Everything in Excess

...But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr...

...By the end of the' 30s he had broken with nearly all his literary peers...

...ultimately, he killed himself with his own father's Civil War pistol...

...Lawrence and Andre Malraux...

...The question, therefore, is whether the values that dominated Hemingway's writing, including the emphasis on male heroism, are separable from the darker aspects of the life as Myers records it...

...In addition to the indebtedness of Hemingway's war writing to War and Peace, Myers observes the great similarity in pattern of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich...

...We tend to forget how early everything happened to Hemingway, how precocious he was...

...A remarkable proportion of those close to him came to bad ends through fatal accidents, insanity and suicide...

...He was not in business in thosedays...

...Some merely record the disorder of the lives in implied contrast to the order of the work...

...Hcwasonly22when Sherwood Anderson gave him generous letters of introduction to Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, who both took to him immediately, became his teachers and helped him perfect his famous understated style...

...In tackling his latest subject, though, Myers faced a huge mass of materials difficult to assess fairly...

...Determined to stick with him, his last wife suffered public humiliations in the course of three such affairs...

...If truth to experience counts in literature we must have the testimony of writers who, having passed tests of courage in extreme circumstances, possess a consequent sense of themselves and others that can be acquired in no other way...

...The four had finer and more original minds than Hemingway...

...His behavior toward women is particularly relevant critically because his sentimentalized, worshipful heroines are a major defect in his fiction, and because in his own mind love (or what he thought to be love) was essential to the creative process...

...Andre Gide never butted open the jammed door of a burning airplane with his head...

...He brings up the difficult case of George Orwell, and invoking Hemingway's obsession with the word "truth," asks whether by Hemingway's standards—or what should have been his standards—Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is not, in moral and historic terms, a "truer" picture of the Spanish struggle than For Whom the Bell Tolls...

...Toward his sons and siblings he was tyrannical, casting them off when they opposed his wishes...

...What does all this have to do with the best of the writing...

...In violation of his war correspondent's pledge, he killed retreating Germans just for the excitement of it...

...There have been in recent decades a spate of literary biographies...

...Hemingway was a voluminous correspondent, given to extreme changes in mood...

...Hemingway was probably at his peak in the period of the Spanish Civil War...

...Some of the memoirists were as prone to lies and posturing as Hemingway himself...

...The clergyman of his church was a Civil War buff...

...His preoccupation with war and killing was with him from the beginning...

...Increasingly he lived a life of Romantic excess, in drinking, sex, boastful vanity, dangerous exploits...

...He was handsome, courageous, athletic, witty, likable, extremely intelligent, a voracious reader, a devoted craftsman, eager to learn all arts, sports and skills from people who practiced them best...

...He alternated acts of generosity with bullying cruelty...

...He felt a bitter jealousy toward Malraux, shamefully expressed in unfair boasts and taunts...

...It had already been made direct and lean by his newspaper training, including the mastery of cablese under the guidance of Lincoln Steffens...

...In the famous tough-guy New Yorker interview with Lillian Ross he bragged, "I've fought two draws with Mr...

...Myers notices how closely Robert Jordan's experience in For Whom the Bell Tolls parallels Lawrence's in Arabia...

...Nevertheless, when heproduced those scenes he was vividly recalling his own days as a war correspondent in 1922 watching the defeated Greek Army fleeing the Turks...

...Hemingway was not yet 19, with nearly a year of newspaper work behind hi m, when an Austrian bomb knocked him out of World War I. He was not yet 20 when the romance wilh an Army nurse that inspired .1 Farewell to Armscndcd by her jilting him, a more serious w ound than the one he suffered his first week on the Italian front...

...Lawrence, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf...

...He himself made them so by his malicious obiter dicta in Death in the Afternoon and GreenHills of Africa, the notorious portraits of old friends in^4 Moveable Feast, and the autobiographical moments slightly changed into fiction in such stories as "Cat in the Rain...

...Stendhal and I think I had the edge in the last one...

...In 1923, when the first six stories of In Our Time appeared in the Little Review, Hemingway, well married and about to become a father, seemed to have everything...

...Myers' biography is the dramatic story of how much Hemingway saved from all of this and how much he wantonly wasted, especially how many people close to him he destroyed in the course of destroying himself...

...With growing regularity, Hemingway personally violated the soldier's and sportsman's codes which were the moral essence of his stories...

...We were all at some damned Sevastopol.' Two contemporaries whose firsthand encounters with war far exceeded Hemingway's wereT.E...

...Before that knowledge, those of us who lack it must always be a little uneasy, as Henry James was before returned Civil War heroes...

...Lawrence he greatly admired...

...Then commitment to a cause transcended his jealous egotism andiniw Whom the Bell Tolls he could balance magnificent war scenes with the realities of politics...

...But he could invent from knowledge...

...But here too Myers shows his responsibility as a critical historian in his assessment of an era when so many fighters for freedom thought it enough to be antifascist without being antitotalitar-ian...

...This is not only because what Hemingway acted out, as opposed to what those mentioned thought and felt, was so spectacular, violent and gross— almost unbelievable in its excesses—that it evoked a flood of memoirs (17 at present count) by people who knew him...

...Virginia Woolf never killed sharks with a machine gun...

...His doctor father was a relentless hunter who saved humans but killed animals...

...Though Myers is not so sensitive a writer as Carlos Baker, I his volume is a marked advance on Baker's pioneering 1969 biography, both in all the new personal material it contains—some of it pretty horrifying—and in the detailed biographical/critical analyses of individual works...

