Ernest (Miller) Hemingway
(1899-1961)
One of the most famous American novelist, short-story writer and essayist,
whose deceptively simple prose style have influenced wide range of writers.
Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was unable to
attend the award ceremony in Stockholm, because he was recuperating from
injuries sustained in an airplane crash while hunting in Uganda.
"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have
hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else
thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their
interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat
as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue." (from
'On the Blue Water' in Esquire, April 1936)
Ernest Hemingway was born inn Oak Park, Illinois. His mother Grace Hall, whom
he never forgave for dressing him as a little girl in his youth, had an
operatic career before marrying Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway; he taught his
son to love out-door life. Hemingway's father took his own life in 1928 after
losing his healt to diabetes and his money in the Florida real-estate bubble.
Hemingway attended the public schools in Oak Park and published his earliest
stories and poems in his high school newspaper. Upon his graduation in 1917,
Hemingway worked six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. He then
joined a volunteer ambulance unit in Italy during World War I. In 1918 he
suffered a severe leg wound. For his service, Hemingway was twice decorated by
the Italian government.
Hemingway's affair with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, during his
hospital recuperation gave basis for the novel A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929). The
tragic love story was filmed first time in 1932, starring Gary Cooper, Helen
Hayes, and Adolphe Menjou. In the second version from 1957, written by Ben
Hecht and directed by Charles Vidor, Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones were in
the leading roles. Its failure caused David O. Selznick to produce no more
films.
After the war Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. He
moved in 1921 to Paris, where wrote articles for the Toronto Star. "If you are
lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then whenever you go for
the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." (from
A Moveable Feast, 1964) In Europe, the center of modernist movement, Hemingway
associated with such writers as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who
edited some of his texts and acted as his agent. Later Hemingway portrayed
Fitzgerald in A MOVEABLE FEAST (1964), but less sympathetically. Fitzgerald,
however, regretted their lost friendship. Of Gertrude Stein Hemingway wrote to
Maxwell Perkins, his editor: "She lost all sense of taste when she had the
menopause. Was really an extraordinary business. Suddenly she couldn't tell a
good picture from a bad one, a good writer from a bad one, it all went phtt."
(from The Only Thing That Counts, 1996) When he was not writing for the
newspaper or for himself, Hemingway toured with his wife, the former Elisabeth
Hadley Richardson, France, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1922 he went to Greece
and Turkey to report on the war between those countries. In 1923 Hemingway
made two trips to Spain, on the second to see bullfights at Pamplona's annual
festival.
Hemingway's first books, THREE STORIES AND TEN POEMS (1923), of which he
received no advance at all, and IN OUR TIME (1924), were published in Paris.
THE TORRENTS OF SPRING appeared in 1926 and Hemingway's first serious novel,
THE SUN ALSO RISES, on the same year. The story, narrated by an American
journalist, deals with a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of
the disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation. Main characters are Lady
Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes. Lady Brett loves Jake, who has been wounded in
war and can't answer her needs. Although Hemingway never explicitly detailed
Jake's injury, is seem that he has lost his testicles but not his penis. Jake
and Brett and their odd group of friends have various adventures around Europe,
in Madrid, Paris, and Pampalona. In attempt to cope with their despair they
turn to alcohol, violence, and sex. As Jake, Hemingway was wounded in WW I;
they share also interest in bullfighting. The story ends bitter-sweet: "Oh,
Jake, Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."
Hemingway wrote and rewrote the novel in various parts of Spain and France
between 1924 and 1926. It became his first great success. Although the
Hemingway's language is simple, he used understatement and omission which make
the text multilayered and rich in allusions.
After the publication of MEN WITHOUT WOMEN (1927), Hemingway returned to the
United States, settling in Key West, Florida. Hemingway and Hadley divorced in
1927. On the same year Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy fashion
editor. In Florida he wrote A Farewell to Arms, which was published in 1929.
