Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences

Another book about Hemingway? Amazingly, perhaps, this is the best one yet. Papa with all his flaws and all his gifts, X-rayed, dissected, analyzed, and left with his compromised humanity intact as an awesome, if not a sympathetic, character. What I came away with from this rivetting biography is an appreciation of Hemingway the Artist. We already knew that he was a great writer, and a mythic figure, created at least halfway by himself. Mr. Mellows shows that typewriters and words were only the most obvious media that Hemingway used, and that from the time he left home, and probably before, he was using the people who showed up in his life as ruthlessly as he used language. Hemingway's greatest contribution to writing may be the savage way he trimmed style and excess from sentences until they were as spare as could be, leaving the pure idea without any affected embellishment whatever. He did the same thing with the people in his life, wives included, reworking them to fit his narratives, and discarding them when they either failed to conform, or worse, did something by word or deed that bruised his insanely touchy feelings. Sexual ambiguity is everywhere in Hemingway's life, and he himself put it there by embracing a macho pole of identity while containing all the while certain feminine charcteristics such as extreme sensitivity and receptivity. He needed these qualities to be the artist he was, but he eschewed them in his active daily life. No wonder he shot himself. Read this book.

Mellow is a fan of Hemingway and perseverant, hard working, and knowledgeable about even the minutia of his subject matter. For the whole of a very readable biography, he is in constant dialogue with different texts: Hemingway's, family memoirs, diaries of his lovers, family photo albums. And in doing all of this, he disentangles a lot of cleverly woven strands woven together in the quest of one man toward greatness....I can remember first reading Hemingway like six or so years ago when I was in high school and I hated him... could not understand why he did not understand why... the pointlessness of it all... Once, being forced to read 'A Room of One's Own' all of my disappointment in the man turned toward adulation; I still count Hemingway among my favorite authors.... and this book strengthens it.....Even if Hemingway were some no one whose books had never been things of legend, whose life had not been held in esteem even while he lived-- this would still be a remarkable book. I highly recommend it to anyone-- it is definately worth all the money you'll spend....

Anyone who has read Hemingway extensively has a general idea of his life, as he wrote in a very autobiographical (albeit slanted) stlye. However, for anyone wanting a fair, unflinching review of the author's life, including his loves, his clashes with friends and reviewers, and his frustrating decline as a writer, I encourage them to read Mellow's excellent biography.Mellow is clearly a fan of Hemingway's, but at the same time he provides a very even-handed and thorough account of the author's many personal vendettas, his sometimes boorish and insensitive behavior, and his failed relationships with his wives while at the same time providing glimpses into the autobiographical aspects of many of Hem's works. I became much more interested in Hemingway's excellent short stories after reading Mellow's book, which refers to them extensively. We meet Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gerald Murphy, and other Hemingway friends and aquiantances in vivid detail. I also was particularly impressed with the biography's epiphanous ending, as Hemingway took his life in Ketchum Idaho in 1961 with a self-inflicted shotgun blast. All in all, this is an excellent, concise, very readable biography which should be must reading for all fans of Hemingway's writing.

I need not elaborate on the content of this book, for it is as compelling as any intelligent reader will allow it to be. For those interested in an unflinching look at the writer's public and private life and the historical period in which he lived, which must inevitably come with the undying attempt to dissect literary persona and legend from literary and historical fact, then this is your biography. I recommend Mellow's study to professors and students alike.