Hemingway: The 1930s.

Spanier, Sandra

By Michael Reynolds. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997. Cloth.

Hemingway in the 19305 was pushing the limits of genre and the patience of his public. In category-defying works like "A Natural History of the Dead," Death in the Afternoon, and Green Hills of Africa, he was mixing fiction, reportage, natural history, travelogue, landscape painting, autobiography, and discourses on writing and aesthetics. In 1934, trying to explain the African work in progress that was not the novel he knew his editor awaited, Hemingway insisted to Max Perkins it was "the best thing I've written--True narrative that is exciting and still is literature is very rare." Rare, too, is a biography as informative, insightful, and well wrought as Michael Reynolds' Hemingway: The 1930s--an artful book that itself takes chances with style and conventions of genre yet is anchored firmly to the bedrock of documentary evidence, a book of nonfiction that reads like a novel.

This fourth volume of Reynolds' ongoing Hemingway biography opens in May 1929, in Hendaye, Spain, with the writer laboring over galley proofs of A Farewell to Arms to get the ending right, even as the first installment of the novel has just appeared in Scribner's Magazine. It ends a decade later to the month, in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, where, effectively ending his second marriage, he has just taken up residence with Martha Gellhorn and work on For Whom the Bell Tolls, the big novel his editor and readers have been awaiting for ten years. Reynolds asserts that like others of his generation who "went to the Great War to make the world safe for democracy," Hemingway is still "looking for values that remain valid no matter how the stock market fluctuates or which way the political climate turns" (20).

But like his styles, Hemingway's characters are changing: "Leaving behind the passive young men of his early period, vulnerable men to whom unfortunate things happened, he was searching in no organized fashion for that man's other, the active man who chooses his fate rather than letting it choose him" (21). The 19305 would see the transformation of Hemingway from the "literary cult figure" of 19205 Paris to an "American icon"--by the end of the decade "as well known as many sportsmen, movie stars, gangsters, and politicians," yet rarely at rest or peace. "It is an old American story of promise fulfilled through fortitude and good fortune," Reynolds observes in characteristically elegant prose, "a tale of rewards beyond all expectation, a cautionary tale of the Dream and its dark side" (xx).

Exploring both the Dream and the dark side, Reynolds paints a portrait of the artist that is balanced and astute. He captures the energy and exuberance of a writer whose contemplative and active lives are "jammed together so tightly that only minutes separate them" (48), the gregarious host who leaves no one untouched by his intensity, the absolutely dedicated artist whose only unshakable faith is in the integrity of art, who could inspire Archibald MacLeish to write, "Every time I see you... I get a new revelation from god about the whole business (40).

Yet Reynolds captures, too, the intensifying cycles of "black ass" depression and "insidious paranoia" (228), the increasing abrasiveness in print and in public, the growing tendency to bite every hand that ever helped him, the ominous preoccupation with his own demise. He captures the conflicts and contradictions of a man who "embraced Catholicism, partially as the price for embracing Pauline Pfeiffer, a dedicated Catholic" but also out of deeply seated religious need (21), yet who was ever the cynic, in continuous revolt against genteel traditions. Hemingway wanted desperately for his work to be well received, yet baited the literary establishment incessantly and gratuitously, as if daring them to trash his work. With his growing success and cadre of dependents, part of him "seeks the responsibility, wants to be celled `papa,' the provider of largesse, the giver of names, the man in the house. The other side of him is never easy in any place called home" (37).

One of this volume's most important contributions to the increasingly crowded field of Hemingway biography is its recreation of the contexts--cultural, social, political, historical, economic, as well as literary--in which the works of the 19305 were conceived and delivered. From terrain maps, contemporary news accounts (not just in the Paris Tribune and The New York Times, but the Billings Gazette, the Havana Post, the Key West Citizen), library cards, hotel registers, the lyrics of radio crooners, the fluctuating stock market reports, the logs of boats, Reynolds culls the telling details to evoke as vividly as possible at six decades' remove the atmosphere in which Hemingway breathed and wrote: the sounds in the air, the shapes and colors of the landscapes, the weather in his countries, what the morning paper said.

