Ernest Hemingway

A Biography

De: Mary V. Dearborn

Narrado por: Tanya Eby

A revelatory look into the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, considered in his time to be the greatest living American novelist and short story writer, winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Mary Dearborn's new biography gives the richest and most nuanced portrait to date of this complex, enigmatically unique American artist, whose same uncontrollable demons that inspired and drove him throughout his life undid him at the end and whose seven novels and six short story collections informed - and are still informing - fiction writing generations after his death.

©2017 Mary V. Dearborn (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A fine book undermined by performance

Would you consider the audio edition of Ernest Hemingway to be better than the print version?

In no way. The audio does the printed book a disservice.

Would you be willing to try another one of Tanya Eby’s performances?

Dearborn's work is very fine, as is her work on Mailer, Miller, etc. but unfortunately the spoken performance of this book has an almost patronizing tone: every aside or clause is overemphasized, and in several cases the inflection is just 'off' and doesn't sit well with the text. It sounds a little like Siri, or the flattened but forced affect of a computer reading. It's prim. Listening to Dearborn herself talk is lively, incisive. Not so with this performance, which I started to think was done by a 'bot'.

Deeply involved, An affront to privacy

With Hemingway’s life already full of adventure and interesting stories, a considerable section of this book is wasted on excessive detail of side characters and tabloid-esque narratives. While I appreciate the author’s commitment to presenting a full image of Ernest Hemingway, it frequently felt like I was hearing things that should not be shared, like his medications or the mental troubles of his son. Now, knowing more about the man, it feels as though the author meant to tell Hemingway’s tale as a series of pitfalls and shortcomings.

Hemingway the person with all his flaws and quirks!

The somewhat brief ending really let me down with this one. Good information about Hemingway and how he interacted with the world around him.

Dearborn Doesn't Like Papa and You Won't Either

Ernest Hemingway was charismatic and had a gift for simple writing, which he based largely on the style of Owen Wister, author of The Virginian (1902). He called his style the "Iceberg Method", because the visible part, above the water/on the page, is just a small portion of the subject. Hemingway lived large and wrote his experiences down in a fictional format. Of course, he twisted things, making himself more heroic in the lead role of his books and savaging his friends throughout the pages. He became legendary, and burned almost all the bridges along the way.

He was also an arse, prone to lying, attacking his friends, drunkenness, reckless behavior (like driving and handling firearms while drunk, sometimes both at the same time). He was happiest getting/being drunk, surrounded by syphocants, telling the same lies about his past over and over again. He went through 4 wives, the last of whom hated him (but was still married to him) at the time he killed himself.

He wrote only four good novels: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea (more of a novella really). But what masterpieces they are. His few other novels were bad, like really bad. Some of his short stories are magnificent. But in the final analysis, his career quality is really uneven and his output fairly paltry.

But the subject is so thoroughly unsympathetic that the biography was a real chore to get through. Mary Dearborn doesn't hide her contempt for Hemmingway. She really ends up not liking her subject, but feels that a woman's view of the man should be penned for posterity, so she takes up the joyless task. Maybe I ended up not liking the man for seeing him through Mary's eyes. But probably not. He just really seems like an arse.

And he went crazy. It runs in his family. His father killed himself too. And sexual nonconformity and gender dysphoria run in the family. It is a messy cocktail. The poor women who were sucked into his orbit and became his wives! One really comes away feeling sorry for them.

One thing that jumped out at me was how Hemmingway was one of the first modern "Anywheres"--people who did not live in a place, were not from or of a place, but were from and of anywhere. Hemmingway followed the bullfighters in Spain from town to town. He spent some winters fishing from Key West or Havana, other winters were spent skiing in the Alps. He spent summers and falls on a ranch in Wyoming or Sun Valley Idaho. He took extended safari-hunts in Africa. He lived long stretches in Paris and often stayed months in New York City.

His success in reputation and money allowed his life to become unmoored, literally and figuratively. This rarely results in happiness and it certainly didn't for Hemmingway. Trading out wives and homes and countries and climes seemed like a desperate attempt to distract him from the fact that those who really knew him didn't like him--including his mother, his siblings, his peers (including a number who started out as friends), his wives, and eventually his children. He drove everyone away eventually. Enabled by his fame and his royalties, he became a monster. Then he went insane, contributed to by numerous head injuries, mostly resulting from stupidity.

And he shot himself and ended it all at age 61 after becoming so fat and neurotic that a young Italian beauty he wanted for wife number 5 refused to fall under his spell. Rather than face his body falling apart over the next decade due to his hard living and drinking while living with a wife who was mostly waiting around for him to die, he pulled the trigger. While the world mourned, his frenemies and family sighed relief.

I really wanted to like him and be inspired. Maybe I'm inspired--to be a Somewhere, moored to a place; to avoid addictions and dependence on drugs/alcohol; to not treat relationships as disposable; to not be jealous of and turn on friends; to keep myself humble and open to correction; to not be like Papa Hemmingway.

The Complete Hemingway

I’ve read most of the biographies, and many essays about Ernest Hemingway and his writing. This is by far one of the most exhaustively researched and unflinchingly detailed works about a complex man and his life. Every imaginable source is used to flesh out facts from the fiction of his life. I enjoyed this book immensely even though it made him a little less larger than I had pictured him.