The Hemingway Shelf Rises

‘Ode to Hemingway: Three Stories and Ten Poems’By Curtis DeBergPaul Adrian Books, 56 pages‘Ernest Hemingway & the Death of Alan Winslow: One Man Alone’By Robert Craig StoneIndependently published, 530 pages‘Hemingway’s Goblet’By Dermot RossMary Egan Publishing, 320 pages‘Hemingway’s Daughter’By Christine M. WhiteheadIndependently published, 427 pagesWhy is it that Ernest Hemingway, more than his great contemporary, William Faulkner, still sells? At least part of the answer is to be found in Hemingway’s turning himself into a biographical figure in ways that never interested Faulkner, so that writers in the Hemingway wave re-imagine his life in both fiction and fact. Faulkner’s understanding of the difference between his persona and Hemingway’s is evident in “The Wild Palms.” One of his characters coins a phrase: “Set, ye armourous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves.”A reference to a contemporary writer, let alone a rival, in Faulkner’s fiction is rare and a tribute to how powerful Hemingway, the man and the writer, were in Faulkner’s day and remain so. Curtis de Berg’s fiction and poetry is not merely Hemingway inspired; it is suffused with the desire to inhabit a writer, his style, and biography. Dr. DeBerg writes a poem about his visit to Stockholm, the site of the Nobel ceremony that Hemingway, a world traveler, declined to visit. Dr. DeBerg’s poetry reflects a wistful sort of yearning that envelops him but also the world in Hemingway’s absence: “I stood near where he was meant to stand in ‘54, / When the world wanted his presence, he sent his words instead.”Alan Winslow grew up in a Chicago suburb, not far from Hemingway’s. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism in World War I, and held several State Department posts in a life that parallels Hemingway’s, and who becomes, in Robert Craig Stone’s detective work, the model for characters and themes in Hemingway’s work. The indefatigable Mr. Stone explains his convoluted route to Winslow that can be taken as a good example of how biographies proceed in fits and starts full of many detours.Assigning real-life prototypes for fictional characters is a problematic endeavor but also an inescapable part of what biographers hazard when assessing both the facts and the fictions of their subjects. Some readers may balk at some of Mr. Stone’s conclusions, but others will savor the complexity of Hemingway’s fiction when measured against the history he had to work with.Nick Harrieson, Dermot Ross’s fictional creation, becomes obsessed with a relic from Pamplona, where in 1928 his grandfather met Hemingway who inscribed the goblet as a gift. Mr. Ross’s novel is as much about Harrieson, a hapless college professor, as it is about Hemingway, yet what the narrative suggests is that Hemingway, for all his faults, remains a central figure against whom other writers and readers measure themselves.A false impression is sometimes conveyed that Hemingway is just for men, even though Mary Dearborn has written a recent well received biography of the master. Christine M. Whitehead’s fictional protagonist, Finn Hemingway, is the daughter Hemingway never had, and is more ambitious than the three sons he did have. She too, though, must measure up to a Hemingway that is as much a king of the literary imagination as Clark Gable was in his Hollywood heyday.Novels have been published about other great writers, including Faulkner, whose life as a novelist and lover is poignantly explored in Joan Williams’s “The Wintering.” His obsession with the heroics of flying is wonderfully evoked in Taylor Brown’s “Wingwalkers,” but in both cases the elusive, gnomic Faulkner is glimpsed but never quite available in that Hemingway fashion.Hemingway’s letters fill volumes and volumes, Faulkner’s hardly more than one, and the former is much more voluble about himself and his writing than the latter, which accounts for a burgeoning literature of fiction and fact about writers and characters who cannot seem to get on, for better or worse, without Hemingway’s example.I’m waiting for the novel that will feature Malcolm Cowley, who befriended both Hemingway and Faulkner, and wrote about them — circumspectly so as not to tell all he knew — leaving that crucial space for the novelist that will come along to fill in the gaps.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn.”

The Hemingway Shelf Rises

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