The narrative is punctuated throughout with vignettes or snapshots reminiscent of the sketches that alternate with the stories of In Our Time to afford both panoramic and closeup views of the contemporary scene, or of the Newsreels of Dos Passos' U.S.A., another experimental work that melded 19205 modernism and 19305 social consciousness and confounded the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Reynolds repeatedly reminds us of the confluence of the cultural, social, political, historical, economic, and literary, of the concurrence of events public and private, individual and collective. Take the events in Havana and environs of 27 April 1932:

About the same time the Anita's first marlin hit the trailing bait, three

Cuban university students were brought before a military tribunal for

having tried six times to blow up President Machado with a dynamite-laden

car. At 8:45 a.m. Pauline's marlin ran her line out three hundred

yards, jumping and jumping, jerking her about for forty minutes until

Ernest pulled it to gaff. Before the marlin's colors faded, the three

students were sentenced to eight prison years on the Isle of Pines.

Chugging back into the harbor that afternoon, no one on the Anita noticed

that the Orizaba had docked during their absence; they were at dinner

that evening when that ship departed for New York. On board were the

critic Malcolm Cowley's estranged wife, Peggy, and her sometime lover

and troubled poet, Hart Crane, who at noon the following day went

over the fantail to his death by water. (92)

Through accounts of revolutionary unrest in Cuba, U.S. immigration quotas newly tightened against the "yellow horde," the 1935 hurricane that wiped out the Miami-Key West rail line and hundreds of vets camped on Matecumbe Key, and the economic distress of Key West (where the paper reported that a dairy cow was ambushed for meat and "even bars and prostitutes were short of customers" [173]), Reynolds reconstructs the background for Hemingway's proletarian novel, To Have and Have Not, opening the way for fresh critical views of the text in context. He does the same for 1930s Spain. He lays out the pieces of the "political puzzle ... waiting to be formed into the bloody picture they promised" (72) and succinctly summarizes the background, players, and events of the "war more cruel and politically complicated than historians would ever sort out" (262).

Reynolds reminds us continuously that Hemingway could not be in the fourth decade of the 20th century the Byronic artist, the lone hero of his own volition, an island entire of itself. He reminds us of the extent to which even this most rugged and independent of individualists was a product not only of his time and place, but, increasingly in the 1930S, of the marketplace as well. When Hemingway began writing a regular "Letter" for Arnold Gingrich's new magazine, Esquire, in 1933, his life became "a continuing serial, reaching an expanding, largely male readership." By 1935, when the magazine was selling half a million copies a month, he was "reaching the largest audience ever afforded an American author" (140). In a single month of 1934, Americans could read Hemingway's work in both Cosmopolitan and Esquire, while Vanity Fair featured in a full-page spread the Ernest Hemingway paper doll. The next spring Hemingway reported to his Esquire readers that his house was now Number 18 on the F.E.R.A. tourist map of Key West--"all very flattering to the easily bloated ego of your correspondent but very hard on production" (200). Success had its price. As Reynolds notes with his characteristic flair for metaphor, "Part of him understood the cost, but once he was seated firmly in that saddle there was no way to dismount short of shooting the horse" (105).

Reynolds traces Hemingway's experiments in nonfiction to his childhood dream of becoming a natural historian and postulates "the disturbing truth that Hemingway was never completely at ease with the idea of fiction" (148). "Hemingway never stopped believing there was a truth to tell," he asserts (and adds in a provocative endnote, "This Protestant conundrum affects more than one American writer, including, at times, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain" [334].) Distinguishing truth from fiction is a vexed question for the reflective biographer as well, and this one is well aware of the "constructedness" of the genre. In an epigraph to his second volume, The Paris Years, quoting John Barth, Reynolds indicates the premise of his own theory and practice of biography: "The story of your life is not your life. It is your story." (He restates the premise in an epigraph to the present volume, quoting Wallace Stevens: "In the way you speak/You arrange, the thing is posed.") Reynolds is ever mindful of his subjectivity without making it his subject.

