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Hemingway: A Convincing Portrait
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13230 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1987 |
3,411 Words |
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Peter Shaw
Peter Shaw is a frequent contributor to Commentary, the
American Scholar, and other journals. He is the author of The
Character of John Adams. |
HEMINGWAY
Kenneth Lynn
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987
784 pp., $24.95
Despite having lived his life in the glare of publicity, Ernest Hemingway kept secret the most significant experiences that fed his art. As a result, ordinary readers and critics alike, convinced that they understood him, have missed the deepest meanings of his works. The popular view has always been of Hemingway as a celebrant of male prowess: on the battlefield in the First World War, in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, in the bull ring and boxing rings, hunting big game in Africa, taking big fish off Cuba, and in dominating and using women. A somewhat more sophisticated but equally untenable view has it that the heroism and brutality of Hemingway and his characters were poses struck by a man uncertain of his masculinity. Finally, there was the interpretation that came to dominate first literary criticism and then the academy, as Hemingway's writing gradually came to be included in high school and college reading lists. By this account, after Hemingway was wounded in the First World War, he never recovered from an accompanying psychic wound; he carried with him also a disillusionment with idealism and rhetorical excess of the kind that seemed to have lured the world's leaders into that war in the first place.
The Hemingway hero, critics of this persuasion point out, was not actually a brave man of action. Instead, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway's first novel, the hero is a sensitive man who looks to such characters as the intrepid young bullfighter Pedro Romero for models of bravery
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