| I consider Ernest Hemingway's writing through two pairs of terms: “personal” and “authentic” (the two kinds of stories he wrote) and “writer” and “author” (the roles he played in creating those stories). Focusing on drafts and published versions of the “personal” fiction, I reconstruct his creative process to demonstrate that circumstances of production affected meaning. Hemingway later described his writing as “autobiography by remate,” a jai alai pass that bounces off two walls between players. Locating the “bounce points” reveals that he composed his early short fiction in seemingly unrelated pairs: one story set in his recent past and one in his distant past. Both, however, would reflect aspects of a single present concern. This pairing would later structure his novels, and, eventually, pairs of novels.; His experience writing his early short fiction and his reaction to critical response to his work of meta-criticism, Death in the Afternoon, became the subject matter for his late novel The Garden of Eden in ways that challenge definitions of “text” and “author.” Common and critical usage of these terms obscures more it reveals about the relationship of the writer to his works. For Hemingway, who developed ideas and texts cyclically, “works published by the author” do not necessarily mean “works finished by the writer”; his early short fiction served as drafts for his later longer works. The “personal” fiction may thus be understood as a single, fluid text.; Hemingway long understood that, as an author, he was as much a product of his typewriter as were his characters. The problems of being “Ernest Hemingway, author,” were both enviable and insoluble. Publication, on which these problems hinge, was for him—and perhaps for all autobiographical writers—a necessary danger and a dangerous necessity. He eventually came to understand that it was, and always had been, the central problem that informed his writing and his relation to his publics. |
