HEMINGWAY: A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED LIFE?

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, October 27, 1985
Page: 90
Section: BOOKS

The Hemingway myth - that war was better than life, that guts were the birthplace of honor - was adolescent and, eventually, banal. But it was not the exploits of the man that revealed so much as the ironclad, if contradictory, ethos behind them: an individual conscience with an eye on the greater good, a stoicism whose underside was sensitivity, and, above all, a courage that defied an ever-present cowardice. Hemingway took dialogue out of the parlors of Victorian America and put it in the cafes and bedrooms of modernism's malaise, though his romantic notions about women remained couched somewhere between Fielding and DeFoe. The muscle-and-bone narration he introduced preceded writers from James M. Cain to Mailer, and the impact was so great that it's all but taken for granted today. The continuing rash of scholarship in recent years - biographies, anthologies, collected letters - indicates that the affair with this boyish, tragic and singular man is far
from over.

Both "Along With Youth" and "Hemingway" owe a good deal to Carlos Baker's seminal 1969 work, "Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story," though Griffin seems more willing to acknowledge the debt than does Meyers. "Along With Youth" - the first of a projected three volumes - closely follows Hemingway
from his birth in 1899 in an affluent Chicago suburb to his first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, in 1921, before the couple embarked for Paris. Griffin presumes not so much to rewrite scholarship as to accentuate it: He relies heavily upon the 2,000 pages of letters from Hadley to Hemingway during their nine-month courtship, as well as the cooperation of Hemingway's first son and last wife.

The portrait that emerges from Griffin's extensive, if mildly ingenuous, research is not the blustering blowhard Hemingway's public would come to know in later years, though certainly there were early hints of that compensatory personality. Born to an overbearing diva-manquee mother and a mild-mannered physician father (the latter would commit suicide in 1928), the young Ernest declared after church one day that he didn't "want to be an Onward Christian Soldier; I want to go with Dad and shoot lions and wolves." At age 6, he killed a porcupine with an ax and wrote his father a proud letter about it, enclosing some of the quills.

He imitated Ring Lardner when writing for the high school newspaper in Oak Park; read Ivanhoe, Dickens, Crane and Twain as a boy. As an intern at the Kansas City Star, in 1917, he covered the cop shop and the emergency room, and he learned to write in the laconic prose of big-city tabloids. When his nearsightedness kept him from the service, he joined the Italian Red Cross as an ambulance driver and became the first American wounded on the Italian Front. It was in the hospital at Milan that he met Agnes Kurowsky, a nurse seven years his senior who broke his heart and provided the material for Catherine Barkley in "A Farewell To Arms."

Griffin's somewhat breathless contention is that Agnes and Hemingway were lovers (she has always denied it), and that her rejection so strangled him he began immediately to write in the bite-the-bullet prose that would define his work. "His sentences now were short and simple," writes Griffin, "the irony bitter and harsh, each word like his first steps without crutches or his cane." Both points are troublesome, if not unprovable: The question of sexual consummation seems irrelevant now, and the Kansas City Star doubtless had as much to do with Hemingway's tough-guy verse as any unrequited love, no matter how silencing the trauma.

The letters from Hadley, on the other hand, show how much she and Hemingway liked one another - she was fond of his writing; he, her tennis and piano playing - and it is easy to see why Hemingway idealized her four decades later in "A Moveable Feast." Hadley, generous and maternal, was probably the first and last woman who loved him for who he was - before the self became obscured by the persona that fame nurtured. She was also possibly his best early critic, writing, when he was 21, that his style "eliminated everything except what is necessary and strengthening"; that she was "wild over the way you pounce on a strong word and use it in the right place, without any of this damned clever affect most present day writers have."

Griffin has included five early stories, previously unpublished, with the obvious belief that they will shed light upon the formative years before Hemingway met (or read) Joyce, Pound or Stein. (Hadley lost the bulk of his other work on a train to Lausanne in 1922, and Hemingway never forgave her.) But the stories offer little beyond a glance into the shallow quagmire of young idealism, along with the necessary throat-clearing all writers worth their salt must endure before getting down to business.

From the time of that lost suitcase, Hemingway had two decades of fine writing and better before the decline began - his profligacy in everything but prose that would last for 20 years. His marriage to Hadley saw him through his apprentice days in Paris and the publication of "In Our Time" in 1925, then ''The Sun Also Rises" a year later. He met, learned from and discarded other writers from Sherwood Anderson to Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford, many of whom showed up as either scoundrels or clowns in "A Moveable Feast" long after the quarrels were irreparable.

Hemingway subsidized his first fictional efforts in the '20s as a free- lance correspondent for the Toronto Star, writing short features about trout-fishing, shoplifting, rum-running, barber colleges. He purred when Yeats won the Nobel Prize and prayed that George Carpentier would knock out Jack Dempsey. Objectivity was not his forte, but he proved a master at the empathetic use of the second-person ("When you enter Germany" . . . "If you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight. . ."). He covered the Greco-Turkish War in 1922, and interviewed Mussolini twice after Il Duce had seized power - writing, in 1923, "If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff." Like any pro, he saved his best material for fiction.

That was usually the case with women, too, for Hemingway fell in love with idealized images, and when their flesh-and-blood reality failed him, he made them into fictionalized creations. A wiseacre drinking companion in Paris became Brett Ashley in "The Sun Also Rises"; Agnes Kurowsky paid for her sins by dying in childbirth as Catherine Barkley in "A Farewell To Arms"; the brash, independent Martha Gellhorn was transformed into the doe-eyed Maria of "For Whom The Bell Tolls." His fourth wife, Mary, was the only woman he did not immortalize in the work. Her own sainthood was of this earth, for she stayed with him 17 years, until his body was spent, the mind ravaged by shock treatments and despair.

Despite some chronological meanderings, Meyers' work carefully accounts for the period of celebrity and waste that, fueled by Hemingway's swaggering resentments and consequent isolation, led to the pathetic effort of "Across the River and Into the Trees" and the small attempt at resurrection in "The Old Man and the Sea." By turns compassionate and irreverent, "Hemingway" is a bread-and-butter biography that intermingles Hemingway's external conquests with critiques of his work, which are often more belabored than persuasive. Like Griffin's, this massively researched volume seems less than the sum of its parts - a pastiche whose compendium of facts could have benefited from a more thoughtful authorial voice.

Neither biography lives up to its subject. Hemingway, who called critics ''the lice that crawl on literature," disdained scholarly analyses all his life, and his cursed, cultivated impenetrability withholds even from the grave. By the postwar years, he had become physically and emotionally violent, was consuming "gallons" of martinis and - having hit the nadir of author- celebrity exploits - was endorsing Ballantine beer and Parker pens.

Suicidal, alcoholic and vainglorious for much of his life, at the end, Hemingway could claim neither the Catholicism nor the faith in literature that had once allowed him room to breathe. "Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name," he wrote in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and it was this nothingness - these flat parameters of consciousness - that beat him in the final years. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1954, several years before he
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, he wrote a friend: "We call this 'black-ass' (depression) and one should never have it. But I get tired of pain sometimes even if that is an ignoble feeling." Surrender was outside the code of this rigid, extraordinary man, and even his last act - one of violent oblivion - must have seemed preferable to waiting out the enemy.

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