Hemingway at Sea

Arthur Phillips, for the New York Times, takes a look at a few new books on Hemingway.

From the article...

This abiding interest in the man, as opposed to his books, has three causes: the undeniably adventurous and outsize details of his tragic life; his intentional cultivation of celebrity (and the resulting mountain of documentary records); and the fact that he wrote fiction so closely tied to the actual places, people and details of his life. We feel we know him because we have read his stories of protagonists very much like him doing things he actually did in places he really lived with characters very much like his family and friends.

This is unfortunate, though, because it kills — or at least weakens — the power of his fiction, limits how we think of it. We start to read it small, view it as merely well-pruned memoir. It becomes an illustration of his life (“Oh, that character’s really his first wife”), when of course the best of his fiction is unique because it is not just one man’s story. It is great art because of its range of possible meanings and effects. His finest fiction is vast, universal, open to interpretation, changeable and debatable, intentionally opaque, impersonal. It is ours, not his.

Three recent books in that tide of Hemingway iconography present different glimpses of him, and imply different relationships between his life and his art.