Anthony Burgess' Ernest Hemingway and His World is trying to be an attractive (there are over a hundred photographs) summary of Hemingway's life. Yet there is more to writing a biography, even one as short as this, than merely mixing facts and anecdotes with occasional off-hand interpretations. Burgess' central theme is that "Hemingway the man was as much a creation as his books, and a far inferior creation."

While this is an interesting thesis, Burgess never argues it. Even the crudest of amateur psychologists could make better sense of Hemingway's self-creation. I say psychologists because Burgess himself plays this role, his fundamental critical assumption being that a writer's work can be explained and understood through a knowledge of his life. This can be a valuable assumption, especially with a writer whose work is as autobiographical as Hemingway's. But instead of exploring the relationship between Hemingway's life and the lives of his characters, Burgess draws preposterous one-sentence conclusions, claiming, for example, that Hemingway's "obsession with death and killing" in Death in the Afternoon (which is, after all, about bullfighting) stems from guilt over his recent divorce.

Although he claims to want to separate man from myth, Burgess treats Hemingway's life unevenly, paying far more attention to the mature celebrity than to either the adolescent from Oak Park or the struggling writer in Paris. (p. 428)

Burgess virtually ignores Hemingway's literary achievements, devoting almost as much of this book to the movies made from Hemingway's fiction as to the fiction itself. His only real discussion of Hemingway's style comes in the middle of a passage about Hemingway's habit of boxing with his friends. This boxing, says Burgess, was "an outward expression of the big inner fight that was going on … a struggle to write a 'true simple declarative sentence.'" This kind of comment is both misleading and presumptuous. It is possible, after all, that Hemingway simply liked to box; but, more significantly, the inner struggle he waged throughout his life had to do not so much with writing as with coming to terms with his own inadequacies. How long has it been since Burgess has read "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"—where Harry, the dying writer, thinks of how "he had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in"?

Because he cannot, despite his claims to the contrary, distinguish the man from the legend, Burgess does not see that Hemingway's fiction reveals a side of the man that the legend obscures. This legend was partly of Hemingway's own making, and his creation of a living yet fictional self is a fascinating story. Burgess, however, because he is content merely to sketch the legend's growth and eventual self-destruction, does not tell it. There was a complex man beneath the mask. This sketch is so vague that it not only distorts but ignores that man. (pp. 428, 430)