Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois,
started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas
City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the
First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the
Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was
decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable
time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he
became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and
was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek
Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the
group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in
his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally
successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an
American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his
role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a
reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his
most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among
his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old
Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey,
his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his
victory in defeat.
Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray
soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people
whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of
modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and
faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his
predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his
short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without
Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine
Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst
Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of
the award and later published in the book series Les Prix
Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated
with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this
document, always state the source as shown above.
Selected Bibliography
Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Fourth
edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1972.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. (Ed.). Ernest Hemingway's
apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916-1917. NCR Microcard Editions:
Washington, D.C., 1971.
Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Robert W. Trogdon (Eds.). The
Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell
Perkins Correspondence 1925-1947. Charles Scribner's Sons:
New York, 1996.
Clifford, Stephen P. Beyond the Heroic "I": Reading
Lawrence, Hemingway, and "masculinity". Bucknell Univ. Press:
Cranbury, NJ, 1999.
Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected
articles and dispatches of four decades. Edited by William White,
with commentaries by Philip Young. Collins: London, 1968.
- Complete poems. Edited with an introduction and notes
by Nicholas Gerogiannis. Rev. ed., University of Nebraska Press:
Lincoln, 1992.
- The Complete Short Stories. The Finca Vigía ed. Charles
Scribner's Sons: New York, 1998.
- Death in the Afternoon. Jonathan Cape: London, 1932.
- Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed.
Carlos Baker. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1981.
- A Farewell to Arms. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York,
1929.
- Fiesta. Jonathan Cape: London, 1927.
- For Whom the Bell Tolls. Charles Scribner's Sons: New
York 1940.
- The Garden of Eden. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York,
1986.
- Green Hills of Africa. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York
1935.
- In Our Time. Boni and Liveright: New York, 1925.
- Islands in the Stream. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York,
1970.
- A Moveable Feast. Jonathan Cape: London, 1964.
- The Nick Adams Stories. Preface by Philip Young. Charles
Scribner's Sons: New York, 1972.
- The Old Man and the Sea. Charles Scribner's Sons: New
York, 1952.
- Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. Panther
Books/Granada Publishing: London 1985(1981).
- The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other stories, Charles
Scribner's Sons: New York, 1961.
- The Sun also rises. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York,
1928(1926).
- The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the
Passing of a Great Race. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York,
1926.
- Three Stories & Ten Poems: Ernest Hemingway's First
Book. A facsimile of the original Paris Edition published in 1923.
Bruccoli Clark Books: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1977.
- True at First Light. Edited with an Introduction by Patrick
Hemingway. Arrow Books/Random House: London 1999.
- Winner Take Nothing. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York,
1933.
Josephs, Allen. For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest
Hemingway's Undiscovered Country. Twayne: New York, 1994.
Lacasse, Rodolphe. Hemingway et Malraux: destins de
l'homme. Profils; 6, Montréal 1972.
Lynn. Kenneth S. Hemingway. Simon and Schuster:
London, 1987.
Mandel, Miriam. Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the
Fictions. Scarecrow Press: Metuchen, NJ and London, 1995.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York, 1985
(Macmillan: London, 1986 (Harper & Row: New York 1985).
Nelson, Gerald B. & Glory Jones. Hemingway: Life and
Works. Facts On File Publications: New York, 1984.
Palin, Michael. Hemingway's Travels. Weidenfeld &
Nicolson: London, 1999.
Phillips, Larry W (Ed). Ernest Hemingway on Writing.
Grafton Books: London, 1986 (1984).
Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: an Annotated
Chronology: an Outline of the Author's Life and Career Detailing
Significant Events, Friendships, Travels, and Achievements.
Omni chronology series, 1 Omnigraphics, Inc: Detroit, MI, 1991.
Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: The Final Years. W.W.
Norton: New York 1999.
Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: the Homecoming. W.W.
Norton: New York, 1999.
Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: the Paris years. W.W.
Norton: New York 1999.
Reynolds, Michael S. The Young Hemingway. W.W. Norton:
New York, 1998.
Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway's First War: The Making
of A Farewell to Arms. Basil Blackwell: New York and Oxford,
1987 (Princeton U.P. 1976).
Trogdon, Robert W. (Ed.). Ernest Hemingway: A
Documentary Volume. In: Dictionary of Literary Biography
(series) Vol. 210. Gale Research Inc.: Detroit, Michigan, 1999.
Wagner-Martin, Linda (Ed.). A Historical Guide to Ernest
Hemingway. Oxford University Press: New York and Oxford,
2000
The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts, has
an extensive collection of books and manuscripts, and holds
more than 10,000 photos of Ernest Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway died on July 2, 1961.
