Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences

Hemingway's (1899-1961) third wife, Martha Gelhorn, bore no great affection for him, but she did cogently sum up his importance: ``He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language.'' If true, this idea may justify the continuing proliferation of Hemingway biographies, to which Mellow has made a notable addition with this concluding volume of a trilogy devoted to the modernist writers and artists of the ``lost generation'' ( Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company and Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald ). With two-thirds of its pages concentrating on the first 30 years of Hemingway's life, Mellow's work is especially valuable for its exploration of the influences that shaped the writer's skills--particularly the impact of Stein and Ezra Pound--and led to his becoming the 20th century's most famous author. Hemingway's pose as a literary tough guy accounted for much of his celebrity and has provided ample material for the psycho-sexual speculations of biographers--including Mellow, who examines in great detail the many instances of male bonding that accompanied Hemingway's interests and lifestyle. Mellow softens Hemingway's harsh portrait of his mother as a domineering harridan, while he acknowledges that Hemingway's unresolved feelings about his mother affected his relationships with women. Hemingway was haunted, too, by the suicide of his ineffectual but admired father, from whom he learned the ``masculine'' pursuits of hunting and fishing, although Mellow contends that Hemingway's fear of death obsessed him long before that devastating loss. Hemingway's hoard of private papers to which Mellow had access--character notes, outlines and early versions of now-famous stories and novels--reveal much about him; the papers provide insight, for example, into the process by which a writer transforms the ordinary stuff of life into art. Mellow devotes only a few pages to Hemingway's slow decline into the pontifications of the ``Papa'' period, aptly remarking that ``one has to fight back the feeling that Hemingway let himself down badly.'' These words resonate against the image of the writer as a charismatic young man with a wide smile and big shoulders whose great promise and considerable achievements Mellow so sensitively assesses. Photos not seen by PW . ( Nov. )