The Hemingway Review

Mary V. Dearborn's new book represents the most thorough and authoritative one-volume biography of Hemingway since Carlos Baker's magisterial Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story in 1969. At 752 pages in bound galleys, with an index to come, it runs even longer than Baker, and for good reason. A great deal of new material has surfaced during the past half century to be taken into account, and Dearborn has been diligent both in reading what other biographers and critics have contributed and in uncovering fresh information.

She is an accomplished biographer whose subjects have included Henry Miller, Louise Bryant, Norman Mailer, and Peggy Guggenheim. But her last book, on Guggenheim, was published in 2002 and, as her preface reveals, she has been thinking about a Hemingway biography since at least the middle 1990s. The gender-bending revelations of The Garden of Eden caught her attention as did the scholarship of Carl Eby, Debra Moddelmog, Rose Marie Burwell, among others. From the beginning, Dearborn had no "investment" in the Hemingway legend of machismo. Instead she set out to discover "what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer."

That took her back to Oak Park and northern Michigan and to Ernest's parents, Grace and Ed Hemingway. It's refreshing to see Dr. Hemingway so identified, inasmuch as he was almost universally known by his middle name Ed(ward) rather than by Clarence, his given first name. Dearborn is careful about that and about names in general. Only once does she lapse–in the bound galleys–by referring to Lady Brett rather than Lady (Brett) Ashley.

With her sensitivity to gender issues, Dearborn makes more than other biographers of the relationship between Grace Hemingway and her adoring music pupil Ruth Arnold, who as a teenager became a live-in companion to the family as early as 1906. Matters reached a crisis stage in 1919-1920 after Mrs. Hemingway determined to build Grace Cottage across Walloon Lake from the family's Windemere home in northern Michigan, presumably as an escape from her housekeeping duties but also, Dr. Hemingway believed, as a private retreat for her and Ruth. He objected angrily, but could not stop Grace from going ahead with her plan, paid for by her earnings from voice and music lessons. By and large, the six Hemingway children kept an almost total silence about Ruth. (Ernest objected to his mother's building of Grace cottage on the [End Page 114] grounds that the money might have been better spent financing college educations for himself and his siblings.) According to Dearborn, though, as of 1920 Ed Hemingway felt sure that Ruth's relationship with his wife was lesbian, and a good deal of new evidence, including loving correspondence between Grace and Ruth, supports that conclusion.

Dr. Hemingway, a hard-to-evaluate figure in the life story of his son, is humanized by way of a letter he sent Ernest after their last meeting. This took place in Oak Park in the final week of October 1928, when, Dearborn establishes, Ernest brought Pauline to the family home for a brief visit. Ernest was in good spirits, having finished the first draft of A Farewell to Arms, while his father, pale and distressed, was suffering from the diabetes and paranoia that led him to take his life a few weeks later. During that short interim, Ed Hemingway sent his son a letter that included this limerick:

I can't seem to think of a wayTo say what I'd most like to sayTo my very dear sonWhose book is just doneExcept give him my love and "HOORAY."

These discoveries in the Hemingway family archives testify to the author's dedicated digging, and are duplicated by so many others that her book is full of surprises. She also makes effective use of sources frequently neglected in the past: Peter Viertel and William Walton, for instance. In addition, she provides detailed sketches of almost all of the minor characters–extremely useful information often...