Ernest Hemingway Biography>Childhood
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born at eight o'clock in the
morning on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. In the nearly sixty
two years of his life that followed he forged a literary reputation
unsurpassed in the twentieth century. In doing so, he also
created a mythological hero in himself that captivated (and at
times confounded) not only serious literary critics but the
average man as well. In a word, he was a star.
Born in the family home at 439 North Oak Park Avenue
(now 339 N. Oak Park Avenue), a house built by his widowed
grandfather Ernest Hall, Hemingway was the second of Dr.
Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway's six children; he had four
sisters and one brother. He was named after his maternal
grandfather Ernest Hall and his great uncle Miller Hall.
Oak Park was a mainly Protestant, upper middle-class
suburb of Chicago that Hemingway would later refer to as a
town of "wide lawns and narrow minds." Only ten miles from the
big city, Oak Park was really much farther away philosophically.
It was basically a conservative town that tried to isolate itself
from Chicago's liberal seediness. Hemingway was raised with
the conservative Midwestern values of strong religion, hard
work, physical fitness and self determination; if one adhered to
these parameters, he was taught, he would be ensured of
success in whatever field he chose.
As a boy he was taught by his father to hunt and fish along
the shores and in the forests surrounding Lake Michigan. The
Hemingways had a summer house called Windemere on Walloon
Lake in northern Michigan, and the family would spend the
summer months there trying to stay cool. Hemingway would
either fish the different streams that ran into the lake, or would
take the row boat out to do some fishing there. He would also go
squirrel hunting in the woods near the summer house,
discovering early in life the serenity to be found while alone in
the forest or wading a stream. It was something he could always
go back to throughout his life, wherever he was. Nature would
be the touchstone of Hemingway's life and work, and though he
often found himself living in major cities like Chicago, Toronto
and Paris early in his career, once he became successful he
chose somewhat isolated places to live like Key West, or San
Francisco de Paula, Cuba, or Ketchum, Idaho. All were
convenient locales for hunting and fishing.
When he wasn't hunting or fishing his mother taught him
the finer points of music. Grace was an accomplished singer who
once had aspirations of a career on stage, but eventually settled
down with her husband and occupied her time by giving voice
and music lessons to local children, including her own.
Hemingway never had a knack for music and suffered through
choir practices and cello lessons, however the musical
knowledge he acquired from his mother helped him share in his
first wife Hadley's interest in the piano.
Hemingway received his formal schooling in the Oak Park
public school system. In high school he was mediocre at sports,
playing football, swimming, water basketball and serving as the
track team manager. He enjoyed working on the high school
newspaper called the Trapeze, where he wrote his first articles,
usually humorous pieces in the style of Ring Lardner, a popular
satirist of the time. Hemingway graduated in the spring of 1917
and instead of going to college the following fall like his parents
expected, he took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City
Star; the job was arranged for by his Uncle Tyler who was a
close friend of the chief editorial writer of the paper.
Ernest Hemingway Biography>World War I
At the time of Hemingway's graduation from High School,
World War I was raging in Europe, and despite Woodrow
Wilson's attempts to keep America out of the war, the United
States joined the Allies in the fight against Germany and Austria
in April, 1917. When Hemingway turned eighteen he tried to
enlist in the army, but was deferred because of poor vision; he
had a bad left eye that he probably inherited from his mother,
who also had poor vision. When he heard the Red Cross was
taking volunteers as ambulance drivers he quickly signed up. He
was accepted in December of 1917, left his job at the paper in
April of 1918, and sailed for Europe in May. In the short time
that Hemingway worked for the Kansas City Star he learned
some stylistic lessons that would later influence his fiction. The
newspaper advocated short sentences, short paragraphs, active
verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy.
Hemingway later said: "Those were the best rules I ever learned
for the business of writing. I've never forgotten them."
Hemingway first went to Paris upon reaching Europe, then
traveled to Milan in early June after receiving his orders. The
day he arrived, a munitions factory exploded and he had to carry
mutilated bodies and body parts to a makeshift morgue; it was
an immediate and powerful initiation into the horrors of war.
Two days later he was sent to an ambulance unit in the town of
Schio, where he worked driving ambulances. On July 8, 1918,
only a few weeks after arriving, Hemingway was seriously
wounded by fragments from an Austrian mortar shell which had
landed just a few feet away. At the time, Hemingway was
distributing chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers in the
trenches near the front lines. The explosion knocked Hemingway
unconscious, killed an Italian soldier and blew the legs off
another. What happened next has been debated for some time.
In a letter to Hemingway's father, Ted Brumback, one of Ernest's
fellow ambulance drivers, wrote that despite over 200 pieces of
shrapnel being lodged in Hemingway's legs he still managed to
carry another wounded soldier back to the first aid station; along
the way he was hit in the legs by several machine gun bullets.
