Hemingway : Life and Work

Traces Hemingway's life, attempts to depict his complex personality, and analyzes the autobiographical aspects of his fiction

Undaunted by the large body of biographical and critical work that has preceded his own, Lynn succeeds in casting the familiar life of Ernest Hemingway in a new and interesting light. He focuses on key events and relationships that affected the novels and short stories that ultimately changed our literature: Hemingway's traumatic wounding in World War I; his wives and lovers; and, most importantly, the parents who shaped his Oak Park years. Cursed with the same depressive streak, Hemingway was haunted by his father's suicide. Much of his own strength and talent was drawn from his mother, but her overpowering influence left other marks as well. She dressed him as a twin to his older sister when he was a toddler, an experience that undoubtedly contributed to the subsequent counter-posture of excessive masculinity central to Hemingway's public image. Nevertheless, Lynn finds evidence aplenty that this childhood feminization also accounted for a lifelong fascination with androgyny and sexual transposition vis-a-vis women, imparting another level of meaning to Hemingway's oft-repeated declaration that in his writing he wanted "to make people feel more than they understood." Taking as his premise Hemingway's glib assertion that the only analyst he relied upon was his "portable Corona Number 3," Lynn (Literary and Historical Writing About America, etc.t tracks the exploration of a disordered inner world as Hemingway sought to find some sort of resolution to the agony of his personal conflicts through "his cunningly wrought fiction." The man who emerges from Lynn's biography is a vastly more complex and compelling figure than the white-bearded, pontificating "Papa" of myth. Photos. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This intelligent, lively, mean-sprited biography of Hemingway gives us virtually no new factual material. Still, by virtue (or vice) of its single-minded psychological reductionism and its determination to find or invent biographical identifications and unconscious motives in all of Hemingway's fiction, Lynn discovers a "new" Hemingway. The reader is triumphantly presented with a vulgarized portrait of the artist as a mother-fixated young, middle-aged, and old man, unconsciously inclined to androgony and viciously in thrall to his own vengeful wrath and self-serving sentimentality. Lynn's revisionist readings of some of Hemingway's best-known stories seem like tortured efforts to support an eccentric interpretation that is intermittently provocative but ultimately unpersuasive. Earl Rovit, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.