Ernest Hemingway
From Philosopedia
Hemingway, Ernest Miller (21 July 1899 - 2 July 1961)
A major mid-20th century novelist and short story writer, Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the first son and the second of six children born to Dr. Clarence Edmonds ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hall Hemingway. His father not only delivered his son but also went out on his front porch and blew a horn to announce the event.
His mother was domineering and religious, and he preferred hunting and fishing with his father to his mother's love of music and Oak Park, which he described as having wide lawns and narrow minds. He did not attend college, working instead as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917, a time when he learned to use short sentences and started a distinctive style of writing that emphasized understatement and an economy of words.
During World I, he joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps and served in France and Italy. He was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers at the Austro-Italian Front, ending his service as an ambulance driver. He transferred to the Italian infantry and was decorated for heroism, after which he reported battles in the Near East for the Toronto Star.
For many, Hemingway was known for skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting. Death in the Afternoon describes bullfighting more as a spectacle, a tragic ceremony, rather than a sport. Green Hills of Africa (1935) was based upon a safari he made, and To Have and Have Not (1937) described his growing concern with social problems.
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The Wives
In 1921 in Chicago he married Hadley Richardson, 8 years his senior, the guest list including writer Sherwood Anderson. She did not scold him for drinking, and she liked "the way Ernest made cigarette smoke pour from his nostrils." When they settled in Paris so he could cover the Greco-Turkish war, he met Gertrude Stein and joined the American expatriate circle which became known as the Lost Generation. They had one son, John (called Bumby). Of Stein, Hemingway wrote in a letter to writer Sherwood Anderson, "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers."
In 1927 he married a devout Catholic, Iowa-born Pauline Pfeiffer, and converted to Catholicism. She was a journalist who worked in Ohio at the Cleveland Press and in New York at the Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Given a chance to assist the Paris editor of Vogue, she forgot about marrying Matthew Herold, a distant cousin, and moved to Paris where she met Ernest and his wife, Hadley. When Hadley recognized that Ernest was preferring Pauline to her, she agreed to a divorce if first they would spend 100 days apart and if, at the end of that time, they were still in love she would agree to a divorce. Then she cancelled, and Ernest and Pauline married shortly after the divorce became final, Ernest agreeing to converting in order not to lose his new love. They divorced in 1940, having had son Patrick in 1929 and son Gregory (Gigi) in 1931. Pfeiffer died in 1951 of a brain hemorrhage while visiting her sister in Hollywood - she is buried in an unmarked grave in the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.
In 1940, he married novelist Martha Gellhorn, who became one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. They divorced in 1945. She lived to be 89, ill and nearly blind, and in 1998 ended her life by taking a poison pill.
In 1948, he married Minnesota-born Mary Welsh, who worked for the Chicago Daily News and in London for the Daily Express. Although she married when 32 to a drama student from Ohio and then to an Australian journalist whom she divorced, she and Hemingway married in Cuba. She miscarried their unborn child due to ectopic pregnancy, but she remained with Hemingway for the rest of his life. In 1976 she wrote her autobiography.
The Books
His memories of Paris, 1921 - 1926, were posthumously published in A Moveable Feast (1964).
He was influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude Stein, because of her style of writing, shown in his Three Stories & Ten Poems (Paris, 1923) and In Our Time (1925).
His For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) argues for human brotherhood. Readers empathized with his writing about courage, the fear of death, and the need to cultivate a stoicism which could help one handle ever-present despair. Its plot implies that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere,
As the leading spokesman for the "lost generation," he told the feelings of war-wounded people who had become disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, people who had little choice but to stoically accept primal emotions. Many of his characters depicted strong men and women who had developed an exhausted cynicism and were forced with their courage and honesty to confront the brutality of civilized society. Hemingway's use of spare dialogue down-played emotion and recorded bare happenings, allowing the reader to evaluate what was being described.
The Sun Also Rises (1926, tells of the moral collapse of some expatriated Americans and some Englishmen who had to face up to what life had become for them.
Farewell to Arms (1929), which is about an English nurse and an American ambulance lieutenant during the war, draws upon his own experiences. The story ends with the lieutenant's deserting, fleeing to Switzerland for the birth of their child, and both mother and child dying, leaving him desolate, alone, in a country whose customs were unfamiliar.
His several works with short stories were reviewed favorably, and he greatly influenced writers of the period.
When Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) resulted in a front-page New York Times Book Review article by John O’Hara, author of Guys and Dolls, with a hyperbole to the effect that Hemingway was the greatest author in the English language since Shakespeare, intellectuals smiled, knowing perhaps secondarily that “Papa” was a poor speller. More disinterested critics considered that the book showed Hemingway was bitter and defeatist, like the aging colonel who was the tale's protagonist.
When his Old Man and the Sea (1952) followed and Papa Hemingway was asked by restaurateur Toots Shor how on earth he got a Nobel Prize (1954) for a simple fish story like that, Hemingway skipped any explanations of symbolism or levels of meaning. He simply explained that the old Cuban was really himself, the “fish” was really Across the River and Into the Trees, the sharks were the critics who had turned his work into shreds, and the faithful little boy was John O’Hara.
The Activities
A war correspondent during World War II, he took part in the D-Day landings (1944). After the Spanish Civil War, he lived in Cuba, staying there until the 1960 revolution, when he was forced to leave the fighting cocks he had been breeding and needed to return to his old home at Ketchum, Idaho.
