ABASTRACT Hemingway was one of the most recognized figures in

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ABASTRACT
Hemingway was one of the most recognized figures
in the American culture both as a writer and as a public
figure.
He started his career as a reporter for the Kansas
City Star. During his career as a writer he wrote fiction
and poetry, always basing his writing on his
experiences. He met important writers on his trips. He
won the Nobel Prize with his novel The Old Man and
the Sea in 1953.
He participated in World War I as an ambulance
driver volunteer for the American Red Cross in Italy. In
World War II he created the Crook Factory for a spy
network and got information about Nazi sympathizers.
About his personal life, he married four times,
having three sons, but he had a lot of affairs. He loved
outdoor life: fishing, hunting, bullfighting, etc. His final
years were full of illnesses both physical and emotional.
Finally, he killed himself in July of 1961.
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INDEX
INTRODUCTION………….….…………………………………………..………………..7
CHAPTER I
BRIEF NOTES ABOUT HEMINGWAY´S BIOGRAPHY…………….………..…………...14
1.1 Chronological Facts ………………….…………………………………..….............27
1.2 General Vision of Ernest Hemingway………………………………………….........30
1.3 Hemingway as an Ambulance Driver………………………………………………..35
1.4 His Life as a Writer…………………………………………………………………..43
1.5 His Suicide………………………………………………………………………..….61
CHAPTER II
HIS INVOLVEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF HIS TIMES
2.1 World War I…………………………………………………………………………..68
2.2 World War II……………………………………………………………………...…74
2.3 The Cuban Revolution………………………………………………………………..82
CHAPTER III
HIS PERSONAL LIFE
3.1 Hemingway in Key West 1928-1929 .........................................................................96
3.2 Hemingway in Paris ..................................................................................................102
3.3 Hemingway as a Soldier............................................................................................108
3.4 Hemingway in Cuba..................................................................................................115
3.5 Hemingway’s marriages............................................................................................126
3.5.1 Hemingway´s First Marriage to Hadley Richardson 1921-1927 ...........................126
3.5.2 Hemingway’s 12 year Marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer 1927-1939……...……….....133
3.5.3 Hemingway's Marriage to Martha Gellhorn 1939-1944. .......................................143
3.5.4 Hemingway's Marriage to Mary Welsh.1945-1961 ...............................................149
CHAPTER IV
INFLUENCE OF THE TIME ON HIS WORKS
4.1 Hemingway’s Journeys to War ....................................................................................156
4.2 Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway ...............................................................................167
4.3 Perkins' death and the decline of Hemingway..............................................................171
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CHAPTER V
ANALYSIS OF ONE OF HIS NOVELS A FAREWELL TO ARMS
.
5.1 General Introduction .................................................................................................178
5.2 List of Characters......................................................................................................182
5.3 Analysis Book One ...................................................................................................185
5.4 Analysis Book Two...................................................................................................207
5.5 Analysis Book Three.................................................................................................221
5.6 Analysis Book Four ............................................................................................…..230
5.7 Analysis Book Five...................................................................................................233
5.8 General Interpretation………………………………………………………....…….240
5.9 The Hemingway code hero ………………………………………..………………..245
5.10
Character
Studies………………………………………………….252
5.11 Style….….…………………………………………………………………..………263
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................................................269
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................274
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Facultad de Filosofía Letras y
Ciencias de La Educación
Escuela de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa
“ERNEST HEMINGWAY IN HIS TIME”
Tesis previa a la obtención del Título de
Licenciatura en Ciencias de la Educación,
Especialidad Lengua y Literatura Inglesa.
Autoras: Tania Marisol Contreras Cabrera
Fanny Leonor Faicán Pauta
Director: Dr. Gorky Abad Granda
Asesora: Lcda. Katherine Youman
Cuenca, Ecuador
2006
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DEDICATIONS.
FANNY.
My thesis is dedicated to my family who guided
and supported me everyday in my career at the university,
especially my brother, Fede, who did everything possible to
make my dream come true.
TANIA.
The present work is dedicated to my husband who
always stood by me during my University studies. To him
go all my love and gratitude. I also want to thanks to my
parents who have never deserted me and who have always
been with me; and my children, who incentivated me to
culminate this work as soon as possible.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.
