A Victim of Celebrity

...What seems to have happened is that he became a victim of his own celebrity...

...at his best he commanded an art as pure as this century has seen...

...Hemingway's best critics understood that his true subject at this time was not war or manhood or the outdoor life, but fear...

...This realization leads one to daydream about the heights he might have reached if things had worked out differently and he had achieved only a middling level of popularity...

...He might have added: And soon, you may become the thing they praise...

...That probably never occurred, Mellow shows...

...Fitzgerald remarked that after the psychologists have been forgotten, "E.H...

...Hemingway was a national idol for a large part of his life, and a national whipping boy after his death, when the culture turned...

...Badly wounded while an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, he told and retold the story...

...The character he turned himself into??Papa Hemingway, big-game hunter, connoisseur of food and wars and women??had no weaknesses...

...My book will be praised by highbrows and can be read by lowbrows," Hemingway wrote to the publisher of his first collection of stories, In Our Time...

...and was in love...

...He concentrates on the early and middle phases of Hemingway's career, hurrying through the sad last years as if with his eyes averted...

...Then something happened...

...But as James Mellow demonstrates in his perceptive biography, Hemingway was a self-created man...

...But that is probably a silly question...

...What are we to make of Hemingway, more than 30 years after his death...

...If you become popular," Hemingway told the writer Morley Callaghan in 1929, "it is always because of the worst aspects of your work...

...All the self-promotion would have meant nothing, of course, if Hemingway had not been such a gifted writer...

...The rest of us should be so flawed...

...In his early work, he captured the spirit of the age...

...The characters he gave us at the outset were complex figures, men who struggled with their weaknesses...

...and the result is an impersonal art that is severe and intense, deeply serious...

...This crude figure began to appear in his writing, starting with Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon, garrulous and self-important works of nonfiction written during the 1930s...

...It is impossible to imagine him, like Faulkner in the '20s and '30s, submerging himself in his writing with only a vague sense that other people would eventually read it...

...Hemingway's celebrity was his nemesis...

...The fears Hemingway once explored were now buried under layers of bluster...

...His great preoccupation was always courage...

...His generosity usually had a purpose...

...Frankly, its significance escapes me...

...Much of his work is dreadfully immature: His bullying streak, his self-righteousness, his crude view of women are often all too clear...

...Precisely by letting the story tell itself, Mellow does us a great service...

...author, "The Dylanist" People were always underestimating Ernest Hemingway...

...Adams was a man in a state of moral shell shock...

...That novel...

...Without the grotesquely expanded sense of himself that his fame allowed, might he have continued to write disciplined, self-questioning works??might he have deepened his art...

...Mellow comments, "is full of obsequious Italian waiters, porters, bartenders, and gondoliers, bowing and scraping in admiration" of the protagonist, Richard Cant-well, whose culinary expertise and sexual heroics are portrayed as the stuff of legend...

...By the time he was 30, Hemingway had written In Our Time, The Sun AIso Rises and A Farewell to Arms...

...Other critics of his early work saw him as a follower of Sherwood Anderson and, rather oddly, Ring Lardner...

...But time has burned away the fog of his reputation, and at last we may be able to see him plain...

...Nonetheless, upon Hemingway's return to the United States newspapers carried headlines like "Worst Shot-up Man in U.S...

...The book's subtitle is taken from one of the Nick Adams stories, and though Mellow trundles out the phrase from time to time, he avoids trying to turn it into a theme...

...They always praise you for the worst aspects...

...his devotion to the concrete and the immediate was a desperate attempt to control at least some limited sphere of his existence...

...Whatever his shortcomings, he remains one of the greatest short-story writers in the English language, and he wrote several novels that will continue to live...

...Within the narrower margins of his gift, however, Hemingway was a master...

...Edmund Wilson put his finger on the problem: "Something dreadful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person...

...Gertrude Stein claimed she created him...

...will be read for his great studies into fear...

...Mellow, refreshingly commonsensical, neither worshipper nor detractor, helps us do that...

...An account he published in an Illinois newspaper described how, despite his own injuries, he carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety...

...He was as avid for fame as for esthetic success...

...he was one of those writers who teaches his generation how to understand itself...

...He lacked both the compassion and the detachment of the great novelists??people like Tolstoy, George Eliot, Stendhal??and above all he lacked their curiosity...

...but courage??psychological and artistic courage??was precisely what was missing from his later work...

...The novelist's own comment on the book was that he hoped it was "better than Proust if Proust had been to the wars and liked to f...

...In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his nature, the emotional situations which obsess him, are externalized and objectified...

...But as soon as he speaks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin...

...Readers saw something of themselves in Nick Adams, who wandered stunned through stories like "Big Two-Hearted River" and "A Way You'll Never Be," having experienced a war that destroyed the abstractions he'd been brought up to believe in...

...Ernestwouldalwaysgiveahelpinghandtoa man on a ledge a little higher up," F. Scott Fitzgerald noted??and so did his malice...

...Wisely, he does not claim to have come up with any startling new "key" to Hemingway...

...Wyndham Lewis agreed, writing, "One might even go so far as to say that this brilliant Jewish lady had made a clown of him by teaching Ernest Hemingway her baby talk...

...it is hard to imagine how he could have not become famous...

...A few years later, Hemingway proved himself equally resourceful at stage-managing his rise to literary fame...

...Even if one agrees with Mellow that the story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was his masterpiece and that later works like For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea marked something of a return to form for Hemingway, it is difficult not to see the latter part of his career as a sad decline...

...in the process, his wounds grew more severe, his heroism more conspicuous...

...Mellow, who sees Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences as the last work of a trilogy that includes his Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company and Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, has written a fine biography: intelligent, engaging, respectful yet not uncritical...

...Although Mellow judiciously refrains from speculating about why Hemingway turned against her, we may speculate (injudiciously) that to be typed as the protege of a little-read member of the avant-garde alarmed a writer so intent on being "read by lowbrows...

...Many of the reviews hailed him as a gifted follower of Stein...

...Numerous people who have written about him have noted his curious penchant for attacking individuals who had helped him, but Mellow's account of his break with Stein makes one wonder whether this wasn't also a shrewd career move...

...In his teens, he had already invented one of his most enduring characters: Ernest Hemingway, War Hero...

...It never fails...

...Ultimately these qualities began to deform Hemingway's fiction too, as in the embarrassing Across the River and Into the Trees...

...on Way Home...