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 modernists to write, I thought he 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 life history artist as the artists he writes about.

For Hemingway fans, “A Life Without Consequences” is possibly the most illuminating portrait of the most influential writer of the 20th century. Much of what we already know about man is documented ad nauseam. That he was and is universally detested by some, adored and imitated by others can be found in the letters sent and received by him, his four wives, editors, publishers and friends; not to mention his innumerable critics, “the damned bastards” that he compares with 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, drinker, womanizer, openly intolerant, deeply romantic, envious of his peers, foul-mouthed Pulitzer winner. Prize for Print Journalism and Nobel Prize for Literature, you have to read this book. The extraordinary legacy he left behind from his origin, what life did to him and why he did what he did with his life, throbs in the characters, places and real events of this epic that is better read than a novel.

Born into a late 19th century upper-middle-class Victorian family in Chicago’s posh Oak Park suburb, the Hemingway that Mellow reveals may or may not have been heavily influenced by his talented mother Grace and medical father Clarence. But most of his work seems autobiographical; his family, childhood and adult friends and enemies are the basis of the characters in his stories. Sadly, her father, brother, and granddaughter Margo committed suicide.

The wooded hunting and fishing scenes from his childhood, his first encounters with girls, and sex reveal wonderful glimpses of a simpler time. His tragic wartime experiences 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 and death. The old photos show Hemingway, the boy dressed as a girl, which was common then. In adulthood, Hemingway overcompensates for virility by demonizing homosexuality. He exaggerates his masculinity by being a womanizer (my opinion) and by getting involved in love affairs while “happily” married. Mellow includes photos of Hemingway’s family and the people he met before, during and after two world wars, including his celebrated wives.

Hemingway belongs to the less is more class of black literati who found his way to the Hollywood money machine. Along with writers such as Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Dream), Hemingway’s “The Killers” and “To Have And Have Not” are the classic hard black genre of a man who does not allow interruptions or intrusions. in his life as a writer. He worked from sunrise to noon and drank the rest of the day. His characteristic brevity, with a lot of space between forceful dialogues, 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 this is why most screenplays are not as successful as their original books.

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 cafe / bar at the Copenhagen airport.

“The old man (Hemingway) moves with grim victorious determination … the earth seemed to bend beneath him, so hard he stepped on it. Refusing a vermouth and a pernod with a resounding ‘No’, they serve him Russian vodka, clearly more to your pleasure “.

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 is physically sick from war wounds and plane crashes, his mental abilities are fading, what else is dad left for but to blow his brains out?