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A review by jfl
Hemingway: A Life in Pictures by Mariel Hemingway, Boris Vejdovsky
4.0
I did not expect much from this book when I bought it. The New York Times review was not particularly complimentary and my interest was more in the photographic reproductions than in any of the accompanying text. I had read most of Hemingway’s works through Islands in the Stream, the first volume of his collected letters published by Cambridge Press and Kenneth Lynn’s biography. I simply wanted pictures to go with that reading.
Most of the original photographs in the book are housed in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Those that come from other sources the authors have identified in an appendix. Some of the photos have long been in the public domain and will be quite familiar; others are not as common. Still others are noted for their absence. For example, there are no pictures of Maxwell Perkins, his long-time editor at Scribner’s; Aaron Hotchner, his intimate friend during the final years of his life and the author of a controversial biography; Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate of the Pilar; Jane Mason, one of the women who engaged Hemingway during his marriage to Pauline. There is one of Charles Thompson, Hemingway’s companion on his first African safari and who appears significantly in The Green Hills of Africa with the name of Karl, but the face is obscured by an antelope horn. There is a photo of Hemingway’s birth-home in Oak Park but not of the home his mother built and in which he lived for years. Neither is there a picture of the exterior of Finca Vigia, his Cuban home nor of the home in Ketchum, Idaho where he committed suicide. It might have been interesting also to have included pictures of his sons in their later years. But all that is really insignificant. The photos that the authors did include in the volume were well-chosen and instructive.
It was the text that surprised me. It turned out to be far stronger than I had anticipated. It often captured succinctly much of Hemingway’s actual and fictional life as well as the controlling themes of many of his works. It laid out clearly the areas of controversy in both his life and in his writings. It gave the reader a solid verbal snapshot of Hemingway unvarnished. For example, focusing on Hemingway’s WWI experience in Italy, Boris Vejdovsky noted:
In the section that deals with the African safaris is this concluding observation:
Or, as another example, in the discussion of the book Islands in the Stream, is the following observation:
What takes a while to understand is the book’s organization. It is not rigorously chronological. The first 6 sections or chapters are organized thematically around what the authors describe as Hemingway’s “fictional topography.” In the arrangement or order of those sections there is a type of chronological flow whose headings are titles of either a Hemingway short story or book that for someone familiar with Hemingway’s works provides a clue to the content. Within each section, the text does proceed chronologically:
• The first section, titled “Indian Camp”, subtitled “An American Childhood”, deals with Hem’s youth and young adulthood in the Midwest that is the topography for almost all of the Nick Adams stories.
• The second section titled “In Another Country”, subtitled “Hemingway’s European Education”, focuses on Hemingway’s time in Italy and Spain and Europe during WWI and WWII that became the topography for, in addition to a number of short stories, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Across the River and Into the Woods –books that deal with war or some aspect of war.
• The third section titled “A Moveable Feast”, subtitled “Paris, Song of Innocence and Experience”, focuses on Hemingway’s years in Paris and the Alps (1921-1928) that is the fictional topography for a number of the short stories as well as for the first part of The Sun also Rises and A Moveable Feast.
• The fourth section titled “The Capital of the World” and subtitled “Writing and Death” deals with the time Hemingway spent with bullfighting in Spain (thru 1959) that is the topography for Death in the Afternoon and A Dangerous Summer as well as short stories like “The Undefeated”.
• The fifth section titled “The Hills of Kilimanjaro” and subtitled “Africa, the Last Frontier” discusses Hemingway’s Africa safaris and is the topography of The Green Hills of Africa as well of such short stories as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”.
• The sixth section titled “Islands in the Stream” and subtitled “A Writer Sets Sail” focuses on the years Hemingway lived in Key West and Cuba that became the topography for To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the Stream.
• The last two sections are strictly thematic and are not rooted topographically. One, titled “Hills Like White Elephants” discusses the women in Hemingway’s life. The last section, titled “The Last Good Country”, discusses Hem’s final years with his physical, mental and emotional challenges.