In presenting this thesis we want to express our
sincere thankfulness to
our Holy Father who sustained us and who lighted our way
during the years
we spent at the University; to all the professors who gave
their wise counsel
and imparted their knowledge to us; especially our
Director, Dr. Gorky Abad
Granda and our Adviser, Lcda. Katherine Youman, who
have done their best to help us.
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ERNEST HEMINGWAY IN HIS TIME
INTRODUCTION
We have chosen this writer because as far as we know no
figure in the American Literature in the twentieth century has
dominated this field both as a writer as well as a public figure
as Ernest Hemingway did.
Less than six months after
Hemingway was born the twentieth century began. At the
height of his career, Hemingway took on a larger-than-life
persona that transformed him into one of the most recognized
figures in American culture, even to those who were not
familiar with or used to his writing. It has been almost 45
years after Hemingway’s death in 1961, and he still remains
as one of the most widely read and best known American
writers of this century.
Hemingway’s success was due to the fact that because he
was very dedicated to learning the art of writing, he started to
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become very famous in the 1920’s. He started his career as a
journalist, serving at the beginning as a reporter with the
Kansas City Star in 1917 and then as a future writer and
foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Hemingway’s
work for the Toronto Star enabled him to move to Paris,
France, in 1921, and it was there that he started a close
friendship with and got support from the American
expatriates such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Being a
journalist was his main source of income; he also wrote
fiction and poetry, and began to see his work published in
important magazines at the time, such as Poetry, The Little
Review, and the Transatlantic Review, Der Querschnitt,
Transition and other magazines and anthologies which
featured the work of the emerging modernist authors.
Hemingway’s literary success was accompanied by his
growing status as a well known public figure; many of the
activities he was involved in also contributed to this aspect:
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his effort as a writer, his hunting in Africa and deep sea
fishing in the Caribbean, and maybe most importantly was
his being a Loyalist supporter during the Spanish Civil War.
He lived for many years in the American West, crewed on a
yacht in the Caribbean, spent two summers in East Africa,
traveled extensively in France and Italy, and saw scores of
bullfighting. While working for four years as a professional
writer in Spain, he wrote Death in the Afternoon (1932), The
Sun Also Rises (1926), and Fiesta .
Hemingway’s notoriety, in fact, contributed to a decline
in his reputation among critics during the 1940’s and it was
not until the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, when
he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and his award of the
Nobel Prize the following year, that Hemingway’s literary
stature was restored. Hemingway’s final years before his
death were a chain of recurrent illnesses, both physical and
emotional; he finally died by his own hand in July 1961.
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Before he died, he finished writing an autobiography of his
early years in Paris, and the book, which was published under
the title A Moveable Feast in 1964, serves as a fitting
conclusion to the career of this great American author.
Some educational centers have collected his pieces of
work, writing, editions, etc. There are also many unpublished
papers that can be read and seen at Harvard University,
Amherst Public Library, Indiana University, Knox College
Library, Library of Congress, and Washington University
Library, among others.
Delaware Library houses one of the largest and most
comprehensive collections devoted to the writing of Ernest
Hemingway. The collection includes a complete selection of
the first editions of Hemingway’s books; an exhaustive
collection of subsequent editions, translations, contributions
to books and anthologies, and periodical appearance
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ephemera and associated materials; and an important
collection of Hemingway’s manuscripts and correspondence.
The cornerstone of the University of Delaware Library’s
Hemingway holdings is the collection of books and papers
that were put together by Captain Louis Henry Cohn and his
wife Marguerite Cohn. Captain Cohn, who was Hemingway’s
first biographer and his wife Marguerite, founded the New
York bookstore House of Books in 1930, which specialized
in the sale of first editions by contemporary authors. As one
of Hemingway’s first major collectors, Cohn dedicated
himself
to
bibliographer.
becoming
the
American
author’s
initial
A Bibliography of the Works of Ernest
Hemingway was published in 1931 and during the course of
his research, Cohn and his wife Marguerite put together one
of the great private collections devoted to the work of
Hemingway.
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The Cohn collection contains copies of all Hemingway’s
published writings, including first editions, variants and
subsequent editions, translations, and contributions to
anthologies and periodicals. The collection has an incredible
amount
of
correspondence,
including
letters
from
Hemingway to Louis Henry Cohn and others, and Cohn’s
correspondence with Hemingway’s editors, publishers and
friends related to his bibliographic efforts.
Collection
also
includes
several
of
The Cohn
Hemingway’s
manuscripts, as an extensive group of galleys and other proof
materials of writings about Hemingway.
