Note on these potted biographies

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SOME reading these essays will be familiar with the details of Ernest Hemingway’s life. Others might not. These potted biographies are offered to those who might not. They are nothing more but a precis of what several biographers have established and written. Carlos Baker was the first and Hemingway’s ‘official’ biographer who published in 1969, eight years after Hemingway’s death. Later came volumes by Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Reynolds, Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow, Kenneth Lynn and James Hutchisson, as well as several other slimmer works.

Baker might be regarded as having done a large amount of the initial spadework, and the other biographers all acknowledge a debt to him. Those others report that they undertook a degree of original research and several ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life recorded by Baker were subsequently amended (as in corrected). I have not undertaken any original research.

When you read these potted biographies (or any other biography, whether of Hemingway or someone else), it is worth bearing in mind the following observation by the scholar Debra Moddelmog in her contribution to New Essays On Hemingway’s Fiction:

The identity of Hemingway — or of any other biographical subject including ourselves — is thus a process of articulating into being. Because this articulation takes the form of narrative, the biographer always tells a story, but the story does not come out of nowhere, nor is it implicit in the ‘facts’ of the author’s life. Rather, the biographer chooses a story from among the many that his or her culture makes available and selects the facts that will make the story cohere. Thus the biographer’s biography — like the historian’s history — always tells two stories. The first is in the text itself and is a story of inclusion: the text includes not only the plot that the biographer selects out of many, but also those particular experiences that enable this plot to come together. The other story exists only in the negative, the absent, for it is a story of exclusion: the numerous plots that the biographer rejects and those experiences that must be censored of omitted for the sake of narrative unity and ideological consistency.

My scepticism and view that Hemingway was a gifted, though limited, ‘middling’ writer and that his status ‘as a great writer’ was almost ‘luck’  came about for a variety of reasons, of which perhaps the most potent were his own ruthless ambition and, later, the interest academia took in his work from the 1950s on will certainly, unwittingly, be reflected in the ‘facts’ I present (or, as Moddelmog might say, have chosen). I am very conscious of that.

Throughout these essays I stress that every pronouncement on Hemingway and his work, whether by some ‘celebrated’ academic, an ageing fanboy (of whom there are still quite a few) or, pertinently, by me, is a subjective view. No one is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ because in too many ways there cannot be a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I would also like to make that clear.

After these several years of reading and writing about Hemingway, and having had more than a few moments of doubt, wondering whether I was, in fact, simply too stupid to recognise Hemingway’s reputed ‘genius’, I’ve finally settled into the view that no, I am not. Ironically, that makes the man and his achievement of ‘global literary fame’ all the more fascinating.