Whether he carried the wounded soldier or not, doesn't diminish
Hemingway's sacrifice. He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal
for Valor with the official Italian citation reading: "Gravely
wounded by numerous pieces of shrapnel from an enemy shell,
with an admirable spirit of brotherhood, before taking care of
himself, he rendered generous assistance to the Italian soldiers
more seriously wounded by the same explosion and did not allow
himself to be carried elsewhere until after they had been
evacuated." Hemingway described his injuries to a friend of his:
"There was one of those big noises you sometimes hear at the
front. I died then. I felt my soul or something coming right out of
my body, like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by
one corner. It flew all around and then came back and went in
again and I wasn't dead any more."
Hemingway's wounding along the Piave River in Italy and
his subsequent recovery at a hospital in Milan, including the
relationship with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, all inspired his
great novel A Farewell To Arms.
A Soldier's Home...
When Hemingway returned home from Italy in January of
1919 he found Oak Park dull compared to the adventures of war,
the beauty of foreign lands and the romance of an older woman,
Agnes von Kurowsky. He was nineteen years old and only a year
and a half removed from high school, but the war had matured
him beyond his years. Living with his parents, who never quite
appreciated what their son had been through, was difficult. Soon
after his homecoming they began to question his future, began
to pressure him to find work or to further his education, but
Hemingway couldn't seem to muster interest in anything.
He had received some $1,000 dollars in insurance
payments for his war wounds, which allowed him to avoid work
for nearly a year. He lived at his parent’s house and spent his
time at the library or at home reading. He spoke to small civic
organizations about his war exploits and was often seen in his
Red Cross uniform, walking about town. For a time though,
Hemingway questioned his role as a war hero, and when asked
to tell of his experiences he often exaggerated to satisfy his
audience. Hemingway's story "Soldier's Home" conveys his
feelings of frustration and shame upon returning home to a town
and to parents who still had a romantic notion of war and who
didn't understand the psychological impact the war had had on
their son.
The last speaking engagement the young Hemingway took
was at the Petoskey (Michigan) Public Library, and it would be
important to Hemingway not for what he said but for who heard
it. In the audience was Harriett Connable, the wife of an
executive for the Woolworth's company in Toronto. As
Hemingway spun his war tales Harriett couldn't help but notice
the differences between Hemingway and her own son.
Hemingway appeared confident, strong, intelligent and athletic,
while her son was slight, somewhat handicapped by a weak right
arm and spent most of his time indoors. Harriett Connable
thought her son needed someone to show him the joys of
physical activity and Hemingway seemed the perfect candidate
to tutor and watch over him while she and her husband Ralph
vacationed in Florida. So, she asked Hemingway if he would do
it.
Hemingway took the position, which offered him time to
write and a chance to work for the Toronto Star Weekly, the
editor of which Ralph Connable promised to introduce
Hemingway to. Hemingway wrote for the Star Weekly even after
moving to Chicago in the fall of 1920. While living at a friend's
house he met Hadley Richardson and they quickly fell in love.
The two married in September 1921 and by November of the
same year Hemingway accepted an offer to work with the
Toronto Daily Star as its European corespondent. Hemingway
and his new bride would go to Paris, France where the whole of
literature was being changed by the likes of Ezra Pound, James
Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ford Maddox Ford. He would not miss
his chance to change it as well.
Ernest Hemingway Biography>The Paris Years
The Hemingways arrived in Paris on December 22, 1921
and a few weeks later moved into their first apartment at 74 rue
Cardinal Lemoine. It was a miserable apartment with no running
water and a bathroom that was basically a closet with a slop
bucket inside. Hemingway tried to minimize the primitiveness of
the living quarters for his wife Hadley who had grown up in
relative splendor, but despite the conditions she endured,
carried away by her husbands enthusiasm for living the
bohemian lifestyle. Ironically, they could have afforded much
better; with Hemingway's job and Hadley's trust fund their
annual income was $3,000, a decent sum in the inflated
economies of Europe at the time. Hemingway rented a room at
39 rue Descartes where he could do his writing in peace.
With a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson,
Hemingway met some of Paris’ prominent writers and artists
and forged quick friendships with them during his first few
years. Counted among those friends were Ezra Pound, Gertrude
Stein, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Max Eastman, Lincoln Steffens
and Wyndahm Lewis, and he was acquainted with the painters
Miro and Picasso. These friendships would be instrumental in
Hemingway's development as a writer and artist.
Hemingway's reporting during his first two years in Paris
was extensive, covering the Geneva Conference in April of 1922,
The Greco-Turkish War in October, the Luasanne Conference in
November and the post war convention in the Ruhr Valley in
early 1923. Along with the political pieces he wrote lifestyle
pieces as well, covering fishing, bullfighting, social life in
Europe, skiing, bobsledding and more.
