I think that, like many journalists, Hemingway could turn a good phrase, but his rise to prominence and eventually global fame was, to put it baldly for the sake of brevity, something of a fluke.
I have been reading any number of biographies, memoirs and related works about ‘Papa’ Hemingway – he awarded himself that nickname – and came across Bradford’s book recently. I was attracted by its title which encouraged me to expect that it was not yet another quasi hagiography. (To be fair more recent biographies, unlike
Bradford has a lot to say and would seem to have done a great deal of research, much of it based on close readings of Hemingway’s correspondence. He is, though, notably hostile to Hemingway.
I, too, am sceptical about the writer and often feel that to describe someone as ‘larger than life’ as Hemingway might be is simply code for ‘a complete pain in the arse’; but Bradford comes across as almost hating him. It’s frankly a little odd.
Bradford’s central theme is that Hemingway was a self-delusional fantasist – and I don’t disagree at all – but I can’t deny that the case he lays out is badly undermined by some real howlers and inexplicably bad editing.
Just a few examples: he refers to Sylvia Beach as both ‘Beach’ and ‘Beech’. The writing is often so confusing – sometimes it is very unclear who a ‘he’ is referring to so bad is the writing – that you start to wonder just how much you should trust the author’s research and his judgment. And ‘publicly’ is thus spelled, not ‘publically’, and for an English professor (and his publisher) to get that consistently wrong is not encouraging as to the quality of the rest of the book.
In fact, for an author, who is, according to the dust cover, a ‘research professor of English at Ulster University’ and ‘visiting professor at the University of Avignon’, he does not write at all well. Worse, the publisher is not some fly-by-night outfit, but an apparently respected house; so how it can allow this work to reach the presses in its current condition is very odd.
This is even odder in that Bradford is certainly no common-or-garden or wannabe biographer: he has written about Patricia Highsmith, Martin Amis, Alan Sillitoe and Norman Mailer.
Another curious aspect of the book and one which also give this reader cause for concern is Bradford’s quite obvious dislike of Hemingway. At times, especially early on in the book, he even seems to hate him.
These and related points should be borne in mind because Bradford does make some strong claims about Hemingway and the writer’s relationship with the truth. According to Bradford, Hemingway was a fantasist from a young age and it got worse as he grew older. It would seem that once he was over 50, he had pretty much, to use a popular phrase, lost his marbles.
Some of the made-up stories he told are quite fantastical and one wonders why previous biographers apparently glossed over them. Hemingway claims to have worked as a prizefighter, a bullfighter, commanded as a lieutenant a battalion of crack Italian troops in World War I, flown a Hurricane for the RAF, personally helped in the mass execution of more than 100 Falangists in the Spanish Civil War, personally gunned down 110 German soldiers in the battle of Hürtigenwald in World War II, landed on the Normandy beach on D Day, and much more. None of this was true. It is all complete bullshit.
But to confuse the issue terribly, he did do some extraordinary things in World War II which have been verified.
Bradford’s book is certainly worth reading, if only to get one more perspective on Hemingway; but potential readers should bear in mind my strictures above. I am giving the book just two stars because however interesting it and its claims are, it should and could have been so much better.
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