Its scene is the Italian front in World War I, where two lovers find a brief
happiness. The novel gained enormous critical and commercial success.
In 1930s Hemingway wrote such major works as DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (1932), a
nonfiction account of Spanish bullfighting, and THE GREEN HILL OF AFRICA
(1935), a story of a hunting safari in East Africa. "All modern American
literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," is
perhaps the most quoted line from the story. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1937) was
made into a film by the director Howard Hawks. They had became friends in the
late 1930s. Hawks also liked to hunt, fish, and drink, and the author got
along with Hawk's wife Slim, who later said: "There was an immediate and
instant attraction between us, unstated but very, very strong." According to a
story, Hawks had told Hemingway that he can make "a movie out of the worst
thing you ever wrote." The author has asked, "What's the worst thing I ever
wrote?" and Haws said, "That piece of junk called To Have and Have Not." "I
needed the money," Hemingway said. The screenplay of the film was written by
Jules Furthman and William Faulkner.
"And then it just occurred to him that he was going to die. It came with a
rush, not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling
emptiness, and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge
of it." (from 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro')
Wallace Stevens once termed Hemingway "the most significant of living poets,
so far as the subject of extraordinary reality is concerned." By "poet"
Stevens referred to the author's stylistic achievements in his short fiction.
Like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway applied techniques from modernist poetry to his
writing, such as the artful use of repetition, although in lesser extent than
Stein. Hemingway's much quoted "ice-berg theory" was that "If a writer of
prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he
knows and the reader . . . will have a feeling of those things as though the
writer had stated them."
One of Hemingway's most frequently anthologized short stories is 'The Snows of
Kilimanjaro,' first published in Esquire in August 1936. It begins with an
epitaph telling that the western summit of the mountain is called the House of
God, and close to it was found the carcass of a leopard. Down on the savanna
the failed writer Harry is dying of gangrene in an hunting camp. "He had loved
too much, demanded too much, and he wrote it all out." Just before the end,
Harry has a vision, that he is taken up the see the top of Kilimanjaro on a
rescue plane-"great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun." In the film
version of the story, directed by Henry King, Harry does not die. Nick Adams,
Hemingway's autobiographical pre-World War II character, featured in three
collections, In Our Time, Men Without Women, and WINNER TAKE NOTHING (1933).
In 1937 Hemingway observed the Spanish Civil war firsthand. As many writers,
he supported the cause of the Loyalist. In Madrid he met Martha Gellhorn, a
writer and war correspondent, who became his third wife in 1940. The first
years of his marriage were happy, but he soon realized that Gellhorn was not a
housewife, but an ambitious journalist. Gellhorn called Hemingway her "Unwilling
Companion". She was eager to travel and "take the pulse of the nation" or the
world.
With TO WHOM THE BELLS TOLL (1940) Hemingway returned again in Spain. He
dedicated to book to Gellhorn-Maria in the story was partly modelled after
her. "Her hair was the golden brow of a grain field," Hemingway wrote of his
heroine. The story covered only a few days and concerned the blowing up of a
bridge by a small group of partisans. When the heroine in A Farewell to Arms
dies at the end of the story, after giving birth to a stillborn child, now it
is time for the hero, Robert Jordan, to sacricife his life. The theme of the
coming of death also was central in the novel ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE
TREES (1950).
In addition to hunting expeditions in Africa and Wyoming, Hemingway developed
a passion for deep-sea fishing in the waters off Key West, the Bahamas, and
Cuba. He also armed his fishing boat, the Pilar, and monitored with his crew
Nazi activities and their submarines in that area during World War II. In 1940
Hemingway bought Finca Vigia, a house outside Havana, Cuba. Its surroundings
were a paradise for his undisciplined bunch of cats.
