Hemingway: The Paris Years

Rating:
Summary: The True Story of A Moveable Feast
Review: Michael Reynolds's Hemingway, The Paris Years is the second volume of his five volume life of Hemingway. Reynolds's takes pains in his introduction to thank and praise Carlos Baker for his Hemingway biography, but Reynolds's work has become acknowledged as the greater of the two. This volume deals with Hemingway's Paris years from 1921 to 1926, the same period that Hemingway describes in his short memoir, "A Moveable Feast."

The twenty-two year old Hemingway is newly married to his first wife Hadley and has been advised by his American literary mentor, Sherwood Anderson, to go live and work among the writers and artist of Paris' Left Bank expatriate pack.

Reynolds present Hemingway's Paris years in detailed chronological order. He occasionally goes into greater detail than is appropriate for good story telling but the book reads for the most part like a novel. Hemingway takes a trip to Italy to visit his WWI haunts in Milan and the riverbank where he was wounded. Hemingway's early work as a reporter for the Toronto Star takes him to some of the major political events of the 1920's. He interviews Mussolini mere months before he seizes power in Italy and attends a 1922 Genoa conference that is eerily similar to the 2001 Genoa conference. He takes exciting bullfighting trips to Spain wherein the development of Hemingway aficion for bullfighting is well described. The details of Hemingway's climb up the literary pecking order are made clear. He is being referred to as the best young American novelist by friendly critics years before he has published a novel.

The painstaking process by which Hemingway fashioned his early, classic short stories is described in you-are-there detail. The pugnacious Hemingway picks fights with perceived rivals, both with fisticuffs and with his writing. The long and difficult negotiation by which his first publisher, Boni and Liveright publish his first widely available book, "In Our Time," is well described. It seems that "In Our Time" was published almost more as a favor to Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway's other literary fans than on it's own commercial merit. Hemingway's dissatisfaction with Boni and Liveright's efforts for him is described as well as Fitzgerald's efforts to bring Hemingway to Scribner's. Hemingway writes the short satiric novella "The Torrents of Spring" to force Boni and Liveright to break their contract with him and then gives his first real novel, "The Sun Also Rises, " to Scribner's.

The book ends with Hemingway on his way home to Paris from New York in winter 1926. He has successfully broken his contract with his first publisher and signed a new contract with Scribner's.

I sometimes feel sorry for the biographers of great men. In this case, the subject, Hemingway, lived his larger-than-life life to the fullest, grabbing all the gusto, having his adventures and love affairs while the poor biographer is trapped in his academic cocoon, poring over old papers, scribbling in notebooks, devoting his own life to writing about someone else's life. Such is the lonely world of biographers. Those thought aside, "Hemingway, The Paris Years" is a one fifth of monumental achievement by Reynolds and a must read for any fan of the great man.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Fair, Entertaining
Review: Mr. Reynolds continues his bio of EH with the writer's first marriage and Paris years of the early 1920's. Reynolds is excellent in his narrative of EH's developing literary career. The trial and errors of the early stories, the rejection and success of getting the stories published is well told. EH's social life in Paris is well analyzed. Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound are part of EH's life for short periods that EH makes the most of. His life as a reporter and editor are well told too. His life as husband and father is secondary to his work as a writer. Mr. Reynold's skill as a biographer has improved since the first volume. He is less judgemental and lets EH's nasty side reveal itself thru incident rather than excessive criticism. A first rate bio.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely well done
Review: This book is wonderfully (and obviously pain-stakingly) crafted. It reads like a novel, but it illuminates Hemingway's personality through subtle, and not so subtle, touches. This is an excellent telling of the early years in Paris and Toronto and of how Hemingway taught himself to write. I especially enjoyed the details of the Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford relationship regarding the Transatlantic publication, and I also enjoyed learning better what Stein gave to Hemingway's writing -- but overall I enjoyed the book evenly from start to finish. This book can stand alone. It was the first one in the series that I'd read. I look forward to reading the others.