ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A Biography

By Mary V. Dearborn

Illustrated. 738 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

Ernest Hemingway began his career blessed lavishly by the gods. As a rugged young journalist, with a radiant, adoring wife, he dazzled the expatriate and artistic community of Paris in 1922 with his exuberance, gregariousness and exceptional good looks, including “the most beautiful row of teeth” the writer Max Eastman had ever seen. As Mary V. Dearborn notes in her authoritative biography, Hemingway “virtually commanded affection, admiration and attention.” His first books of character sketches and stories showed that he had literary talent as well, with an understated style stripped of euphemism, piety and cant. “In the golden city at a golden time,” Dearborn writes, “he would appear a golden young man.”

With the publication of “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, Hemingway put a stamp on his spectacular literary career. Rapidly hailed as an important American writer, he became first a celebrity and then a legend, with his voracious pursuit of the adventurous roles and violent rituals of masculine contest. As he aged, however, that myth of heroic virility seemed increasingly untenable. He extolled male camaraderie, but was driven to betray and demolish his friends. He deserted his Paris wife, Hadley Richardson, and in three more marriages became more demanding of women’s adulation and service, more selfish and abusive. As his third wife, the writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn, observed, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” And after World War II, Hemingway’s claim to literary genius seemed suspect as well. “How can a man in his senses,” John Dos Passos wondered when “Across the River and Into the Trees” came out in 1950, leave such garbage “on the page?” The international success of “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) redeemed his literary reputation for a while, and secured the Nobel Prize. But his suicide on July 2, 1961, was so shockingly at odds with the hypermasculine persona he had cultivated and protected that it undermined critical evaluations of his aesthetic standing as well. Harold Bloom saw him the same way he saw Updike, as “a minor novelist with a major style.” His golden legend became the tragic saga of a man destroyed by his demons and hiding despair. Yet Hemingway’s outsize life and controversial achievement has continued to be a magnet to biographers, and Dearborn is the first woman to join their company. A perceptive and tough-minded biographer, who has written about other fabled icons of masculinity — Henry Miller, Norman Mailer — Dearborn has now tackled the big one. A feminist biography, then? Not exactly. Her chief asset as a female biographer, she insists, is her immunity to the hairy-chested, competitive Hemingway legend. Dearborn wants to opt out of the legend business and focus instead on “what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer.”

Dearborn delved into the Hemingway family archives in Texas, and she gives rewarding attention to her subject’s relationships with his father, his five siblings and especially his mother. Grace Hemingway is often seen as domineering and emasculating; Ernest claimed to hate her for her sanctimonious condemnation of his early fiction, and blamed her for his father’s suicide. Dearborn contends, however, that she was artistically talented, creative and charismatic. It’s well-known that she dressed little Ernest in frills with a long blond bob, as the twin of his older sister, Marcelline. But she also encouraged his skill with guns; at the age of 2, she boasted, “Ernest shoots well with his gun and loads it and cocks it himself.” Guns would be part of his legend, from the Tommy gun he used to shoot sharks in Bimini to the doublebarreled shotgun with which he killed himself. The cover of Dearborn’s biography pictures him aiming the Tommy gun straight at the reader, as if to demand we read the book.

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Dearborn traces Hemingway’s “persistent confusion about gender identity” to Grace’s androgynous mothering style. His hair fetish, a sexual fascination with matching short haircuts and bleached blond hair for men and women, which became a theme in the gender-bending posthumous novel “The Garden of Eden,” could be judged as a shameful secret, but also, she argues, as “openness to fluidity in gender boundaries.” Of course, that openness could be risky for a macho superhero in the 1950s. When he wanted to get his ears pierced in Africa, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, sent a tactful note to dissuade him: “Your wearing earrings will have a deleterious effect on your reputation.” Dearborn is incisive about the ways each wife handled the difficult bargain she had made in marrying a legend.