The Cohn
Collection also has a lot of materials related with
Hemingway, all of which are present in their collection.
This Collection serves as a major resource for study and
research on Ernest Hemingway.
The University of Delaware Library also includes a
small, but significant collection of Hemingway’s literary
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manuscripts. The core of this Collection is a group of the
author’s typescripts for some of his best-known works,
including short stories such as: “A Clean Well –lighted
Place” and “The Happy Ending”, which was published as
“The Snows of the Kilimanjaro”; an eighty-four page section
of the manuscript of Hemingway’s account of big game
hunting. The Green Hills of Africa; and an untitled play that
was eventually published under the title The Fifth Column.
The collection serves as an important resource for the study
of
Hemingway’s
compositional
process.
Ernest
Hemingway’s works serve as an introduction to an important
scholarly resource for research and study of one of the most
important literary figures of the twentieth century.
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CHAPTER I
BRIEF NOTES ABOUT HEMINGWAY´S
BIOGRAPHY.
Ernest Miller Hemingway first saw life at 8:00 a.m. on
the 21st of July, 1899 in suburban Oak Park, Illinois to Dr.
Clarence and Grace Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway was the
second of six children to be raised in the quiet suburban town
by his physician father and devout, musical mother. Indeed,
Ernest Hemingway's childhood pursuits fostered the interests
which would blossom into literary material. The elder son of
an eldest son, he represented the third generation of his
family to reside in Oak Park, Illinois, an enclave of
puritanical respectability forming part of the western suburbs
in Chicago.
“The name Ernest came from his maternal grandfather
and Miller from a great-grandfather. The eponymous Ernest
had run away from farm life in the wake of his family’s
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migration to Iowa from England. Following distinguished
service in the Civil War, Ernest Hall went on to make a
fortune in the wholesale cutlery business.
His wife died
when their only daughter Grace was twenty-three and their
son Leicester still in teens”1
A passionately young woman, Grace studied singing in
New York and even attempted an operatic career as a
contralto, making her debut at Madison Square Garden in
l895. However, poor health, traceable to a childhood bout of
scarlet fever, took her back to Illinois, where in October
1896, she married Clarence Edmond (Ed) Hemingway, the
studious young doctor across the street. After the wedding,
the couple resided with Grace’s widowed father, in a big
house at 439 North Oak Park Avenue.
1
HOTCHNER, A.E. Hemingway and His World, Rizzoli International Publications, N.Y, 1989,
page 14.
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Grace hoped her son would be influenced by her musical
interests, mainly teaching music, directing a church choir and
staging family chamber concerts with a reluctant Ernest
recruited for the cello.
Young Ernest Hemingway preferred accompanying his
father on hunting and fishing trips; this love of outdoor
adventure would later be reflected in many of Ernest
Hemingway's stories, particularly those featuring protagonist
Nick Adams like “Indian camp” and “Big Two-Hearted
River”.
Hemingway’s parents severely punished their children.
Grace hit the children with a hairbrush while the Doctor with
a razor-strop did the same, too. They were very Christians
and insisted that their children might be like them but
Hemingway when he was 17 years old refused totally his
religion. However, he used to say to his mother that he
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prayed every night and that he believed in God, too. He was
only twice on his knees at his wedding with Hadley and at the
christening of their son.
Young Hemingway learned from his father the craft of
fishing, as well as bait casting, hunting, and love of unspoiled
nature.
Perhaps it was generous feeling for and
understanding of life in the wild that prompted a confident
three –year- old Ernest Hemingway to proclaim himself
“afraid of nothing.”
As a boy, Hemingway enjoyed a special relationship with
his father, the two of them becoming intimate co-adventurers
dedicated to exploring the outdoor life that still abounded on
every side. But, on the other hand, Hemingway always had
quarrels with his mother because he used to see her as a chief,
and they didn’t have a good relationship between them. But
one of the good habits that he inherited from his mother was
carrying books with him, so that he could read them at any
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time or place during his free time. As he had read a lot he
never lamented to have missed a university education.
In the late 1920’s Dr. Hemingway suffered a series of
devastating humiliations, losing his health to diabetes and his
money in the Florida real state bubble. Dr. Hemingway took
his father’s 32 revolver and shot himself behind the right ear
on December 6, 1928.
