Book Review – Hemingway – A Life Without Consequences
Book Review: Hemingway – A Life Without Consequences
James R. Mellow ISBN 0-201-62620-9 Houghton Mifflin 1992
Until I read this three-dimensional biography of the American writer who taught the modernists how to write, I thought I knew everything I wanted to know about Ernest Hemingway. Everything is in his literature; it’s all in the press and in the archives, I thought. But I didn’t find the man I thought I knew in this James Mellow biography. Eureka! Biographer James Mellow is as much a living history artist as the artists he writes about.
For Hemingway fans, “A Life Without Consequences” is possibly the most insightful portrait of the most influential writer of the 20th century. Much of what we already know about man is documented over and over again. That he was and is universally hated by some, adored and imitated by others can be found in letters to and from him, his four wives, editors, publishers and friends of his; not to mention the innumerable critics of him, “the slanderous bastards” that he compares to the hyenas in his African novels.
To understand this complex man who took his own life, the expat behind the legendary heroic war correspondent, journalist, big game hunter, heavy drinker, womanizer, openly bigoted, deeply romantic, envious of his peers, foul-mouthed Pulitzer Prize winner of Print Journalism, and Nobel Prize for Literature, you have to read this book. The extraordinary legacy he left behind, where he came from, what life did to him, and why he did what he did with his life, pulsates through the real characters, places, and events of this epic that reads better than a novel.
Born into a late-19th-century upper-middle-class Victorian family in the posh Chicago suburb of Oak Park, the Hemingway revealed by Mellow may or may not have been greatly influenced by his musically talented mother Grace and his physician father, Clarence. But most of his work seems autobiographical; his family, friends and enemies from childhood and adulthood are the basis of the characters in his stories. Unfortunately, his father, brother and granddaughter Margo committed suicide.
The wooded hunting and fishing scenes of his childhood, his first encounters with girls and sex, reveal wonderful glimpses of a simpler time. His tragic experiences during the war appear in the Nick Adams stories and later novels. Everything he did as Ernest Hemingway is in his fiction. And of course so are Paris, Spain, Cuba, Key West and life or death. Old photos show Hemingway the boy dressed as a girl, which was common at the time. In maturity, Hemingway overcompensates for manhood by demonizing homosexuality. He exaggerates his masculinity by being a womanizer (in my opinion) and engaging in affairs while “happily” married. Mellow includes photos of Hemingway’s family and people he knew before, during and after the two world wars, including his famous wives.
Hemingway belongs to the class of black literature less is more who found his way into the Hollywood money machine. Alongside such writers as Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Dream), Hemingway’s “The Killers” and “To Have And Have Not” are classic hard-core noir from a man who allowed no interruptions or intrusions. in his writer’s life. He worked from dawn to noon and drank the rest of the day. His characteristic brevity, with plenty of space between punchy dialogue, finds its way into his novels. By asking the reader to question, to contemplate what the characters might be thinking but not saying, Hemingway is engaging the imagination. With a few exceptions, I think that’s why most of the screenplays aren’t as successful as the original books of it.
The famous post-Stalinist Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (now in his eighties) admired Hemingway. As a young man, Yevtushenko wrote a poem about his chance encounter with “the old man” in a Copenhagen airport cafe/bar.
“The old man (Hemingway) moves with grim victorious determination… the earth seemed to bend beneath him, so heavily did he trample on it. Refusing a Vermouth and Pernod with a resounding ‘No,’ he is served Russian Vodka, clearly more to his taste” .
Everything about Ernest Hemingway is larger than life until he can no longer tolerate the myth he has cultivated and the expectations he has of himself. His body physically sick from war wounds and plane crashes, his mental abilities fading, what else is dad left to do but blow his brains out?