Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences

Lost Generation Trilogy #3

by James R. Mellow

Early in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, biographer James R. Mellow recounts an episode from the writer's apprentice years in which the then young journalist kept Kansas City Star colleague Ted Brumback awake for the better part of the night with drunken readings from Robert Browning. When Brumback woke up at four the next morning, Hemingway was still talking, but sailed through the work day that followed with seemingly no ill effects. "Sometimes I think that's the outstanding characteristic of genius," Brumback said later, "boundless energy." It was this vital energy and its subsequent translation into fiction that distinguishes Hemingway from his illustrious contemporaries. Perhaps no other writer in this century has so deliberately, and so successfully, pursued such a variety of experiences for source material.

Just recounting the significant events in Hemingway's life--the war experiences, the literary feuds, the safaris, the wives--is a major endeavor, and Mellow's ability to do so fluently and concisely in this relatively compact work, and with depth of analysis, is one of the book's outstanding qualities. Mellow's extensive experience with Hemingway's contemporaries (having written both Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company and a biography of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Invented Lives) proves invaluable to him in this project. He has the background both to cover the Paris of the 1920s, where Hemingway honed his craft, and to make the necessary critical assessment of the writer's time-line, which Hemingway conflated and re-created repeatedly in later life. Mellow's sensitive appreciation of Hemingway's prose doesn't blind him to a clear-sighted assessment of the writer's literary weaknesses and failures. Nor does his evident affection for his subject hinder him from detailing the manipulations, grudges, and breaches of faith that Hemingway was capable of in his ambitious drive to be the Great American Writer. Mellow is particularly good at demonstrating how Hemingway's life, as much as his fiction, was a conscious creation. The title of this biography is, we discover, largely an ironic one, as the writer's tendency to mix truth and fantasy in his writing and his own life was to have vast consequences, for his friends and lovers, for himself, and most tragically, for the literary genius that was far too often squandered in his later years. --John Longenbaugh

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Literature, 20th Century

704 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

James Robert Mellow was an American art critic and biographer.

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

across the liver and into the sleaze

Far be it from me to say that Ernest Hemingway wasn't a great writer. No doubt he was. His inimitable style is known around the world. But what did he write about? Ah, that's another topic. If you sit down to "do" Hemingway, as I did back in the early 1970s, you will soon be appalled by the focus on "manly" activities, the authoritative insistence that he knows about alcohol and can "hold his liquor", he knows about weapons and their use, that animals are there to be killed by us for sport, and that men need women but basically male company is to be preferred. Bullfighting is great because it proves what a "real man" you are. But why do you want to prove it? This question wasn't the major one in Mellow's great biography of this difficult man and Nobel Prize winning writer, but it could have been.

I am reluctant to take up books that run over 600 pages, but I read this one with a great deal of interest. If biographies are your thing, I think you will love HEMINGWAY: A LIFE WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES. It goes into detail about the Hemingway family, about his early years in Chicago and Michigan, his journalistic career, his World War I experience, his various love affairs and marriages, his friends, his publishing connections and efforts, and the famous world of the Lost Generation in Paris, Spain, Austria and Switzerland, then the hunting life in East Africa. Mellow strikes an excellent balance between personal detail and general spirit of the times. His gleaning of information from letters and interviews must reach the peak possible, given that the book was published 24 years ago and new sources are unlikely. Some biographies tend to wander off into psychological analysis unwarranted by the information available. Mellow avoids this completely. He asks some questions, comes to some closure, but leaves the matter largely up to you, the reader. I came away thinking that Hemingway was worse than I had known. As for adultery, that is hardly rare in this world and one could not accuse him of being worse than most other men if just for that, indeed it's probably in human nature. But he betrayed or attacked almost everyone he knew; wound up knifing his friends, colleagues, and sponsors in the back. The other major thing I learned was that while every good writer bases his or her work on lived or observed experience, Hemingway often based his life story on his written characters, that is, he turned his stories into his biography just as his biography had been slotted into his stories. A person who cannot distinguish between the two will eventually have mental problems and that is how the famous writer's life ended. I have given here my personal survey of what I gleaned from this excellent biography. If you read Mellow's work, you will come to your own conclusions as to what kind of a man Hemingway was. The stories and novels are connected very well to the life story. All the material you need is in the book.

