's suicide, about which he spoke frequently in both his life and his work, haunted him for the rest of his life...

...No less than such legendary nineteenth-century culture heroes as Lord Byron or Franz Liszt, Hemingway the artist has seemed tightly inseparable in the mind of his public from Hemingway the man...

...and even into the great Hemingway love scenes which, as Lynn points out, are filled with erotic whisperings and playful pillow talk about the exchanging of sexual roles...

...Ernest was dressed as a girl with a girlish hairdo, to match Marcelline's...

...I know it...

...From his bold skirmishes in the bullring and the boxing ring, to his extravagant African hunting safaris, to his uncanny fearlessness and savoir-faire in the face of battle, all of Hemingway's putative feats seemed to mark him as the embodiment of an intensely masculine, Homeric ideal, grafted onto a twentieth-century version of the bold, independent, experience-hungry romantic artist...

...First and last, says Lynn, Grace was the "dark queen" of Hemingway's inner world, a treacherous paradigm of all womankind...

...O ne of Grace's whims, which other Hemingway biographers have passed over far too lightly, was her elaborate fantasy that Ernest and his older sister Marcelline were to be raised as if they were twins of the same sex...

...And indeed, Grace Hall Hemingway was a physically imposing, self-possessed woman, used to having her own way in everything, whatever the cost...

...Max Eastman immediately dubbed it "Bull in the Afternoon," and not without reason, for as Lynn points out, its hero was not a haunted Jake Barnes or Nick Adams, but "an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway...

...On the other hand, there have always been plenty of critics who found Hemingway's taste for breast-beating annoying, and who take great delight in labeling him a colossal fraud...

...Hemingway's seething reaction to this bizarre charade can only be guessed at...

...It's an awful nuisance in the bed at night...

...According to his own accounts (which, as Lynn demonstrates, were riddled with lies and exaggerations), Hemingway had been heroically wounded in the First World War...

...In the fabulous anecdotes about Hemingway's manly prowess circulated in the public press during the forties and fifties, the pleasing image of Hemingway's hard drinking and hard playing is unmarred by the waves of desperation that drove his increasingly compulsive and self-destructive behavior...

...Lynn has in fact done Hemingway an enormous favor—one the novelist could never have done forhimself—by lifting from his shoulders an immense, largely self-imposed burden of fancy and falsehood, thus making it possible for us to read his work freshly, as the tale of a ceaseless, and finally tragic, inner struggle...

...Small wonder, under the circumstances, that Hemingway grew into such a peculiar man...

...You are...

...And such interpretations will likely have implications extending far beyond the tight coils of his troubled psyche...

...And the recurrence of the same kinds of images and conversations, in story after story, novel after novel—from such early stories as "Soldier's Home," through The Sun Also Rises, and most graphically of all, in the recently published fragment of The Garden of Eden—makes it clear beyond question that Hemingway's own erotic ideal was bound up in the confusion and commingling of the sexes, and that the seeds of this ideal can be found not in Paris, but in Oak Park...

...But the explanation seized upon by many of the most influential critics, from Malcolm Cowley to Edmund Wilson, amounted to little more than a politically inspired variation upon the mythic theme, transcribed, as it were, for the left hand...

...Virtually every major work in the Hemingway oeuvre will now have to be rethought and reinterpreted, in line with this new understanding of their author...

...We're the same one...

...The "war wound" interpretation had the great virtue, in their eyes, of making the bloody-minded Hemingway into a politically correct, anti-war writer, without significantly sacrificing his lingering aura of machismo...

...In the earliest works, which Lynn still regards as his best, Hemingway found a way to give uncanny expression to the things that troubled him most, without ever revealing precisely what they were...

...When the dust begins to settle after the initial impact of Lynn's book, those who genuinely admire Hemingway's art will find that his new biographer has given their man a new lease on life...

...Even his remarkable success with The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 did not really alter the downward curve of his career, for that was a book bathed in a sort of crowd-pleasing sentimentality and crude symbolism that the younger Hemingway would have disdained...

...For as Hemingway's life would suggest, those who tinker with the traditional conceptions of gender may be playing with fire...

...These stories are more like 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 cryptic, fragmentary, lyric poems than straightforward works of narrative prose, and it was in such shorter forms that Hemingway excelled...

...Over the years, Hemingway and his work have generally been approached in two quite different ways: in a spirit of uncritical admiration, or in a spirit of unrestrained debunking...

...It will be impossible henceforth to read Hemingway in the same way...

...To be sure, many elements of that struggle have been adumbrated before...

