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ERNEST HEMINGWAY SELECTED LETTERS 1917-1961

Baker has edited this first-ever collection of Hemingway letters with the sensible idea that everyone knows the life too well to need much explanatory material—particularly who's who; and while you may have to figure out some identities, it was well that Baker resisted the temptation to make the letters stand as a sort of Hemingway autobiography. Read them instead as a novel—some great, full-of-it romance of ego. But as the truth of his life, no; Hemingway seems to have been honestly incapable of telling that. What's fascinating, indeed, is how early all the more detestable traits of the man rushed out. Boastfulness and plain garden-variety lying are already in evidence as early as 1918: a letter to a newspaperman friend, while Hemingway was in New York before leaving for Italy and the ambulance corps, confides that he's engaged to film star Mae Marsh. As Baker drily notes, Mae Marsh never met him. But it's the company of other writers that really sparks the nasty fun. From his brief exile in Toronto, Hemingway writes back to Paris and solicitously informs Gertrude Stein: "They are turning on you and Sherwood [Anderson] both; the young critical guys and their public. I can feel it in the papers etc. Oh well you will get them back again." There's a strong suggestion that Hemingway's Sherwood Anderson-parody, The Torrents of Spring, was in response to Edmund Wilson's remarking that H.'s "My Old Man" read like Anderson; certainly, for the rest of his life, Hemingway's viciousness peaked when he had a secondary or tertiary scapegoat. The only one he was directly beastly to, of course, was "poor" Scott Fitzgerald—to whom H. wrote: you don't know how to think; Tender Is the Night is done all wrong (once Fitzgerald was safely dead, Hemingway would say that it was his best); women destroyed you; you're minor-league and can't finish anything. Before 1938, he could look back and analyze himself—see his famous letter to Stein, in which he says that "Big Two-Hearted River" is an attempt "to do the country like CÉzanne"; but after '38 or so, all of that was gone, blown away by fame so that only the personal gracelessness was left—plus the constant fear. The letters to Max Perkins and Charles Scribner, Jr., with reports of daily word counts, fornication tallys. The letters boasting of how he taught his youngest son an anti-Semitic joke, how he flattened Wallace Stevens in a Key West bar. A remarkably smarmy correspondence with Arthur Mizener on Fitzgerald and other assorted unarmed dead. A scatalogical vendetta against James Jones (whose From Here to Eternity apparently ventured a little too close). Only three sets of Papa letters come off as half-pleasant: to his various wives-to-be and those past; to Bernard Berenson (a late exchange, utterly quirky); and a true—if passive—concern for Ezra Pound in a mental hospital after the war. All the rest is irredeemably grotesque. Fascinating, of course, but strictly as a sort of story—one that dramatizes the tension between the fictional, heroic Hemingway and his mean-spirited creator.

Pub Date: April 6, 1981

ISBN: 0743246896

Page Count: 983

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1981

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NUTCRACKER

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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