Dateline Toronto: the complete "Toronto Star" dispatches

Along with Youth: Hemingway, The Early Years Dateline Toronto: The Complete "Toronto Star' Dispatches

THE PUBLISHER claims that Along with Youth "promises to become the definitive Hemingway biography.' Griffin's two important discoveries are Hemingway's letters to his Red Cross friend Bill Horne and new information about their commanding officer, Captain Jim Gamble. In the late 1970s, Mary Hemingway allowed Griffin to remove five early stories from the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library and to print them in this book.

Hemingway's apprentice fiction was not good enough to publish in his lifetime. These stories, mixed in with Griffin's own text, bring his limping narrative to a halt. Though Griffin does not actually discuss these stories, he unconvincingly claims that Hemingway's style and vision were formed before he went to Paris. Just as birth anticipates death, so, for Griffin, everything written in youth "anticipates the mature Hemingway voice.' Hemingway's style was not modeled on Tolstoy, Kipling, Crane, Stein, Joyce, and Pound, but on the "unaffected in tone, sonorous, rhythmical' letters of his first wife, Hadley, which "set a standard for Ernest.' Since dozens of Hadley's repetitious letters are quoted, we can judge how characteristic sentences--"I wanted to run down and holler my undying affection in your too distant ear' and "I love you so highly and lowly and like a boy and girl warmly'--influenced her husband.

Both the method and the accuracy of this biography are radically flawed. Based on a dissertation, it is amateurishly padded with long and sometimes pointless quotes. Griffin, with a keen eye for the non-essential, spends two full pages on an uneventful train ride from Chicago to New York. He cannot distinguish between petty and significant detail, or, when presenting evidence, between fact, fiction, and fantasy. Though dissatisfied with Carlos Baker's biography, he lacks Baker's originality and precision, repeats all his faults, and presents a compendium of trivial facts--without analysis, interpretation, or insight. He maintains that Hemingway's father gave "a rousing speech about adolescent sexuality,' although we know that Clarence Hemingway was extremely reticent about sex. He unaccountably calls Death in the Afternoon Hemingway's "own Life on the Mississippi' (on another page, he refers to Twain's book as Old Tunes on the Mississippi). And he completely misreads the character of Hemingway's first love, the sophisticated nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, by stating she was not a "serious, intelligent woman.'

Griffin also makes numerous factual mistakes. Hemingway's mother's temporary blindness was not related to scarlet fever; Hemingway's left eye was defective from birth, not from boxing with his son Jack; the family cottage was named after an English lake, not in appreciation of Sir Walter Scott; Hemingway was never a lieutenant in the Italian army; Jim Gamble did not save his life. Hemingway, while earning $50 a week and saving for a trip to Italy with Hadley, did not lose $700 on the Carpentier-Dempsey fight. His close friend Chink Dorman-Smith was Irish, not Scottish, and was not (like Griffin) credulous about Hemingway's sexual adventures. Griffin states, without evidence, that Hemingway had sexual relations with Indian girls, was actually engaged to the actress Mae Marsh, was seduced by a rich, beautiful woman in Paris in 1918 ( a fantasy from The Torrents of Spring), and was the lover of his childhood friend Kate Smith. In "Summer People,' his story about Kate, as in A Farewell to Arms and Across the River, Hemingway portrays fictional sex with women he never managed to sleep with in real life.

Griffin describes in excruciating detail the buds and lawn in Oak Park and the kinds of apples at Walloon Lake, a sister's dress and a walk to a dance, an uncle's handkerchief and the temperature in Kansas City, what Hadley made for breakfast and wore on her honeymoon. But he does not fully discuss the influence of the Civil War, the church and high school in Oak Park, the marriage of Hemingway's parents and Hemingway's conflict with them, his writing for papers in Kansas City, Toronto, and Chicago, the psychological effects of his wound, his friendship with Chink Dorman-Smith, and, most importantly, how the dominant traits of his character emerged from his early life. Griffin's laundered Hemingway is a conventional chap who shows no indication of future greatness. This portrait is likely to please the immediate family (Jack writes a laudatory preface), but few others. If Griffin plans to continue this ambitious project, he will have to raise his standards.

IN 1962 Gene Hanrahan reprinted 73 of Hemingway's Toronto Star articles in The Wild Years. Dateline Toronto contains an additional 99 pieces written in Canada, America, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and Turkey from February 1920 until he left journalism for fiction in January 1924. The subject matter becomes more interesting as Hemingway matures in Europe and writes with acute political perception about the leading figures at the Genoa Economic Conference, the disastrous inflation in the Ruhr ("the economic recovery of Germany is necessary if Europe is ever to get back to normal'), and the retreat of the Greek refugees into Thrace after the Turkish victory--the subject of two great chapters of In Our Time. As a reporter, he consistently supported the underdogs and the oppressed, expressed sympathy for the victims of war and of violence. Long before most observers, he saw the true nature of Fascism and the character of Mussolini, whom he called "the biggest bluff in Europe.'