Though an entire book could be devoted to Hemingway's ambition or the cultivation of his popular persona, Leff's truncated work is too much a biographical recap. ``I want, like hell, to get published,'' the unknown Parisian expatriate confessed to a correspondent in 1923, long before he would become America's greatest authorial personality. Leff (Film and Literature/Oklahoma State Univ.) suggests that to do so, Hemingway made a Faustian deal with popular culture, ``cultivat[ing] publicity even as he pretended to scorn it''--the kind of publicity available through having bestsellers, serializing in Scribner's magazine, and selling rights to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Broadway, and Hollywood. Hemingway's career began as the all-American cult of personality was born, promoted by Time magazine, radio, and the movie industry. Leff brings up some interesting points, such as Time's puffing of the new author's image as an adventurer in its review of In Our Time, or the parallel reviewers drew (to Hemingwya's annoyance) between the nymphomaniac heroine of the cheaply bestselling The Green Hat and Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Mostly, Leff sticks close to familiar biographical material rather than analyzing the context, or the apparatuses, of Hemingway's rise to prominence. Leff, the author of studies on movie mogul David O. Selznick and Hayes-era censorship, does better toward his book's end, discussing the production of the 1932 film version of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway was irritated to see studio PR rehashing the inaccuracies of his legend, but he was also taken in by Gary Cooper playing Frederic Henry, who was based, of course, on Ernest Hemingway. However, at the point where novelist's fame is secured, Leff abruptly leaves off, compressing the rest of his life into an afterword, almost impatient for the author to ride off into immortality. (illustrations not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Independent Publisher
Leonard Leff, author of Hitchcock and Selznick (1987) and The Dame in the Kimono (1990), has written an engaging and entertaining portrait of Ernest Hemingway during the 1920s and 1930s and his role in the commercial contexts of publishers, reprint houses, photographers, reporters, and movie companies. Both a biographical sketch and American cultural study, Hemingway and His Conspirators charts the projection of Hemingway from an unknown author committed to the craft of writing into a world-famous celebrity and story-teller who became the most important character of every book that he wrote. Using letters and archival documents, Leff revealingly discloses how both Hemingway's writings and his persona as a writer, war hero, and adventurer were packaged and promoted in the early years of his career. Leff's book shows the major difficulties that Hemingway had with publishers concerned with obscenity and sexuality, and the major role played by Scribners editor Max Perkins in championing Hemingway's writings. Leff's Hemingway goes beyond other biographical studies to expose how the public figure of Hemingway was created by mass media with the help of and eventually beyond the control of Ernest Hemingway. With a cast of players such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Helen Hayes, Sinclair Lewis, David Selznick, and Gary Cooper, the book succeeds in portraying the personal and commercial creation of a tragic public figure in a world of promotion, advertising, and publicity.
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