Probing Papa's psyche

Kenneth S. Lynn. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Pp. 702 with index. $24.95 cloth. New York: Fawcett, 1988. $14.95 paper.

Denis Brian. The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway By
Those Who Knew Him. New York: Grove Press, 1988. Pp. 356 with index. $19.95 cloth.

Richard E. Hardy and John G. Cull. Hemingway: A Psychological Portrait.
New York: Irvington, 1988. Pp. 101 with index. $18.95 cloth.

During his career, Ernest Hemingway — Illinois' most famous literary son — sought the spotlight, yet feared and frustrated his biographers. Ironically, his suicide in 1961 undercut the robust image he had projected in his life while guaranteeing a spate of published post-mortems.

Three recent books illustrate Hemingway's continuing hold on the popular imagination as well as the wide-ranging attempts to capitalize on it. Each purports to extricate Hemingway the man from the surrounding myth — one that, in turn, has glamorized, victimized and obscured him. In the process of demystification, all three books offer psychological appraisals of the author and his art. But here the resemblances end.

Easily the best of this lot and the successor to Carlos Baker's standard study (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 1969) is Kenneth S. Lynn's Hemingway. Lynn adroitly sidesteps the usual pitfalls facing the biographer: stuffiness, redundance and reductiveness.

A historian at Johns Hopkins University, Lynn avoids turning Hemingway's exciting life into dull prose. His style is clear and concise, in the best tradition of his subject, and he never resorts to jargon.

Lynn synthesizes previous research on Hemingway. More importantly, he corrects and extends the work of his predecessors. For example, he confirms recent reports that Hemingway probably exaggerated the extent of his WWI wounds and challenges Philip Young's influential theory (first fully developed in Ernest Hemingway, 1952) that the author's subsequent writing represented an ongoing effort to cope with the effects of this trauma.

Drawing upon posthumously published writing by Hemingway in addition to newly available materials about him in the JFK Library, Lynn offers an alternative explanation of what haunted Hemingway — a bizarre upbringing that threatened his sexual identity. Publication of a family reminiscence by Hemingway's sister Marcelline in 1962 revealed that Grace Hemingway had treated her oldest children, Marcelline and Ernest, like twins when they were young, dressing her son as a girl for several years. By connecting this fact to evidence that Grace also dominated her husband Clarence, Lynn shows that Ernest grew up in an atmosphere of sexual uncertainty which later expressed itself in the androgynous nature of many of his intimate relationships and fictional portraits.

Hemingway emerges from this study as a complex, often paradoxical man. Lynn demonstrates the writer's attractive qualities without minimizing his personality quirks or character flaws. For instance, Hemingway is depicted as an inconsistent parent, capable at one point of rescuing his son Gregory from an impending shark attack at sea and, later, of devastating him by unfairly blaming him for his mother's death.

Finally, Lynn strikes the proper balance between covering Hemingway's life and critiquing his work. The latter is analyzed in terms of the former without confusing fact and fiction — a frequent failing in Hemingway research.

If Hemingway exemplifies the best in recent Hemingway scholarship, Denis Brian's The True Gen represents the more common mixed blessing. The title, a military expression used to distinguish the genuine from the false, promises a credible, coherent vision which the book fails to deliver. Instead, the subtitle more aptly describes Brian's achievement.

Warned by the writer's widow Mary not to believe much of what was in print about her husband, Brian favored the spoken word over the written record in his research. The result is an intermittently engaging but ultimately unsatisfactory "oral history" of the author's life, presented through interviews with 100 Hemingway relatives, friends, acquaintances and experts conducted over two decades. The prospect of hearing direct testimony from such notables as Hemingway's siblings, schoolmates, wives, sons, lovers, enemies and doctors is enticing. Unfortunately, presentation of the material is flawed in two respects.

First, it is often impossible to tell when successive statements in the text reflect joint interviews or separate sessions with the individuals being quoted because the circumstances of these conversations are not routinely disclosed. Although the juxtaposition of contrasting — at times even contradictory — views is often intriguing, the lack of contextual clues unnecessarily complicates the reader's task of interpretation.

An even more glaring omission is Brian's failure to provide systematic commentary on the interviews' significance. Except for a brief introduction about his methods and a slight concluding chapter where he labels Hemingway manic-depressive, Brian presents the interviews as if their comparative merit and overall import were self-evident.

Richard E. Hardy and John G. Cull's Hemingway: A Psychological Portrait is thin not only in size (just over 100 pages) but also in substance. The authors, both licensed clinical psychologists, admit the difficulty of attempting a psychographic study of a man they never knew — a man, furthermore, who expressed contempt for psychologists and psychiatrists all of his life. Unfortunately, their conjecture doesn't appreciably deepen our understanding of either the man or his work.

In the quarter century since his death, Hemingway's critical reputation has fluctuated, but popular interest in him has never flagged. So long as his life and art raise questions that can never be fully resolved, probing Papa's psyche will remain a perennial pastime, and the yearly yield — like this one's — is likely to vary.□

Judith L. Everson, associate professor of English at Sangamon State University, teaches a graduate seminar on Hemingway and serves as associate editor for book reviews and humanities essays at Illinois Issues.

August & September 1988 | Illinois Issues | 60