Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences

Ernest Hemingway would have been a nightmare on Twitter. He would have retweeted your Blog post and then Dm’d all of your friends, slagging it off. He would have written sneery tweets about you but slightly changed your name so he could deny all responsibility. He would have encouraged others to do the same. He would have unfollowed anyone who didn’t retweet his clever tweets, claiming never to have liked them in the first place. Indeed, if he’d been alive today he would have fitted in perfectly. The literary criticism circles of the twenties and thirties were perfect for Twitter.

But it’s hard to argue against him being none of the great innovative writers in the English language. Beyond the desperately competitive male ego, the constant striving to be more of a ‘man’ than anyone else, his prose is often extraordinary. Creating a style which blends both fact and fiction, Hemingway was often criticised for being a fabricator of stories, guilty of hyperbole when telling his stories of his experiences in the First World War. But he did experience those things about which he wrote. Being shot in Italy; immersing himself in the lives of the bullfighters; deep sea fishing in Cuba. The Spanish Civil War.

Biographies need to be very good to be any good and I generally don’t bother with them. Before embarking on a re-read of Hemingway’s novels, James R Mellow’s epic ‘Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences’, which has been on my bookshelf for years, has been an excellent place to start. The detail, the focused analysis of letters from throughout Hemingway’s life, bring to life a strange and complicated character, rightly seen as one of the greats. At no point does Mellow attempt to sugar coat his subject – the mark of a great biographer – but the reader becomes acutely aware of the struggle to become a great writer rather than merely a successful one.

The most fascinating parts of this book are the sections on Hemingway’s time in Spain, during the Civil War. It was, as his third wife Martha Gellhorn writes, ‘the only time in his life when he was not the most important thing there was.’ Hemingway recognises the importance of the fight against fascism and travels to the heart of that horrific conflict. He has already predicted a further World War: his unforgiving stance on the anti-Franco side loses him many more literary friends. As a writer he was as honest as they come. He lived the lives of his characters to the full.

So, is it sensible to read a major biography of a writer before re- reading his books? I think so. What could have been a Wizard of Oz experience, pulling back the curtain to a writer who failed to live up to his public persona, might have ruined them for me. But I don’t think so. Seeing the man behind the books, at specific times of career, will hopefully allow me to understand where they come from. I’d never assumed that he was a particularly pleasant human being. Seems I was right. But we’ll see.