Conversations with Ernest Hemingway.

Conversations with Ernest Hemingway,

edited by Matthew Bruccoli (Mississippi, 204 pp., $22.95 cloth; $11.95 paper)

HEMINGWAY, a modern Byron, was the most charismatic American author of our time. As an old newsman, he knew the value of publicity and always told lively if inaccurate stories. At 47, he looked virile enough "to make bobby-soxers swoon by the droves.' Even in New York, he shot ducks, boxed in Stillman's Gym, and acted like his fictional characters. He emerged from the African jungle, after two plane crashes, clutching a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin, exclaiming: "My luck--she is running very good.' During the interviews at the end of his life, the public personality displaced the serious writer.

Matthew Bruccoli, an authority on Hemingway, has diligently disinterred forty interviews, some quite obscure, that were published between 1919 and 1965. The early ones are superficial, the later ones inevitably repetitive, and they reinforce rather than revise the familiar image. Perhaps unable to secure rights or pay the fees, Bruccoli has omitted two of the most important interviews--Malcolm Cowley's in Life (1949) and Lillian Ross's bitchy New Yorker piece (1950)--as well as minor ones by Jackson Burke and William Dawson.

Bruccoli has also been constricted by the format of this "Conversations' series, which allows only a brief introduction, offers a chronology that repeats rather than expands the book list on a previous page, and deliberately reproduces typographical errors in the original version, reprinting "his eyes never left my fact' (instead of "face'). This format provides no information about the authors and their relation to Hemingway (Milt Machlin wrote a vulgar book about him; George Plimpton was a disciple and friend) and no annotations of the text. But it is essential to know, for example, that the "irresponsible biography' of Lawrence of Arabia was by Richard Aldington, that the Nobel Prize-winner's boring rewrite of the Bible was Faulkner's A Fable, and that the girl for whom Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea was his young Italian love, Adriana Ivancich.

Despite these considerable limitations, this book is full of fascinating things about Hemingway's true character and public image, the facts and myths of his life, his honest revelations and his boastful claims. Only the best interviewers --Plimpton, Kenneth Tynan, Robert Manning--were able to penetrate Hemingway's mask and perceive that the real man was, despite the tough-guy legend, "a giant child made gruff by shyness,' knowledgeable on subjects that interested him and deeply dedicated to his art. He offered judgments rather than opinions and frankly told one interviewer: "The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am stupid.'

Hemingway relates that as a reporter he disliked asking people questions about their private lives, that he was distributing cigarettes when wounded in the war, wrestled with Max Eastman (who had accused him of wearing false hair on his chest), never won a major prize until 1953, and never sold a share of stock. He contributed to his own myth by claiming he had run away from home to become a boxer, fought with the Italian army at Caporetto, returned to the front until the Armistice, and had a silver kneecap.

Hemingway admitted that To Have and Have Not was a group of short stories that did not make a very good novel; but he unwisely claimed, when writing one of his weakest works, that as a writer he had "moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra,' to calculus. During the Spanish Civil War, propagandizing for the Loyalists, he maintained that the Insurgents were doomed to defeat and asserted that tales of executions by his side were untrue--though he later described them brilliantly in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the 1950s, he forgot his own Catholic conversion in the 1920s and insisted: "It was bad enough for a woman to be converted, but for a man, it was unforgivable.'

Hemingway, somewhat surprisingly, praises Angus Wilson's homosexual novel Hemlock and After, but criticizes the work of younger rivals that clearly shows his influence: Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. He is especially good on the origin of his works and gives valuable advice on the craft of writing. He describes how he wrote three stories in one day during a hot streak in Madrid ("Why don't you try to write just one more? the waiter asked') and how he got the idea for The Sun Also Rises when put in a genito-urinary ward with many soldiers who had groin wounds. He explains that his fictional hero, Jack Barnes, "was capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them.'

Hemingway acknowledges the influence of the Kansas City Star style book, which emphasized clarity, conciseness, and accuracy and taught him to write a simple declarative sentence. He always rereads what he has written before starting to write, and stops when he is writing well so it will be easy to continue the next day. He writes of the things he feels deeply about and invents out of his own knowledge in order to make his work become part of the reader's experience. He always tries to "write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens the iceberg.' Since he always wrote best when he was in love, Hemingway had (as Scott Fitzgerald observed) a new woman for every major book.

In his Nobel Prize speech Hemingway self-reflectively observed that as a writer grows in public stature, "he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.' When he was broken in health and spirit, and could no longer remember or write, he chose to kill himself, as his father had done: "It's everybody's right, but there's a certain amount of egotism in it and a certain desregard of others.'