The Humanist or Catholic?
Hemingway wrote in an essentially Humanist fashion without reliance on God or the supernatural, Corliss Lamont noted in the mid-1950s at a time when Catholics claimed he had converted in 1927 and was a believer.
Paul Johnson, a Roman Catholic historian, journalist, and author who wrote for New Statesman, is on record as objecting to those evolutionists who justify their atheism or use it to promote risky biotechnological experimentation. He has been critical of Richard Dawkins, for example, and regards liberation theology as a heresy, defends clerical celibacy, but guesses that women priests eventually will be allowed. In his Intellectuals (1988), he describes Hemingway (page 144) as having been raised as a strict Congregationalist.
But, Johnson concludes that Hemingway not only did not believe in God but regarded organized religion as a menace to human happiness, that he seems to have been devoid of the religious spirit," and that he "ceased to practise religion at the earliest possible moment."
In A Farewell to Arms, the fictional Frederic Henry is in the mess hall when some of the officers begin teasing the priest. The major announces he is an atheist, and the priest tells Henry not to read a certain book. The major says then that “all thinking men are atheists,” illustrating the novel’s interpretation of God and religion, and the larger view of the world in general. Implied is Hemingway's view that not only is there no God but also that the universe is indifferent.
The Final Years
During the 1940s, he was incontestably one of the best-regarded novelists in the nation, but following his death he has been criticized negatively for his glorifying the killing of animals, his difficulty in relating to women as well as his condescending depiction of them, and his use of toughness to conceal his own limitations.
Although treated at the Mayo Clinic for mental illness, Hemingway apparently decided during a state of acute depression to kill himself, for which there were precedents in his family, rather than to seek help from physicians. His brother, sister, and father had taken their own lives, and in 1996 his granddaughter actress Margaux Hemingway died from taking an overdose of a sedative.
He had been in two successive plane crashes in which he had a grave concussion and temporarily lost vision in his left eye and hearing in his left ear; he was injured in a bushfire that left him with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand, and right forearm (and in such pain he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize; his severe drinking problems led to hi blood pressure and cholesterol count; he reportedly had severe paranoia, fearing FBI agents would look for him if Cuba turned to the Russians; he had liver problems; he had electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression. And he attempted suicide in the spring of 1961.
After attending a dinner at a restaurant in Ketchum on the morning of 2 July 1961, the 60-year-old took out his shotgun, pointed it at his head, and blasted himself to death.
The Catholic Funeral for An Atheistic Humanist
His funeral was a scaled-down Catholic service chosen not by him but by family and friends who were saddened by his willingly having taken his life. It was scaled down because of his many marriages as well as recognition that he had not at all been a believer, that he had converted because of his second wife's insistence.
The body was taken to a funeral home in nearby Hailey, and the local priest (Father Robert J. Waldmann) conducted a brief graveside committal service at the Ketchum Cemetery that was attended by a small group of Hemingway's immediately family and about fifty invited friends.
Others buried in the Ketchum Cemetery are John Hadley Nicanor "Jack" Hemingway, Ernest's son who is the father of actor Mariel Hemingway, actor-model Margaux (a suicide, who died in 1996 of an overdose of Phenobarbital); Margaux Louise Hemingway, John's daughter; Mary Welsh Hemingway, the fourth and last of Ernest's wives; and Ann Sothern, who was born as Harriet Lake in Valley City, North Dakota, and had a career that spanned six decades and included 64 movies and 175 TV episodes - she received an Oscar nomination in 1988 for best supporting actress in The Whales of August; she did of heart failure.
His Impact
After his death, stories were told of his having struck his wives, of his having beaten the poet Wallace Stevens, a much smaller man, over some minor literary problem, and of his having been a "despoiler of wildlife."
A 1954 unfinished work, edited by his 70-year-old middle son, Patrick, was published in 1998. Entitled True at First Light, it implies Papa Hemingway may have had a mysterious tribal bride or two. One, a Kenyan called Debba from the Wakamba tribe, was “very beautiful and quite young and more than perfectly developed.” Whether she was actual or fictional is debatable, for Hemingway’s mischievous streak and love of practical jokes included a boast that he had made love to the spy Mata Hari. That, however, was impossible because she had been executed by the French the year before he arrived in Italy in 1918.
Hemingway’s estate was worth over $5.8 million in 1990 dollars. He died owing the government about $50,000. His remains were buried at Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho. The gravestone is a large flat slab with name and vital dates only.
(For allusions to his sexual proclivities, see entry for F. Scott Fitzgerald. John Lahr, in “My Mother the Ziegfeld Girl” (The New Yorker, 13 May 1996), describes how Hemingway once made a pass at his mother. Ann Douglas, in Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995) called Hemingway’s mother “smothering,” saying when he refused to apologize for leaving the house after midnight for a picnic, Grace Hemingway banished him from the household, promising that “when you have changed your ideas and aims in life, you will find your mother waiting to welcome you, whether it be in this world or the next.” The Masses editor, Max Eastman, accused Hemingway of not being the macho man he pretended to be, citing "the swing of his big shoulders," "the clothes he wears," and the "sense of the obligation to put forth evidence of red-blooded masculinity." Also, see Hemingway’s Genders (1994) by Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes, who go deeply into the subject of homosexuality.)
