Literary Lives

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story.
by Carlos Baker.
Scribner's. 697 pp. $10.00.

Henry James, IV, The Treacherous Years.
by Leon Edel.
Lip-pincott. 381 pp. $10.00.

Near the end of his recently published biography of Hemingway, Carlos Baker quotes with some relish the writer's backhanded tribute to Henry James. Hemingway was immobilized in Venice, not well, not able to be out on the town seeing, tasting, drinking, smelling, loving, bullying in his usual style. A plane accident in Africa, and other ills, kept him in bed reading. To the Italian girl whom he idealized as the Laura-like mistress of his old General Cantwell in Across the River and into the Trees, he explained genius offhandedly. “James, he told Adriana, was a great American writer who came to Venice, looked out a window, smoked his cigar, and thought. Apart from the cigar, his own case was not greatly different. . . .” Hemingway had not cared for Henry James, but he had cited him in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech as an honorable and great writer who had not received the Prize. There was something of likeness between them, he saw at last, something of a bond in their both having lived sincerely for the same art and sacrificed life to it. Otherwise, no two men and no two writers could have been more different. The books on Hemingway and James, coming out in the same season, illustrate the splendid variety possible in biography, and refute anyone's prescription that biographies should be made thus and so.

But then what is biography for, what does it do? Baker says it is “a thousand scenes”; Edel says it is “inner experience.” The two books, reviewed by coincidence or design side by side, make a nice contrast in virtues and vices in the art of biography in a decade rich in “lives.”¹ The two books should not bear alone the weight of judgment. They have good company these days. There is a general high standard of performance rewarding the expectation for biography. Documentation is expected, but pedantry, while eagerly practiced by the hundreds of second-level writers of biography, is not going to be rewarded. The writer is supposed to swallow his documents and digest them and present his life in as interesting a form and with as much suspense as a novel. He has a better chance than in the experimental fiction of the day. Biography has a ready-made form. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It tells a good story, that of birth, growth, decline, death. Its structures echo the rhythms of the body, the sequences of life. It is with our blood and breath that we respond to a good life story. It is the existential art. It assures us of the thereness of a man, of man in general, even of oneself.

With these things understood, there are as many different ways of telling a life story as there are biographers and subjects. The writer pins down reality by using homely, everyday facts. He releases significance from facts by arrangement, sequence, variation in the use of scenes, narration, analysis, and any other device which at the moment seems legitimate to him and furthers his particular aim. The shape of one particular life determines the shape of the book. Strictures of critics as to how biographies ought to be written, laid down as law, invite the triumphant success of a book resonant with life, a biography that disobeys all the critics' rules. Even a biographer's own guidelines may be viewed with a grain of salt, since he will often contradict his own axioms when confronted with the knobbiness of life which he must somehow subdue into book form. When Boswell tells us that Samuel Johnson sent out for oysters for his cat Hodge, he tells us something important about the imperious man, rough-featured, awkward, majestic, who lived in fear and trembling for his spiritual safety and was only momentarily comforted in his ordinary human vanity by being called “great.” The inimitable little fact has reassured us that this man lived.

Living, too, although on different levels of intensity, are the two new examples of “lives.”

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Leon Edel's Henry James, The Treacherous Years, is the fourth volume of what is to be a five-volume biography. It is the best so far. It covers the years 1895 to 1901, which make a natural kind of climax, a period of trouble, retrenchment, experiment, self-purging and self-defining, leaving for the last volume the expected triumphs of the writing of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. This penultimate episode is a well-turned piece of work, low-keyed, unemphatic, making its excitements quietly. The only events of importance are the hooting of James on the stage of the St. James Theater after the premiere of his play, Guy Domville, by an angry gallery mob, and the move into Lamb House, which became a much-loved center for the real work to which, after the play fiasco, he devoted himself. Edel emphasizes the relationship of Henry to William, the older brother, whose shadow still bothered him; and he makes a good deal of Henry's friendship for a young sculptor, Hendrik Andersen, demonstrating through excerpts from James's letters to Andersen an apparently homosexual passion, though the small amount of evidence does not bear out whether it was known to be such to James himself.

