I’d Die for You and Other Last Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel

Hemingway’s Brain

Andrew Farah

Bones – Like “The Complete Poems of Ernest Hemingway” and “The Early Stories of Truman Capote,” “I’d Die for You and Other Last Stories” does not showcase an immensely talented writer at his best. You cannot judge writers by their worst work when their greater achievements continue to inspire. But, then again, that’s not the point of this sort of volume. Such literary exhumations are, at best, thoughtful efforts to advance the scholarship surrounding an artistic giant or, at worst, cheap attempts at grave-robbing. The same goes for new biographies when the existing number of published biographies outpaces the number of books the subject himself wrote. The good news is Anne Margaret Daniel appears reassuringly focused on scholarship and, in “Hemingway’s Brain,” Andrew Farah does a great service by examining how concussion, brain trauma, alcoholism, dementia and mental illness affected Papa and his writing. Farah veers off course, however, when he assigns motives to Hemingway, his wives, his children, their friends. There is a fog of friendship as equally dense as the fog of war and the fog of memory; attributing motives and intentions (and, even, reconstructing events) based on cloudy recollections of people unknown from decades past is never easy, no matter how skilled the historian. Despite my minor criticisms as well as the multiple merits of each book, I finished reading these feeling a bit like a buzzard gnawing the hard, dusty bones of two great artists. In the end, there is the writing, the writer and the bones – and here I am pecking away because the real reason people keep writing and editing these sorts of postmortems is because people like me devour them.