Just as Hemingway was beginning to make a name for
himself as a reporter and a fledgling fiction writer, and just as he
and his wife were hitting their stride socially in Europe, the
couple found out that Hadley was pregnant with their first child.
Wanting the baby born in North America where the doctors and
hospitals were better, the Hemingways left Paris in 1923 and
moved to Toronto, where he wrote for the Toronto Daily Star and
waited for their child to arrive.
John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway was born on October 10,
1923 and by January of 1924 the young family boarded a ship
and headed back to Paris where Hemingway would finish
making a name for himself.
~~~
With a recommendation from Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox
Ford let Hemingway edit his fledgling literary magazine the
Transatlantic Review. In recommending Hemingway to Ford,
Pound said "...He's an experienced journalist. He writes very
good verse and he's the finest prose stylist in the world."
Ford published some of Hemingway's early stories,
including "Indian Camp" and "Cross Country Snow" and
generally praised the younger writer. The magazine lasted only a
year and a half (until 1925), but allowed Hemingway to work out
his own artistic theories and to see them in print in a
respectable journal.
An unparalleled creative flurry...
From 1925 to 1929 Hemingway produced some of the most
important works of 20th century fiction, including the landmark
short story collection In Our Time (1925) which contained "The
Big Two-Hearted River." In 1926 he came out with his first true
novel, The Sun Also Rises (after publishing Torrents of Spring, a
comic novel parodying Sherwood Anderson in 1925). He
followed that book with Men Without Women in 1927; it was
another book of stories which collected "The Killers," and "In
Another Country." In 1929 he published A Farewell to Arms,
arguably the finest novel to emerge from World War I. In four
short years he went from being an unknown writer to being the
most important writer of his generation, and perhaps the 20th
century.
The first version of in our time (characterized by the
lowercase letters in the title) was published by William Bird’s
Three Mountain Press in 1924 and illustrated Hemingway’s new
theories on literature. It contained only the vignettes that would
later appear as interchapters in the American version published
by Boni & Liveright in 1925. This small 32 page book, of which
only 170 copies were printed, contained the essence of
Hemingway’s aesthetic theory which stated that omitting the
right thing from a story could actually strengthen it. Hemingway
equated this theory with the structure of an iceberg where only
1/8 of the iceberg could be seen above water while the
remaining 7/8 under the surface provided the iceberg’s dignity
of motion and contributed to its momentum. Hemingway felt a
story could be constructed the same way and this theory shows
up even in these early vignettes. A year after the small printing
of in our time came out, Boni & Liveright published the
American version, which contains ten short stories along with
the vignettes. The collection of stories is amazing, including the
much anthologized "Soldier’s Home," as well as "Indian Camp,"
"A Very Short Story," "My Old Man" and the classic "Big Two-
Hearted River" parts one and two. "Big Two Hearted River" was
a eureka story for Hemingway, who realized that his theory of
omission really could work in the story form.
Next came The Torrents of Spring, a short comic novel that
satired Hemingway’s early mentor Sherwood Anderson and
allowed him to break his relationship with Boni & Liveright to
move to Scribner’s. Scribner’s published Torrents (which Scott
Fitzgerald called the finest comic novel ever written by an
American) in 1925, then a year later published Hemingway’s
second novel The Sun Also Rises, which the publisher had
bought sight unseen.
The Sun Also Rises introduced the world to the "lost
generation" and was a critical and commercial success. Set in
Paris and Spain, the book was a story of unrequitable love
against a backdrop of bars and bullfighting. In 1927 came Men
Without Women and soon after he began working on A Farewell
To Arms.
~~~
While he could do no wrong with his writing career, his
personal life had began to show signs of wear. He divorced his
first wife Hadley in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer, an
occasional fashion reporter for the likes of Vanity Fair and
Vogue, later that year. In 1928 Hemingway and Pauline left Paris
for Key West, Florida in search of new surroundings to go with
their new life together. They would live there for nearly twelve
years, and Hemingway found it a wonderful place to work and to
play, discovering the sport of big game fishing which would
become a life-long passion and a source for much of his later
writing. That same year Hemingway received word of his
father’s death by suicide. Clarence Hemingway had begun to
suffer from a number of physical ailments that would exacerbate
an already fragile mental state. He had developed diabetes,
endured painful angina and extreme headaches. On top of these
physical problems he also suffered from a dismal financial
situation after speculative real estate purchases in Florida never
panned out. His problems seemingly insurmountable, Clarence
Hemingway shot himself in the head. Ernest immediately
traveled to Oak Park to arrange for his funeral.
