Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences

National Review, Dec 14, 1992 by Selden Rodman

Hemingway: A Life without Consequences, by James R Mellow (Houghton Mifflin, 704 pp., $30)

EVERYBODY WHO knew him should write his own biography of Hemingway--and many have. This one is mistitled: "A Life without Consequences." Mellow calls Hemingway a creative genius and implies that he was our greatest novelist; but every one of his books explored a different phase of his life. The biography I would write, if I were so foolish, would not be the one Mellow writes. The Hemingway he depicts is opportunistic, mean-spirited, publicity-mad, bitchy, envious, and cruel. Mostly that is what you find in the letters, as more and more become accessible. The Hemingway I knew was humble, generous, brave, self-mocking, kind. That one is there too, but harder to find, the novelist not being given to self-scrutiny or self-pity. What I have written about that second Hemingway has been published, but it is not what the biographers are looking for. Will the whole Hemingway ever be captured between two covers?