Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

Life

Hemingway was one of the 20th century's most important and influential writers, and many details of his own life have become nearly as well-known as has his work, along with his absence of punctuation. His image was of a stoic, macho, adventurous figure, and he often drew heavily on his own experiences for his writing.

He was a leading figure of the so-called Lost Generation. Hemingway's fiction, especially his early work, was dominated by two types of characters. The first type were people altered by their World War I experiences, people who'd become detached and cynical, yet emotionally needy. The second type of character — perhaps a response to the first type — is a simple, plainspoken individual of direct emotions, who finds fulfillment or even redemption in fishing, bullfighting or other physical activities.

Death and violence were constant themes in Hemingway's life and writing. He saw violence in both World Wars, and in the Spanish Civil War. Hunting was among his favorite interests. He was notoriously accident-prone, perhaps due to his adventurous life.

Hemingway created one myth after the other about himself: he claimed he had an affair with Mata Hari and that he joined the Arditi after his wounding in the first World War, among other accounts. Many people were perfectly willing to believe these tales, unlikely as they often were.

Hemingway was sometimes captured or challenged in his lies, and the discrepancy between himself and the idealized image he had created has been cited as a factor in his troubled life and eventual suicide. Hemingway probably suffered from depression, which was aggravated by his alcoholism.

Early life

Hemingway was born at eight o'clock in the morning on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a physician, and the family lived a comfortable, protected life.

His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, dressed and raised him as a girl for part of his life, calling him "Ernestine". Accounts vary from two years[1] to six years[2] to even his teens.[3] Some reports claim that, when Hemingway was born, his mother fantasized that he was the twin of his older, 18-month-old sister, Marcelline. Some accounts hold that she dressed them both as girls and let their hair grow long, then later cut their hair and dressed them both as boys.

For two months each summer, Hemingway was allowed to attend a boys' camp, where he could dress and live as a boy.[4]

In his youth, Hemingway joined his father hunting; at ten, he got his first shotgun. He enjoyed a good fight, and boxing was a lifelong passion. (Some of his Nick stories seem partly based on his experiences at this time.)

After high school, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. He adopted as his personal standard the main directives of the newspaper's stylebook: "Brevity, a reconciliation of vigour with smoothness, the positive approach".

First World War

Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army. He did not pass the medical examination due to poor vision.

Later, he enlisted in the American Field Service ambulance Corps and left for Italy, then mired in World War I. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris. The city was under constant bombardment from German artillery.

Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway asked the cab driver to bring him to the place where the shells were falling. Hemingway wouldn't stop looking for enemy fire until one shell tore apart the façade of a church at the Place de la Madeleine nearby. (He later said: "I was an awful dope when I went to the last war...")

Not long after arriving in Italy, Hemingway saw the brutalities of war: On his first day of duty, an ammunition factory near Milan suffered an explosion. Hemingway had to pick up human remains, mostly of women who'd worked at the factory.

This first and extremely cruel encounter with human death left him shaken. The soldiers he met later didn't lighten this horror: Eric Dorman-Smith quoted Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe god a death . . . and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next" (Burgess (9.), p. 24). A 50-year-old soldier, to whom Hemingway said, "You're troppo vecchio for this war, pop," replied "I can die as well as any man." (Burgess (9.), p. 24). Hemingway, for his part, would conjure this very same Shakespearean line ("we owe god a death") in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his later famous African short stories.

On July 8, 1918, at the Italian front Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, ending his career as an ambulance driver.

The exact details of the July 8 attack remain mysterious but two facts are certain: A trench mortar shell hit him leaving fragments in both legs, and he was awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government. He may have saved another soldier's life by carrying him on his back.

Convalescing in the Ospedale Croce Rossa Americana, Via Alessandro Manzoni in Milan, he met Sister Hannah Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse from Washington, DC, and one of eighteen nurses looking after just four patients. He fell for her, but they never were together. Soon after his departure, she fell in love with another man.

(Hemingway once wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: "We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get a damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist" (Lynn (13.), p. 10). Some ten years after his painful World War I experiences, A Farewell To Arms was published. The work is heavily autobiographical.)

After the First World War

After being discharged from the Army, Hemingway returned home and in 1920 took a job in Toronto at the Toronto Star newspaper as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent.

About this time, Hemingway met Canada's young literary prodigy, Morley Callaghan who also was a cub reporter at the same paper. Callaghan, who respected Hemingway's work, showed him his own stories, which Hemingway liked. (The two later joined up in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, France with F. Scott Fitzgerald and the other expatriate writers of the day.)

