Loving or hating your subject

Allan Massie on Life & Letters

‘Reviewing two books about Hemingway in The Spectator (19 August 2006) Caroline Moorehead asked: ‘How far is it right for biographers to write about subjects they so patently dislike? Hemingway is portrayed as bullying, narcissistic, foul-tempered, slovenly and miserly.’ No doubt he was all these things, some of the time anyway, but the question remains a fair one. In his defence, the author of the book in which Hemingway is so portrayed, Stephen Koch, might argue that all these epithets might also be applied to the Hemingway depicted by his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, and by his admiring friend or, in some people’s opinion, sidekick, A. E. Hotchner. The difference of course is that in their books we are also given the attractive, life-enhancing side of Hemingway’s character. If Hotchner’s Hemingway often seems boring and boorish, it’s also clear that till near the end Hotchner loved the company of his hero; and there is tragic pathos in his detailed account of Hemingway’s descent into depression and paranoia as he lurched, lost and bewildered, towards his suicide.