Hemingway at Sea - three new books

By ARTHUR PHILLIPS - New York Times - Published: November 10, 2011 

Left - A photograph of Ernest Hemingway from “Hemingway: A Life in Pictures."
 Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston


It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway’s influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still. Here he is in a letter to his mother, July 1924, describing the San Fermín bullfighting festival in Pamplona, Spain: “It is a purely Spanish festa . . . and there are practically no foreigners.” Two years later he published a novel set in Pamplona, and from that moment on his letter’s description of a sleepy town would never hold true again. The 2012 college grad who will be gored running with the bulls in Pamplona next July, and the thousands of others safely drinking too much behind the barriers, are all living out the fantasies of one man.

THE LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY - Volume 1: 1907-1922.

Edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon -Illustrated. 431 pp. 

Cambridge University Press. $40

HEMINGWAY - A Life in Pictures 
By Boris Vejdovsky with Mariel Hemingway
Illustrated. 207 pp. Firefly Books. Paper, $29.95

HEMINGWAY’S BOAT - Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
By Paul Hendrickson - Illustrated. 531 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30

That man seems to hold our interest, and inspire imitation, in ways other writers don’t. His personality and his travels continue to fascinate as much as, and perhaps more than, his fiction. A broad Gulf Stream of books about him flows on and on, year after year, leaving him, I fear, more read about than read.

This abiding interest in the man, as opposed to his books, has three causes: the undeniably adventurous and outsize details of his tragic life; his intentional cultivation of celebrity (and the resulting mountain of documentary records); and the fact that he wrote fiction so closely tied to the actual places, people and details of his life. We feel we know him because we have read his stories of protagonists very much like him doing things he actually did in places he really lived with characters very much like his family and friends.
This is unfortunate, though, because it kills — or at least weakens — the power of his fiction, limits how we think of it. We start to read it small, view it as merely well-pruned memoir. It becomes an illustration of his life (“Oh, that character’s really his first wife”), when of course the best of his fiction is unique because it is not just one man’s story. It is great art because of its range of possible meanings and effects. His finest fiction is vast, universal, open to interpretation, changeable and debatable, intentionally opaque, impersonal. It is ours, not his.
Three recent books in that tide of Hemingway iconography present different glimpses of him, and imply different relationships between his life and his art.
Full piece at New York Times