Hemingway: The 1930's

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The concluding installment of Reynolds's (Hemingway: The Paris Years) three-volume life of Papa makes a fitting centennial tribute to one of the most influential American writers of the century. Here Reynolds chronicles Hemingway's life from 1940 to his suicide by shotgun in July 1961. Beginning with the writer's tumultuous third marriage to journalist Martha Gellhorn, Reynolds takes readers through the end of the Spanish Civil War, the great success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, WWII and Hemingway's self-exaggerated role in "liberating" Paris, the triumph of The Old Man and the Sea, the Nobel Prize and the author's slow but certain physical and mental decline. Readers have front-row seats for his stormy fourth and last marriage to Mary Welsh, a relationship marked by continual brawls and reconciliations, and we follow the couple through Europe and Africa, enduring the back-to-back helicopter crashes that left Hemingway physically battered and emotionally scarred. Touchingly, in his final years, Hemingway sought to return to the people and places of his past, only to confront the futility of doing so. Hemingway suffered from severe depression and increasing paranoia, Reynolds writes, and his decline was hastened by shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic. Ultimately, he was unable to complete several ambitious projects, works eventually published as A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, The Dangerous Summer and, just out from Scribner, True at First Light. Recent scholarship and the release of important archival information make it clear that the demands placed on the celebrity Papa, a self-created and self-perpetuated myth, only hastened the end. As Reynolds concludes, Hemingway's story is one "the ancient Greeks would have recognized." (July) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Completing his celebrated five-volume study, Reynolds traces a dark change in Hemingway's later personality, while correcting the old wisdom that the writer was unable to work in his autumn years--which freshens the tragedy of his 1961 suicide. Barring further unpublished Papa novels, this may be the definitive biography of a troubled master. (LJ 5/1/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

This book explores Hemingway's exploits during World War II including his counter-intelligence work in Havana, his submarine patrols, and his experiences at Omaha Beach on D-Day. In a sympathetic portrayal of both the writer and the man, Reynolds, currently an independent author, who has taught literature at North Carolina State University, follows Hemingway's glorious post-War writing career, and ultimately his physical and mental deterioration in the 1950s through his suicide in 1961. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

...[A]llowing events rather than themes to form his narrative, Mr. Reynolds avoids critical judgments of Hemingway's work and offers no startling new theses....Yet he sharpens many details....[and] offers fresh and vivid details surrounding Hemingway's deterioration.....Even his sad and desperate end still evokes some sense of heroism, the shaking of a fist in the faces of cruel gods.
— The New York Times

James Wood

...[E]xcellent and exhaustive....Reynolds acutely analyzes the happiness and suffering that both [Hemingway and his wife Mary] created and received....One of the forces of disintegration, sensitively considered by Reynolds, was Hemingway's fear that he would never write anything better than For Whom the Bell Tolls....
— The New York Times Book Review

Merle Rubin

...Reynolds paints a bleak picture of this writer's decline....[His] account of Hemingway's tormented last decades is keenly analytical, boldly interpretative, and reasonably judicious.
— Christian Science Monitor

Kirkus Reviews

Covering the last two decades of Ernest Hemingway's life, the fifth and concluding installment in this biography (which began with The Young Hemingway, 1986) unfolds, with quiet but steadily mounting tragic detail, depicting a writer whose legend swelled as his physical and psychic resources ebbed. In the 1940s, Hemingway wrote his Spanish Civil War epic, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and served as a WWII correspondent. A decade later, he reached the zenith of his reputation as he won the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes and became a fixture on bestseller lists and college syllabi. He started an ambitious land-sea-air WWII trilogy that became transformed into posthumously published tales of artists mourning Paris as a lost Eden: Islands in the Stream, Garden of Eden, and A Moveable Feast. But though Hemingway continued to write some of his best material at peak periods, his body and spirit were now continually undermined by the need to live up to prior Byronic exploits. He fell increasingly into the embrace of "the old whore Death" by suffering several concussions during the war and two plane crashes on safari in Africa, then exacerbating the pain with excessive drinking. Reynolds mines recent memoirs and newly available Hemingway archives at the JFK Library to trace his subject's downward spiral, including growing tendencies toward paranoia and confusion of his fiction with reality. He is excellent in chronicling Papa's dance of death with last wife Mary Welsh, in a relationship marked by sexual games, verbal abuse, embarrassing flirtations with other women, expensive peace offerings, and threats of suicide eventually made good. A distinguished, moving account of a creator who, throughrelentless self-discipline, lived long enough to report on the darkness inside himself—and all of us. (b&w photos, not seen)