Richard Bradford - The Man Who Wasnt There: A Life of Ernest Hemingway

Richard Bradford is Research Professor in English at Ulster University and Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon. He has published over thirty acclaimed books, including: a biography of Philip Larkin, which was an Independent Book of the Year; the authorised biography of Alan Sillitoe; a life of Kingsley Amis; and a biography of Kingsleys son, Martin. He has written for the Spectator and the Sunday Times and has been interviewed on his work for various BBC Radio Arts programmes, as well as appearing on the Channel 4 series Writers in their Own Words . His The Importance of Elsewhere , on Larkin the photographer, inspired a BBC TV programme and, most recently, his biography Orwell was given five stars as an excellent new biography by The Telegraph.

The Man Who Wasnt There will make even very knowledgeable Hemingway readers want to re-examine what they believe they know about the man and his work. Many familiar episodes in Hemingways life are seen afresh as Bradford shrewdly reassesses previous biographers work in the light of Hemingways own testimony, most significantly the shocking disclosures of unpublished letters and other unseen documents. For Bradford, Hemingway was constitutionally unable to tell truth from fiction not simply in his declining, fame-wracked years but from the beginning of his adult life. This is revisionist biography at its best well informed and fearless.

Carl Rollyson, author of Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn

Richard Bradford is as dynamic a writer as his subject and brings Hemingway and his remarkable worlds for there were many, from Paris to Cuba, from Mombasa to Madrid to life with zest and wit. Bradford bases his new study on years of meticulous research in the archives, revealing the significance of numerous previously unpublished letters. Bradford not only helps us understand the deeply flawed, larger-than-life Hemingway but also offers intriguing insights into his lovers and wives, his literary friends and his enemies. Above all, he offers some powerful correctives to what have become powerful myths about the man who wasnt there.

Anna Beer, author of Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot

Vivid and pugnacious, like its subject, this book addresses head-on the topic most of Hemingways biographers have found embarrassing: his lying. It is not news, of course, that he was a self-fantasist. What is startling here is the extent of his fabrications, often designed to defame formerly close friends: Dos Passos and Fitzgerald in particular. Anyone who dared to challenge him, male or female, was knocked down, physically or in print. In this portrait we have Hemingway the sexist, racist, foul-mouthed egomaniac who ultimately goes mad with persecution mania. It will ruffle a few feathers among those wedded to the image of him as all-American literary hero.

Martin Stannard, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Leicester, and author of Evelyn Waugh:
The Early Years 19031939; Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City: 19391966 and Muriel Spark: The Biography

For Gerard Burns, who inspired it

And for Amy

Contents

Lisa Verner has been of great help. The Northern Ireland Cardiologists, Charles Jack and Alastair Graham, made sure that I survived to write the book. Martin Stannard, a fellow literary biographer, has provided invaluable assistance. Tatiana Wilde and David Campbell have been helpful editors. As usual Amy Burns was splendid.

Correspondence quoted without a specified source has come either from Selected Letters , 19171961 , edited by Carlos Baker, London, Granada, 1981, or from the The Letters of Ernest Hemingway , Four Vols, 19071931, ongoing, edited by S. Spanier et al., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

While every effort has been made to obtain permission from the owners of reproduced copyright material, I apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.

Halfway through writing this book a question occurred to me: why bother? When I began I was aware of the amount of biographical work already in print: seven conventional lives, along with numerous sidelong accounts of his various activities and preoccupations, involving women, war, his family, espionage (pure speculation), bullfighting, his cats, cocktails, travel in general, Spain in particular, and his boat. There is even a biographical account by a forensic psychiatrist entitled, with no hint of irony, Hemingways Brain. There was such a wealth of information in the public arena that I began to wonder why Id started to write another life, let alone what I thought I could offer that was not already available. Watching a Coen Brothers film-noir I became aware of why Hemingway fascinated me and of what was lacking in everything else written about him, something that explained who he was and why he wrote as he did. The movie was of no relevance but its title suddenly caused the Hemingway enigma to unravel: The Man Who Wasnt There.