Volume 12, Number 11 · June 5, 1969
Dead Souls
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
by Carlos Baker
Scribners, 697 pp., $10.00
Carlos Baker's biography of Ernest Hemingway is bad news. The friendliness with which it has been received would seem to give sanction to this unfortunate development in the practice of biography. Baker's work is an enterprise of a special kind, not the first of its sort, and, one supposes, not the last. It is a form of book-making that rests upon only one major claim of the author: his access to the raw materials. The genre rises out of a vast collection of papers, letters, interviews, and junk, and is itself, in the end, still an accumulation, sorted, labeled, and dated, but only an accumulation, a heap. In a hoarding spirit it has an awesome regard for the penny as well as the dollar. (Like poor Silas Marner, who 'loved the guineas best, but would not change the silver…he loved them all.') The original accumulation—the 'facts,' the private papers, the authorized commission—is thought of as predetermining not only in content but in form. Condensation would seem to be insulting to the beseechments of the papers, one and all. The book is written by 'the material' and nothing is weighed or judged or pondered. A catalogue does not gossip about its entries.
Review, 2138 words
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