In early 1941 Gellhorn made with Hemingway a long, 30,000 mile journey to
China. Just before the Invasion of Normandy in 1944, Hemingway managed to get
to London, where he settled at the Dorchester Hotel. Before it, he had taken
Gellhorn's position as Collier's leading correspondent. She arrived two weeks
later, and settled in a separate room. Hemingway observed the D-Day landing
below the Normandy cliffs; Gellhorn went ashore with the troops. Back in Paris
after many years, Hemingway spent much time at the Ritz Hotel. Hemingways's
divorce from Gellhorn in 1945 was bitter. Later Gellhorn said that having "lived
with a mythomaniac, I know they believe everything they say, they are not
conscious liars, they invent to increase everything about themselves and their
lives and believe it." In 1946 Hemingway returned to Cuba. After Gellhorn had
left him, he married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine, whom he
had met in a London restaurant in 1944.
Hemingway's drinking had started already when he was a reporter, and could
tolerate large amounts of alcohol. For a long time, drinking did not affect
the quality of his writing. In the late 1940s he started to hear voices in his
head, he was overweight, the blood pressure was high, and he had clear signs
of cirrhosis of the liver. His ignorance of the dangers of liquor Hemingway
revealed when he taught his 12-year-old son Patrick to drink. The same
happened with his brothers. Patrick had later in life problems with alcohol.
Gregory, who was a transvestite, used drugs-he died at the age of 69 in a
women's prison in Florida.
Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway's first novel in a decade, was
poorly received, but the allegorical 27,000 word story THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA,
published first in Life magazine in 1952, restored again his fame. The
proragonist is an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago, who finally catches a
giant marlin after weeks of disappointments. As he returns to the harbor, the
sharks eat the fish, lashed to his boat. The model for Santiago was a Cuban
fisherman, Gregorio Fuentes, who died in January 2002, at the age of 104.
Fuentes had served as the captain of Hemingway's boat Pilar in the late 1930s
and was occasionally his tapster. Hemingway also made a fishing trip to Peru
in part to shoot footage for a film version of the Old Man and the Sea.
In 1959 Hemingway visited Spain, where her met the famous bullfighter Luis
Miguel Dominquín at a hospital. Abull had caught Dominquín in the groin. "Why
the hell do the good and brave have to die before everyone else?" he said.
However, Dominquín did not die. Hemingway planned to wrote another book of
bullfighting but published instead A Moveable Feast, a memoir of the 1920s in
Paris.
Much of his time Hemingway spent in Cuba until Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.
He supported Castro but when the living became too difficult, he moved to the
United States. While visiting Africa in 1954, Hemingway was in two flying
accidents and was taken to a hospital. In the same year he started to write
TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT, which was his last full-length book. Part of it appeared
in Sports Illustrated in 1972 under the title African Journal.
In 1960 Hemingway was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,
for treatment of depression, and released in 1961. During this time he was
given electric shock therapy for two months. On July 2 Hemingway committed
suicide with his favorite shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Several of
Hemingway's novels have been published posthumously. True at First Light,
depiction of a safari in Kenya, appeared in July 1999. It is one of the worst
books published by a Nobel writer.
