Hemingway Reminisces

THE years have not been kind to Ernest Hemingway, either as man or writer. Biographers have increasingly portrayed him as an arrogant, self serving egotist whose private life - lived largely in the public eye - was based on an image of himself as a macho, domineering male, really a cover for a compendium of hang ups. His body of work is often portrayed now as the passing triumph of a terse, laconic style over soft centred substance. For a writer who once thought that he might rival Tolstoy, it has been a process of deflation.

It is something of a surprise, then, to come across a one man stage show that gives us a Hemingway of the kind he himself sought to project. James Mitchell Lear, who both wrote the script and plays the subject in Hemingway Reminisces, now at the Crypt, is clearly an admirer of the old school. He strongly resembles the later Hemingway, stockily built with a head framed in white hair and beard; and we meet him in Havana as he waits in a bar for an interviewing journalist.

As he sips from a carafe of wine, he begins to chat to us, the audience, and the evening's persona soon takes shape. This is a kindly man whose life has brought him wisdom - and some humility. We hear of his love for his father, though not for his mother - there were difficulties there. Once anti Semitic, he admits his grievous error and pleads his recovery from it as from a disease. He insists on his artistic integrity; he would not write a newspaper column or, later, sell put to Hollywood. Poor Scott Fitzgerald did that, and look at what happened to him.

A little philosophy on bull fighting and life is offered. He did heroic things (now disputed) in the wars, Spanish and after, and is moved in the telling. Much married, he insists that all his wives were lovely, intelligent and dedicated to him; nothing here about the circumstances of the break ups. His friends, too, were exceptional, loyal and enduring. The story drifts on to a nostalgic close and farewell, without a hint of the black psychoses which ended in trauma and suicide.

The most charitable description of the material is that it is at least selective and that its manifold omissions accumulate to a major inaccuracy. Mr Lear's portrayal is similarly benign, not seeking any extreme of emotion or, indeed, conviction. He is content, for some 90 minutes, to offer his chosen anecdotes in a reasonably relaxed and convinced manner, but they are essentially superficial. The Hemingway he gives us is a bland, discursive man, not the driven writer who was finally devoured by his demons. The latter was at least interesting.