Admirably in this day of exploitative biographies, he is loathe to overstate or sensationalize: "Later many would say that a torrid affair took place that summer between Ernest and Jane [Mason], but letters, the Anita log, and the Havana Post show that Hemingway had little time for adultery" (131). He notes the contradictory accounts of what landed Jane Mason in a New York hospital after the auto accident in Cuba in which she, her son, and two of Hemingway's sons escaped injury, again foregrounding the mutability of "facts." (Some said she leapt off a balcony to try to kill herself, one paper reported her shot by a revolutionary, another paper and the Anita's log confirm that she landed two marlin in the three days following the crash [133].)

Noting the invisibility of Martha Gellhorn in memoirs of the war in Spain by many who knew Hemingway (perhaps out of deference to his marriage to Pauline), Reynolds draws on her own accounts of that war to offer a corrective. She was there, "male memory or good manners notwithstanding" (287). And he juxtaposes Gellhorn's Collier's reports with Hemingway's North American News Alliance reports (including their respective accounts of Robert Merriman, prototype of the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls) to enrich his own depiction of that war.

Reynolds is sympathetic to his subject but not seduced, indulging in the occasional mildly sardonic editorial remark. On Hemingway's get-the-government-off-our-backs complaints that Federal emergency relief efforts to resuscitate Key West were causing everyone in town to quit work to go on relief, Reynolds notes: "Actually, there was no work to quit, no market for fish, no money for food, but that is easy to ignore if the self-reliant strenuous life is your moral guide and your diminished bank account is in no danger of failing" (188-89). He presents Grace Hall Hemingway, once dubbed by her son an "All-American bitch," with more understanding than is common: as a woman ahead of her time, "a self-reliant, ambitious, and articulate woman who loved to perform in public" (90-91). "While most boys grow up in conflict with their fathers," Reynolds notes, "Ernest's conflict was with his mother, whose every characteristic-he shared without ever acknowledging the debt" (91).

Hemingway, the doctor's son, once described his method of writing as "trying to make a picture of the world as I have seen it, without comment, trying to keep my mind as open as a doctor's when he is making an examination" (148). The biographer acknowledges his debt to his own father, a geologist, "who taught me to read maps and rocks" (314). (Like the two preceding volumes, this one is prefaced by maps of Hemingway's places in his time: the Florida Keys, Wyoming, East Africa, Spain.)

Reynolds knows that the concrete names of places and people, the numbers of roads and dates have an eloquence of their own. His catalogue of one winter's visitors to Ernest and Pauline's rented house in Key West in 1931 reads like the guest list at Gatsby's party. He finds the fascination in a grocery list. In 1936 "Everyone knew exactly what [Hemingway] should be writing, and was quick to tell him so. Harvard wanted him to write a check for its 300th Anniversary Fund. Max Perkins was desperate for a novel. Cosmopolitan wanted short stories like the ones he'd written ten years earlier, only without offensive words." The list goes on. "In the face of these various well meaning suggestions," Reynolds continues, "Ernest instead wrote out an order list for the Bimini pilot boat:(2) tins of candy, 1 caviar, maple syrup, vegetables, fruit,(2) dozen lemons, a dozen tomatoes, dill pickles,(2) jars of goose paste, walnuts, pecans, barbecue sauce, crackers, cookies, jelly, tripe, mustard, a far of pickled onions, and a tinned ox tongue (231).

Reynolds' biography even evokes the excitement of archival research: the drama of mining the letters and manuscripts for evidence of events or states of mind or the course of the creative process. His physical descriptions of the manuscript revisions of To Have and To Have Not, of the first typed draft page of For Whom the Bell Tolls, convey the scholar's almost sensual pleasure in the heft and texture of original paper.

Hemingway's stated intention in Green Hills of Africa was "to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination." If Michael Reynolds harbored a similar ambition for his own work of creative nonfiction, he succeeded admirably. Hemingway: The 1930s blazes a trail that should open up new territories for further exploration in a comparatively neglected region of Hemingway studies. It is a book that will richly reward both the scholar poring over endnotes and the layperson looking for a good read.