Isn’t that a goddam hell of a letter from a guy whose been like Smith and I have been? . . . It’s hell when a male knifes you—especially when you still love him.
—Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to Howell Jenkins, March 20, 1922
The radical-feminist call for the ejection of Ernest Hemingway from the canon of classic American writers does not seem to have had an effect on American book publishing. Studies of Papa’s fiction continue to proliferate: more than twenty such books were published in the 1980s. And, despite Carlos Baker’s apparently definitive biography of 1969, there has been a steady stream of Hemingway lives that testify to the ongoing public fascination with the man and writer. Lesbian ideologists in the academy—intent on transmogrifying Hemingway into a “chainsaw sexist” (the phrase is Susan F. Beegel’s in American Literary Scholarship [1990])—may bitch that Hemingway was a macho fake and a sexist pig whose simplistic stories of sex and safaris degrade women. But as new facts about Hemingway’s life and his relationships have emerged, fact by fact, the image of a complex, deeper, and more difficult writer has come into focus, a writer who simply cannot be tied down in any gender-obsessed strait jacket.
James R. Mellow’s Hemingway: A Life without Consequences is the most recent of the new lives.1 It must be said at once that Mr. Mellow’s work reflects, in its way, the obsessive preoccupation with gender in our time.
But Mellow’s