[Paul W. B. Marsden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mellow’s biography has been a key source that I have used in writing my book, ‘Making A Moveable Feast’. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DXC2S9KC
This biography by Mellow is thorough and reliable in detailing Hemingway’s life from beginning to end. It has plenty of footnotes and an excellent bibliography at the back to support both facts and his opinions. Mellow is clearly sympathetic towards Hemingway but backs it up with evidence. Mellow has also spent a lot of time in the JFK Library, Boston reviewing first hand manuscripts, letters and other original Hemingway sources.
Well written in an accessible way. Highly recommended.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

To enjoy “Hemingway: A Life without Consequences” requires surviving its ghastly beginning. The book is competent in the last quarter where author James Mellows examines Hemingway’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, WWII and his psychological collapse in the 1950s. It dazzles in the middle two quarters where he describes Hemingway’s years in Paris and his emergence as a major writer. Unfortunately, it is excruciatingly boring in the opening quarter devoted to the first 18 years of Hemingway’s life spent in Oak Park, Illinois and the northern Michigan.
The reasons for this highly uneven quality are quite clear. Mellow’s prime area of focus in his career was the “modernist” movement of the American expatriate community living in Paris. His two prior books had been biographies of Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald. Thus, he understands the context of Hemingway’s Paris years extremely well. His text on this period is lively and he provides remarkable insight. The problems with the Illinois and Michigan years is that Mellow has no feel for the historical and cultural setting. His analysis is based solely on his research. His pages are people with dull Anglo-Saxon names like Bill Smith and their actions in unremarkable places like Walloon Lake that virtually none of his readers would have ever visited. I suspect that virtually every reader must have considered giving up at some point in the first 1125 pages. Once the difficult opening section is completed, the book then soars. The final 125 pages are satisfying for any reader with any background knowledge of the Spanish Civil War and the Liberation of France at the end of WWII. Mellow’s knowledge of the cultural context is not on the same level as it is for Paris during the 1920s but many of players (John Dos Passos, Marth Gellhorn, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, etc.) are familiar to the reader.
Mellows, a self-declared homosexual, has a rather unique way of chronicling Hemingway’s tumultuous love life but his judgements in most cases seem sensible. In defense of Mellow, it must be recognized that some of the Nick Adams stories deal with the theme of homosexual and thus provide license for those determining to do so to speculated about Hemingway’s tendencies.
Mellow’s big conclusion is absurd. He states: “Hemingway had been at the center of a cultural revolution unequaled in its wide-reaching effects on Western Culture except by the Italian Renaissance: had been - in his early years – a leader among the extraordinary band of writers, artists, playwrights, composers, architects, publishers, publicists, scholars and critics who had shaped the art of their time anew.” (p. 593) This is an extravagant overstatement of the importance of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound and the numerous lesser lights who frequented Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris in the period between the two world wars. Nonetheless, Mellow does provide an excellent portrait of a literary community that was extremely important to the English-speaking world.
Mellow’s great strength is his thoroughness. He meticulously describes the composition of everyone of Hemingway’s works explaining what events and people impacted Hemingway in his writing. Mellow clearly has made a tremendous research effort and has thought carefully about everything that he comments on.
While there may be better biographies of Hemingway available, but this nonetheless quite admirable. The reader simply needs to resist the temptation to quit in the very tough early-going.

[Sue Pit · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vast biography with greatest emphasis and detail especially as to the earlier years. This bio reveals an imperfect man of some complex divergent attributes that in part shape his endeavor to best actively tell a story so to make one feel as if there and how it would be with a sense of real, thus creating a style new at that time. One does not necessarily end up admiring him as a man and do appreciate his sense of adventure and quest (and ability) to tell a good story.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learned a lot about Hemingway's life that I didn't know. The last ten pages or so are the most fulfilling because Mellow finally takes a step back from the burdensome detail and lets the events of Hemingway's life take shape. There are many unanswered questions about what drove him to end his life the way he did, and Mellow is candid that he can't figure it out.