In 1921 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson and moved to Paris as a correspondent for the Star, covering the Greco-Turkish War. After the 1922 publication and banning in the United States of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States.

In 1923, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, his first son, John, was born in Toronto. Busy supporting a family, and bored with working for the Star, and on January 1, 1924, Hemingway resigned.

Following the advice of Sherwood Anderson, the Hemingways settled in Paris. Anderson gave Hemingway a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" of the Montparnasse Quarter. Hemingway's other mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of imagism. He was so taken with Pound that he considered giving him the Nobel Prize gold medal. He later said of them: "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right." (to John Peale Bishop; Cowley (4.), p. xiii).

At the same time, Hemingway became a close friend of James Joyce. These authors and many others met at Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 18 Rue de l'Odéon, Paris.

In Montparnasse, Hemingway's favorite cafe was La Closerie des Lilas. Here, in just over just six weeks, Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises.

A tragedy became an unexpected boon when Hemingway's manuscripts, including A Farewell to Arms were stolen at Gare de Lyon. In re-writing A Farewell..., Hemingway had time to reconsider it, thus improving the work. The second version was a great deal less ornate. Hemingway compressed his prose to its bare essentials, related in a nearly journalistic, matter-of-fact style. These features would become essential components of Hemingway's style.

The Sun Also Rises

The 1926 publication of The Sun Also Rises was met with acclaim and success. Hemingway's style rocked the literary scene when it first appeared. Seemingly simple, it was revolutionary at a time when Victorian writing with neo-Gothic decorations still dominated the literary world.

Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927. In this period, Hemingway wrote much of Men Without Women.

In 1927 Men Without Women was published — a collection of short stories, containing "The Killers," one of Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories.

Hemingway's father committed suicide using an Civil War era pistol. His several incurable illnesses had become too much to bear. This suicide was doubtless a great pain to Hemingway, who may have been ashamed by the "cowardice" of the act. Another friend, Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press from his days in Paris, committed suicide shortly after.

A Farewell To Arms

Hemingway drew heavily on his own World War I experiences for his second major work, A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. The novel portrays the romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

When A Farewell to Arms was released, many other World War I books had already been published, including Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That.

By this time, Hemingway was no longer in love with Sister von Kurowsky and had divorced Hadley. He had fathered a boy named Patrick who, like Henry's son in A Farewell to Arms, was delivered by Cesarean section. Pauline's difficult labor experience inspired Catherine's in the novel.

With the success of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's financial troubles were easing. He was now an author of worldwide renown, happy with his marriage to Pauline and financially independent.

Many of the novel's characters are based on real people. Helen Ferguson, inspired by Kitty Cannell, and the priest, based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi (of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona). The basis for the character of Rinaldi, who had already appeared in "In Our Time", is more mysterious.

A Farewell to Arms has been criticised as a male fantasy. Lieutenant Henry always seems to know what to do and say. Women are attracted to him, men respect him, and Italians embrace him as they would a native. Nobles want to play billiards with him, and Nurse Barkley falls for him so completely that she hardly thinks of anything else. Henry is always in grave danger, yet always escapes.

Nonetheless, the work's place among the classics of modern literature is undisputable.

The First Forty-Nine Stories

Forty-three of these stories were originally collected in the volumes In Our Time (1926), Men Without Women (1928), Winner Take Nothing (1934). The other six stories are the African stories 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber' and 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro', 'The Capital of the World', 'Old Man on The Bridge', and two early stories 'Up in Michigan' and 'On The Quai at Smyrna'.

Hemingway's fame as a writer rests largely on his short stories, and The First Forty-Nine Stories has attained the status of a cult book. It represents some of the best and most influential short fiction of the twentieth century.

The most well-known and characteristic stories are "Hills Like White Elephants", "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", "The Killers", "Big Two-Hearted River", "The Battler". They are distinguished for their stylistic quality and terseness of language.

The book also includes much longer stories, among these the famous "Snows Of Kilimanjaro", which deals with a dying man recollecting his past while waiting for a rescue that will never arrive. In "The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber", Margaret Macomber kills her husband at the moment he has finally attained the bravery to hold his ground before a charging buffalo. Other longer stories include "The Undefeated", "Fifty Grand", and "Fathers And Sons".

