Putting Everything in Question
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
Putting Everything in Question ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY By Carlos Baker Scribner's. 697 pp. $10. Reviewed by ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Professor of English, Columbia University I was a...
...of lying, bullying, boasting, drinking, jealousy, fighting, paranoia, money, trips, fear, wounds, illness, and despair...
...After their marriage, Mary, his loyal fourth wife, began having such mishaps too...
...Missing, for example, is any extended comparative evaluation of the writings themselves...
...The later fiction could not evaluate or absorb what was happening...
...Hemingway's body, from crown to toe, inside and out, suffered more than any body could, except in a medieval saga or Western thriller...
...Hemingway was an ominiv-orous reader who kept up with all sorts of publications, from racing form sheets to the Partisan Review...
...Those he did go to bed with, especially his four wives, he often treated badly...
...The happiest days of his life were with a U.S...
...Odysseus, beloved of Athena, was also a sacker of cities...
...Army unit under heavy attack in Germany, "free of the complications of women...
...So also with the British officer's code of reticent understatement that he set as a standard in his writing, and constantly violated outside it...
...In Africa a rescue plane, about to carry him and his wife from their serious crash a few hours earlier, caught fire before taking off...
...Exactly the opposite has happened...
...His wife Mary had to accommodate herself to all sorts of humiliating triangular situations, which she accepted under the inadequate slogan, "Boys will be boys...
...In both frequency and seriousness, family illnesses equaled the accidents...
...By "Don Juan" Baker apparently means a bedroom athlete or Dionysian ecstatic...
...Often they were sheer fabrications...
...There are no subjects I would not jest about if the jest were funny enough," he once said, "just as, liking wing shooting, I would shoot my own mother if she went in coveys and had a good strong flight...
...Baker's book is as much a document for biologists and apocalyptists as for literary critics...
...From then on the rapidly shifting "ages" of the 20th century, each lasting from five to 10 years, were in part colored for us by the way Hemingway did or did not respond to them—to World War I, retrospectively, in A Farewell to Arms...
...Up to almost the very end, none of this abated Hemingway's enthusiasm for boxing, baseball, travel, deep-sea fishing, safaris, fiestas, and war...
...Baker talked to many of them to establish facts, but there is insufficient sense of how Hemingway really appeared to them, what it was like to be with him...
...Some injuries followed the laws of probability, given the sheer number of risks he took...
...There is far more than one had guessed, a fantastic excess of everything—of women taken (including Havana whores and African Wakamba girls), women abused, creatures killed, friends denounced and rejected...
...While Hemingway killed dragons outside, those in-sids grew larger and more fearsome and finally destroyed him...
...From early interviews with Mussolini, he understood—as Winston Churchill, for one, did not—what Fascism would lead to...
...But his pleasures were manic and interrupted by bizarre episodes in which he publicly humiliated his wives, savagely denounced old friends and benefactors, and in sudden knockdown fights beat up barroom bums, yachting millionaires and Wallace Stevens...
...But all his life, sometimes day after day for months on end, Hemingway killed incredible numbers of creatures simply for the pleasure of it...
...We know every wound his body suffered, but not its erotic joys...
...People in many fields respected his analytical intelligence and phenomenal memory...
...the heating arrangements in the house at Ketchum...
...the number of shotgun shells accumulated for a single duck shoot with Max Perkins (2,300...
...Baker is scrupulous about unpermitted quotations from unpublished manuscripts and the 2.500 unpublished letters...
...This obsession with killing, this presumption of a god's right to take life, has been much discussed by both Hemingway and his critics, especially Philip Young...
...Hunting and war were always the sports of the aristocracy...
...Baker seems to have little sense of the shattering implications of his chronicle...
...Always, he proclaimed utter devotion to prose written "truly...
...As a result his title character, a great talker, rarely speaks...
...Very little of this could Hemingway deal with or even acknowledge in the fiction...
...Eight years have passed since the suicide...
...No ideology or movement could win deep commitment, even briefly...
...Only in the photographs do we meet him face to face...
...This Baker supposed had been taken care of by his own previous critical volume on Hemingway...
...He did not engage blindly...
...His interest in war was a technical, sporting one: Men made even better game than lions...
...This was reserved for craft and sport, the bullfighting of Death in the Afternoon, the lion-hunting of Green Hills of Africa...
...He had emphatic opinions about rival writers...
...Lesser accidents occurred nearly every year...
...We recognized from our own responses to his phrases on a page that Hemingway was creating a generation as much as describing it...
...About the last Baker is content to hint and suggest, even though his subject was "unchivalrously outspoken to friends and even to relatively new acquaintances about his internal domestic affairs...
...To Have or Have Not had been his belated and marginal response to the Depression, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, his qualified commitment to the Spanish Civil War...
...If the sign of maturity is being able to forgive one's parents, Hemingway never grew up...
...After living 35 years with the Hemingway books and Hemingway legend, it is a devastating experience to live it all again in the overcrowded pages of Carlos Baker's meticulously documented chronicle...
...Considering what is now going on in the universities, including the graduate faculties of arts and letters, it is hard to imagine what that definitive book would be like or who would be reading it...
...His car rolled over while he was driving with John Dos Pas-sos...
...For the last year or so, Hemingway was a wasted, prematurely old, nearly speechless man, haunted by fears of the fbi...
...It has been variously explained by his father's suicide, his hatred of his mother, the trauma of his early war experiences, his recurrent moods of despair...
...But such killing, though hyperbolic in his case, is universally the primordial way of being a "man's man," which was his ideal...