I wish Mellow had been that candid about the enigma of Hemingway's life throughout the rest of the book. Although there is a large amount, too much, of detail, I kept wishing for more conclusions and original thought from the author. Mellow has a few thoughts interspersed in sentences at the ends of his sections, but they fail to draw the enormous detail together coherently. Even when Mellow does come through, I found myself seriously disagreeing with his conclusions. They seemed to buy into the machismo ideal that Hemingway constructed about himself rather than critically observe it.

Mellow also has this obsession with matching scenes from Hemingway's works with events in his life. He spends a lot of time parsing scenes from stories and novels and trying to figure out which scenes had to come from which parts of Hemingway's life. I don't think that spending so much time parsing a scene from a story to match it with an experience Hemingway had (or didn't have and must have made up) tells us that much about the man. All writers take events from their lives and and times and construct them into narratives. Hemingway did the same. It says something about events that made an impression on Hemingway, but the number of pages spent vetting whether or not Hemingway *really* experienced some event or not was distracting and didn't add to an understanding of who Hemingway was.

He does spend a lot of time on Hemingway's relationships with other authors of the time period which is fascinating. It paints a vivid picture of how they all worked together, worked for the same publishers, and fed off each other. But, again, the over detail makes it confusing, hard to understand, and made me wish there was more order imposed by the author.

I wasn't thrilled with this book, but I didn't hate it. I'll keep it on my shelf and maybe come back to it in retirement when I have the time and space to spend working my way through it analytically. It was just too overwhelming for the time I have to spend on books right now, and that, sadly, detracted from much of what I could have gotten out of it.

[Jeff Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mellow does a very through job of telling us the Hemingway story up through the time in Paris. There is an enormous amount of detail about Hemingway, and Mellow presents it in a way that I felt as if I were living my life right there with him. After that period, however Mellow does not do so well. After Hemingway moves to Key West, Mellow's treatment of him is less detailed and also not very flattering. I believe that Mellow concentrated on the 1920's Paris Hemingway on purpose because of his intent to write his "lost generation" trilogy. As a fan of Hemingway, it was at times difficult for me to seem him presented in such a poor light as Mellow does during the second half of this book. I would not recommend this book to other Hemingway fans.

[John Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a competent, though not outstanding, biography of Ernest Hemingway. It is factually detailed and covers all the major points of Hemingway's life, although it is a little light on the last 20 years of Hemingway's life. However, the author did not really grasp Hemingway's innermost character. This failing is especially significant in a biography of a figure like Hemingway, who was a defiant individualist, an iconoclast, and a man of many contradictions. On the whole, reading this book is a worthwhile investment of the reader's time, but not up to the level of some other Hemingway biographies, such as that published by Jeffrey Meyers.

[J. David Thayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the Hemingway history anyone could ever need is found right here. A superb read. My only criticism is that the childhood years seem to plod on longer than necessary, and then everything between Across the River and Into the Trees to the eventual suicide feels very rushed my comparison. But it’s all in here. Excellent work!

[Kimberly Tilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book shatters the mythology of Ernest Hemingway. He was not the hyper-masculine confident adventurer he presented himself to be. He was selfish, cruel, envious, but still a fine writer and that goes a long way. I’d rate this book a 4.5.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent though dated.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's been a million biographies written on Hemingway and this is another good one. Like most biographies it hurts because if it's written truly you see all the flaws in the person's character.

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long but interesting. Learned a lot about other authors of the time

[Kari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overlong and over literary analysis

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone who enjoys reading Hemingway will really like this biography.

[Troy Arndt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best Hemingway biography I've ever read. Mellow's writing style is excellent.

