Word: hemingways
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Warts and All. Hemingway's motto was "l faut (d'abord) durer" (One must, above all, endure). He was relaxed, fulfilled, only when writing well or when life's hostilities were out in the open-during war. "Having a wonderful time!" he wrote friends after his baptism of fire as a World War I ambulance driver. As a correspondent in World War II, he reiterated: "I love combat." Baker suggests that Hemingway's "esthetic of pleasure and pride" in "killing cleanly" may have been applied to war as well as the hunt...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...