Things turn sour

His books sold very well and were approved by critics, but with Hemingway's success came bad behavior. He told F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write, and claimed Ford Madox Ford was sexually impotent.

He was the target of much criticism. The journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. McAlmon, the publisher of his first non-commercial book said, according to Fitzgerald, he was "a fag and a wife-beater" (Burgess (9.), p. 57) and that Pauline was a lesbian. Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She claimed he had derived his prose style from her own and from Sherwood Anderson (Burgess (9.), p. 64).

Max Eastman suggested that Hemingway "come out from behind that false hair on the chest" (Times 1961 (15.), p. 6). Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the Afternoon, a satire of Death in the Afternoon.

Key West

Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway moved to Key West where he established his first American home. From his old stone house — a wedding present from Pauline's uncle — Hemingway fished in the Dry Tortugas waters, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and traveled ocassionally to Spain , gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.

Death In The Afternoon, a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932. He became a bullfighting aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his writings on Spain he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him that he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than him).

A safari led him to Mombasa in fall 1932, Nairobi and Machakos in the Mua Hills. 1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, a narrative about hunting Kudu. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the fictionalised results of his African experiences.

But his good fortune in business, art, and marriage was overshadowed by serious failures in health: (anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids; kidney trouble from fishing in Spain, torn groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching ball, lacerations (to arms, legs, and face) from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a broken arm from a car accident.

Social criticism

Hemingway's leisurely way of life provoked some criticism: Max Eastman and others pleaded him to give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about social affairs.

For a short while, he did so. The article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist magazine, and novel To Have and Have Not showed a certain social awareness. Soon, he would take political sides more explicitly.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939. Hemingway had lost his adopted homeland to Franco's nationalists, and would later lose his beloved Key West home because of his 1940 divorce. Furthermore, many of his literary peers were dead or ill.

For Whom The Bell Tolls was published in 1940. The novel, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War, tells of an American man fighting on the Republican side.

The Second World War

The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941 and for the first time in his life, Hemingway took an active part in a war.

Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking Nazi submarines threatening the coasts of Cuba and the United States. As the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage, he went to Europe, first as war correspondent for Collier's magazine.

At Villedieu-les-Poêles, France, Hemingway threw three grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding, a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. It was the first time he had killed a man.

Seemingly encouraged, he declared he would be an unofficial intelligence unit. Later, he acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards, formed his own partisan group which took part in the liberation of Paris. Some have argued that Hemingway was trying to emulate the characters he had created in his fiction.

After the Second World War

After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of Eden, which was never finished and would be published in much abridged form in 1986. At one stage he planned a major trilogy which was to be comprised of "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being" (the latter eventually published in 1953 as The Old Man and The Sea). There was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of these pieces were edited and stuck together as the posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream (1970).

Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), set in World War II Venice. He derived the title from the last words of General Stonewall Jackson. In Across..., his now-divorced third wife appeared as the third wife of the protagonist, Adriana Ivancich as in his lover Renata (which means "Reborn" in Latin).

The novel received poor reviews, many of which accused Hemingway of bad taste, stylistic ineptitude and sentimentality. Perhaps the last charge was most true, and fit an emerging pattern: Hemingway was growing old.

The Old Man and the Sea

Main article: The Old Man and the Sea

One section of the above-mentioned Sea trilogy was published as The Old Man and the Sea, in 1952. That short novel's enormous success satisfied and fulfilled Hemingway, probably for the last time in his life. It earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and restored his international reputation.

Then, his legendary bad luck struck once again: On a safari he was in two successive plane crashes.

Hemingway's injuries were serious: He sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg; had a grave concussion; temporarily lost vision in his left eye and hearing in his left ear; had paralysis of the sphincter; a crushed vertebra; ruptured liver, spleen and kidney; and first degree burns on his face, arms, and leg.

As if this were not enough, he was badly injured one month later in a bushfire accident which left him with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The pain left him in prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.

Later years

A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and cholesterol count were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression, aggravated by alcoholism, had probably already started.

He also lost his Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana he had owned for over twenty years, and was forced to "exile" to Ketchum, Idaho, when the situation in Cuba began to escalate.

His very last years, 1960 and 1961, were marked by severe paranoia. He feared FBI agents would be after him if Cuba turned to the Russians, that the "Feds" (Burgess (9.), p. ??) would be checking his bank account, and that they wanted to arrest him for gross immorality and carrying alcohol. (The FBI was in fact surveilling Hemingway due to his activities in Cuba.)