It is all a continuing drama of inner life, the dangers, difficulties, gains, fulfillments of that hidden life unknown to anyone but the sufferer or the rejoicer himself. It is a life guessed from letters, deduced from the tone and subject matter of the writer's fiction. In Edel's view, the novels and tales of children and adolescents, the tales James wrote after the playwriting failure, were for him a purging of anxieties and uncertainties, and a finding of himself through a reliving of his childhood in the versions of his stories. The general idea seems to bear weight. Some of the instances are humorlessly far-fetched, as when, for instance, Edel writes:

The murder of little Effie in The Other House, which inaugurates the series, can be read as inflicted at the age at which the little Henry, within the mature artist, felt himself annihilated by the brutality of the audience at Guy Domville. It will be recalled that James originally planned to have the child poisoned; but his selective imagination chose the form of death he himself had described at the Archbishop's when he had spoken of having been under water—“subaqueous”—at the time of his débacle.

The defect of the method is that the biographer seems to have put a cart before a horse. Looking for the artist's secrets in the works, he seems to be using them rather than perceiving them. His ambition is bold. “I have accepted the axiom of modern pschology that there is sequence and consistency in the stuff of man's imagination; that an artist's work is less accidental than it has seemed; and that even as form and discipline represent conscious effort on the part of an artist, there exists an equally consistent unconscious effort—an inescapable use of the buried materials of life and experience—to which the artist constantly returns. Biography has for too long occupied itself with the irrelevancies of daily life.” Edel has been sustained in his long work on James by believing that he was in quest of “the secret of a man's life”—Thoreau's phrase. “It is the quest for this secret that I regard as the justifiable aim of literary biography. All the rest is gossip and anecdotage.” Which is to arrogate everyone using different kinds of raw materials to a lower level. This of course would have to include James Boswell, with his trivial reportage of the great Doctor's eating habits, his cat's eating habits, his dress, his walk, his progression through the coffee houses, his least interesting pronouncement. Edel is most emphatic: “The physical habits of the creative personality, his ‘sex life’ or his bowel movements, belong to the ‘functioning’ being and do not reliably distinguish him from his fellow-humans.”

It is dangerous to make hard and fast rules, for others or for oneself. Even bowel movements cannot be excluded from possible discussion. Erik Erikson has shown, in Young Man Luther, how relevant to Luther's emotional and even spiritual life his constipation was—this with no loss of dignity and interest and even wonder. One is thankful that Edel is not faithful to his own precepts. He makes James a realer man by telling us about his bicycling, about his habit of embracing and laying on of hands, about how the shaving off of his beard signified a new life. Even the comparatively unexciting but human event of Henry James's having cocoa informally with a beautiful young actress, Elizabeth Robins, from whom he learned a great deal about backstage events, warms the surrounding pages of psychological analysis.

The service Edel does best for James is to make the reader understand that the writer's feeling for his art was warmly emotional. Edel quotes effectively from time to time James's self-exhortations, passages as near to prayer as he probably ever came, in his notebooks. Lonely in his study at Rye during a great coastal windstorm, he feels “the old reviving ache of desire to get back to work.” And thinking of a big novel he must begin to write: “Ah, once more, to let myself go! The very thought of it soothes and sustains, lays a divine hand on my nerves, and lights, so beneficently, my uncertainties and obscurities. Begin—and it will grow.” Edel respects James deeply in his profession and presents the dignity and importance of it.

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Except in the respect that he too feels for his protagonist's profession of writing, no biography could be more opposite in its treatment than Carlos Baker's life of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was a man with virtues and vices like carbuncles sticking out all over him. Baker throws it all at you without mercy, a life lived at a high and self-punishing pitch of intensity. It was a naive, violent, devoted, scattered, used, wasted life, which somehow produced some of the best fiction of the generation. Baker's is a long, thick book, in which inner experience seems at first the thing least likely to be chanced on in a long succession of happenings, wars, travels, marriages, divorces, events of shooting, boxing, eating, drinking, loving, hating. It is a scenic and sensuous book, its values inhering in actions presented and seldom analyzed.

It seems artless, but of course it is not. Baker has a firm sense of what he is doing. He had written a critical study of Hemingway earlier and had chosen not to do it again. He has been pointlessly berated by Irving Howe in a Harper's review recently for not doing so. And he has been blamed by Elizabeth Hardwick in the New York Review of Books for being not one or the other, but for being both a journalist and an academic.

