Ernest Hemingway

A Biography

By: Mary V. Dearborn

Narrated by: Tanya Eby

Length: 29 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

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'.

Very interesting biography and great narration

The narrator does a excellent job, one of the best I have listened to. The biography is very interesting but has a few holes and places that I wish she would have explained better.

The last of a man's man.

Would you listen to Ernest Hemingway again? Why?
Yes. He interests me as a writer and a person and this book does present a fair amount of information.

What did you like best about this story?
Learning more about the man, the myth and the legend. Shows warts as well as praises.

What does Tanya Eby bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Emotion.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Laughed at the funny parts and felt sad as his depression started taking over his life.

Any additional comments?
I am not sure if Mary Dearborn is showing a feminine bias or a historical bias but there are several points in the book I felt that she did not understand the behavior of the American male in that time period when viewing him with her present day eyes. By today's standards Hemingway was a bully and a bore, but in the context of the age he lived in - he was not. His treatment of his wives came off one sided. She comes off as confused as Earnest may have been about his sexuality. His mother was in any age a whack job and would have confused anybody. But Mary Dearborn shows great understanding and empathy concerning the battle he had with depression. All in all she has written a good book on the greatest of American writers in the 20th. century.

Too long; narration unclear

The story was just too long. Also, the narrator seemed to slur words. Definitely, the narration would benefit from clearer diction.

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.

Real Story.

Very interesting. thought I knew Hemmingway pretty well. was very well done. a good listen.

The book is great, performance is monotone.

I was looking forward to listening to this book on my commute to work, but the monotone narrator made me want to take a nap. I even checked back on Audible to see if the narration was done via a computer. The hard copy book is great, but the audio book was disappointing.

Excellent Read

I always wanted to know more about Hemingway and this book, the narration, research and detail were fantastic. I got a glimpse into the life of the author of some of my favorite books.

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

Hemingway's version of "truth" draws a lot from the line in the film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": "When legend becomes fact, print the legend." He was inventing his own mythology before he was even out of his teens, transforming a one-week stint as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I into a enlistment in the Italian Army serving in the elite special forces of the Arditi Corps. Another 40+ years of tale-spinning to friends and journalists and the blurred crossover of non-fiction into fiction in many of the short stories and novels complicates the task of all the subsequent biographers.

Mary Dearborn unravels as much as can be currently done using the latest pieces of the puzzle that are gradually being unveiled to us through various studies (e.g. those such as "Ernest Hemingway's a Moveable Feast" that examine the veracity of "A Moveable Feast", the ongoing and continuing Letters project (Volume 4 of 17 to be published as of September 2017) and the recent memoirs and biographies that have focussed on specialized topics and themes e.g. "Hemingway in Love: His Own Story", "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961", "The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War", "Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage", "Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961".

Dearborn does especially draw attention to Hemingway's androgynous hair fetish, the love-hate relationship with youngest son Gregory (Gigi) Hemingway (who later transgendered into Gloria) and the final sad years of mental illness which may have been triggered as early as the concussion injury sustained in a World War II London car crash. Much of what was written post-WWII was never published at the time and some of it only in posthumous heavily edited forms such as the gender bending "The Garden of Eden" (probably too risque for both its late 40's writing time and the author's marketed image) and the various edited versions of the final African journey "True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir" and "Under Kilimanjaro". The ongoing Hemingway Library Edition may yet show us more of those unknowns as well although the story seems to be never-ending. Whatever questions fascinate you about this one person's life can likely never be fully answered and the journey itself becomes the goal. In that I see Hemingway as a stand-in for all humankind. Even with all of this ongoing documentation he is still a mystery and the subject of endless curiousity for us.

I read "Ernest Hemingway" in hardcover by Mary V.. Dearborn in parallel with the audiobook edition narrated by Tanya Eby. The narration was excellent and clear and well-paced.

#ThereIsAlwaysOne
Erratum
pg. 428 in the print edition "...the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1941."
As most with a heritage from the Baltic States or Eastern Europe will know, the Hitler-Stalin Pact actually dates from August 22, 1939.

Trivia
Great use of a "Crook Factory"/"Operation Friendless"/"Hooligan Navy" image as the cover photo. The second use of this one I believe cf. "The Crook Factory" by Dan Simmons.