“Ernest graduated in 1917, in Oak Park High School; he
was considered the Class Prophet. Ernest also excelled in
algebra, science, and Latin. It was in High School that Ernest
gave himself the nickname of Hemingstein.”2
Ernest Hemingway's aptitude for physical defiance
remained with him through high school, where he both
played football and boxed. He tried his best in sports, but he
2
MEYERS, Jeffrey. Hemingway A Biography. Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1817,
page 18.
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lacked coordination.
He went in for swimming, cross
country, and football teams with the worst results.
Besides sports, Hemingway debated in the Burkle Club,
shot for the Boy’s Rifle Club, and played a cello in the high
school orchestra. Hemingway decided not to go to college,
but rather to become a newspaper reporter. He wanted to be
a reporter for the Kansas City Star.
In October 1917, when Hemingway left Oak Park and
boarded the train for Kansas City, he entered upon what
would become a life of insatiable wanderlust. It started with
an offer of a job, on a trial basis at $15 a week, as a reporter
of the Kansas City Star. Luckily, it was one of the best
newspapers in the nation.
Because of permanent eye damage contracted from
numerous
boxing
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Ernest
Hemingway
was
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repeatedly rejected from service in World War I. Boxing
provided more material for Hemingway's stories, as well as a
habit of likening his literary feats to boxing victories.
Ernest Hemingway also edited his high school newspaper
and reported for “The Kansas City Star”, after adding a year
to his age, after graduating from high school in 1917. After
this short stint, Hemingway finally was able to participate in
World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red
Cross. He was wounded on July 8, 1918, on the Italian front
near Fossalta di Piave; during his convalescence in Milan he
had a romance with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky.
Hemingway was given two decorations by the Italian
government, and joined the Italian infantry. Fighting on the
Italian front inspired his novel A Farewell to Arms in 1929.
Indeed, war itself is a major theme in Hemingway's works.
Hemingway would witness first hand the cruelty and stoicism
required of soldiers he portrayed in his writing when covering
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the Greco-Turkish War in 1920 for the Toronto Star. In 1937
he was a war correspondent in Spain; the events of the
Spanish Civil War inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
Upon returning to the United States after World War I, as
well as working for the Toronto Star, Hemingway lived for a
short time in Chicago. There, he met Sherwood Anderson and
married Hadley Richardson in 1921. On Andersen's advice,
the couple moved to Paris, where he served as foreign
correspondent for “The Toronto Star”. As Hemingway
covered events on all of Europe, the young reporter
interviewed important leaders such as Lloyd George,
Clemenceau, and Mussolini.
Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson
lived in Paris from 1921 to 1926; this time of stylistic
development for Hemingway reaches its zenith in 1923 with
the publication of Three Stories and Ten Poems by Robert
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McAlmon in Paris and the birth of Hemingway’s son, John.
This time in Paris inspired the novel A Moveable Feast,
published in 1964.
In Paris, Ernest Hemingway used Sherwood Anderson's
letter of introduction to meet Gertrude Stein and enter the
world of ex-patriot authors and artists who inhabited her
intellectual circle. The famous description of this "Lost
Generation" was born of an employee's remark to
Hemingway, and became immortalized as the epigraph on his
first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
The "Lost Generation" both characterized the postwar
generation and the literary movement it produced. In the
1920's, writers such as Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein
decried the false ideals of patriotism that led young people to
war, only to the benefit of materialistic elders. These writers
sustained that the only truth was reality, and thus life could
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be nothing but hardship, and they strongly influenced Ernest
Hemingway.
The late 1920's were a time of much publication for
Ernest Hemingway. In 1926, The Torrents of Spring and The
Sun Also Rises were published by Charles Scribner's Sons.
In 1927 Ernest Hemingway published a short story
collection, Men without Women. So too, in that year he
divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a
writer for Vogue. In 1928 they moved to Key West, where
sons Patrick and Gregory were born, in 1929 and 1932. 1928
was a year of both success and sorrow for Hemingway; in
this year, A Farewell to Arms was published and his father
committed suicide. Clarence Edmond Hemingway had been
suffering from hypertension and diabetes. This painful
experience is reflected in the reflection of Robert Jordan in
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
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“In addition to personal experiences with war and death,
Ernest Hemingway’s extensive travel in pursuit of hunting
and other sports provided ample material for his novels.
