The Importance of Being Ernest : HEMINGWAY: A Life Without Consequences, <i> By James R. Mellow (Houghton Mifflin: $30; 688 pp.)</i>

Hardly terra incognita for literary biographers, Ernest Hemingway’s life has been explored not only in Carlos Baker’s supremely thorough “Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story” (1969) but in scores of studies and memoirs by scholars, critics, friends, colleagues and ex-wives.

Aware that some readers might thus liken James Mellow to the canoeist who retraced Lewis and Clark’s route up the Missouri, Mellow’s publicists take pains to assure us that this biography (only nine pages shorter than Baker’s) reveals aspects of the writer’s life overlooked by previous biographers, sets the factual record straight, explodes many Hemingway myths, takes a fresh look at his journalism and casts a new light on how Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound influenced his work and that of all modernists. As if this weren’t enough, the publicists promise an unprecedented exploration of Hemingway’s relationships with men, beginning with his father and his boyhood friendships in the Michigan woods.

When I read these claims, I frankly was skeptical that a biographer of even Mellow’s skills could pull off such an ambitious project. But he has succeeded, with great verve and astonishingly thorough scholarship, with sensitivity for his subject and an awareness of Hemingway’s failings as an artist and a human being. This book does not supplant Baker’s ground-breaking work, but is a notable expansion of it, a needed companion volume. Without it, neither scholar nor layman can claim to have a full understanding of the forces that shaped and ultimately destroyed the talent of a man who is arguably the most influential American writer in the 20th Century.

I say arguably because Hemingway’s stature remains a topic of some debate, especially in the stifling lecture halls of today’s creative-writing mills and politically correct English departments. Even in his own day, the validity of his immense reputation was questioned, though for literary rather than political reasons. Mellow quotes Gertrude Stein as saying that Hemingway “sounds like a modern but smells like a museum” because, after his first book, he abandoned experimental for traditional narration. Then, as now, there was a school of thought that Hemingway’s fame was less the artist’s reward than the product of his considerable talent for self-promotion. As Mellow documents, the writer indeed could have taught today’s literary hypemeisters a thing or two, but his standing had--and has--a more solid foundation.

Mellow’s book offers the closest look yet at Hemingway’s journalism and its relationship to his imaginative work. He was very contemporary in his merging of fact and fiction, but, more to the point, he was vastly popular because he brought the world to his readers. In his day, the written word was the public’s window to the names, events, and places that shaped the age. In today’s CNN culture, however, a writer like Hemingway seems superfluous, even outmoded. Of course, he was far more than a mere reporter. By fusing the recorder with the artificer, he created a world out of the one he had experienced and wrestled meaning from such terrible and seemingly meaningless events as World War I.

Hemingway was a modernist, and our age is “postmodern.” But anyone reading Mellow’s book will see how far the wrong way we have come since a brilliant circle of poets, painters and novelists staged an authentic cultural coup by overturning Romanticism and Victorianism and inventing modernism. Our infotainment, fin-de-siecle culture is a far cry from the age of Cummings, Joyce, Malraux, MacLeish, Pound, Picasso, Stein--and Hemingway. In a cogent paragraph, Mellow summarizes his subject’s enduring importance (and not incidentally, the importance of this biography):

“He had been at the center of a cultural revolution unequaled in its wide-ranging effects on Western culture except by the Italian Renaissance: had been--in his early years--a leader among an extraordinary band of writers and artists . . . who had shaped the art of their time anew . . . veritable creators in a period of insidious violence and destruction.”

Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gelhorn, had little love for him, but nonetheless described him as “a genius . . . not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our language.”

I would disagree with Gelhorn on one point: At least in his early career, Hemingway was a genius at substance as well as style. His was a “moral” fiction in that it provided models of behavior. The horrors of World War I had obliterated 19th-Century certitudes; and yet, Hemingway offered a way to act, a way to be. In a world of shattered faiths and fallen temples, Jake Barnes could stoically accept his emasculating war wound in “The Sun Also Rises”; the matador, Pedro Romero, could be graceful under pressure, sweeping his cape before the great bull’s horns. Art could triumph over violence, human self-control over bestial power. Though his heroes’ codes may be out of date, his style has influenced the most current writers, from Jim Harrison and Cormac McCarthy to Thomas McGuane and the late Raymond Carver.

