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. 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
Ernest Hemingway's Baby Picture, ca. 1900Hemingway 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] (http://www.pbs.org/hemingwayadventure/michigan.html) to six years[2] (http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Profiles/People_Profile/0,2540,15,00.html) to even his teens[3] (http://www.harpercollins.com.au/drstephenjuan/0208news.htm). 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] (http://www.nhti.net/library/authorresources/hemingwaybio.htm) 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 facade of a church at the Place de la Madelaine 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.
Hemingway later transferred to the Italian infantry, and was seriously injured.
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, Ontario, Canada 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 his own stories to him and Hemingway praised it as fine work. (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 Toronto Star covering the Greco-Turkish War. After the 1922 publication and American banning 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, he became bored with the Toronto Star, and on January 1, 1924, Hemingway resigned.
The Hemingways decided to live abroad for a while, and, following the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris. Anderson gave Hemingway a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced Hemingway to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in Montparnasse Quarter. Hemingway's other mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of imagism. He was so impressed with Pound that he considered giving him the Nobel Prize gold medal. Hemingway 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
restaurant 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.
Hemingway in Key West
Ernest Hemingway's writing desk in his Key West home.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 Sloppy Joe's, Havana's famous bar, and traveled to Spain occasionally, gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.
A collection of pieces mostly about bullfighting, Death In The Afternoon, was published in 1932. He became an aficionado of bullfighting after having seen the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, which was 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 about Spain he was greatly influenced by the Spanish master Pio Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he travelled to Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him that he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he did) although the extent of Baroja's influence is not fully appreciated in the English speaking world.
A safari led him to Mombasa in fall 1932, Nairobi and Machakos in the Mua Hills. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the literary results.
1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, another nonfiction work, this one based on Hemingway's big game hunting and safaris in Africa
But his good fortune in business, art and marriage was overshadowed by serious attacks on his 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, laceration of arms, legs and face from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a car accident resulting in a broken arm.)
Later Years
A glimpse 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 in San Francisco de Paula and was forced to "exile" to Ketchum, Idaho after the situation in Cuba had started to escalate.
The 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 5:00 AM, he
died as a result of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
Always do sober what you said
you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
For a war to be just three
conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
The 1st panacea of a mismanaged
nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary
prosperity; a permanent ruin.
For a true writer each book
should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond
attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that
others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
Ernest Hemingway, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
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