Books: Ernest, Good and Bad

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Carlos Baker's warts-and-all treatment doesn't make Hemingway particularly likable. But it does make him more fully human than any accounts by previous memoirists or by Hemingway himself. Baker's approach—a kind of uncompromised sympathy—grants Hemingway in abundance the personal virtues of charm, impulsive kindness, physical courage and even "grace under pressure"—if the pressure did not threaten him too directly. But long before his final crackup, Baker makes evident, Hemingway felt habitually threatened. The he-man swagger and the toothy grin camouflaged a soul less in the family of Jack London than of Edgar Allan Poe. Hemingway's life, like his writing, contained, in the words of Critic Edmund Wilson, "the undruggable consciousness of something wrong."

The life of a great writer—or any writer—should not be confused with the value of his works. It was Hemingway's opinion and hope that a writer will be judged finally by the sum total and average of what he has written—and on nothing else. Resolutely concerned with turning out a solid and meticulous biography, Baker sticks to the life, refusing to pass judgment on the works —as, in fact, he ultimately abstains from personal judgment of the man.

He is no doubt correct when he argues that it is too soon to offer any speculation about lurking critical questions. (For example: Will Hemingway endure mainly as a short-story writer or as a novelist?) Yet the absence of strong opinion and strong feeling, one way or another, finally seems an aggravating weakness of the book.

One other thing is missing—an adequate tribute to the fact that Hemingway's obsession with death came paired with a ravenous appetite for living. He savored the odor, the flavor, the texture of life like a condemned man eating his last meal. None of his contemporaries described life's "moveable feast" so lovingly. He took an elemental, purring pleasure in food, drink, sun, physical grace, all animals. He condensed life to pure sensuousness, and before he savaged it—and before it savaged him—he celebrated it as it has rarely been celebrated in art.

Despite its dryness of tone, Baker's book is a massive and humane critical achievement. He firmly makes a necessary point: this sometimes foolish, vain and gallant man might have gone through life merely flailing at his personal terror—shooting it, gaffing it or punching it in the nose. Instead, he also tried to exorcise it with words. That made all the difference.