But one needn’t be a writer or student of literature to feel rewarded by Mellow’s success at separating the artist from the legend: an operation as difficult with the late Hemingway as liberating Siamese twins. Drawing on a vast store of previously untapped sources, he deftly reconstructs the birth of the writer’s spare yet passionate prose in the composition, at age 26, of his first book, “In Our Time.” Mellow rightly characterizes that collection of loosely linked short stories and vignettes as an innovative masterpiece. Mellow might have added that had it been published today, “In Our Time” would be considered in the vanguard: Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” for example, hailed as an innovative masterpiece when it came out in 1990, employs a technique similar to Hemingway’s in its weaving of fact and fiction about war.

Where others have focused on Hemingway’s marriages and affairs, Mellow uniquely examines his volatile relationships with men. Throughout his life, but especially in his brash, cocky youth, Hemingway appeared to have a charismatic effect on other males, some of whom he was driven to dominate. Toward others, like his boyhood fishing buddy, Bill Smith, he exhibited a craving for approval of his work and his choices in women. He sought out older men as mentors and confidants, often turning on them savagely after they’d given him a helping hand (Sherwood Anderson probably was his chief victim).

Any number of armchair shrinks have theorized that a repressed homosexuality was the source of Hemingway’s overbearing machismo. Mellow, like previous biographers, teases us with episodes suggesting a confused sexuality: a graphic, unpublished sketch of homoerotic practices Hemingway witnessed or heard about in New York in 1918; the writing of the posthumously published “Garden of Eden,” a novel that explores a couple’s sexual role reversals. Mellow’s interpretation: Hemingway was not homosexual but may have feared he was because he (and others) sometimes confused his fictional celebrations of masculine comradeship (the fishing scenes in “The Sun Also Rises,” for example) with something less innocent.

Mellow goes on to theorize that Hemingway yearned in his real life for a “masculine Eden” of hunting, fishing and bullfighting, free from the intrusive influence of women. That may have been due to his stormy relationship with his mother. She was not the emasculating witch her son made her out to be--Mellow corrects the record on that--but she was often suffocatingly pious and self-righteous. Whatever the case--if I’ve understood Mellow’s implications correctly--the “masculinism” in Hemingway’s life and writing was not the repression of forbidden desire but a motif or theme squarely in an old American literary tradition. The male hero must escape society--usually associated with women, marriage, domesticity--for the wilderness, the sea, the road, the battlefield. Nick Adams’ fictional ancestors are Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn, his descendants Jack Dulouz and Augie March.

Despite its subtitle, the final third of “Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences” shows that consequences were the one thing the writer could not escape --the consequences of fame, ego and alcohol. Mellow sensitively but unflinchingly chronicles Hemingway’s devolution into a boozy, bullying, vindictive self-promoter, a professional legend. In a cool but nonetheless scathing analysis, Mellow notes that even his journalism from World War II suffered because of his obsession with his own myth, and that his much-praised memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” was a self-serving failure to negotiate honestly “with the hard truths of his feelings, his marital affairs.”

Mellow sums it all up in a damning sentence:

“One has to fight back the feeling that he let himself down badly.”

In the end, suffering from paranoid delusions and high blood pressure, undergoing electroshock treatments, his head as white and nearly as addled as Lear’s, Hemingway found himself unable to compose a simple inscription to a presentation volume for President Kennedy. He broke down in front of his doctor, Mellow reports in a touching scene that evokes as much pity as those of Hemingway’s nastiness arouse disgust. He could not write, he cried, the words would not come any more.

The end came in Idaho, on a clear summer morning in 1961, less than a month before his 62nd birthday. Hemingway unlocked a full-choke Boss shotgun from its storage closet and leaned his forehead into both barrels. As Baker did before him, Mellow makes us hear the blast . . . and I could not help but hear as well an echo from this book’s early pages: the 3-year-old Hemingway answering his mother when she asked what he was afraid of. “Fraid a nothing!”

But the man who had been afraid of nothing, who had made a life’s work of studying fear and courage--in the Alto Adige, in the bullring and boxing ring, on the African plains, the banks of the Ebro, and in the corpse-strewn gloom of the Ardennes forests--had discovered within himself terrors darker than any Cape Buffalo or Spanish bull, terrors he could neither face nor overcome.

James Mellow resurrects him, and re-illuminates his art, in this excellent biography.