Fame became of him: Hemingway as public writer.

THE PECULIAR FATE of Ernest Hemingway after the publication of A Farewell to Arms in 1929 has always been a matter for critical speculation. By 1929, he was a hero of art, a selfless craftsman who had written some of the most concentrated prose in the English language. By the end of the Thirties, he had written little that matched his work of the Twenties. John Raeburn offers a theory why, and his study is immensely valuable for an understanding of this major American writer.

Raeburn puts his case succinctly: Ernest Hemingway's rise to literary eminence was accompanied by a different kind of fame--personal fame--which at first was subordinate to his literary renown, rather soon vied with it on equal terms, and eventually surpassed it to make Hemingway not only the best-known writer but one of the most famous men of his time. Enthusiasm among the intellectual elite, which nearly canonized him in the 1920s, waxed and waned after 1930, but the enthusiasm of the public, the guarantor of his personal fame, never wavered once it took him up as its champion. . . . His own acute awareness of the public response to his personality, and his sense of what this response meant, affected what he chose to write about and what he said when he did write. Nearly everything he published after 1930 reflected this awareness.

The public Hemingway was a conscious creation, very carefully fostered, and psychologically important to him, which explains, for example, his fury when, in that boxing match in 1929, Fitzgerald as referee neglected to end the round and allowed Morley Callaghan to knock Hemingway down. The creation of the public persona was to a considerable extent carried out in his nonfiction, beginning in his essays for the transatlantic review in the early 1920s but becoming a major enterprise only after the publication of A Farewell to Arms. During the 1930s, his fiction appears to have been subordinated to a series of books and articles featuring Hemingway himself as their hero. Between 1930 and 1936 Hemingway wrote some twenty short stories, among them several as good as anything he ever published, such as "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," but he also published a much larger quantity of nonfiction, including two full-length books, Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa (1935), and a series of monthly Letters in Esquire between 1933 and 1936.

In Death in the Afternoon he created a persona so vivid that it far outweighed his fiction in the public mind and became an increasingly dominant factor in his own mind. The nonfiction that followed reinforced that public personality, the outlines of which are indicated by the titles of his Esquire Letters: "Marlin off the Moro," "Shootism versus Sport," "Notes on Dangerous Game," "Out in the Stream," "Sailfish off Mombasa," "On Being Shot Again," "Wings over Africa," "On the Blue Water," "There She Breaches." It is true that hunting, fishing, skiing, drinking, and other such activities had always been very much present in Hemingway's fiction, but up until this time they had existed in tension with and often as an antidote to the dark apprehensions, the nada, that was also there. In the nonfiction the apprehensions and the tensions disappear and the activities become ends in themselves, the accouterments of a glamorous life. Esquire was the perfect place for these pieces to appear.

During 1933-34 Hemingway traveled to Africa to hunt big game. "Nothing he did until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War," as John Raeburn writes, was to have so great or so enduring effect on his public reputation as the African trip. The novelist who had dramatized grace under pressure in fiction could now demonstrate that virtue in himself, and the nonfiction about the trip became a public record of his meeting the challenges he sought. His self-portrayal as the stalwart hunter of lion, kudu, rhinoceros, buffalo, and other big game remained one of the vivid and dramatic elements of his personal fame although he returned to Africa only once thereafter, twenty years later. Africa offered the same moral advantage as bullfighting, but here he rather than the bullfighter took the chances and administered the deaths. He admitted that he was too old and too heavy to be a successful bullfighter, but his condition was no obstacle to becoming a great hunter.

Defending the public image he had created, he got into a famous fistfight with Max Eastman, who had remarked in a review of Death in the Afternoon that Hemingway was "wearing false hair on his chest," and he repeatedly savaged Gertrude Stein in print for accusing him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas of being "yellow."

Edmund Wilson, the earliest major admirer of Hemingway in the 1920s, took a scornful view of these later developments. In an essay on Hemingway in The Wound and the Bow, Wilson observed that beginning with Death in the Afternoon Hemingway had lost control of his artistic faculties in attempting to aggrandize his public personality. The "arrogant, belligerent, and boastful" Hemingway of the Esquire Letters was "certainly the worst-invented character to be found in the author's work," and Wilson worried that this "obnoxious" character was the only one Hemingway had left.

Even when Hemingway made a critical comeback with For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1939, Wilson still thought the public man had damaged the artist, making most of his writing during the Thirties shrill, belligerent, and dishonest. Even his fictional heroes resembled his self-advertisements, and his celebrated anti-fascism was simple-minded, just lion hunting in a different guise. The loss of artistic control after A Farewell to Arms--though there are periodic recoveries--is reflected in the growing length of Hemingway's works. The intensity and compression of the earlier work give way to an increasing garrulousness, ending with the monstrous banality of The Dangerous Summer and Garden of Eden, which is being readied for publication (probably unwisely).

At his best, Ernest Hemingway was one of the greatest of twentieth-century artists, able to endow the most banal detail with cosmic significance. John Raeburn has given us an important analysis of the decline and loss of that power.