Mom and Papa (February/March 1986 | Volume: 37, Issue: 2)

Mom and Papa

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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February/March 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 2

Biographies of writers often disappoint. Albert Camus once described life in the literary arena with bleak accuracy: “One imagines black intrigues, vast ambitious schemings. There are nothing but vanities, satisfied with small rewards.”

In some ways, Ernest Hemingway’s tumultuous life is an exception to that rule. Everything about him—his talent, as well as his rewards and vanities—was outsized. His 61 years were so crowded with noisy sideshows—wars, travels, feuds, safaris, fishing trips, boxing matches, bullfights, marriages, affairs, hard drinking—that it sometimes seems astonishing he found the time to write anything at all. Yet virtually all of it reappeared in his work. He was, as Alfred Kazin noted recently in this magazine, “the most extraordinary appropriator,” able to make nearly everything he saw or felt or survived part of his pages. And although a quarter of a century has now passed since he shot himself, our interest in him has never flagged. Professor Carlos Baker’s official biography, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, appeared in 1969; it is a solid study—scholarly, admiring, readable—but it has turned out to be only an island in the steady stream of Hemingway books, all seeking to separate what really happened to the writer from his own vivid versions of it. Memoirs have been published by old friends and old enemies, by hangers-on and members of the family; academics have picked over his syntax, quarreled over his sexual orientation, assessed and reassessed his output.

Peter Griffin’s new book, Along With Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years, is the first of a projected three volumes. It focuses on the writer’s earliest experiences—boyhood summers in upper Michigan, World War One, his romance with the nurse Agnes Kurowsky (who is shown to have been more serious about him than had previously been thought)—all of which would later inspire much of his best writing. And it includes intriguing new material: chatty but revealing letters to Bill Home, a close friend from Chicago newspaper days; love letters from Hadley; and five unpublished short stories, wildly uneven but already filled with evidence of his early determination to write about “real people, talking and saying what they think.”

 

But, perhaps more important, it offers a few suggestive clues as to what went so terribly wrong at the end. Hemingway’s suicide stopped a long sad decline into despair and paranoia and miserable health. “What does a man care about?” he had asked a few weeks earlier. “Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them.” But he had in fact been talking of ending his own life for years before he fell ill. The conventional wisdom has been that it was the example of his father’s suicide in 1928 that he had finally been unable to resist emulating. That may, in part, be true, but as Griffin reveals, Hemingway was already considering doing away with himself at the age of twenty-one, nearly a