Michael Finocchiaro's review of Hemingway (original) (raw)

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Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > Hemingway: A Biography

Hemingway by Jeffrey Meyers

Hemingway: A Biography
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This was a highly readable biography of one of America's most fabled writers. A model for all writers that followed him, despite peaks and valleys in his writing quality overall, but what a fascinating and intense life! There was also some great advice for writers which I found more than relevant:

"From the beginning of his career Hemingway sought to base his fiction on reality, but he tried to distill the essence of the experience so that what he made up was truer than what we remembered. The vignettes from In Our Time illustrated his new asthetic theory: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

And also,
"His basic principles of writing have been extremely influential: Study the best literary models. Master your subject through experience and reading. Work in disciplined isolation. Begin early every morning and concentrate for several hours a day. Begin by reading everything you have written from the start or, if engaged in a long book, from the last chapter. Write slowly and deliberately. Stop writing when things are going well and you know what will happen next so that you have sufficient momentum to continue the next day. Do not discuss the material while writing about it. Do not thing about writing when you are finished for the day but allow your subconscious mind to ponder it. Work continuously on a project once you start it. Keep a record of your daily progress. Make a list of titles after you have completed the work." (page 113)

And again, in a letter to his father:
"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not just to depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as the beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way. It is only by showing both sides - 3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to."

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are my favorites, but I also reread his The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and found it fantastic. The book provides loads on insight into the events in the writer's life that impacted his writing and inspired his characters, particularly excellent for understanding his short stories.

There was a lot of irony in Hem's life and the over-shadowing of his father's suicide tainted much of his writing and, of course, his ultimate destiny. He seemed a bit obsessed with death and the idea of suicide. As noted in the book, "In 1961, the year of his own suicide, Hemingway wrote to Carlos Baker that Fenton had set a bad example to other biographers by jumping to his death from a hotel window, and wondered what he had been thinking about on the way down. (p. 496).

I also liked these passages near the end of the book: "Hemingway described with unusual knowledge and authority physical pleasure, the natural world, violent experience and sudden death. He portrayed the heroic possibilities and tragic consequences of war, the psychic dislocation in battle and the stoicism of survival. He created unsurpassed images of Italy, France, Spain, and Africa. As a man he had intense idealism, curiosity, energy, strength, and courage. He attractively combined hedonism and hard work, was a great teacher of ritual and technique, carried an aura of glamour and power. As an artist, he wrote as naturally as a hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects. Hemingway's phrases now live in our language: grace under pressure, a separate peace, death in the afternoon, a clean, well-lighted place, a moveable feast."

Norman Mailer was quoted as saying, "It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him. What is more likely the truth of his own odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods. It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the nothing that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible that he carried a weight of anxiety with him which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself." (p.571)

Highly recommended if you are a Hemingway fan for insights into this uniquely powerful and ultimately human writer.

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Reading Progress

January 5, 2017 – Shelved

January 5, 2017 – Shelved as:to-read

May 10, 2021 –Started Reading

May 17, 2021 –Finished Reading

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