For further reading: Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by C. Baker (1969); My
Brother, Ernest Hemingway by L. Hemingway (1962); Papa: Hemingway in Key West
by J. McLendon (1972, rev. ed. 1990); Hemingway, Life and Works by G.B. Nelson
and G. Jones (1985); Hemingway by Kenneth Lynn (1987); The Hemingway Women by
B. Kert (1983); Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises by F.J. Svoboda (1983); Ernest
Hemingway by K. Ferrell (1984); Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, ed. by
H. Bloom (1987); Ernest Hemingway Rediscovered by N. Fuentes (1988); A Reader's
Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. by P. Smith (1989); Ernest
Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction by J.M. Flora (1989); Ernest Hemingway
by P.L. Hays (1990); Hemingway and Spain by E.F. Stanton (1990); Hemingway's
Art of Nonfiction by R. Weber (1990); Ernest Hemingway by R.B. Lyttle (1992);
Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences by James R. Mellow (1993); Hemingway:
The 1930s by Michael Reynolds (1997); Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and
Fall of a Literary Friendship by Scott Donaldson (1999) - Films (see also
below): Among Hemingway's several film adaptations are also The Macomber
Affair (dir. by Zoltan Korda, 1946), The Breaking Point (dir. by Michael
Curtiz, 1950), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (dir. by Henry King, 1952), Ernest
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (dir. by Martin Ritt, 1962), The Killers
(dir. by Don Siegel, 1964). Ava Gardner played in three Hemingway films: The
Killers, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and The Sun Also Rises. She became friend
of the writer and aficionada of bullfighting. - See also: Sherwood Anderson -
Writers in the Spanish Civil war: Federico Garcia Lorca, George Orwell, André
Malraux, Langston Hughes
Selected bibliography:
* THREE STORIES AND THREE POEMS, 1923
* IN OUR TIME, 1924
* THE SUN ALSO RISES, 1926 (GB title: Fiesta) - suom. Ja aurinko nousee - film
1957, dir. by Henry King
* MEN WITHOUT WOMEN, 1927
* A FAREWELL TO ARMS, 1929 - suom. Jäähyväiset aseille - film 1932, dir. by
Frank Borgaze; film 1957, dir. by Charles Vidor
* DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, 1932 - suom. Kuolema iltapäivällä
* WINNER TAKE NOTHING, 1933
* THE GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA, 1935 - suom. Afrikan vihreät kunnaat
* TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, 1937 - suom. Kirjava satama - film 1944, dir. by
Howard Hawks, co-script William Faulkner
* THE SPANISH WAR, 1938
* THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY, 1938
* FIFTH COLUMN, 1938 - suom. Viides kolonna
* THE SPANISH EARTH, 1938 (film commentary)
* FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, 1940 - suom. Kenelle kellot soivat - film 1943, dir.
by Sam Wood
* THE PORTABLE HMINGWAY, 1942
* THE ESSENTIAL HEMINGWAY, 1947
* ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES, 1950 - suom. Joen yli puiden siimekseen
* THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, 1952 (Pulitzer Prize in 1953) - suom. Vanhus ja
meri - film 1958, dir. by John Sturges - Pulitzer Prize 1953
* THE HEMINGWAY READER, 1953
* COMPLETE STORIES, 1954
* TWO CHRISTMAS TALES, 1958
* THE WILD YEARS, 1962
* THREE NOVELS, 1962
* THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER, 1963
* A MOVEABLE FEAST, 1964 - suom. Nuoruuteni Pariisi
* BY-LINE, 1967 - suom. Täyttä elämää
* THE FIFTH COLUMN AND FOUR STORIES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, 1969
* HEMINGWAY'S AFRICAN STORIES, 1969
* ERNEST HEMINGWAY, CUBA REPORTER: KANSAS CITY STAR STORIES, 1970
* ISLANDS IN THE STREAM, 1970 - suom. Saaret ja virta - film 1976, dir. by
Franklin J. Schaffner
* ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S APPRENTICESHIP: OAK PARK, 1916-1917, 1971
* THE NICK ADAMS STORIES, 1972 - suom. Nick Adamsin tarina
* THE ENDURING HEMINGWAY, 1974
* 88 POEMS, 1979
* SELECTED LETTERS, 1917-1961, 1981
* THE DANGEROUS SUMMER, 1983 - suom. Vaarallinen kesä
* ERNEST HEMINGWAY ON WRITING, 1984
* DATELINE: TORONTO, 1985
* THE GARDEN OF EDEN, 1986 - suom. Käärme paratiisissa
* THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY, 1987
* THE ONLY THING THAT COUNTS: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins
Correspondence, 1996 (edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli)
* TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT, 1999 (edited with an introduction by Patrick Hemingway)
* UNDER KILIMANJARO, 2005