...The Old Man and the Sea exalts a man who takes life only when necessary, and who feels a pious kinship with the noble fish that he has killed and that the evil sharks take from him...
...He enjoyed shocking people by referring to his mother as a "prize bitch...
...In the life prior to that decline, Baker obviously finds Hemingway a real monster...
...Baker says that no definitive work can appear on Hemingway before the year 2000, and that "generations of scholars" will open up "new lines of investigation...
...He killed others, he often said, instead of killing himself...
...the stitches in every wound...
...Finally, the man of 60, literally insane, returned full circle to the Paris of The Sun Also Rises in A Moveable Feast—a series of controlled, cruel, nostalgic sketches, in which nothing was forgotten, nothing forgiven...
...the clinical diagnosis of every illness...
...The mature Hemingway, with his jealous hatreds, jangled nerves and battered body—a surrogate for all of us—tried to live life as fully, intensely and appreciatively as possible...
...He was a good soldier and sportsman, brave and uncomplaining...
...Absent also is any study of Hemingway's mind and imagination as it developed and changed over the years...
...But his terms were the traditional ones of an Achilles or Tristan, and therefore incompatible with the detachment, understatement and wit of his early prose...
...The daydream amours of his novels were inspired by women he never went to bed with...
...Whatever codes and illuminations Hemingway appeared to achieve in his early writings gave him no help later...
...In his 50s, Hemingway still planned even modest trips with the excited anticipation of a country boy...
...But he does not ask himself why he has concentrated on the physicality of the action in a way that is no less obsessive and disproportionate than Hemingway's...
...With the life—even so much life—concentrated in a single volume, one might have expected that a certain detachment and distancing would be possible...
...others seemed carelessly self-destructive...
...But he protested too much, and let other vanities corrupt his craft...
...But omitted as well is any detailed investigation of the mass of unpublished manuscripts, to see the relationship between what went wrong with the writing and wrong with the life...
...He was not unpolitical, either...
...Machine-gunning sharks, he wounded himself in both legs...
...In a sense, he was living out the contradictions of an international society in which the old aggressions, now bearing nuclear warheads, were developing suicidally along with an emergent sensibility that as yet had no way of controlling them...
...Reviewed by ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Professor of English, Columbia University I was a sophomore in college in the fall of 1926 when The Sun Also Rises was published...
...the location of Ernest's cot (halfway down the right side) in the Red Cross barracks at Schio...
...to World War II, disastrously, in Across the River and into the Trees...
...Both books were punctuated with flashing, sardonic comments on other writers...
...Hemingway joined in his own person the bullfighting and lion-hunting, the small boat sea adventures of epic and saga, with the mechanized violence of modern war and revolution...
...nor does he see how the life as he tells it becomes a judgment of the works which were so inadequate to that life...
...He loved to shoot sharks with a machine gun, but in his own killing was himself sharklike...
...Breathing flames, Ernest saved himself by breaking open a locked metal door with his head and shoulders...
...He willfully, intelligently and skillfully mastered both the old techniques and the new ones...
...Finally, Baker seems to have little appreciation of the Hemingway wit...
...Quantity and intensity might diminish, and patterns become clear...
...His farm in Cuba was thronged with cats, dogs, cows, fighting cocks, visiting celebrities, resident Cubans, and exiled Basques...
...The Greeks were no less heroic because they boasted, lied, tortured, and raped...
...Men became heroes by killing dragons or other heroes...
...Incredibly, the result is not to correct the legends, but to expand them...
...Twice he shot horses, hoping their bodies would attract bears...
...At that time, we were learning our literary sophistication from other writers, too —from T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, from Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley—but it was Hemingway who taught us to identify a prose style with a life style, to find in a species of wit the clue to a whole pattern of rejections that still left room for Byronic romanticism...
...In his conversation and letters, Hemingway apparently was often very funny in an ingenious, elaborated, allusive way...
...There is basis for the feeling, but mostly the impression is enforced by all that Baker leaves out...
...Baker talked or wrote to some 900 people, all named in the acknowledgments, and tried to reconstruct nearly every nonworking hour of the life: what 19-year-old girl sat next to Hemingway at a four-hour bullfight luncheon...
...It began when at the age of 19 he carried a wounded man 150 yards to safety after his own knee had been smashed by machine gun fire and a Minenwerfer explosive had driven hundreds of fragments into his flesh...
...the size of every marlin...
...Nor does the book offer character studies by the many perceptive persons, including major writers, who knew Hemingway long and well...
...What remains are the physical externals of feasting, drinking, killing, traveling, love-making...
...Yet this gets pitifully little attention compared to the statistics about marlins and ducks...
...In a curious formulation, Baker says that those in a position to know found Hemingway "a perfectly satisfactory lover without being a Don Juan...
...In A. E. Hotch-ner's Papa Hemingway, however much faking there may be or unauthorized use of letters, Hemingway is alive and talks...
...He says that it is Hemingway's "writing rather than his career as a man of action, which justifies the biography...
...How it will seem in the year 2000 we do not know, but right now it seems to put nearly everything in question, including literature itself...
...In his 50s, he was obscenely boastful about his sexual exploits, but none of that is quoted...
...In a World War II blackout, his head smashed into a windshield and required 57 stitches...
...But he grossly exaggerated his brave deeds...
...This would be a chilling thought, except that the kind of scholarship it envisions is already dying on the vine...
...But a Don Juan in the dictionary and psychoanalytic sense Hemingway certainly was, and increasingly so as he grew older...
Vol. 52 • May 1969 • No. 10