Ernest Hemingway Biography>Key West
The new Hemingways heard of Key West from Ernest’s
friend John Dos Passos, and the two stopped at the tiny Florida
island on their way back from Paris. They soon discovered that
life in remote Key West was like living in a foreign country while
still perched on the southernmost tip of America. Hemingway
loved it. "It’s the best place I’ve ever been anytime, anywhere,
flowers, tamarind trees, guava trees, coconut palms...Got tight
last night on absinthe and did knife tricks." After renting an
apartment and a house for a couple of years the Hemingways
bought a large house at 907 Whitehead Street with $12,500 of
help from Pauline’s wealthy Uncle Gus.
Pauline was pregnant at the time and on June 28, 1928
gave birth to Patrick by cesarean section. It was in December of
that year that Hemingway received the cable reporting his
father’s suicide. Despite the personal turmoil and change
Hemingway continued to work on A Farewell to Arms, finishing
it in January of 1929. The novel was published on September 27,
1929 to a level of critical acclaim that Hemingway wouldn’t see
again until 1940 with the publication of his Spanish war novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls. In between Hemingway entered his
experimental phase which confounded critics but still, to some
extent, satisfied his audience.
In 1931 Pauline gave birth to Gregory, their second son
together, and the last of Hemingway’s children.
After A Farewell to Arms Hemingway published his 1932
Spanish bullfighting dissertation, Death in the Afternoon. While
writing an encyclopedic book on bullfighting he still managed to
make it readable even by those who had no real interest in the
corrida. He inserts observations on Spanish culture, writers,
food, people, politics, history, etc. Hemingway wrote about the
purpose of his Spanish book, "It is intended as an introduction to
the modern Spanish bullfight and attempts to explain that
spectacle both emotionally and practically. It was written
because there was no book which did this in Spanish or in
English."
Though a non-fiction book, Death in the Afternoon does
codify one of Hemingway’s literary concepts of the stoical hero
facing deadly opposition while still performing his duties with
professionalism and skill, or "grace under pressure," as
Hemingway described it. Many critics took issue with an
apparent change in Hemingway from detracted artist to actual
character in one of his own works. They disliked a blustery tone
Hemingway drifted into , particularly when discussing writers,
writing and art in general. It was the genesis of the public
"Papa" image that would grow over the remaining 30 years of his
life, at times almost obscuring the serious artist within.
Returning to fiction in 1933, Hemingway published Winner
Take Nothing, a volume of short stories. The book contained 14
stories, including "A Clean Well Lighted Place," "Fathers and
Sons," and "A Way You’ll Never Be." The book sold well despite a
mediocre critical reception and despite the terrible economic
depression the world was then mired in. James Joyce, one of
Hemingway’s friends from his early Paris days, wrote glowingly
of "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" as follows: "He has reduced the
veil between literature and life, which is what every writer
strives to do. Have you read ‘A Clean, Well Lighted Place’?...It is
masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best stories ever written..."
In the summer of 1933 the Hemingways and their Key West
friend Charles Thompson journeyed to Africa for a big game
safari. Ever since reading of Teddy Roosevelt’s African hunting
exploits as a boy, Hemingway wanted to test his hunting skills
against the biggest and most dangerous animals on earth. With a
$25,000 loan form Pauline’s uncle Gus (the same uncle who
helped them buy their Key West home) Hemingway spent three
months hunting on the dark continent, all the while gathering
material for his future writing. In 1935 he published Green Hills
of Africa, a pseudo non-fiction account of his safari.
Unfortunately, he picked up where he left off in Death in the
Afternoon. While the book contained some decent writing about
Africa and its animals it was overshadowed by Hemingway’s
again digression into the blustery tone of his alter ego. In the
book Hemingway harshly criticizes his supposed friends, making
the reader cringe at his insensitivity. He portrays himself as
courageous, skillful and cool while depicting others, including
his friend Charles Thompson, as mean-spirited and selfish. In a
telling review the prominent literary critic Edmund Wilson
poked at Hemingway, saying "he has produced what must be the
only book ever written which makes Africa and its animals seem
dull."
Oddly though, from the same safari Hemingway gathered
the material for two of his finest short stories, "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."
In both stories the protagonist shows a weakness that is
contrary to what the typical Hemingway hero exhibits. Harry,
the dying writer in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," laments his
wasted talent, a talent diminished by drink, women, wealth and
laziness. Macomber in "The Short Happy Life..." shows
cowardice under pressure and just as he redeems himself his
wife shoots him.
As in other Hemingway stories, a curious effect can be seen
in these African tales. Often in Hemingway’s non-fiction work
the truth is obscured by Hemingway’s need to promote his
public personality, his need to portray himself as above fear,
above pettiness, above any negative quality that would tarnish
that image. In his fiction though, certain negative qualities,
whatever they might be, are in the characters as flaws that often
lead to their destruction. Beyond that, in a biographical context,
the actual events of Hemingway’s life end up in his fiction rather
than in his non-fiction. For example: Hemingway’s World War I
injuries more closely resemble those of Frederic Henry in A
Farewell To Arms than the accounts you see repeated in old
biographical blurbs which tell of how he fought with the elite
Italian forces, how after being hit by a mortar he carried a
wounded soldier through machine gun fire to the field hospital,
and how he refused medical treatment until others were treated
before him.