Bullfighting inspired Death in the Afternoon, published in
1932. In 1934, Ernest Hemingway went on safari in Africa,
which gave him new themes and scenes on which to base The
Snows of Kilamanjaro and The Green Hills of Africa,
published in 1935. As before mentioned, he traveled to Spain
as a war correspondent in 1937, the same year that To Have
and Have Not was published. After his divorce from his
second wife Pauline Pfeiffer in 1940, Hemingway married his
third wife Martha Gellhorn, a writer; the couple toured China
before settling in Cuba at Finca Vigia, or Look-Out Farm.
For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940”3.
During World War II Ernest Hemingway volunteered his
fishing boat and served with the U.S. Navy as a submarine
3
HEMINGWAY. M., Madelaine. Ernie: Hemingway’s Sister “Sunny” Remembers, Crown
Publishers, Inc., New York, 1975, page 108.
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spotter in the Caribbean. In 1944, he traveled through Europe
with the Allies as a war correspondent and participated in the
liberation of Paris. Hemingway divorced again in 1945, and
married his fourth wife Mary Welsh, a correspondent for
“Time” magazine, in 1946. They lived in Venice before
returning to Cuba.
In 1950 Across the River and into the Trees was
published; it was not received with the usual critical acclaim.
In 1952, however, Ernest Hemingway proved the comment
"Papa is finished" wrong, as The Old Man and the Sea won
the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize
for Literature.
“In 1960, the now aged Ernest Hemingway moved to
Ketchum, Idaho, where he was hospitalized for uncontrolled
high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes, and depression.
On July 2, 1961, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds and
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was buried in Ketchum. "Papa" was both a legendary
celebrity and a sensitive writer, and his influence, as well as
unseen writings, survived his passing. In 1964 A Moveable
Feast was published; in 1969, The Fifth Column and Four
Stories of the Spanish Civil War; in 1970, Islands in the
Stream was published; in 1972, The Nick Adams Stories; in
1985, The Dangerous Summer; and in 1986 The Garden of
Eden was published”.4
“Ernest Hemingway's own life and character are indeed
as fascinating as any in his stories. On one level, Papa was a
legendary adventurer who enjoyed his flamboyant lifestyle
and celebrity status. But he lived as a disciplined author who
worked tirelessly in pursuit of literary perfection. His success
in both living and writing is reflected in the fact that Ernest
Hemingway is a hero to both intellectuals and rebels alike;
4
BRIAN, Dennis. The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him.
Grove Press, New York, First Edition, 1988, page 310.
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the passions of the man are only equaled by that of his
writing”.5
1.1 Chronological Facts.
• Born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois.
• Graduates Oak Park High School, 1917.
• Cub Reporter, Kansas City Star, 1917- 1918.
• An Ambulance driver, Red Cross Ambulance
Corps, Italy April,
1918.
• Returns to Oak Park, January, 1919.
• Hired as a reporter by the Toronto Star Weekly,
1920.
• Marries Hadley Richardson, September, 1921.
• Departs with Hadley for Paris, November, 1921,
as a correspondent for the Toronto Star.
• Hadley bears him a son, John, October, 1923:
also, his first book is published, Three Stories and
Ten Poems.
5
HEMINGWAY, Gregory. Papa: A Personal Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1976, page 24.
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• A collection of short stories, In Our Time,
published in 1925.
• The Sun Also Rises, a novel in 1926.
• Divorces Hadley, March, 1927.
• Marries Pauline Pfeiffer, May, 1927.
• Men without Women, short stories, 1927.
• Son Patrick born June, 1928. In November,
Hemingway’s father commits suicide with a gun.
• Buys a house, settles down in Key West,
November, 1928.
• A Farewell to Arms, a novel, 1929.
• Son Gregory, born November, 1931.
• Death in the Afternoon, nonfiction, 1932.
• Winner Take Nothing, short stories, 1933.
• Green Hills of Africa, nonfiction, 1935.
• To Have and Have Not, a novel, 1937.
• Covers Spanish Civil War for North American
Newspaper Alliance, 1937-1938.
• The Fifth Column, produced on Broadway, 1939.
• For Whom the Bells Tolls, a novel, 1940.
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• Divorces Pauline, November 4, 1940.
• Marries Martha Gellhorn, November 21, 1940; in
December, buys Finca Vigia and moves to Cuba.
• Goes to China with Martha, as foreign
correspondent, 1941.
• Divorces Martha, December 21, 1945.
• Marries Mary Welsh, March 14, 1946.
