A Conversation with Mary Dearborn
As the first full biography of Ernest Hemingway in more than fifteen years Mary Dearborn drew upon a wide array of never-before-used material.
She has also written biographies of Norman Mailer, Peggy Guggenheim, Henry Miller, and Louise Bryant.
TG: In the preface to the book you describe a 1990s panel on Hemingway and his work at New York’s Mercantile Library. “A burly man with a peppery crewcut, who wrote about the literature of the 1920s stood up and announced. “Hemingway made it possible for me to do what I do”
MD: I think this speaker at the 1990s panel, a literary critic, meant that Hemingway made it possible for a boy or man to become a writer without feeling that his manhood was called into question—whether by society or by pressures within himself. I’m not sure that so many men feel constrained in the same way in these times—but maybe Hemingway deserves some of the credit for that!
TG Why now, and how has being a woman provided a new perspective on Hemingway?
MD: My research began with a long month exploring the Hemingway archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. I was particularly fascinated by the papers of Ernest’s mother, Grace Hemingway—who was revealed in this archive as a fascinating woman, worthy of a biography in her own right. Though there have been umpteen biographies of Hemingway, I found entirely new material in this collection, letters and papers evidently overlooked by those umpteen biographers, all of whom have been male. I could only conclude that they dismissed these papers as “domestic” and therefore unimportant. I thought it was time for a new biography that foregrounds figures like Grace Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. And as a woman, I had no investment in the masculinist ideal that’s tended to be the subtext in the work of these male biographers.
TG: I remember reading Byline Ernest Hemingway and noting how much his writing was influenced by journalism. Talk about his journalistic career.* The single biggest influence in Hemingway’s writing life was his short tenure—just six months—as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star. Thrown into the thick of it, covering emergency rooms, police precincts, and the train station, learning from the newspaper’s style sheet to “write declarative statements” and “avoid hackneyed adjectives,” he formed his impressions of the sheer vigor of the writing life, as well as his trademark style. At another juncture, when he was filing cabled news stories as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, he noted the range of expression even an abbreviated cable could convey and put this journalistic principle to work in his fiction.
I think it’s worthy adding however, that there was nothing easy or off-the-cuff about any of this. Hemingway worked and reworked his prose to get just the right meaning and effect. He didn’t write his great works on deadline, but the discipline of doing so helped him immeasurably to hone his style.
TG: He had the great good fortune of being directed to the legendary editor Max Perkins. Describe their relationship and Perkins’ impact on the Hemingway style.
MD: Sorry, Terrance, but I don’t buy that Perkins affected Ernest’s style much! Mostly Perkins got out of his way, offering encouragement and gently steering him back on course when he faltered. Actually, that’s a pretty significant influence, isn’t it? After Perkins’s death in 1947, Hemingway sorely missed his guidance; Perkins might have forestalled such disasters as the 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees. Perkins’s genius as an editor was in seeing just what kind of help his three star writers, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, needed—it was very different in each writer’s case. With Hemingway, he provided guidance in determining the shape of his career—addressing the larger issues of what book to publish next, what stories a collection should lead with, and so on, while pretty much leaving Hemingway’s writing style intact—by far the best thing he could have done. Anyway, if he’d tried to interfere, Ernest would have told him very quickly where to get off!
TG His mother was a very strong, independent character as was an early supporter, Gertrude Stein. Talk about his attraction to strong, often older women.
MD: The first three women Ernest fell in love with, Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky and his first two wives, Hadley and Pauline, were all significantly older than Ernest. It’s a commonplace among Hemingway critics and biographers to cite his later-life insistence that he hated his mother Grace, but I think his early love for her, throughout his childhood and adolescence, led him to strong, older, ambivalently maternal figures similar to her—like Gertrude Stein, who had in fact a great deal in common with Grace Hemingway.
TG: He seems to me to be terribly insecure and never missed an opportunity to be unkind to those who had been kind to him, most notably Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. why?