When you want to find the truth about Hemingway’s life,
look first to his fiction.
In March 1937 Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the
Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
The civil war caused a marital war in the Hemingway household
as well. Hemingway had met a young writer named Martha
Gellhorn in Key West and the two would go on to conduct a
secret affair for almost four years before Hemingway divorced
Pauline and married Martha. Pauline sided with the Facist
Franco Regime in Spain because of is pro-catholic stance, while
Hemingway supported the communist loyalists who in turn
supported the democratically elected government. Often
travelling with Gellhorn, the two fell in love as they competed for
quality stories. They would eventually marry in November of
1940, nearly four years after meeting at Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key
West in December 1936. Eventually the loyalist movement failed
and the Franco led rebels won the war and installed a dictatorial
government in the spring of 1939. Though his side lost the war
Hemingway used his experiences there to write the novel For
Whom the Bell Tolls, a play titled "The Fifth Column" and several
short stories.
Ernest Hemingway Biography> Cuba
After returning from Spain and divorcing Pauline,
Hemingway and Martha moved to a large house outside Havana,
Cuba. They named it Finca Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), and
Hemingway decorated it with hunting trophies from his African
safari. He had begun work on For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1939
in Cuba and worked on it on the road as he traveled back to Key
West or to Wyoming or to Sun Valley, finishing it in July of 1940.
The book was a huge success, both critically and commercially,
prompting Sinclair Lewis to write that it was "the American book
published during the three years past which was most likely to
survive, to be know fifty years from now, or possibly a
hundred...it might just possibly be a masterpiece, a classic..."
Oddly, the book was unanimously voted the best novel of the
year by the Pulitzer Prize committee, but was vetoed for political
reason by the conservative president of Columbia University; no
prize was awarded that year. The book sold over 500,000 copies
in just six months, and continues to sell well today.
The next ten years would be a creatively fallow period for
Hemingway, (it would be 1950 before he would publish another
novel) but while he looked more interested in bolstering his
public image at the expense of his work, he was actually
immersed in several large writing projects which he could never
seem to complete. During the 1940’s he worked on what would
become the heavily edited and posthumously published novels
Islands In The Stream and The Garden Of Eden. In between he
would also cover (and some say participate in) World War II, and
he would divorce his third wife Martha to marry his fourth, Mary
Welsh. In an insightful essay on Hemingway, E. L. Doctorow
writes of Hemingway’s work during the 40’s, discussing The
Garden of Eden in particular. "That is exciting because it gives
evidence, despite his celebrity, despite his Nobel, despite the
torments of his own physical self punishment, of a writer still
developing. Those same writing strategies Hemingway
formulated to such triumph in his early work came to entrap him
in the later...I would like to think that as he began "The Garden
of Eden," his very next novel after that war work (For Whom the
Bell Tolls), he realized this and wanted to retool, to remake
himself. That he would fail is almost not the point--but that he
would have tried, which is the true bravery of a writer..."
After his work covering the Spanish Civil War and the
subsequent work on his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Hemingway took on another assignment, covering the Chinese-
Japanese war in 1941. He traveled with his wife Martha and
wrote dispatches about the war for PM Magazine. It was a
tedious trip and Hemingway was glad to return to Cuba for some
well deserved rest. He didn’t stay still long. By 1942 Hemingway
had undertaken an undercover operation to hunt down German
submarines in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Cuba.
Hemingway gathered some of his friends, as well as a few
professional operatives, then outfitted his boat Pilar with radio
equipment, extra fuel tanks and a nice quantity of ordnance,
hoping that if he ever located a German sub he could get close
enough to drop a bomb down the hatch. He called the gang the
"Crook Factory." Nothing ever came of their sub hunts except a
good time fishing and drinking together, in the process irritating
Martha who thought Hemingway was avoiding the
responsibilities as a great writer to report the real war then
raging in Europe.
Ernest Hemingway Biography> World War II
In the spring of 1944 Hemingway finally decided to go to
Europe to report the war, heading first to London where he
wrote articles about the RAF and about the war’s effects on
England. While there he was injured in a car crash, suffering a
serious concussion and a gash to his head which required over
50 stitches. Martha visited him in the hospital and minimized his
injuries, castigating him for being involved in a drunken auto
wreck. Hemingway really was seriously hurt and Martha’s
cavalier reaction triggered the beginning of the end of their
marriage. While in London Hemingway met Mary Welsh, the
antithesis of Martha. Mary was caring, adoring, and
complimentary while Martha couldn’t care less, had lost any
admiration for her man and was often insulting to him. For
Hemingway it was an easy choice between the two and like in
other wars, Hemingway fell in love with a new woman.