• Across the River and into the Trees, a novel, 1950.
• The Old Man and the Sea, a novel, 1952.
• Pulitzer Prize for the Old Man and the Sea, 1953.
• Survives two plane crashes in Africa, January
1954.
• Nobel Prize for Literature, October, 1954.
• Buys a house in Ketchum, Idaho, March, 1959.
• Hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic for psychiatric
treatment, November, 1960.
• Discharged by Mayo Clinic, January, 1961;
returns to Ketchum, Idaho.
• In April 1961, attempts suicide and is resent to
Mayo Clinic.
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• Commits suicide with a shotgun, July 2, 1961, at
his home in Ketchum.
• A Moveable Feast, reminiscences of Paris,
published posthumously, 1964.
1.2 General Vision of Ernest Hemingway.
There is perhaps no writer in living memory who lends
himself so well to an illustrated biography as Ernest
Hemingway. Not only did he absorb the ideas of the most
advanced writers of his time and use them to reinvent the
American novel in the way that he did and which now is
classic; he also lived, or extensively traveled, and worked in
some of the world’s most evocative places such as Spain,
Key West, East Africa, China, Cuba and Venice.
His circle of friends was correspondingly broad: “Papa”
Hemingway could claim as intimates Ezra Pound, James
Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred
Vanderbilt and Bro von Blixen, Marlene Dietrich and Gary
Cooper, the matadors Dominguín and Antonio Ordonez. His
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group of friends also embraced countless uncommon
common folk – the waiters at the Closerie de Lilas in Paris,
the bear-trackers of Idaho, the fishermen hanging out at
Sloppy Joe in Key West.
Our work also contains information related to Ernest
Hemingway’s friends and intimates, wives, colleagues, critics
and companions of the road, gun and glass all assemble here
to paint a lively, revealing, and very personal picture of
Hemingway caught in the act of living his life, one of the
most enigmatic of the twentieth century.
To the witnesses to that life, many of whom have died
since Denis Brian interviewed him, Hemingway was a
fascinating man himself. There is information in our work
about his several wives, Hadley, Pauline, Martha, and Mary,
and his sons, sisters, and many others. Each chapter tells a
story of Hemingway, of his chameleonic personality, a man
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who tried to penetrate the fog of myth and outright fiction
which has further obscured the real man in the quarter
century since his death.
Even Carlos Baker and A. E. Hotchner and other
biographers joined in a unique cooperative effort to
understand the man and their own efforts to pierce his many
masks. Hemingway surprised many people when he put his
life in danger again and again; he had battles with his closest
friends; he was dependent on alcohol.
His sexuality, his
marriages and his family influence are only a few of the
facets examined in this work
Ernest Hemingway dedicated to write about both battle
and love in three of the great conflicts of this century World War I, World War II and the Spanish Civil War, all
the while engaging in countless dangerous and colorful
exploits, from hunting rhinos and fishing for marlin to boxing
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and bullfighting; even to liberating the Paris Ritz in August
1944.
An extraordinary man in an extraordinary time,
Hemingway worked very hard and loved nature and fine
painting. He had an irrepressible character but was a good
human being.
With his arresting good looks, his quiet
intensity and animal magnetism, his avid curiosity about
everything and everybody, his warmth and wit, his will to
live life to the fullest, Hemingway became one of the most
charismatic, as well as photogenic, personalities of his time.
But the engine driving all this glamour and power was his
great artistic gift, evident in such legendary novels as The Sun
Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bells
Tolls.
Ernest Hemingway never spoke of anything other than all
the things he had just seen. Hemingway hated the people
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who pretended and those who tried to seem what they were
not. He called them hypocrites and his contempt for them
lasted all his lifetime. Hemingway said the most difficult and
the most complicated subject to write about was a man’s life;
he knew this, he said, because he was a man.
This work is full of research about his life, his trips, his
works, his family and his friends that has been gathered
through articles, magazines, and books in English and in
Spanish, as well as from consulted works from different
sources. It has been difficult to sort out the truth from what
has been written about Hemingway’s experience. Our work is
not so much a conclusion as a reconsideration of this period
in Hemingway’s life based on books, related documents, and
articles.
While the enigma of Hemingway’s life may never be
solved, our work reflects the man as he really was.
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Hemingway became the man who changed the way the world
writes. The forces that took root in him later drove him to
literary success and to despair.
