Ernest, Good and Bad

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY by Carlos Baker. 697 pages. Scribner. $10.

THE orthodox literary theory has been that there were two Hemingways: Ernest the Good and Ernest the Bad. Ernest the Good lived above a sawmill in Paris and worked night and day to become the best writer of his generation. With the help of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and the King James Bible, Ernest the Good learned to write books so true that, by his own definition, "after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: . . . the people and the places and how the weather was."

By the time he was 30, two novels (The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms) and the most brilliant short stories since James Joyce's Dubliners had made him, in his terminology, a champion. He should have lived happily ever after. But then, along came Ernest the Bad--the nonwriting Hemingway.

Ernest the Bad lived in Key West, drank too much, and kept remarrying. Instead of getting his work done, he was forever playing at great white hunter or bravebull aficionado or none-too-accurate war correspondent. When Ernest the Bad did write, the crisp sentences came out flabby, self-parodying. Finally, he turned himself from writer into public figure: "Papa," the self-indulgent joker whom his embarrassed admirers couldn't drag offstage and back to his Ernest-the-Good writing desk.

Fraid a Nothing. Because Hemingway was so flamboyant and public a figure, Carlos Baker's long-awaited biography could hardly discover hidden chapters of his life. But Baker--a Princeton professor, the author of an earlier critical study of Hemingway's writing and sometime novelist himself--is the scholarly inheritor of Hemingway's papers. He has used the material to fashion the first solid, cohesive and convincingly authentic account of a lifetime most often presented in the past in fragments by partisan observers. The book's great additional merit is that it forces readers to take Hemingway whole. After Baker, Ernest the Good and Ernest the Bad will never again be quite so neatly, so conveniently and so misleadingly separated.

The book ends on the morning of July 2, 1961, when Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. He was exhausted at the time and had been under treatment for erratic blood pressure, liver ailments and acute melancholia. But, Baker implies, the tragic themes of Hemingway's writing were not contradicted but confirmed by that final act and by Hemingway's entire personal history.

Certainly Hemingway's life was as haunted by death and violence as his stories. "When asked what he is afraid of," his mother wrote of five-year-old Ernest, "he shouts out fraid a nothing."" But he felt compelled to spend half a lifetime proving it. An astonishing number of Baker's pages--and the book's rich lode of rarely seen illustrations--document the journeys Hemingway undertook to various test sites of courage: high school football in Oak Park, 111., three wars, hunting grounds from Idaho to Africa, boxing and bull rings, ski slopes, four marriage beds.

Ernest had a way of attracting further tests. In the early Paris days, his infant son, Bumby (John Hemingway, first child by first wife, Hadley Richardson), cut the pupil of Daddy's right eye with his fingernail. Baker recounts how Hemingway broke a toe on a gate, tore his stomach on a boat cleat, ripped open his hand on a punching bag, and shot himself in both legs while trying to land a shark. He was particularly prone to head injury: four major concussions in one two-year stretch.

Violence characterized many of Hemingway's personal relationships too, as novelist John Dos Passes found out when he visibly and unflatteringly portrayed Hemingway in his novel Chosen Country. Hemingway spoke lividly of training his dogs and cats to "attack one-eyed Portuguese bastards." According to Baker, he called Scott Fitzgerald, who revered him, "a rummy and a liar with the inbred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel." Thomas Wolfe he rated as "a one-book glandular giant with the guts of three mice." Once he provoked a fight in a hotel dining room with William Saroyan, and when the poet Wallace Stevens, 20 years his senior, visited him on Key West, he left with a rather mysterious black eye. All things being equal, William Faulkner got off lightly: he was merely nicknamed "Old Corndrinking Mellifluous."

Papa's Pocket Rubens. Hemingway was almost as hard on the women in his life. With considerable literary license, he transmogrified some of the girls he admired into famous fictional characters. Agnes von Kurowsky, his World War I nurse, became Catherine in A Farewell to Arms; a hard-drinking English aristocrat, Lady Duff Twysden, turned up as Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises; the aging colonel's lissome contessa in Across the River and Into the Trees is a highly romanticized version of 19-year-old Adriana Ivancich, an Italian beauty whom the Hemingways knew in Venice in 1949.

He was also fond of boasting that he had taken every woman he wanted, and some he hadn't. When he left handsome, auburn-haired Hadley for his second wife, Pauline (a Vogue fashion editor, "small and determined as a terrier"), he described himself as "son of a bitch sans peur et sans reproche." Author Martha Gellhorn was No. 3--he wooed her during the Spanish Civil War and separated from her in World War II. She complained that he took too few baths--and besides, she had her own career as novelist and journalist to follow. Hemingway classified her with his mother, whom he condemned as "a domineering shrew." Baker appears to stand discreetly in awe of Mary Hemingway (called "Papa's Pocket Rubens" by her husband), who stood by him from 1945 to the end.

Warts and All. Hemingway's motto was "l faut (d'abord) durer" (One must, above all, endure). He was relaxed, fulfilled, only when writing well or when life's hostilities were out in the open--during war. "Having a wonderful time!" he wrote friends after his baptism of fire as a World War I ambulance driver. As a correspondent in World War II, he reiterated: "I love combat." Baker suggests that Hemingway's "esthetic of pleasure and pride" in "killing cleanly" may have been applied to war as well as the hunt.

Carlos Baker's warts-and-all treatment doesn't make Hemingway particularly likable. But it does make him more fully human than any accounts by previous memoirists or by Hemingway himself. Baker's approach--a kind of uncompromised sympathy--grants Hemingway in abundance the personal virtues of charm, impulsive kindness, physical courage and even "grace under pressure"--if the pressure did not threaten him too directly. But long before his final crackup, Baker makes evident, Hemingway felt habitually threatened. The he-man swagger and the toothy grin camouflaged a soul less in the family of Jack London than of Edgar Allan Poe. Hemingway's life, like his writing, contained, in the words of Critic Edmund Wilson, "the undruggable consciousness of something wrong."

The life of a great writer--or any writer--should not be confused with the value of his works. It was Hemingway's opinion and hope that a writer will be judged finally by the sum total and average of what he has written--and on nothing else. Resolutely concerned with turning out a solid and meticulous biography, Baker sticks to the life, refusing to pass judgment on the works --as, in fact, he ultimately abstains from personal judgment of the man.

He is no doubt correct when he argues that it is too soon to offer any speculation about lurking critical questions. (For example: Will Hemingway endure mainly as a short-story writer or as a novelist?) Yet the absence of strong opinion and strong feeling, one way or another, finally seems an aggravating weakness of the book.

One other thing is missing--an adequate tribute to the fact that Hemingway's obsession with death came paired with a ravenous appetite for living. He savored the odor, the flavor, the texture of life like a condemned man eating his last meal. None of his contemporaries described life's "moveable feast" so lovingly. He took an elemental, purring pleasure in food, drink, sun, physical grace, all animals. He condensed life to pure sensuousness, and before he savaged it--and before it savaged him--he celebrated it as it has rarely been celebrated in art.

Despite its dryness of tone, Baker's book is a massive and humane critical achievement. He firmly makes a necessary point: this sometimes foolish, vain and gallant man might have gone through life merely flailing at his personal terror--shooting it, gaffing it or punching it in the nose. Instead, he also tried to exorcise it with words. That made all the difference.

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