Bell tolls for ‘Hemingway’ in new biography

Biographer Mary Dearborn is the first in 15 years to dive into the life of one of America’s most mysterious, complex and conflicted historical figures of the 20th century. She offers a detailed study of the man known as much for his words as his robust, charismatic manliness.

Dearborn takes the reader through a chronology of Ernest Hemingway’s life and work. It’s helpful to keep a book of his short stories nearby. She examines a number of his works and surmises Hemingway’s inspiration and true identity of characters.

Dearborn tells of a man who was temperamental, at times violent, and terribly needy. He tossed good friends aside — see F. Scott Fitzgerald — on a whim. She notes one observation that “as long as people around him were worshipful and adoring, why, then they were great.” When he believed they no longer were, they were gone.

It’s a character trait Dearborn traces to his childhood.

It manifested itself in paranoia and mental and emotional dysfunction as he aged, and it worsened, Dearborn believes, through traumatic brain injuries. Dearborn counts six concussions, including the blast in World War I that hospitalized him for weeks, and airplane accidents in the 1950s. These, Dearborn asserts, along with his alcoholism, were complicit in the increase of manic episodes that reached a peak as he ended his sixth decade.

But mental illness was a family trait. His father committed suicide in 1928. Two siblings later did as well. Hemingway’s granddaughter Margaux took her own life, and his son might have.

One morning, his wife, Mary, found him in a corner of the house in Ketchum, Idaho, near the gun rack with a shotgun in his hands and two shells nearby. He was sent back to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for more shock treatments. Those did nothing to alter his fate.