Hemingway was upset by perfectly normal photographs in his Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum for high blood pressure and liver problems — and also electroconvulsive therapy for depression and his continued paranoia.

Death

Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received treatment again, but this was unable to prevent his suicide on July 2, 1961 — at 05:00, he died as a result of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. Incidentally, the shotgun used in Hemingway's suicide was purchased at Abercrombie and Fitch.

Hemingway donated his entire Cuban estate to Fidel Castro.

He is interred in the Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho. The local public elementary school there is named in his honor. In 1996, his granddaughter, actress Margaux Hemingway, would take her own life; she is interred in the same cemetery.

Influence

The influence of Hemingway's writings on American Literature was considerable, and continues to be felt today. His terse prose style is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. Indeed, the influence of Hemingway's style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's style.

J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway.

Hemingway's impact can even be seen in Latin American literature. Gabriel García Márquez, for instance, was influenced by Hemingway (as well as Hemingway's contemporary William Faulkner).

In his own time, Hemingway impacted writers within his modernist literary circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one of the best stories ever written".

Works

Novels

• (1925) The Torrents of Spring
• (1926) The Sun Also Rises
• (1929) A Farewell to Arms
• (1937) To Have and Have Not
• (1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls
• (1950) Across the River and Into the Trees
• (1953) The Old Man and the Sea
• (1970) Islands in the Stream
• (1986) The Garden of Eden
• (1999) True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Nonfiction

• (1932) Death in the Afternoon
• (1935) Green Hills of Africa
• (1964) A Moveable Feast
• (1985) The Dangerous Summer

Short story collections

• (1923) Three Stories and Ten Poems
• (1925) In Our Time
• (1927) Men Without Women
• (1934) Winner Take Nothing
• (1938) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
• (1947) The Essential Hemingway
• (1953) The Hemingway Reader
• (1969) The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War
• (1972) The Nick Adams Stories
• (1987) The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition
• (1995) The Collected Stories (Everyman's Library Classics)

Individual short stories

• (1925) Soldier's Home

In cinema

• (1937) The Spanish Earth
• (1962) Adventures Of A Young Man is based on Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. (also known as Hemingway's Adventures Of A Young Man.)

Awards and honors

During his lifetime, Hemingway was awarded with:

• Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) in World War I
• Bronze Star (War Correspondent-Military Irregular in World War II) in 1947
• Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man and the Sea)
• Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (The Old Man and the Sea cited as a reason for the award)

Bibliography

1. Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms. London: Arrow Books, 1994
2. Hemingway, Ernest (ed. by Carlos Baker), Selected Letters 1917–1961. New York City: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981
3. Hemingway, Ernest, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway The First Forty-Nine Stories and the Play The Fifth Column. New York City: Random House, Inc., 1938
4. Hemingway, Ernest, (ed. and intro. by Malcolm Cowley), The Viking Portable Library Hemingway. New York City: The Viking Press, 1944
5. Hemingway, Ernest, For Whom the Bell Tolls. London: Arrow Books, 1994
6. Baker, Carlos (editor), Ernest Hemingway Critiques of Four Major Novels. New York City: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962
7. Baker, Carlos, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972
8. Berridge, H.R., Barron's Book Notes Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms. Stuttgart: Klett, 1990
9. Burgess, Anthony, Hemingway and his world. Norwich: Thames and Hudson, 1978
10. Döblin, Alfred, Berlin Alexanderplatz. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 1996
11. Esslin, Martin (translated from English by Marianne Falk), Das Theater des Absurden. Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1972
12. Kundera, Milan (translated from Czech by Michael Henry Heim), The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber, 1991
13. Lynn, Kenneth S., Hemingway. New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1987
14. The New Encyclopædia Britannica 15th Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1993
15. Hemingway's Prize-Winning Works Reflected Preoccupation With Life and Death? The New York Times, CX (July 3, 1961)
16. PBS Bio
17. Remembering Papa. Cigar Aficianado. July/August 1999.
18. Harper Collins Bizarre News.
19. Hemingway Biography. Rachel Teague, April 2000, New Hampshire Technical Institute, Concord, New Hampshire.

Miscellany

• Scan of letter from Hemingway's typewriter

External links

• Timeless Hemingway

• Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure Based on a PBS lecture series narrated by Michael Palin.

• The Hemingway Society

• CNN: A Hemingway Retrospective

• Ernest Hemingway One Man Show