Ernest Hemingway.

Curnutt, Kirk

Ernest Hemingway. By Verna Kale. London: Reaktion Books, 2016. 224 pp. Paper $19.00.

Approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of James R. Mellows Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, we are entering a new age of Hemingway biography. Mellows was the last stand-alone volume in that revisionary wave of 1980s' biographies that included sometimes controversial takes on Hemingway's life by Scott Donaldson (1978), Jeffrey Meyers (1982), Bernice Kert (1984), Peter A. Griffin (1985), and Kenneth Lynn (1985). By the time the late Michael S. Reynolds completed the final entry in his multivolume series in 1999--some thirteen years after his first installment--the well on new insights felt as if it had run dry. No matter that the Ernest Hemingway of the 1980s and 1990s was a thoroughly different creature than the Papa of Carlos Baker's 1969 authorized life: such was the sweeping interest in the topics that many of these biographies emphasized (androgyny and sexual gender-bending, most obviously) that the cliched vision of Hemingway the He-Man that had deflated the writer's reputation in the 1970s seemed downright archaic. Even as the liminal boundaries between masculinity and femininity as a topic of analysis gave way around the turn of the millennium to approaches based on environmentalism, queer studies, and postcolonialism, Hemingway as a personality remained far more complex and elusive in scholarship than the pop-culture cartoon could ever admit. Given this transformation, would we really need a next wave of biography? What deeper layers could possibly be peeled away for us to discover yet another Undiscovered Hemingway?

And yet here we are, poised between last year's Hemingway: A New Life by James M. Hutchisson (Penn State University Press) and Mary V. Dearborn's Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, which by the time this review appears in print will have just hit bookshelves from Knopf. We have also benefitted from biographies of various satellites who circled Hemingway's star, such as Ruth A. Hawkins's Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage (2012), which illuminated the least appreciated of Papa's connubial quartet, Pauline. And while books such as Lesley M. M. Blume's Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises and Terry Mort's Hemingway at War: Ernest Hemingway's Adventures as a World War II Correspondent (both 2016) are not strictly biographies, they, too, inevitably deal with personality and chronology and contribute to our appreciation of the man's dimensionality. That is not to mention meditations on biography writing itself such as Donaldson's The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015), which uses Hemingway as one of many test cases for reminding us of the constructs of the genre and the practical problems of pouring a life out on a page.

Amid this pack of new biographies Verna Kale's Ernest Hemingway is perhaps too easy to overlook. At 224 pages it weighs in at only two-thirds of the size of Hutchisson's 300+-page volume and almost one-fourth of the length of Dearbon's 750-page tome. Moreover, the book's handy 5"x7" dimensions as opposed to a standard 7"x9" trim (Hutchisson's biography is an oversized 7"xll") makes it clear that that the page count would even out to around 180 in a more conventional format. Kale's biography is also part of a series called "Critical Lives" from the British publisher Reaktion Books whose other entries spotlight figures as diverse as Antonin Artaud, Octavio Paz, and Alfred Jarry.

One suspects the main struggle this book may face in garnering the critical appreciation it deserves boils down to this tired bugbear of size. No matter that we live in an age of speed and celerity of consumption--the old prejudices against the short story that Edgar Allan Poe tried to demolish way back in 1842 remain operative in our estimations of biography. Brevity seems slight compared with sheer heft and girth. Can a life as colorful as Hemingway's really fit into 200 pages without losing portions of the story? Does a shorter book not force us to skim instead of plunge? Shouldn't every paragraph of a biography reek of the sweaty labor of research, with a thick notes section that documents every dotted i and crossed t?

These are the ingrained assumptions that inevitably kick in when we pick up a biography as compressed as Kale's, and it feels high time to challenge them. As a modern-day Poe might say, what the fast-food industry is struggling to come to grips with might just be true in the art of this genre: forever supersizing "the life of... " might just be detrimental to our health.