The editing was a bit disappointing. Given the book’s intended quality and the unexpected strength of the commentaries, there were numerous either factual or labeling errors that were distracting:
• Page 22: Hemingway’s mother did not, I believe, take him out of school, only his sister.
• Page 23: Calling his mother Mrs. Hemingstein or Mrs. Stein, since he often called himself Hemingstein or Stein, was probably not indicative of his hostility to Grace or a pointed anti-Semitic remark, even recognizing that he had a streak of anti-Semitism.
• Page 25: During Hemingway’s youth, northern Michigan was not “largely uncivilized.”
• Page 26: The Ojibway population around the Petoskey area was not, by the early 1900s, “dense.”
• Page 32: The capital of Missouri was not Kansas City.
• Page 35: The trip invoked in “Indian Camp” was not the one he took in 1919 with his friends.
• Page 65: (a) Hemingway’s Paris years ran from 1921 to 1928. (b) The directions at the end of the last paragraph are incorrect. (c) The Methodist Chapel was located in Horton Bay, near Walloon Lake (not Bay). (d) Hemingway and Hadley did not move to Toronto until 1927 after having moved to Paris.
• Page 110: The 1951 conversation with Pauline was about Gregory and not Patrick.
• Page 136: The person in picture #2 with Hemingway is Mike Strater and not Joe Lowe.
• Page 140: The person to Hemingway’s right in picture #3 does not appear to be Spencer Tracy.
• Page 149: The Patrick involved with the re-editing of A Moveable Feast was Hem’s son, not his grandson.
• Page 150: In picture #3, Carol is the shorter and younger of the two sisters: the names are reversed.
• Page 153: In picture #1, the children might be John (the bigger child) and Patrick?
Even with the errors, Hemingway: A Life in Pictures is a contribution to our appreciation and understanding of Hemingway as one of America’s literary icons.
Most of the original photographs in the book are housed in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Those that come from other sources the authors have identified in an appendix. Some of the photos have long been in the public domain and will be quite familiar; others are not as common. Still others are noted for their absence. For example, there are no pictures of Maxwell Perkins, his long-time editor at Scribner’s; Aaron Hotchner, his intimate friend during the final years of his life and the author of a controversial biography; Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate of the Pilar; Jane Mason, one of the women who engaged Hemingway during his marriage to Pauline. There is one of Charles Thompson, Hemingway’s companion on his first African safari and who appears significantly in The Green Hills of Africa with the name of Karl, but the face is obscured by an antelope horn. There is a photo of Hemingway’s birth-home in Oak Park but not of the home his mother built and in which he lived for years. Neither is there a picture of the exterior of Finca Vigia, his Cuban home nor of the home in Ketchum, Idaho where he committed suicide. It might have been interesting also to have included pictures of his sons in their later years. But all that is really insignificant. The photos that the authors did include in the volume were well-chosen and instructive.
It was the text that surprised me. It turned out to be far stronger than I had anticipated. It often captured succinctly much of Hemingway’s actual and fictional life as well as the controlling themes of many of his works. It laid out clearly the areas of controversy in both his life and in his writings. It gave the reader a solid verbal snapshot of Hemingway unvarnished. For example, focusing on Hemingway’s WWI experience in Italy, Boris Vejdovsky noted:
“Although he might have left…[the war in Italy] for a time, Ernest took from it what was his most precious and inspiring material: wounds of body and soul, confrontation with death, a sense of abandonment, even betrayal, the conviction that he would always be a man without a woman—themes that would inhabit the fiction of his life and the life of his fiction.”
In the section that deals with the African safaris is this concluding observation:
If the first trip was a young man’s exploration of new limits and entry into an unknown territory, the second was a return to places haunted by memory but also by fear of old age and death.
Or, as another example, in the discussion of the book Islands in the Stream, is the following observation:
Published nine years after Ernest’s suicide and after the biographies that had begun to reveal the architecture of the Hemingway monument, the book [Islands in the Stream] underlines the disquiet that inhabits his prose, his dark side and that stream that would eventually carry him off.