...Itdoes matter in the totality of literature that Stendhal took part in the Napoleonic retreat from Russia and that Dostoev-sky faced a firing squad prior to his years of imprisonment in Siberia...

...Hemingway retained some old loyalties, though he betrayed his marriages again and again...

...In A Farewell to Arms some of the details of the Italian defeat at Caporetto, which occurred while he was in high school, were worked up from books and newspapers...

...During World War II, on the basis of a faulty assumption, he wrongly accused British officers of cowardice...

...There is another sense in which no book is an island unto itself, as Eliot declared in "Tradition and the Individual Talents...

...On his last safari in Africa he was coldly rebuked by a professional hunter for claiming game he had not shot...

...There are moral and literary dimensions to Hemingway's story that make the sensational aspects critically relevant and raise some deep, troubled thoughts concerning violence in history and literature's long, rather admiring involvement with it back to Trojan times...

...Worst of all was Hemingway's treatment of wives, children, siblings...

...Interviewing a large number of those still living who had known Hemingway well, Myers found them reacting so intensely in love or hate that it was impossible to make their impressions jibe...

...Much that is worst in Norman Mailer's fiction and demonstrative public displays has come from his own excess in taking on the Hemingway persona...

...But not at Borodino...

...In story after story Myers shows specifically how Hemingway transformed private history not only for literary effect but to fulfill wishes or assuage guilt...

...A great deal, if we recognize that at the time of its biggest impact Hemingway's fiction affected the life-attitudes of his most devoted readers in ways that were far more than literary...

...Tolstoy unless I am crazy or keep getting better...

...No man is an island unto himself...

...So far as writing is concerned it does not matter one whit that they never risked their own lives in trying to kill others...

...Both of his grandfathers fought in the Civil War...

...Lawrence never recited obscene poems about his wife to drunken cronies...

...After he and Dos Passos split politically in the Spanish Civil War over the Communists' secret execution of one of Dos Passos' closest friends, Hemingway denounced Dos Passos as a bastard Portuguese who sold out for money...

...Anumber of them—Fiction and the Colonial Experience, Disease and the Novel, Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930—bear directly on the material of the present biography, as do his studies of George Orwell, Wyndham Lewis and T.E...

...The conventional response is to say, "What of it...

...When Ernest was six he found a porcupine asleep in the school woodshed and hacked it to pieces with an ax...

...But despite everything he had written in his stories, he was incapable of exercising what the Humanists of his day called the inner check...

...His son Jack accused him of directly causing the death of Jack's mother...

...In physical crises he could be resourcefully heroic...

...he believed that every strong impulse, however unworthy, must be obeyed simply because he, Ernest Hemingway, felt it...

...But the issue is not so simple, as Jeffrey Myers shows us in discussing some of Hemingway's models, such as Stephen Crane and JosephConrad...

...Who wishes them to have done such things...

...In the best of them, like Leon Edel's massive Henry James and the present study by Myers, when books are put together with the events they were drawn from, facts both about human nature and art emerge that go beyond what can be discovered in the books alone, yet without impairing their integrity as art...

...Shocking though some of the personal scandals may be, they bear directly on any estimation of Hemingway's art...

...Hemingway was not averse to invention or documentation in fiction...

...The Short Happy Life of Francis Ma-comber" derives from a scandal well known in African hunting circles, yet draws also on Hemingway's feelings about his mistress Jane Mason and his wife Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he married partly for her money...

...None of the four was wounded in war or enjoyed the purgative ecstasy of what Albert Camus called "the one absolute freedom, the freedom to kill...

...He loved the Old Testament because of all the battles in it...

...It is true that Henry James never went into the bush alone to finish off a wounded lion...

...The strongest in his life were his mother and Martha Gelhorn, both of whom he came to hate...

...As early as 1926, in Torrents of Spring, hemade cruel fun of his benefactor Sherwood Anderson...

...His ideal was to have a loyal wife to take care of practical matters while he wrote, a new mistress to inspire the writing, and a former love to write about romantically butnottruly...

...The more success and power Hemingway enjoyed, themorearrogant, boastful and vindictive he became...

...They had their own kind of courage...

...27.50 Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University As the overwhelming detail of this biography demonstrates, we no w know more about Ernest Hemingway than about any other modern writer, more even than about Henry James, D.H...

...Myers has written or edited some 20 books...

...Literature taken collectively constitutes an ever changing ideal order where books not only judge life as it is actually lived and are judged by it, but also judge each other in relation to that actual life...

...As a foreign correspondent he had twice interviewed Mussolini and had taken accurate measure of Chicherin and Clemenceau at the Lausanne Conference...

...Lawrence...

...Hemingway could not stand strong women...

...He gratuitously dug up an old charge that Dos Passos' wife, whom he had once loved, stole from stores...

...Of Tolstoy's account of Napoleonic battles in War and Peace, Hemingway observed, "Tolstoy was at Sevastopol...

...Ernest pored over Brady's photographs of that War, particularly the photographs of the dead...

...Pauline's Uncle Gus, at the depth of the Depression in 1933, gave Hemingway $25,000 for a luxurious hunting safari in Africa...

...Hemingway's greatest model and rival was of course Tolstoy...

...By articulating Hemingway's usually difficult relations with his creative peers and quoting freely at key points from critics like Lionel Trilling, Mark Schorer, Alfred Kazin, and especially Edmund Wilson, the author makes his work an indispensable literary history of the period...

...Neither is a book...

...AsHemingway got older these inspirers got younger and more absurd...