Hemingway and Mary openly conducted their courtship in
London and then in France after the allied invasion at Normandy
and the subsequent liberation of Paris. For all intents and
purposes Hemingway’s third marriage was over and his fourth
and final marriage to Mary had begun. Hemingway wrote,
"Funny how it should take one war to start a woman in your
damn heart and another to finish her. Bad luck."
~~~
In late August of 1944 Hemingway and his band of
irregular soldiers entered Paris. Hemingway was always fond of
saying he was the first to enter Paris en route to its liberation,
but the story is a stretch. He did liberate his favorite bar and
hotel though. He set up camp in The Ritz Hotel and spent the
next week or so drinking, carousing and celebrating his return to
the city that meant so much to him as a young man.
Next, Hemingway traveled to the north of France to join his
friend General Buck Lanham as the allied forces (the 22nd
Infantry Regiment in particular) pushed toward Germany.
Hemingway spent a month with Lanham, long enough to watch
American forces cross over into Germany. The fighting was some
of the bloodiest of the war and was obliquely recorded by
Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees.
Hemingway returned to America in March of 1946 with
plans to write a great novel of the war, but it never materialized.
The only book length work he would produce about the war was
Across the River and Into the Trees. It tells the bitter-sweet story
of Richard Cantwell, a former brigadier general who has been
demoted to colonel after a disastrous battle which had been
blamed on him. The aging Cantwell, with his heart problem that
threatened to kill him at any moment, falls in love with the
young Italian countess Renata. They carry out a love affair and
through their conversations and monologues we learn the source
of Cantwell’s bitterness...an inept military that fails to
appreciate his talents and in fact sends him orders that are
impossible to fulfill, in effect guaranteeing his failure and
disgrace, an ex-wife (based on Martha Gellhorn) that uses her
relationship with Cantwell to gain access to the military brass
for information important to her journalism career and a general
distaste for the modern world.
Banking on Hemingway’s reputation, Scribners ran an
initial printing of 75,000 copies of Across the River and Into the
Trees in September of 1950 after it had already appeared in
Cosmopolitan magazine in the February-June issues of the same
year. Generally slammed by the critics as sentimental, boorish
and a thin disguise of Hemingway’s own relationship with a
young Italian woman named Adriana Ivancich, the novel actually
contains some of Hemingway’s finest writing, especially in the
opening chapters. The critics were expecting something on the
scale of For Whom The Bell Tolls and were disappointed by the
short novel and its narrow scope.
Ernest Hemingway Biography> The Last Days
Stung by the critical reception of Across the River and Into
the Trees , Hemingway was determined to regain his former
stature as the world’s preeminent novelist. Still under the muse
of Adriana Ivancich, Hemingway began work on a story of an old
man and a great fish. The words poured forth and hit the page in
almost perfect form, requiring little editing after he’d completed
the first draft. It had been a story simmering in Hemingway’s
subconscious for some time...in fact he had written about just
such a story in one of his Esquire magazine dispatches as early
as 1936. Max Perkins periodically tried to persuade Hemingway
to write the story, but Hemingway felt he wasn’t yet ready to
write what his wife Mary would later call "poetry in prose."
Hemingway often described competition among writers in
boxing terms. He felt he’d been suckerpunched and knocked to
the canvas by the critics on Across the River and Into the Trees,
but as if he’d been saving it for just such an occasion, he
believed the fish story would allow him to regain his position as
"champion."
In September of 1952 The Old Man and the Sea appeared
in Life magazine, selling over 5 million copies in a flash. The
next week Scribners rolled out the first hardcover edition of
50,000 copies and they too sold out quickly. The book was a
huge success both critically and commercially and for the first
time since For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 Hemingway was
atop the literary heap...and making a fortune. Though
Hemingway had known great success before, he never had the
privilege of receiving any major literary prizes. The Old Man and
the Sea changed that, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in
1953.
Flush with money from the Old Man and the Sea
Hemingway decided to exercise his wanderlust, returning to
Europe to catch some bullfights in Spain and then to Africa later
in the summer for another safari with his wife Mary. In January
of 1954 Hemingway and Mary boarded a small Cessna airplane
to take a tour of some of east Africa’s beautiful lakes and
waterfalls. The pilot, Roy marsh, dove to avoid a flock of birds
and hit a telegraph wire. The plane was badly damaged and they
had to make a crash landing. The group’s injuries were minor,
though several of Mary’s ribs were fractured. After a boat ride
across Lake Victoria they took another flight in a de Haviland
Rapide, this time piloted by Reginald Cartwright. Heading
toward Uganda the plane barely got off the ground before
crashing and catching fire. Cartwright, Mary and Roy Marsh
made it through an exit at the front of the plane. Hemingway,
using his head as a battering ram, broke through the main door.