...they had identical toys and identical dolls...

...Why, for example, would a hypermasculine writer, whether real or fake, put a sexually incapacitated male character like Jake Barnes—a journalist in Paris, just as Hemingway was himself—at the center of The Sun Also Rises...

...As he himself observed in his Nobel Prize address: "Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes . . . but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten...

...But then he was likely to erupt into a rage at his domineering mother, whom he believed to have driven her husband to such extremes...

...Even his suicide did not deter such hell-bent debunkers as Dwight Macdonald from gloating that the champ, finding himself bloody and bowed in the fifteenth round, had taken the easy way out by taking the coward's way out...

...but Grace still went to the extreme of holding Marcelline back from grade school a year, so the two "twins" could begin at the same time...

...There was indeed a wound that figured decisively in Hemingway's art and life...

...I wouldn't let you cut yours...

...The strange combination of extreme callousness and extreme dependency which marked Hemingway's dealing with women had their beginning with Grace...

...Wouldn't you like it short...

...into the Hemingwayesque male-female relationships which so often strain to resemble buddy-buddy male friendships (and view the specter of pregnancy and childbirth as a cruel destroyer...

...In light of Hemingway's preoccupation with blurred sexual identity, these words cannot be read, in the manner of strident feminist critics, as a fantasy of complete male domination, emanating from a man who hated women...

...It also had the virtue, from Hemingway's point of view, of dressing up his charHEMINGWAY Kenneth S. Lynn/Simon and Schuster/$24.95 Wilfred M. McClay THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 43 acters' peculiar anxieties, dreads, and preoccupations in the more presentable garb of World History...

...A work like The Garden of Eden, which put aside the mythic mask, was far too dangerous, too revealing of precisely the things Hemingway wanted to hide, for it ever to be finished, let alone published in his lifetime...

...Oh darling, I want you so much I want to be you too...

...Then we'd both be alike...

...It is hardly possible not to, for Hemingway is one of the inescapable presences of our century, a combative, swaggering, larger-than-life figure whose spectacular and highly publicized extraliterary exploits became, early in his career, the stuff of an unforgettable persona...

...They will come away from the book wondering how so much was misread, for so long, by so many...

...they slept in the same bedroom, in twin white cribs...

...entire cranial vault...

...Known for her tomboyish ways as a young girl, Grace ruled the Hemingway household with an effective combination of naked assertiveness and well-timed attacks of fatigue...

...Tender moments in A Farewell to Arms, for example, emerge in a different light when one perceives the androgynous sensibility that activates them: "Darling, why don't you let your hair grow [says Catherine Barkley to Lieutenant Frederic Henry...

...I like it...

...Laboring under the double burden of his parents' unhappy relationship and the disorienting pretense of his "twinhood," Hemingway could not escape being chronically uncertain of his masculinity and emotionally crippled in his relations with women...

...I like it the way it is...

...I might...

...into Hemingway's ability to think himself imaginatively into femalecharacters, as in the story "Up in Michigan" or the novel A Farewell to Arms...

...I'm tired of it...

...For those who actually read Hemingway's work, and did so with sympathy and interest, there had to be a more satisfying explanation...

...As Lynn observes, he always said that he wanted "to make people feel more than they understood," and in a vividly compressed, meticulously controlled masterpiece like "Indian Camp" or "Big Two-Hearted River," he could pull it off, because the brevity of the form itself spared him the necessity of expounding on matters he dared not touch directly...

...Indeed, hiswork may eventually be seen as a progressive fever chart, sensitively registering the early stages of one of this century's most troubling social and psychological transformations: the progressive blurring and erosion of sexual differentiation...

...In this respect, his example ought to have a sobering effect upon contemporary sages who regard this development with enthusiasm, and who put forward androgyny as a cultural ideal towards which right-thinking men and women must strive...

...For Lynn's biography sweeps the landscape of Hemingway scholarship clean, leaving standing little of what has been said and written in the past...

...into Hemingway's peculiar erotic preoccupation with short-haired, boyish, or lesbian women...

...With each passing year, Hemingway found the temptations of the myth harder to resist, even though dependence on it increasingly meant living a lie, and what is worse, exiling himself from the emotional wellsprings of his art...

...No doubt Hemingway was captivated by the sights of kinky Paris for reasons that were ultimately quite personal: his love-hate obsession with his forceful mother, and the feminine component submerged in his own quivering sensibility...

...Why does the Hemingway-like outdoorsman of "Big elkvo-Hearted River" betray a strange and indeterminate nervousness, which he dares not name...