What takes a while to understand is the book’s organization. It is not rigorously chronological. The first 6 sections or chapters are organized thematically around what the authors describe as Hemingway’s “fictional topography.” In the arrangement or order of those sections there is a type of chronological flow whose headings are titles of either a Hemingway short story or book that for someone familiar with Hemingway’s works provides a clue to the content. Within each section, the text does proceed chronologically:
• The first section, titled “Indian Camp”, subtitled “An American Childhood”, deals with Hem’s youth and young adulthood in the Midwest that is the topography for almost all of the Nick Adams stories.
• The second section titled “In Another Country”, subtitled “Hemingway’s European Education”, focuses on Hemingway’s time in Italy and Spain and Europe during WWI and WWII that became the topography for, in addition to a number of short stories, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Across the River and Into the Woods –books that deal with war or some aspect of war.
• The third section titled “A Moveable Feast”, subtitled “Paris, Song of Innocence and Experience”, focuses on Hemingway’s years in Paris and the Alps (1921-1928) that is the fictional topography for a number of the short stories as well as for the first part of The Sun also Rises and A Moveable Feast.
• The fourth section titled “The Capital of the World” and subtitled “Writing and Death” deals with the time Hemingway spent with bullfighting in Spain (thru 1959) that is the topography for Death in the Afternoon and A Dangerous Summer as well as short stories like “The Undefeated”.
• The fifth section titled “The Hills of Kilimanjaro” and subtitled “Africa, the Last Frontier” discusses Hemingway’s Africa safaris and is the topography of The Green Hills of Africa as well of such short stories as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”.
• The sixth section titled “Islands in the Stream” and subtitled “A Writer Sets Sail” focuses on the years Hemingway lived in Key West and Cuba that became the topography for To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the Stream.
• The last two sections are strictly thematic and are not rooted topographically. One, titled “Hills Like White Elephants” discusses the women in Hemingway’s life. The last section, titled “The Last Good Country”, discusses Hem’s final years with his physical, mental and emotional challenges.
The editing was a bit disappointing. Given the book’s intended quality and the unexpected strength of the commentaries, there were numerous either factual or labeling errors that were distracting:
• Page 22: Hemingway’s mother did not, I believe, take him out of school, only his sister.
• Page 23: Calling his mother Mrs. Hemingstein or Mrs. Stein, since he often called himself Hemingstein or Stein, was probably not indicative of his hostility to Grace or a pointed anti-Semitic remark, even recognizing that he had a streak of anti-Semitism.
• Page 25: During Hemingway’s youth, northern Michigan was not “largely uncivilized.”
• Page 26: The Ojibway population around the Petoskey area was not, by the early 1900s, “dense.”
• Page 32: The capital of Missouri was not Kansas City.
• Page 35: The trip invoked in “Indian Camp” was not the one he took in 1919 with his friends.
• Page 65: (a) Hemingway’s Paris years ran from 1921 to 1928. (b) The directions at the end of the last paragraph are incorrect. (c) The Methodist Chapel was located in Horton Bay, near Walloon Lake (not Bay). (d) Hemingway and Hadley did not move to Toronto until 1927 after having moved to Paris.
• Page 110: The 1951 conversation with Pauline was about Gregory and not Patrick.
• Page 136: The person in picture #2 with Hemingway is Mike Strater and not Joe Lowe.
• Page 140: The person to Hemingway’s right in picture #3 does not appear to be Spencer Tracy.
• Page 149: The Patrick involved with the re-editing of A Moveable Feast was Hem’s son, not his grandson.
• Page 150: In picture #3, Carol is the shorter and younger of the two sisters: the names are reversed.
• Page 153: In picture #1, the children might be John (the bigger child) and Patrick?
Even with the errors, Hemingway: A Life in Pictures is a contribution to our appreciation and understanding of Hemingway as one of America’s literary icons.