1.3 Hemingway as an Ambulance Driver.
Ernest Hemingway arrived at nearly midnight at Milan
after an exhausting journey from his base in Bassano, fortyfive miles northwest of Venice at the foot of the towering,
fortified Monte Grappa.
He asked a pair of guards for
directions. Four blocks away were the Giardino Pubblici, the
public gardens. From there the Via Alessandro Manzoni led
straight to the Plaza del Doumo. He couldn’t miss it.
“They weren’t sure about an Ospedale Americana but the
Croce Rossa where he had been instructed to report was close
to the famous cathedral. He was very sick and tired but he
decided to walk after riding the rails all day.
Fired by a
patriotic fervour, bent on helping to make the world safe for
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democracy, he had left his freshman class at Harvard, over
strong parental objections, to drive an ambulance for the
American Red Cross, attached to the Italian Army with the
“assimilated” rank of sotto tenant (second lieutenant).”6
The United States had declared war on Germany on April
6, 1917, and throughout the land college students not yet
eligible for the draft were deserting their teachers to work for
the nation in any way they could. The undergraduate body as
a whole was out to the Kaiser. Who could concentrate on
such dull subjects like economics, math, and ancient history
when the world was in confusion and history in the making
was screaming from the titles every day.
His chance came when the Red Cross started looking for
recruits to replace some of its drivers in the Italian sector
whose term of service had expired. It was a shortcut to the
6
VILLARD, Henry and NAGEL, James. Hemingway: in Love and War. Northern University
Press, Boston, 1989, page 3.
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front, a passport to adventure in a romantic foreign land, the
chance of a lifetime. He lost no time in taking advantage of
it.
“American Red Cross headquarters, at number ten on the
Via Alessandro Manzoni, was shut for the night when he got
there, and the hospital section, a short distance away from
Via Cesare Cantu, did not look the least like what it seemed
to be. A moderate –sized stone and stucco structure with big
rectangular windows, it had formerly been used as a pension;
except for the familiar emblem over the doorway, the oldfashioned mansion had nothing to indicate that it housed the
first medical and surgical institution ever to be opened by
Americans on Italian soil.”7
Hemingway met Agnes von Kurowsky in Italy; she was
the one who welcomed him at his arrival and had a room
7
VILLARD, Henry and NAGEL, James. Hemingway: in Love and War. Northern University
Press, Boston, 1989, page 5.
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ready for him while working as an ambulance driver. Her
voice was very feminine with an American accent and
Hemingway couldn’t resist her beauty. She was an attractive
person who was wearing the Red Cross uniform and also an
arm band. The room where he stayed had the typical odor of
disinfectant. He could smell the fresh, white paint of the
walls.
The floor was very shiny and the windows had
colorful curtains. He was surprised to see clean bathrooms
that reminded him of the USA.
He was kind of sick at times because of the food and
when he went to Milan he had to drive a four cylinder Fiat
ambulance. This was big, gray vehicle that looked like
elephants alongside the brown beetle Model T Fords that
operated in the foothills and plains.
“Behind Hemingway, were the forty- eight hours that he
had driven without stop and the anxious moments in a violent
storm when he found himself cut off by the Austrians at a
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salient. He had witnessed his first and biggest air raid at
midnight. With his Ford I had run the gauntlet of low- flying
enemy aircraft bombing the road on which he was traveling
with a load of wounded. And he had had his own share of
close calls, as when he had fallen asleep at the wheel one
dark, exhausting night and awakened in the nick of time as a
burden train crossed his path at a junction. Blinding, choking
dust or drenching rain (the cars had no windshields), running
without lights on shell-pocked roads were an integral part of
the experience.”8 Whatever he would see later would offer
no novelty; he had become another participant in the war.
The Red Cross was fortunate in having found lodgings
within sight of the Duomo. Rooms and furnishings had been
readily adapted for use in the hospital and a prodigious effort
had been made to transform the two upper floors into a
8
Consulted from: Report of the Department of Military Affairs. Red Cross Bulletin on June 20,
1918, page 23.
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miniature America in time for its official opening on June 17,
1918.
“Calcimine had been applied in liberal quantities to the
walls and ceilings of each room, existing pieces of furniture
had been redone or covered with cretonne, and the piece
goods brought from the United States had attractively
embellished the whole.
