Ernest Hemingway famously cited the iceberg as a model for his pared-down prose. “There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows,” he told the Paris Review in 1958. “Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.”
The submerged seven-eighths anchoring the master’s own novels and stories are brought to the surface in the Morgan Library’s “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,” organized in collaboration with Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The first major exhibition devoted to the American modernist, it contains unpublished manuscripts and drafts replete with strikeouts, additions, and marginal comments that reveal the author chipping away at and polishing blocks of text.
These manuscripts are just part of the massive trove of Hemingway-related objects —letters, notebooks, passports, ticket stubs, photos, portraits, and more — that the show musters to illuminate the events and daily details of what the Morgan’s website characterizes as “the most consistently creative phase” of the author’s career — bookended by the First and Second World Wars. During this period, Hemingway earned two Medals of Valor for surviving a mortar attack in an Austrian trench; caroused and confabulated in Paris with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, among other American ex-pat artists and writers; married, had a child, divorced, then did it all again; and moved to Key West. He, also, of course, wrote short stories and five books, including “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.”
These events and accomplishments are related through small editorial moments. Here, a young, serious-faced Hemingway is named “the class prophet.” There, a friend commiserates with Hemingway on his broken engagement with Agnes von Kurowsky, the model for Catherine Barkley in “Farewell to Arms.” In Paris, Gertrude Stein dashes off an invitation to the author for tea. Later a penciled epigraph on “The Sun Also Rises” reprises Stein’s famous quote: “You are all a lost generation.”
This accumulation of detail is delightful, even revelatory, but it lacks narrative force. The exhibition is most interesting when it focuses on Hemingway’s aggressive editing. We see “The Sun Also Rises,” for instance, undergoing a radical reduction at the hands of the author, who cut it by 30 percent, including a section in the opening pages laying out the past misfortunes of the fiesta-goers, which disappeared from later drafts at the behest of Fitzgerald and editor Maxwell Perkins. A selection of the 47 different endings for “Farewell to Arms” lines another vitrine. We also rediscover discarded book titles, such as “In Those Days It Was No Uncommon Thing to Call a Man a Son of a Bitch,” the unsuccessful candidate for what became the short-story collection “In Our Time.”
All in all, we learn more about the wordsmith than the man. Ironically, this is in part a result of submerging too much of the iceberg, so to speak. We encounter the thin-skinned, resentful Hemingway carrying himself like a wounded beast across the page in “Kiss my ass / EH” scrawled below Fitzgerald’s critical comments on “Farewell to Arms.” But the exhibition mostly omits his dark side: his disengagement as a father, the unmitigated abuse of friends in “The Sun Also Rises,” the depression that eventually led to his suicide. In doing so, the show avoids the sin of psychobiography. It also, however, violates Hemingway’s own artistic creed: that a writer must include “the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.” In telling history, it doesn’t do to leave too much below the waterline.
