ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY by Carlos Baker. 697 pages. Scribner. $10.
THE orthodox literary theory has been that there were two Hemingways: Ernest the Good and Ernest the Bad. Ernest the Good lived above a sawmill in Paris and worked night and day to become the best writer of his generation. With the help of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and the King James Bible, Ernest the Good learned to write books so true that, by his own definition, "after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: . . . the people and the places and how the weather was."
By the time he was 30, two novels (The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms) and the most brilliant short stories since James Joyce's Dubliners had made him, in his terminology, a champion. He should have lived happily ever after. But then, along came Ernest the Bad—the nonwriting Hemingway.
Ernest the Bad lived in Key West, drank too much, and kept remarrying. Instead of getting his work done, he was forever playing at great white hunter or bravebull aficionado or none-too-accurate war correspondent. When Ernest the Bad did write, the crisp sentences came out flabby, self-parodying. Finally, he turned himself from writer into public figure: "Papa," the self-indulgent joker whom his embarrassed admirers couldn't drag offstage and back to his Ernest-the-Good writing desk.
Fraid a Nothing. Because Hemingway was so flamboyant and public a figure, Carlos Baker's long-awaited biography could hardly discover hidden chapters of his life. But Baker—a Princeton professor, the author of an earlier critical study of Hemingway's writing and sometime novelist himself—is the scholarly inheritor of Hemingway's papers. He has used the material to fashion the first solid, cohesive and convincingly authentic account of a lifetime most often presented in the past in fragments by partisan observers. The book's great additional merit is that it forces readers to take Hemingway whole. After Baker, Ernest the Good and Ernest the Bad will never again be quite so neatly, so conveniently and so misleadingly separated.
The book ends on the morning of July 2, 1961, when Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. He was exhausted at the time and had been under treatment for erratic blood pressure, liver ailments and acute melancholia. But, Baker implies, the tragic themes of Hemingway's writing were not contradicted but confirmed by that final act and by Hemingway's entire personal history.
Certainly Hemingway's life was as haunted by death and violence as his stories. "When asked what he is afraid of," his mother wrote of five-year-old Ernest, "he shouts out fraid a nothing."" But he felt compelled to spend half a lifetime proving it. An astonishing number of Baker's pages—and the book's rich lode of rarely seen illustrations—document the journeys Hemingway undertook to various test sites of courage: high school football in Oak Park, 111., three wars, hunting grounds from Idaho to Africa, boxing and bull rings, ski slopes, four marriage beds.