MD: This really is one of the fascinating quirks of Hemingway’s makeup. Anderson played a key role in launching his career, yet Hemingway repaid him with a book-length parody, The Torrents of Spring. Older writing pro F. Scott Fitzgerald saved The Sun Also Rises by cutting the first twenty or so pages, and Ernest effectively never forgave Scott. Harold Loeb rescued Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, from the returns pile at Liveright, and Hemingway repaid him by writing him into The Sun Also Rises as “that kike” Robert Cohn. He turned on all of them, plus friends like John Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker. It’s quite sad, really, as it meant that this gregarious and fundamentally loving man was without friends for much of his last two decades, when he needed them most.
Why? I think it comes down to hyper-competitiveness and a kind of solitary narcissism. He resisted being seen as “part of” something, whether a literary movement or an expatriate social circle. He wanted to be seen as his own man. What’s sad is that after a certain point, he didn’t have regular contact with writers who were on his level, but mainly with hangers-on. He missed the opportunity for the constructive criticism of his earlier companions.
TG: Among his friends and acquaintances were numerous bisexual and homosexual men, yet he frequently disparaged them, as in a letter to his pal Bill Smith, in which he delivers a diatribe against the American writer Glenway Wescott, who switched sides when a rich man financed his trip to Europe: “There’s a homosexual claque that makes a guy overnight.” “They were organised, like the Masons.” And most crudely “The way to succeed as a writer is through the entrance to the Colon.” Is the facile argument that his excessive machismo was a camouflage for latent homosexuality or as I suspect, you discovered more complexities in his sexual makeup?
MD: There were a lot of gay male writers in the Paris expatriate scene, Ernest’s friend Bob McAlmon among them, and Ernest saw the talented among them, like Wescott and McAlmon, simply as competitors in a crowded playing field. Ernest was neither homophobic or latently homosexual, despite his occasional cruel remarks; he did have a certain amount of what one Hemingway critic called “gender trouble,” familiar to any reader of the posthumous The Garden of Eden; though vigorously heterosexual, he was interested in sexual play in which traditional gender roles were overturned. But I think that’s one of the things that makes him a fascinating figure now. How many men in his day were willing to admit to themselves what they really wanted in bed, and commit to writing—even in unpublished texts?
TG: What were the most surprising things you discovered in your research? TG: What do you hope that the Hemingwayists will learn from your book?
MD: One of Hemingway’s characters said he went bankrupt “gradually and then suddenly.” I was distressed to find that Hemingway fell apart in his middle age in just this way. Almost overnight he was friendless, unable to find direction in his writing, drinking alcoholically, and pretty much hobbled by what seems to have been bipolar disorder, aggravated by a series of Traumatic Brain Injuries. Yet the seeds were there from his earliest days: The mental illness alone seems to have been genetic—his father shot himself when he became psychotically depressed. His charmed life was transformed into an ordeal that he was in effect unable to turn around—a great tragedy for those who loved him and for his readers.
Another surprise: Part of the Hemingway legend is that this virile sportsman and soldier, hard-drinking and hard-boiled, had to have been be a great womanizer as well, yet in fact Hemingway was pretty much a serial monogamist, with six or seven lovers, tops—that is, hardly a Don Juan. He left Hadley for another woman, his second wife Pauline; then he left Pauline for his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. I think it was Faulkner who observed that Ernest felt he had to marry the women he fell in love with. He wasn’t a particularly good husband, and though a fundamentally warm-hearted person, he was unable to show or even to feel love, never really connecting with the women in his life. But that’s a far cry from being a ladies man!
TG:It has been over 90 years since the publication of THE SUN ALSO RISES. After all that time is that comment still valid, and should we be reading Hemingway today, as I was required to do in sophomore high school English?
MD: Teachers love Hemingway because it’s not hard to get their students to love him. I think the stories are the best way in—and not just because they’re short! While I love The Sun Also Rises, I’m not sure what exactly it has to tell students—or non-students who are new to Hemingway, for that matter. It’s about one long, fairly unpleasant party, and the Robert Cohn business is pretty nasty. But “Indian Camp” or “Soldier’s Home” are absolute gems that teach themselves—about meaning, literature, how to write. I think we will always read Hemingway.
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