[Tina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've spent over a month on this book. A month I'll never get back. It was tedious and meandering, but I continued to read it because it has been previously reviewed in several places as the best biography of Ernest Hemingway to date. All I can say about that is that it is time for a better one. Mellow does deal a great deal with analysis of Hemingway's various writings and his correspondence with friends and business associates. Where he falls down is in his analysis of Hemingway's personal relationships. There are places, particularly toward the end of the book, where he mentions a thing (the death of his first grandson?) and never returns to explain it. We do not really learn about his relationship with his sons, nor his relationship with important friends like Sara Murphy, who in Mellow's characterization resembles a sad aging mother who has lost her son, and not the close friend that she would be to Hemingway most of his life. He spends roughly two-thirds of the book on the years between 1923-1929. With roughly one hundred pages left to describe the remaining 30 years of Hemingway's life, the reader is left with a rush to the end that fails to include important events in his life, replaced by drudging anecdotes about Hemingway's growing irascibility. Mellow seems more obsessed with Hemingway's manhood than Hemingway himself, as well as an underlying obsession with sex in Hemingway's works. Biographer's who have never met their subject and who are at a chronological distance from their subject have a demanding task and often choose the picture they wish to paint. While I got a sense of who Hemingway might have been, I feel as though I only got this one person's idea of him. More important to Mellow seems to be his own role as the biographer and his understanding of what makes a writer, presumably because he, Mellow, is also a writer. There is the hint of solipsism that irks. I think any other biography must be more enlightening on the man as a writer and a person than this book.

[Leabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mellow is an excellent biographer with apparent insight into Hemingway's illness and brilliance. He shows that Hemingway's characterizations were based on people he had met in real life. These people's foibles real or imagined were often portrayed in a highly unflattering manner, as if he almost despised them on some level. It seems that a fair amount of projection was occurring in in his mind - perhaps as a result of his untreated condition. I found the account of his fourth marriage particularly interesting, by this time Hemingway is in his 50s and the illness is quite progressed. The account of his last suicidal phase is presented in a starkly factual manner. The pathos is unforced but nevertheless exists in the reality of the events as they occurred.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's ridiculously dense and skips over Hemingway's wives after Hadley more than I would have liked, but ultimately it's a very comprehensive look at his life and it kept me interested from cover to cover. I'm not usually a non-fiction reader, mainly because there's so much fiction out there that I want to read (which leaves me very little time for biographies such as this) but I'm so glad I ended up reading it. I can't wait to start The Sun Also Rises now that I know so much about the writing process of the book as well as the autobiographical influences. Awesome awesome awesome.

[Amy Neftzger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent source of information for true Hemingway fans. Mellow does a great job of detailing Hemingway's life and providing documentation from letters and other sources as he pieces together the history of Hemingway's own life story. That said, this is more of a scholarly work and unless you are a true Hemingway fan the book may be cumbersome to read, as it is extremely detailed. It would be an excellent resources for a college paper or anyone who desires to know as much as can be possibly known about this author. This is a great reference book/ resource.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just loved this biography of Ernest Hemingway. Mellow's style and prose make for easy reading about a controversial, complex, and at times, tormented writer. The work is well-cited and spares no punches in its treatment of Hemingway; his moods, his treatment and passion for women, the disciplined approach he had toward his writing, his heavy drinking and the passion he had for life, fishing and sports. This was the best work I have read on Hemingway.

[Lindz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't get to finish this. From what I read, it was well written well researched, nice comparisons between myth, fact and Hemmingway's fiction and how sometimes with Hemmingway it was hard to tell which. But I think I didn't care enough about Hemmingway to continue reading it. What the 200 pages did make want to do was actually read some Ernest Hemmingway. Maybe then I can read the biography.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a great read on Ernest Hemingway and what possibly drove him to develop the characters in his book. The book was a great way to dislike Hemingway, think he may have been mad, fall in love with him, dislike him again and so on. It was a roller coaster of emotions with this book. That being said, I loved it and would recommend it to a friend.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I switched to this biography after getting bogged down by the Freudian tangents in Kenneth S. Lynn's Hemingway. Needless to say, this book is much more straightforward, in a good way. The writing is clear and thoughtful, and it allows the book's subject to stand out on his own.

[Omar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite his ending, this was a man for whom a single lifetime couldn't possibly have been enough.

[Ed · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe, if I cared more about Hemingway, I could have finished this overly detailed chronicle of his life.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best written biographies I've ever read.

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weighing in at 604 pages, this is one of my favorite biographies of one of my favorite writers.

[Joe Hartigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually didn't like Mellow's writing, but Hemingway's life was fascinating.