“I’ve lived with the Hemingway story for a long time. I have my doctorate in American literature, and I’ve read him since I was in sixth grade,” Mary Dearborn told me in a recent interview.
The Buckland resident, author of six earlier books about American cultural and literary figures, spent five years researching and writing her new book about Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).
“Ernest Hemingway: A Biography” (Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $35) is a detailed examination of the life of one of our country’s most important and influential writers — the first Hemingway biography written by a woman.
Dearborn is a freelance historian who has taught Hemingway’s work at the college level. “Teaching a Hemingway story is a delight,” she confided. She observed that students immediately appreciate his writing style, which is simple on the surface but has hidden depths.
Dearborn found Hemingway’s life as fascinating as his writing. She roots much of his personality and experience in his childhood in Oak Park, Ill. She may be the first scholar to have mined the papers of Hemingway’s mother Grace, a towering figure in the author’s life.
“The previous biographers thought (those papers were) domestic, I think, and therefore unimportant,” Dearborn explained.
One of Dearborn’s major themes — Hemingway’s interest in gender — is previewed in the book’s section on his childhood. She notes that Grace Hemingway liked to treat little Ernest and his elder sister as twins, dressing them in identical outfits and cutting their hair in the same fashion.
The Hemingway home in Oak Park was unusual for its time in terms of gender. The author’s father Ed, a physician, actually made less money than his wife.
Grace Hemingway, who would pass her strong personality and charm on to her famous son, was a prominent fixture in the Chicago arts scene, first as a musician and later as an artist. Ed performed many of the household tasks usually allocated to women of the era.
“Her mother told her never to go into the kitchen,” Dearborn told me, “although she had a couple of things she did cook. Her husband took care of a lot of the jobs. He did things like handle the laundry, which is not a small job when you have six kids.
“She was given free rein for her work and her passions, things she wanted to pursue.”
As the decades went by, Hemingway came to view his mother’s freedom and strength as liabilities for the family. “He chose to believe that his mother just wrecked his father, that she emasculated him,” said Dearborn. “That doesn’t seem to be the case … They were great parents, and they gave their kids the sense that they could do anything.”
Dearborn’s book goes on to trace Hemingway’s early career in journalism and his service in World War I. He worked as an ambulance driver and was eventually wounded. His war experience gave him his first taste of fame. In what was to become typical Hemingway style, he exaggerated both his service and his wounds for the press. His war work also gave him first-hand experience of death and near death, themes in his future fiction. Many of his protagonists would be soldiers or veterans.
Dearborn’s book is perhaps most eloquent when she comes to Hemingway’s early success as an author and his life in Paris in the 1920s. There he took part in the rich expatriate culture that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
Dearborn told me that she at first had some difficulty “animating” Hemingway in this important period. “Getting those years in the ’20s to come alive … that was my biggest challenge,” she recalled.
Eventually, she explained, she succeeded by picturing him as a contemporary — the sort of young artist who might be found living and working in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn today.
“I emphasize his charisma,” she noted, calling that concept something that “could have been invented” for Hemingway.
“It has a meaning of being a gift from the gods in a religious sense. Hemingway was a golden boy in Paris. People would love him from the first time they met him. He was writing stories that would leave people awestruck. And it all started to unravel, even from his 30s.”
Dearborn goes on to document that slow unraveling, which culminated in Hemingway’s suicide just before his 62nd birthday.
“It was really a terrible tragedy what happened to him — what he did to himself, I guess,” she mused. “It was a tragedy to others. And it’s a big loss to us because his writing went downhill … It’s much more of a tragedy when we see what’s been lost. And he knew that, too.”
Hemingway would marry four women over the course of his life. Mary Dearborn manages to empathize with all of the wives, particularly the one who survived him, Mary Welsh Hemingway.
“His poor fourth wife: she had to be a caretaker and she didn’t fully know that when she signed on. She loved him, but it was very hard for her,” said Dearborn.
“He was so damaged. He had a number of concussions. I’ve kind of studied that with football players. They get that cumulative thing; that leads to dementia. And (Hemingway) was an alcoholic, and he was almost certainly bipolar to the extent that you can look back and diagnose these things.”
She went on to describe the writer’s family history, noting that his father, who like Ernest committed suicide by shooting himself, “had depressions that were so bad they were characterized as psychotic.”
Dearborn was frank about the cost of Ernest Hemingway’s instability. “It reverberated for everyone — his wives and his friends and his kids. They really had a tough time. This mental illness thing goes though the kids and it goes on to the next generation.”
I asked her about the book’s cover, which features an image of a casually clad Hemingway pointing a pistol directly at the photographer. Some of her friends objected when they first saw the photograph, Dearborn said, but in the end she deemed it appropriate.
“I think he lived and died by guns,” she asserted. “And he’s also being a jerk (in the photo) because you’re not supposed to point a gun at someone. And that’s Hemingway, too.”
“Ernest Hemingway” deftly displays the complexity of the writer it profiles: a public “he man” who was curious about gender roles, a braggart, a charmer, a thinker, a fighter and a writer. The book should inspire readers, as it has inspired me, to take a fresh look at Hemingway’s work.
Mary Dearborn will discuss “Ernest Hemingway” on Thursday, May 25, at 6:30 p.m. at Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls.
Tinky Weisblat of Hawley is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” For more information about Tinky, visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com