Hemingway.

Hemingway

by Kenneth Lynn (Simon & Schuster, 784 pp., $24.95)

HEMINGWAY continues to fascinate. My biography appeared in October 1985, and two books on Hemingway's early life were published soon afterward. Lynn's book has no new discoveries, and his thesis that "Hemingway was a conflicted, haunted man who produced from his torment some of the most memorable fiction of the century' is quite familiar. But Lynn does offer interesting interpretations of certain aspects of Hemingway's life and reveals new meanings in his work.

He shows that Hemingway's sister Ursula (not Sunny) was the model for Littless in "The Last Good Country'; that "The End of Something' and "An Alpine Idyll' both concern the problems of his marriage to his first wife, Hadley; that the neglected satire, The Torrents of Spring, describes his conflicting feelings about Hadley and his second wife, Pauline; that he expressed his indebtedness to Pauline's Uncle Gus, who paid for his first African safari, by praising Pauline in Green Hills of Africa, and then poured out his venomous feelings about her in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro'; that the title of "A Way You'll Never Be' was meant to reassure his mentally unstable mistress, Jane Mason; that Zelda Fitzgerald contributed to the character of Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, and that Brett has some sort of erotic relations with Jake Barnes, despite his sexual mutilation. Lynn is far less convincing when he claims that Hemingway's sister Marcelline influenced the "twin' gangsters in "The Killers,' that the desire to punish the publisher Horace Liveright influenced "Fifty Grand,' and that Jake Barnes's name came from the lesbians Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes, who lived on the rue Jacob and in the Hotel Jacob in Paris.

Despite the statement of Hemingway's World War I friend Bill Horne (the Italians "were damn tough and tight about awarding the Medaglia d'Argento al Valore.--Believe me, you had to be damned near killed, in the most honorable way, to get that'), Lynn persuasively argues that Hemingway, after being wounded by a trench mortar, was not hit by machine-gun bullets and did not carry a wounded Italian soldier back to a first-aid dugout. No Americans witnessed the incident and the details were provided by Hemingway himself. If he did not perform a heroic act (and we can never be certain about this), then the medal was awarded for propagandistic purposes.

Lynn, who is well known for his obsessive hatred of Malcolm Cowley and his refusal to see the trauma of war in "Big Two-Hearted River,' has --viz., in his brilliant collection of essays, The Air-Line to Seattle--specialized in destructive criticism. In this biography, he treats Hemingway as a psychological case. Lynn's two obsessions are Hemingway's mother, Grace, and the girlish clothing Hemingway wore as an infant. Lynn sees sinister motives in all Grace's acts, though he does concede, in a moment of insight, that "she had done her best to be a good mother.' Lynn minimizes the looks, strength, art, and will that Grace gave to her son; and the radical change in his attitude toward his mother after his father's suicide in 1928. At the same time, Lynn frequently censures Hemingway for disliking and avoiding his mother.

Lynn argues that Grace's decision to raise Ernest and his one-year-older sister, Marcelline, as if they were twins of the same sex and to dress him in girls' clothes until he was three years old made him anxious and insecure, gave him huge fears, led to severe confusion and to a failure of sexual identity, and "disabl[ed] his entire emotional life.' This argument ignores the fact that at the turn of the century little boys were quite commonly dressed as girls (Franklin Roosevelt was kept in girlish skirts and long curls until he was nearly six), that Hemingway always wore overalls during the summers in northern Michigan, and that his male identity was constantly strengthened by his father. There is no indication that Hemingway was ever aware of wearing girls' clothes: few people remember what they wore when they were one or two years old. When Grace died in 1951, Hemingway remarked on how happy her children had been. Rather than injuring Hemingway, the female component in his character (as in the character of D. H. Lawrence) allowed him a deeper understanding of and sympathy with women.

Lynn also makes some serious errors of judgment. Sherwood Anderson did not have the greatest influence on Hemingway, and the recent editing of The Garden of Eden was not brilliant but unconscionable. Most surprising is Lynn's perverse defense of Hemingway's disastrous medical treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

Lynn gives a distorted and sneering account of Hemingway's politics in the Spanish Civil War. He fails to mention that virtually all artists and intellectuals in America and Europe supported the Loyalists in their fight against Fascism, and that Hemingway, as For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals, was more critical of the Communists than almost anyone else on the Left. Lynn tends to lose interest in Hemingway in the mid 1930s, when Lynn has exhausted the limits of his thesis about Grace and girls' clothing, and Hemingway has begun his long personal and artistic decline. The last quarter of Hemingway's life is treated in only seventy pages--one-tenth of this long book.

Despite the other recent biographies of Hemingway, Lynn's work is certainly worth reading. He is an intelligent and perceptive critic, who writes in a clear, crisp style. He is good on the social background of Hemingway's early locales, and convincing about the emotional inspiration of his fiction. Lynn shows Hemingway's greatness as a writer, responds to his admirable actions, and (unlike many obtuse critics) is honest about his egregious personal faults.