Less than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris - Hardcover

Griffin, Peter

4.13

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9780195053326: Less than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019505332X ISBN 13: 9780195053326

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1990

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When the first installment of Peter Griffin's biography of Hemingway appeared in 1985, it won widespread acclaim, especially among writers. The late Raymond Carver, in The New York Times Book Review, called it "wonderful and intimate" and said "it brings to life the young Hemingway with all his charm, vitality, good looks, passionate dedication to writing, like nothing else I've ever read about the man." Ward Just called Along With Youth "one of the most purely attractive biographies I have ever read." Tom Stoppard chose it as one of his "Books of the Year." And James Dickey declared that Griffin's "involvement with his subject is so complete and so creative that the reader cannot help murmuring with approval and enlightenment at page after page."
Along With Youth brought Hemingway from childhood to his marriage in 1921 to Hadley Richardson. Now, in Less Than a Treason, Peter Griffin vividly recaptures Ernest's early Paris years, when he met Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, tnd F. Scott Fitzgerald, and published his first important collection of stories, In Our Time, as well as his finest novel, The Sun Also Rises. As in the first volume, Griffin provides here an intimately detailed rendering of Hemingway's life. The book is replete with physical detail--the sights and sounds of working-class Paris, skiing in the Austrian Alps, the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Griffin presents Hemingway's friendships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound (he thought both were "lazy," but respected them for their talent and influence), his dislike of writers John Dos Passos and Ford Maddox Ford and his less-than-favorable opinion of Maxwell Perkins (he felt Perkins was more interested in business than literature). For Hemingway's personal life, there is his infatuation with Lady Duff Twysden, his affair with Pauline Pheiffer, and the failure of his first marriage.
Throughout this book, Griffin shows how Hemingway incorporated much of his life into his fiction, where the central character is Ernest himself, working out the crises that plagued him at the time. Griffin does all this with a seamless style, weaving unpublished material (including hours of Hadley's reminiscences recorded shortly before her death) into an intriguing narrative of a great writer's life.

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About the Author:

About the Author:
Peter Griffin teaches part-time atMassachusetts Institute of Technology, and lives with his wife in Fall River, Massachusetts.

From Library Journal:

Hemingway's treason during the 1920s, Griffin implies, was to betray two loves: Hadley, his first wife, for desire of another woman; and Clarence, his father, for the needs of his career. Certainly, the decade that produced his first two collections of stories and The Sun Also Rises deserves a more ambitious--and more significant--thesis (see, for example, Michael Reynolds's Hemingway: The Paris Years, LJ 11/15/89). In this slight and slender volume--the second of a projected full-length study begun with Along with Youth ( LJ 11/15/85)--Griffin continues his sometimes ingratiating (and more often vexing) method of paraphrasing letters, stories, and conversations to evoke a kind of journalistic immediacy and intimacy. Though Griffin intends that "Ernest," as he always calls him, bound spiritedly through this literary underbrush, some readers may prefer less atmosphere and more substance.
- Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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