Which brings us back to Kale's contribution. She begins her biography with the famous line in A Farewell to Arms (1929) on the naturalistic hostility of the universe: "They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you." From this she abstracts a core contradiction at the heart of the Hemingway mythos: for all the man's devotion to the rules of sportsmanship and the aficionado's code of ethical conduct, he lived a life remarkably "fraught with injury and broken relationships" (10). But whereas most biographers see this latter, defeatist sense of determinism as an inevitable admission of the transparency of Hemingway's "grace under pressure" ethos--a wish-fulfillment heroism too often dismissed as simple-minded--Kale turns the equation around. Although Hemingway recognized that "the only way out of the game was death," he nevertheless enjoyed a life of "physical and literary triumph, of intense friendships and love affairs... set against some of the grandest and wildest landscapes in the world" (10). This reversal suggests the overall strategy of the approach. Rather than dismiss the romanticism of Hemingway's sensibility, Kale embraces it, and the result is a refreshingly positive spin on the subject. Without denying Hemingway's many failures, the author places the focus on the accomplishments, reminding us in the first place why so many readers remain enamored with him long after his image has been thoroughly dissected as a facade.

Along the way we enjoy several new bits of information and interpretations. Kale cut her teeth in Hemingway studies as a member of Sandra Spanier's Hemingway Letters Project team at Penn State University, so especially in her earlier chapters she draws judiciously from the previously unpublished correspondence collected in the first volume of the project (which appeared in 2012), allowing us to hear fresh turns of phrase from the teenaged Hemingway. Also for the first time we see a photograph of Prudence Boulton, the Native American teenager who inspired Nick Adams's adolescent lover in "Ten Indians" and "Fathers and Sons." And while detailing Hemingway's doomed WWI romance with Agnes von Kurowsky, Kale flashes us forward forty years to learn that in 1957 Papa reached out to the Red Cross to learn of his lost love's current whereabouts, although he never tried to re-establish contact. (As we know, in one of the more remarkable coincides in the Hemingway story, Agnes spent her later years in Key West while Ernest was only ninety miles south outside Havana). There is also a wonderful reading of Across the River and into the Trees that analyzes this much maligned 1950 novel as a "metafictional elegy to his own career": "In addition to more than 25 references to the word 'trade'--typically in reference to the skillful practices of soldiering and writing--the novel contains tongue-in-cheek references to Hemingway's characteristically short sentences and his disinclination toward adverbs" (153). Hemingway even stitches in puns and allusions to his own corpus, including three separate references to "in our time," as if daring the reader to accept Across the River as a culminating "bibliography" of his achievements.

For all that feels fresh and non-accusatory here--for example, Kale takes a balanced stand on Ernest's treatment of Grace, noting his resentments but also recognizing his dutiful sense of obligation to her throughout his life (17)--ultimately the sheer fluidity of the presentation is what one appreciates most. I will be honest and admit that I have never read Baker, Lynn, or Mellow front to back. I tend to parachute into a period, reading in a patchwork fashion. As with most readers I suspect, I simply do not have the time--600 pages feels like too much of a long-term commitment. Kale's biography glides by rather than grinds on, however. In its compactness, it flows forward with an assured pace that never feels rushed. Is it a compliment to say one can finish it in about two hours? I do not see why not. I had the pleasure of making it from beginning to end during a layover in the Atlanta airport. One or two of my own favorite moments might have gone unmentioned in painting the bigger picture--"One Trip Across" (1934), for example--but the attention afforded other works such as The Fifth Column (1938) often given short shrift in similarly condensed biographies compensated for any omission.

In finishing the book I was reminded of Hemingway's somewhat ungracious commentary on Faulkner in Death in the Afternoon (1932): "All bad writers are in love with the epic." Sometimes it feels as if all biographers are in love with the epic, too. Verna Kale's Ernest Hemingway reminds us that succinctness offers its own formal pleasures by resisting digression and not spinning its wheels with undue elaboration. Given Hemingway's own celebrated devotion to concision, the format suits its subject. This biography is a happy reminder that brief can be beautiful.

Kirk Curnutt

Troy University