Hero as Celebrity

BYLINE: ERNEST HEMINGWAY edited by William White. 489 pages. Scribners. $8.95.

Ernest Hemingway is becoming the publishing business' posthumous answer to cottage industry. Three years after his suicide, A Moveable Feast arrived, literary leftovers served up by his widow, Mary. Now, after another three years, comes this 77-piece assembly of Papa's journalism, newspaper and magazine pieces edited by William White, professor of journalism at Wayne State University.

Although By-Line: Ernest Hemingway is really source material for Hemingway biographers and thesis hunters in the Eng. Lit. factories, the book does have intrinsic value for nonacademic readers. Hemingway told good yarns. His fishing and hunting stories made sea and forest seem God's heaven. And he had wise words for would-be writers: "Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent." But always the book's main interest is the author. It traces the rise, the peaking out and the decline of Ernest Hemingway as stylist.

The Image. First there was the bright 20-year-old, freelancing formula features at $10 apiece to the Toronto Star Weekly. Next came Hemingway at 23, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, filing color stories on the Greco-Turkish war and the Genoa Economic Conference, along with vignettes of trout fishing in Germany and the "king business" in Europe. Some of that early stuff was basic Hemingway: clear as glass. He attended a prestigious press conference given by Benito Mussolini. Il Duce "sat at his desk reading a book. His face was contorted into the famous frown. He was registering Dictator . . . and he remained absorbed in his book ... I tiptoed over be hind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary --held upside down."

By the mid-1930s Hemingway was the celebrated author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; he had a tough and masculine image to live up to. He harpooned a 50-ft. sperm whale off the coast of Cuba, and he also clumsily managed to shoot him self through both calves with a .22 Colt automatic. He was doing his writing at Key West in those days, and "to discourage visitors while he is at work your correspondent has hired an aged Negro who appears to be the victim of an odd disease resembling leprosy who meets visitors at the gate and says, Tse about Mr. you.' " Hemingway and I'se crazy

Manic Sentences. He eventually tired of his self-imposed isolation. Heming way the North American Newspaper Alliance correspondent went to Spain to cover the Civil War, and there he did his best reporting. His words wept at the barbarism of battle. "The com pany had gone on [toward Teruel] and this was the phase where the dead did not rate stretchers, so we lifted him, still limp and warm, to the side of the road and left him with his serious waxen face where tanks would not bother him now nor anything else and went on into town." A wounded Loyalist soldier had a "face that looked like some hill that had been fought over in muddy weather and then baked in the sun." Hemingway reported so well and so movingly from Spain that two of his newspaper pieces later appeared virtually intact as short stories.

His trek down from the summit be gan with his all-knowing China stories for the newspaper PM and continued with his World War II pieces in Collier's magazine. He, not events, became his subject. He reported how Hemingway landed on D-day in an LCV(P), and told the commander how to find Fox Green beach. He told how Hemingway forged ahead of the Allied armies with a group of guerrillas. It was Hemingway who liberated Paris and a fair sampling of French wine cellars.

The last Hemingway is Papa running off at the mouth, unzipping his ego in public, and writing manic sentences.

Out of control, Hemingway became a parody of himself. Military parlance, scrambled syntax, bravado posturing descended on his magazine pieces like an awful curse. Look bought "The Christ mas Gift," Hemingway's 1954 account of near death in two plane crashes in Africa. What Look published was a mawkish self-portrait of the Hemingway hero emerging from the jungle with two bunches of bananas, four bottles of Carlsberg beer and a jug of Grand MacNish. At 54, he was ready to take the count.

Thirty years after his moveable Parisian feast, Hemingway remembered that Gertrude Stein had told him to "get out of journalism and write . . . the one would use up the juice that I needed for the other. She was quite right and that was the best advice she gave me." But he did not take it. Instead, he became a gossip columnist, with himself as sole celebrity.

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