Mark Shechner
PAPA
Not long before he died, Ernest Hemingway wrote to one
of his literary executors,
"It
is my wish that none of the letters written
by me during my lifetime shall be published. Accordingly, I hereby
request and direct you not to publish or consent to the publication by
others, of any such letters." That should have been enough to stay
the hand of those biographers and publishers avid, like fight
promoters , to get one last payday out of the ex-champ, no matter
what the cost. Mary Hemingway, to her credit, held out against
Carlos Baker and the Scribner Hemingway industry for eighteen
years after her husband's death in 1961. To her discredit, she finally
did cave in and authorize publication of a book that is both dis–
honorable and damaging.
*
The dishonor lies in the violation of
Hemingway's wishes in the name of some higher claim, some fanci–
ful version of the advancement of learning that Baker calls "the
continuing investigation of the life and achievements of one of the
giants of twentieth-century literature."
In
plain words, more
gargoyles for the mausoleum. Yet to read these letters is to recognize
immediately why Hemingway wanted them kept out of the
marketplace, for they place on view in the most vivid fashion all that
was most unsavory in the man's private character. The damage done
here is not to the man or the "legend" - which can matter only to
those who insist that exemplary writers be also exemplary human
beings- but to those books that we once read in such total confi–
dence as documents of life "in our time." Such raw encounters with
the man as these letters afford undermine the authority of the books
and put the "continuing investigation" of them on a more slippery
footing, one informed by suspicion and distaste.
It
is an advance of
sorts, but in the direction of substituting an author's life for his books
and confusing a biography for a career.
It
is one of the unsettling
side effects of bringing a writer's life into sharper focus that his
writing may become , in the process , more remote.
Ernest Hemingway was a barbarian. That has never been pre–
cisely a secret, and yet we've always found chasers to help us down
•Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters,
1917-1961. Edited
by
Carlos Baker. Charles
Scribner's Sons. $27.50
