WELL READ BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL
the title of your new book? Q: What’s
Troubled genius In a world that loves to place everything in neat categories, Ernest Hemingway has always been designated an unabashedly “male” writer, his “man’s man” persona part of the legend. It comes as little surprise then that Mary V. Dearborn’s insightful new biography, Ernest Hemingway (Knopf, $35, 752 pages, ISBN 9780307594679), is the first written by a woman. As such, Dearborn—known for previous biographies of Norman Mailer and Peggy Guggenheim, among others—brings a fresh perspective to a well-documented life. Dearborn pointedly looks beyond the legend. While it includes all the requisite details of Hemingway’s storied life—the love affairs, the feuds, the wars (real and emotional)—that shaped the writer in all his complexity, her portrait is a largely psychological one, seeking both the impetus for his distinctive fiction as well as the roots of the failures in his personal life. “At some point in the unfolding of his brilliant career, a tragedy began to take shape,” Dearborn writes. “Ernest seemed to find it difficult to give and receive love, to be a faithful friend, and, perhaps more tragically, to tell the truth, even to himself.” This last inability may have served him well as a storyteller (at least at the start), but less so as a man. Hemingway’s father was a doctor—who, like his son, eventually committed suicide—and Hemingway grew up in comfort in the suburbs of Chicago during a golden age of white, middle-class mobility. The shiny, privileged upbringing was, in retrospect, tarnished by a self-centered mother and a depressive father. Dearborn explores how these seminal relationships would shape Hemingway’s views of both women and men throughout his life. Hemingway grew to hate his
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mother, and throughout his relations with women, the four-time married writer both loved and never fully understood the female sex. Critics of his work often have pointed to the thinness of his female characters. Dearborn’s study goes deeper, tracing a fascinating trajectory from sensitive, innovative young writer to the late-in-life caricature of his macho public image. Two central ideas drive this elegantly written biography. One is Hemingway’s perennial need, established at a young age, to strive for perfection. He needed to have things under control in order to write. This necessary control abandoned him in his last years, precipitating his mental decline and suicide. The other pervasive theme is the mental illness that seems to have haunted his family. “Mental illness coursed through the Hemingway family like one of the rivers Ernest wrote about with such beautiful economy, its incessant, implacable force pausing only in small eddies, where Dearborn illness cursed pointedly individuals,” looks beyond Dearborn writes with lyrical the legend. insight. “It took and continues to take the form of cycles of mania and psychotic depression; alcoholism and other additions; and suicide. . . . More important, the river carried as it rushed along artistic talent, even genius, as well as extraordinary personal charm.” There have been scores of biographies of Hemingway, some written by friends, some by academics, some by family members. Dearborn’s is the first full-scale biography of the Nobel Prize-winning American writer in 15 years, and it is a worthy addition to the canon—a splendid reassessment that shores up the genius while removing some of the faulty bulwark that has long supported the myth.
Q: Describe the book in one sentence.
are your three favorite things about Lili, the young Q: What widow at the heart of your novel?
Q: How do your gardening skills compare with Lili’s?
have three kids, three dogs, three cats and seven chickens. Q: You Do they all get along?
an Englishwoman, what do you find most surprising about Q: As life in Los Angeles?
Q: Words to live by?
THE GARDEN OF SMALL BEGINNINGS In Abbi Waxman’s witty and poignant debut novel, The Garden of Small Beginnings (Berkley, $16, 368 pages, ISBN 9780399583582), a young widow tries to find a new path in life—with the help of her quirky sister and a handsome gardening instructor. Originally from England and a former advertising copywriter, Waxman lives with her husband and three children in Southern California.
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