A Quarter-Century Later,

By LANCE MORROW

In 1928 Ernest Hemingway's mother mailed him a chocolate cake. Along with it she sent the .32-cal. Smith & Wesson revolver with which Hemingway's father had just killed himself. Hemingway dropped the pistol into a deep lake in Wyoming "and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight."

The story is minutely savage in its details and haunting in its outcome: perfect Hemingway. And of course, there is the water. Doctoral theses have been fished from all the waters and fluids in Hemingway -- lake water and trout stream and Gulf Stream and the rain after Caporetto and the endless washes of alcohol refracting in his brain. His style was a stream with the stones of nouns in it and a surface of prepositional ripples. Ford Madox Ford wrote that a Hemingway page "has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water. The words form a tesselation, each in order beside the other."

It is easier to see to the bottom of the brook than to the dark cold place in the psyche where that pistol came to rest. Ernest Hemingway's books are easier to know, and love, than his life. He wrote, at his early best, a prose of powerful and brilliant simplicity. But his character was not simple. In one of his stories, he wrote: "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is a man's life." The most complicated subject that he knew was Ernest Hemingway.

He was a violently cross-grained man. His life belonged as much to the history of publicity as to the history of literature. He was a splendid writer who became his own worst creation, a hoax and a bore. He ended by being one of the most famous men in the world, white-bearded Mr. Papa. He stopped observing and started performing. He sentimentalized and pontificated and lied and bullied.

Still, a long mythic fiesta between two explosions may not be a bad way to have a life. The first explosion came in Fossalta di Piave in northeastern Italy at midnight on July 8, 1918. A shell from an Austrian trench mortar punctured Hemingway with 200-odd pieces of shrapnel. The wounds validated his manhood, which they had very nearly destroyed. The second explosion came 25 years ago this summer. Early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway (suffering from diabetes, nephritis, alcoholism, severe depression, & hepatitis, hypertension, impotence and paranoid delusions, his memory all but ruined by electroshock treatments) slid two shells into his double-barreled Boss shotgun. Mens morbida in corpore morbido. There was a gruesome ecology in the fact that the last creature Hemingway brought down was himself.

Hemingway was mourned mostly as a great celebrity, his worst side, and not as a great writer, which he was. The Louisville Courier-Journal wrote in an editorial: "It is almost as though the Twentieth Century itself has come to a sudden, violent, and premature end." He was a genius of self-proclamation. He made himself a representative hero. The adjectives he used did not so much describe as evaluate and tell the reader how to react: things were fine and good and true or lovely or wonderful, or else bad, in varying degrees. As the scholar Harry Levin has suggested, Hemingway sent postcards back home: "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here." He worked hard at his writing, and yet the interval between Fossalta and Ketchum was also a kind of permanent vacation: Paris, Pamplona, Africa, Key West, Havana, Wyoming. Readers chained to their jobs and mortgages and hometowns and responsibilities could pick up Hemingway and taste the wine and see the fish jump, and become Hemingway for a little while.

For a time during the late '60s and early '70s, when the air in America was full of rage and Viet Nam, Hemingway came to seem an atavistic character who loved the wrong things: violence and war. But Hemingway's reputation as a writer has survived, and grown. Public interest in the man and his work persists in an age that might be expected to forget the long-vanished ghost of the grandfather of Margaux and Mariel Hemingway. His publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, estimates that 1 million Hemingway books are sold each year in the U.S. alone. In the past year, a major new biography by Jeffrey Meyers has appeared, as well as a memoir by his son Jack Hemingway. Jack and some other relatives have lately formed Hemingway Ltd., which will market the family name for use on such items as fishing rods and safari clothes. Jack has also lent Papa's name, grotesquely, to a line of shotguns.

The Garden of Eden, published this spring, is an odd, interesting ingredient in the Hemingway psychomyth. Hemingway began the novel in early 1946, but it ran away from him, swelling to hundreds of thousands of words. He tried over the years to cut it down and make it manageable, but it was still a mess when he died. An editor at Scribner's pruned the manuscript to a tight and coherent 65,000 words.

Perhaps Hemingway had trouble with the prospect of publishing the fantasies he was entertaining. His hero, David Bourne, is a young writer whose wife cuts her hair as short as a man's and dyes it ash-white, and persuades him to exchange sex roles in a way whose mechanics are not explained. The man is to be the woman and the woman is to act the man. In bed, they do "devil things," also unexplained, and the wife brings a lesbian lover into their menage.

Into the age of Rambo comes an ambivalent Hemingway that he had more or less suppressed. Perhaps it should not be surprising that a man who spent so much of his life being aggressively masculine might (in mid-life, after going through several marriages and two World Wars) wonder what it would be like to take a vacation from his attack hormones. At the end of The Garden of Eden, in any case, the usual Hemingway order is restored: the rich, perverted bitch- wife goes crazy and departs, and the girl lover, lately lesbian, turns into one of Papa's adoring, delicious, perfect girls of one dimension.

Hemingway should be spared further Freudian autopsy. He was a masterpiece of contradiction. Every element in him had a blood feud with its opposite. He cherished his friends and he treacherously turned on them (on Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald and many others). He adored women and he hated them. His literary program was to write the brutal truth, and yet he was sometimes a liar and a fraud. He was profoundly creative and profoundly destructive. He had a spontaneous gift of life. He enjoyed (that is the word) a lifelong relationship with death. He resolved all contradictions at last by joining his father and his father's pistol in the amniotic deep.