What Baker has attempted in the largest, most comprehensive way, with a chronology digested and regurgitated, in a succession of events which seem like existence itself, is to present the life which was the ground of the work, assuming that the reader knows the work and knows the repute of Hemingway. He, like Edel, has had a rationale. “If Ernest Hemingway is to be made to live again, it must be by virtue of a thousand pictures, both still and moving, a thousand scenes in which he was involved, a thousand instances when he wrote or spoke both publicly and privately of those matters that most concerned him. The small boy who shouted ‘Fraid o'-nothing’ became the man who discovered that there was plenty to fear. . . .”

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Carlos Baker's is a “daily life” sort of book. The “thousand pictures,” the ten thousand details, crowding pell-mell, may give one indigestion—particularly in the first third of the book—but the pace does not tire (however much the reader, temporarily, may), and the book gains in power as it accelerates. The biographer has made a deliberate mosaic, not an accidental one. And, as a matter of fact, he is not true to his proposition that a life is (altogether) a thousand pictures. The actions and the years are laced together with comment. He speaks of young Hemingway as “brutally outspoken” and forewarns that this is “a newly emergent trait visible in times of nervous stress.” He underlines an emotion as a novelist might. Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, had been skiing, a season of joy broken by weather. “The wind and rain of a season of thaw were always afterwards associated in his mind with the prospect of imminent disaster.”

Baker psychologizes. “The pretense that his boyhood had been rough and dirty, the threatening stance of the tough guy in the face of those who crossed him, and the assumption of the role of the maturing artist who had lost his early bloom and was now as worn as old saddle leather, were all facets of the public image that Ernest wished to project.” This was Ernest at thirty. “Truth-stretching had been among his leading avocations since boyhood.”

The best pages, however, follow sustained flights of action and movement, as when Hemingway as war correspondent in France moved cross-country with guerrillas, or with Buck Lanham, the American officer who indulged him but came to value him too, in his role as coordinator of the regular and the irregular forces. Splendid use of detail makes living a late journey westward across the United States by automobile. “The car was crammed with luggage and Ernest was enthralled by the appearance of the countryside. All across Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, he counted and identified every bird he saw and kept a running record of the wild animals. He insisted on stopping at grocery stores in the smaller towns to buy apples, cheese, and pickles, which he washed down with Scotch and fresh lime juice. They listened to the World Series on the car radio. When the national anthem was played, Ernest always removed his cloth cap and held it unostentatiously against his chest in a comic gesture of patriotism. Bulletins about the dying Pope Pius XII frequently interrupted the broadcasts. Each time this happened, Ernest quietly made the sign of the cross. In Iowa they made a point of driving through Parkersburg, Pauline's birthplace [the deceased second wife], and Dyersville, where Ernest's great-grandfather, Alexander Hancock, had settled in 1854.” And so on and so on, to the beguilement of every reader who wants to know what happened next. It is told with gusto.

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Edel uses habits and incidents of “daily life” to enhance his psychological analysis; Baker analyzes his piled-up incidents and events of “daily life” to recreate a coherent if not entirely explicable character. The virtue of his book is that Hemingway escapes us; there seems to be more of him than we will ever know. Much of the teasing interest is in the discrepancy between the man as he lived and the man who wrote. To be fair to Baker, it must have been as inexplicable to Hemingway himself and his friends as to Baker. Baker has simply given us the setting and the character in all fairness and set the problem, not solved, not solvable, in front of us. He sends us back to the books, that is, Hemingway's books, with an increased sense of wonder.

In honest wonder, biography contemplates the contradictions of the single human person. It is sobering to realize that only the last several hundred years of Western history has been a time to foster the art. Eastern cultures did not; Sovietized Europe and Asia have not; it is doubtful if the space age will. The clean, computerized society of the future promises impatience with what “will not compute.” Human nature will have to lop off extravagances to fit with moon-shots and Mars-shots. Only joint or committee purposes will serve. The heroism or the monstrosities of the future will be quiet, joint, long-term, stretching beyond the life of one man.

¹ Samples: in 1959, Chambers's Stonewall Jackson and Ellmann's James Joyce; in 1963, Aileen Ward's Keats; in 1966, Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain; in 1967, David Higgins's Portrait of Emily Dickinson.