The crash had injured Hemingway more than most would know.
In his biography of Hemingway Jeffrey Meyer lists the various
injuries to the writer. "His skull was fractured, two discs of his
spine were cracked, his right arm and shoulder were dislocated,
his liver, right kidney and spleen were ruptured, his sphincter
muscle was paralyzed by compressed vertebrae on the iliac
nerve, his arms, face and head were burned by the flames of the
plane, his vision and hearing were impaired..." Though he
survived the crashes and lived to read his own premature
obituaries, his injuries cut short his life in a slow and painful
way.
Despite his ailments, Hemingway and Mary traveled on to
Venice one last time and then headed back to Cuba. On October
28, 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but due
to his injuries was unable to attend the ceremonies in Sweden.
Instead, he sent a written acceptance, read to the Nobel
Committee by John Cabot, the US Ambassador to Sweden.
Denouement
After 1954 Hemingway battled deteriorating health which
often kept him from working, and when he was working he felt it
wasn’t very good. He had written 200,000 words of an account
of his doomed safari tentatively titled "African Journal" (a heavily
edited version was published in July of 1999 as True At First
Light), but didn’t feel it publishable and didn’t have the energy
to work it into shape. There were no short stories forthcoming
either and those he had written he put aside as well,
disappointed with his effort. He was struggling creatively as
much as he was physically, and as a way to satisfy his writing
"compulsion" he returned to those subjects he knew well and felt
he could write about with little struggle.
In 1959 Life magazine contracted with Hemingway to write
a short article about the series of mano y mano bullfights
between Antonio Ordonez and Louis Miguel Dominguin, two of
Spain’s finest matadors. Hemingway spent the summer of 1959
travelling with the bullfighters to gather material for the article.
When he began writing the story however, it quickly grew to
some 120,000 words, words that Hemingway couldn’t edit into
short form. He asked his friend A. E. Hotchner to help
(something he would have never considered in his prime) and
together they succeeded in cutting it down to 65,000 words.
Despite reservations about the article’s length the magazine
published the article as "The Dangerous Summer" in three
installments in 1960. This was the last work that Hemingway
would see published in his lifetime.
Besides highlighting Hemingway’s increasing problem with
writing the clear, effective prose which made him famous, his
physical deterioration had become obvious as well during that
summer of his 60th year. Pictures show Hemingway looking like
a man closer to eighty than one of sixty. At times despondent, at
others the life of the party, the swings in his moods, exacerbated
by his heavy drinking of up to a quart of liquor a day, were
taking a toll on those close to him.
During this time Hemingway was also working on his
memoirs which would be in 1964 as A Moveable Feast.
Hemingway wouldn’t live to see the success of this book which
critics praised for its tenderness and beauty and for its rare look
at the expatriate lifestyle of Paris in the 1920’s. There was a
control in his writing that hadn’t been evident in a long time.
By this time Hemingway had left Cuba, departing in July of
1960, and had taken up residence in Ketchum, Idaho where he
and Mary had already purchased a home in April of 1959. Idaho
reminded Hemingway of Spain and Ketchum was small and
remote enough to buffer him from the negative trappings of his
celebrity. He had first visited the area in 1939 as a guest of
Averill Harrimen who had just developed Sun Valley resort and
wanted a celebrity like Hemingway to promote it. He had always
liked the cool summers there and the abundance of wild land for
hunting and fishing.
But even the beautiful landscapes of Idaho couldn’t hide
the fact that something was seriously wrong with Hemingway. In
the fall of 1960 Hemingway flew to Rochester, Minnesota and
was admitted to the Mayo Clinic, ostensibly for treatment of high
blood pressure but really for help with the severe depression his
wife Mary could no longer handle alone. After Hemingway began
talking of suicide his Ketchum doctor agreed with Mary that
they should seek expert help. He registered under the name of
his personal doctor George Saviers and they began a medical
program to try and repair his mental state. The Mayo Clinic’s
treatment would ultimately lead to electro shock therapy.
According to Jefferey Meyers Hemingway received "between 11
to 15 shock treatments that instead of helping him most
certainly hastened his demise." One of the sad side effects of
shock therapy is the loss of memory, and for Hemingway it was a
catastrophic loss. Without his memory he could no longer write,
could no longer recall the facts and images he required to create
his art. Writing, which had already become difficult was now
nearly impossible.
Hemingway spent the first half of 1961 fighting his
depression and paranoia, seeing enemies at every turn and
threatening suicide on several more occasions. On the morning
of July 2, 1961 Hemingway rose early, as he had his entire adult
life, selected a shotgun from a closet in the basement, went
upstairs to a spot near the entrance-way of the house and shot
himself in the head. It was little more than two weeks until his
62nd birthday.
The End
