One of this biography's achievements is to deepen our understanding of Hemingway's fraught relationship with his mother ... Dearborn captures Hemingway in all of his extremes, the story of a hugely flawed and endlessly compelling human being producing enduring art.
Dearborn delved into the Hemingway family archives in Texas, and she gives rewarding attention to her subject’s relationships with his father, his five siblings and especially his mother ... Dearborn is incisive about the ways each wife handled the difficult bargain she had made in marrying a legend ... Dearborn skillfully covers an enormous range of rich material; she is an indefatigable researcher. But I’m not an indefatigable reader, and her insistence on using every minute detail slows the momentum of Hemingway’s story ... Ultimately, the scale of Hemingway’s life is so colossal and his motives so convoluted that no biographer, however gifted, can neatly sever the legend from the life, or have the last word on its meaning.
The result is a work in which 'the Hemingway legend' — a phenomenon in which Dearborn has 'no investment' — emerges more or less intact. Only here it is presented with an array of qualifications that cast Hemingway as a more troubled, complex and tragic figure than most previous biographies have allowed ... Dearborn explores these corners of his sensibility more fully than previous biographers, and she does so with subtlety and insight — qualities that are also present in her discussions of Hemingway’s work ... But Dearborn is not always convincing when writing admiringly. Her claim that Hemingway was uniquely adept at transforming life into literature is unverifiable, and vulnerable to the example of countless other writers ... On the whole, though, this is an admirable, affecting and thoughtful biography, distinguished by a scrupulousness and good sense that animates its subject with vigor.
...It’s always worthwhile to explore (on ever accumulating evidence) what makes a genius tick, even if tabulating his flaws can get to be a slog in Hemingway’s case. Ms. Dearborn does not shrink from the task. Once again we see how Hemingway built his career on the bodies of betrayed friends ... Ms. Dearborn’s book is not especially disparaging relative to other biographies—to her credit, she seems content to marshal the evidence pro and con, and there is a superabundance of both ... What makes this book seem a little relentless, at times, is its insistent focus on the flawed human being rather than his achievement.
Dearborn’s poised and elegant account is compelling because of her clarifying, sober, and calculated restraint, which serves to diminish much of the mist ... also cites relevant Hemingway scholarship with tact and discrimination, skillfully integrating into her narrative the work of people like Charles Fenton, Mark Spilka, Matthew Bruccoli, Philip Young, and others ... At the emotional center of Dearborn’s chronicle are the complicated strands of Hemingway’s personality, beginning with his enormous self-confidence ... Dearborn tells the sad story of Hemingway’s later years with intelligence and grace.
It would be wrong to concentrate overmuch on the tragic aspects of the Hemingway story. As Dearborn reminds us, in the early years of his adulthood, he was a golden youth in a golden time … There is also the abiding question as to the possibility of a homosexual element to his nature—the question, simply, as to whether he might have been gay. Dearborn is adamant on this, stating flatly on the first page of her book: ‘The short answer is no.’ But in areas as delicate as this, short answers are often inadequate to the occasion … Her book, at more than 600 pages of narrative, is lively and briskly entertaining throughout.
Dearborn, who has written biographies of Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and others, tackled Hemingway with diligence and prodigious research into letters, stories and interviews to try to explain what brought him to kill himself in 1961 ... Hemingway books just keep coming out. At least eight are expected this year. Dearborn has written one that Hemingway admirers will want to read, keep and read again.
... there is always room for fresh perspective on familiar territory. And Dearborn, who has published life stories of two other exemplars of American machismo, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, brings a keenly dispassionate, coolly discerning tone to her narrative. She refuses to indulge Hemingway’s odious behavioral tics. (Those anti-Semitic slurs hurt one’s ears more now than they ever did.) But she also persuasively explains why so many others did: “Simply put, people wanted him to like them, so he got away with more than other people did. His charisma protected him from the consequences of his most outrageous actions.”
Ernest Hemingway’s legacy endures in Mary V. Dearborn’s cautious and yet exhilarating new biography. She does not tout her achievement, but this is the first major Hemingway biography by a woman, and her gender makes a difference. She can put the question in a particularly authoritative way: What aside from the macho code and grace-under-pressure ethos remains of his reputation? ... The estimation of Hemingway’s place in American fiction — the esteem his short stories still commands — is not altered by this biography. But a more nuanced portrayal emerges in this empathetic, if still critical, study of a conflicted man and artist.
Her fluid narrative and careful research contribute to an impressive biography. Hemingway changed our language and the way we think, she asserts. Dearborn's account shines from beginning to end, helped by Hemingway's dramatic life and charismatic personality.
[Dearborn] distills a wealth of material for a richly detailed investigation of another writer intent on proving his vigor and manliness, on the page and off ... A thorough, but familiar, portrait of a tormented artist.
...these apparent insights of themselves are not enough for this slog of a book. There’s something more that gives the book its value. It’s almost inexplicable. And that is the influence that this one man and his ideas of masculinity have had on writers in America, even until now. The book is a nuanced portrait backed up by dogged research, medical records, FBI and KGB files and family letters of that influence. It is surely not the first but it’s an academically solid portrait.
