Hemingway Before the Legend

...Here as elsewhere, one feels that, though Mr...

...Dangerous as it is to probe beneath the surface, one can never discover what is there unless he takes the risk...

...What we cannot help wishing is that he had attempted to disentangle Hemingway's public and private personalities, or, if so it turned out, to show where the two became confused or fused in Hemingway himself...

...In Italy, he immediately complained of the Austrians' failure to attack the entrenched Italians: "I'm fed up...

...The occasional tensions of the period have been magnified until the symbol of his boyhood is a runaway vagabondage...

...Having a wonderful time...

...Fenton doesn't try to tell us, and the glimpses don't suffice to answer the questions we want to ask...

...Fenton leaves us with no key at all...

...Fenton gives us good pictures of Hemingway as a student and writer for high-school publications in Oak Park, cub reporter on the Kansas City Star, ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, freelance journalist in Toronto and Chicago, and finally feature writer and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and Star Weekly...

...From conversations and correspondence with Hemingway's friends and acquaintances, and from a painstaking reading of his high-school and newspaper writings, Charles Fenton gathered the materials for a carefully detailed account of the apprentice days that preceded In Our Time and The Sun-Also Rises...

...Yet, he never seriously tries to get at the complexities that demand examination however much they forbid final explanations...

...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Last winter, while Hemingway was busy keeping the Hemingway legend alive by escaping death in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, an account of the nore-legendary Hemingway was being readied for his public...

...Fenton does not hold that Hemingway is a simple man or that the sources of his art can be illuminated by simple examination of the surfaces...

...In his first reporting job, on the Kansas City Star, Hemingway showed the acute interest in words, the insistence on precise observation, and the ability to work hard and take "great pains" that were later characteristic...

...through copious quotations, how his style gradually developed and how he used his journalism to help him toward his fiction...

...Fenton explains that this excerpt from a Milan letter expresses Hemingway's "public personality...

...In Chicago, he snorted at his friends' discussions of art, and ostentatiously left to watch the fighters working out in the gym...

...As soon as he got to Paris on his way to join the ambulance service, he hopped a taxi and said, "Drive up to where those shells are falling...

...But after taking away one key which might have helped us to an understanding, albeit a partial one, Mr...

...The book will prove indispensable for anyone who seeks facts about the early Hemingway, and especially about his apprentice writings...

...Hemingway as an adult has never taken anything easily, nor do many high-school students of intelligence and sensitivity have an entirely carefree existence...

...it simply tries to be factual, scholarly —and safe...

...Such episodes did occur, of course, as they occur for many boys...

...If Gertrude Stein was unfair to him when she pictured him pacing the room, head in hand, crying in anguish, "My career, my career...

...The book provides a great many glimpses of the man who later became familiar to all of us...

...Otherwise, the sections dealing with Hemingway as foreign correspondent—and they make up almost half the book—offer little to repay us for the tedium of reading so many of the articles and dispatches which their author has certainly never wanted to re-read...

...Fenton seeks to show us...

...Fenton adopted a self-denying ordinance that prevents him fom giving his material the significance and the life it should have...

...Had my baptism of fire my first day here, when an entire munition plant exploded...

...But in resolutely refusing not to theorize, or even interpret, Mr...

...We carried them in like at the General Hospital, Kansas City...

...Hemingway himself has encouraged the legend of a turbulent youth...

...Fenton has collected a wealth of interesting material, in endeavoring to avoid what he considered the errors of preceding interpreters he has fallen into the even worse error of saying little beyond the obvious...

...there yet was much essential truth in the picture...

...But, just as in the discussions of Hemingway's personality, the author never gets beneath the surface...

...For this everyone interested in Hemingway can only be grateful...

...If the book is anti-legendary, it is in no sense debunking...

...Much of the material that he brings together here is new...

...In Paris, as a foreign correspondent working hard between dispatches to do "real" writing, he despised the strange-acting and strange-looking breed that crowd the tables of the Cafe Rotonde...posing as artists...

...Thus, after giving details of Hemingway's childhood and school days, the author tells us that the Ail-American Boy is a more accurate image than the turbulent youth (or, by implication, the wounded hero of Philip Young's study) : "It was characteristic of such a temperament that this buoyancy should disguise a more somber aspect of his life and attitudes...

...What is pose, and what his natural posture...

...But he had his eye steadily, consciously and self-consciously, on his goal: to get out of journalism and write things that would endure...

...Hemingway was a dedicated, determined writer...

...It is this side of his Oak Park boyhood which has been emphasized by Freudian literary commentators and casual biographers...

...The seeds of his mature style can be found in his early style (of course), and here we can watch the seed sprout and grow under the care and cultivation of Wellington and Moise of the Kansas City Star, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein and, above all, the young Poppa himself...

...He makes one fine analysis of the differences between an original cable from Adrian-ople and the revised version for In Our Time...

...they are almost a pattern for a certain kind of - middle-class American boyhood...

...He could turn out trash at the dictates of editors with an astonishing and frightening facility—as anyone who read his Look account of the recent African misadventures well knows...

...Later, he says: "To think of his adolescence in terms of misery or maladjustment is to misunderstand his Oak Park experience and his personality as a whole...

...Probably...

...The main concern of the book, however, is not personality but literary apprenticeship, and a large proportion consists of quotations from Hemingway's journalistic writings...

...There's nothing here but scenery and too damn much of that...

...One of his Toronto acquaintances just after the war remembers him as shadow-boxing while others conversed...