In gala dress for an afternoon
reception, bright with flowers and flags of the Allies, it had
won high praise from a hundred invited guests, including
noted Italian doctors and the commanding officer of the
French and British Forces in Italy, General Angelotti.”9
The Red Cross had become the chosen instrument of the
United States government for keeping Italy in the war. The
devastating defeat of that country in a German-led surprise
attack at Caporetto on October 24, 1917, had resulted in an
9
Consulted from: Report of the Department of Military Affairs, Red Cross Bulletin on June 20,
1918, page 98.
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alarming loss of morale. Not yet able to support in the form
of troops, Washington had decided on a massive program of
relief and rehabilitation to aid the stricken nation. The official
order was the ambulance corps had to be together by the Red
Cross with orders to spread the message of to be alert because
the enemies were arriving at the place where they were.
That had held a special attraction for Ernie: the entrance
of these ambulances on the streets, together with other Red
Cross personnel, was designed to make the man in the street
and his brother on the battlefield have courage and react
accordingly. Ernie could say that the police had fully paid
the expected dividend. Wherever the ambulances went they
brought hope and happiness among the soldiers.
As a driver Hemingway felt that he was playing a part in
strengthening the desire of the fighting men to keep the
enemy away until help arrived from overseas.
Hemingway
continued writing after the war, though he was never careful
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as to the form his writing would take.
There was no
intimation that he might use the war or the hospital as
background for a book one day or that he intended to go in
for fiction in preference to anything else. He was only a
reporter and that was that.
“Contrary to many people’s impression, Hemingway did
not receive his injuries while serving as an ambulance driver.
He had fallen into the role of warrior by accident. During the
Austrian offensive in June things were relatively quiet in his
sector, and he decided to get a look at the war somewhere
else. It was no secret that, along with the ambulance corps,
the Red Cross branch that ran the most risks in Italy was the
rolling canteen or the field kitchen service.
Originally
planned as a string of trailers to be towed along just back of
the lines, dispensing hot coffee, cold drinks cigarettes, and
chocolate bars to the soldiers, most of them, because of
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impractical road conditions, soon developed stationary units
attached to a designated regiment.”10
1.4 His Life as a Writer.
Ernest Hemingway discovered his genius as a very young
man and took great pleasure in writing well. He knew a good
deal about the craft of fiction and frequently expressed his
sound and practical ideas in letters, interviews and
introductions to his own works.
His basic principles of writing have been extremely
influential:
- Study the best literary models.
- Master your subject through experience and
reading.
- Work in disciplined isolation.
- Begin early in the morning and concentrate for
several hours each day.
- Begin by reading everything you have written from
the start, or if engaged on a long book, from the last
chapter.
- Write slowly and deliberately.
10
CLARK, Frazer. American Red Cross Reports on the Wounding of Lieutenant Ernest
Hemingway. 1918, page 18.
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- Stop writing when things are going well and you
know what will happen next so that you have
sufficient time to continue the next day.
- Do not discuss the material while writing about it.
- Do not think about writing when you are finished
for the day but allow your subconscious mind to
ponder it.
- Work continuously on a project once you start it.
- Keep a record of your daily progress.
- Make a list of titles after you have completed the
work.
It often took Hemingway all morning to write a single
perfect paragraph.
But he said he could easily write five
thousand words a day. In Europe he wrote in cafes, in hotel
rooms and at home; in Key West he wrote at a table in his
separate studio. But after he moved to Havana in 1940 he
started to write standing up at a lectern in his bedroom, under
the horns of a huge water buffalo. Hemingway's aesthetic is
based on two essential principles. The first —derived from
newspaper experience which had trained him to report only
what he had witnessed directly—was that fiction must be
founded on real emotional and intellectual experience and be
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faithful to actuality. But must also be transformed and
heightened by the imagination until it becomes truer than
simple events.
The second principle was that fiction must be intensity,
that the structure and meaning that give work solidity and
strength must be concealed beneath the story. He believed a
work of fiction could be judged by the quality of material the
author eliminated and that "the most essential gift for a good
writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the
writer's radar and all great writers have had it.”11
Many novelists observed that Hemingway, whose
sensitive characters become embittered, was in reality so
deeply susceptible to emotion that he strove constantly for
the elimination of himself, his thoughts and feelings, from
the surface of the work.
11
SANFORD, Marcelline. At the Hemingways. London: Putnam, 1963, page 217.
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Hemingway's theories and techniques were formed
in the early 1920s and remained consistent throughout his career. It was only when his shit detector began to fail in the
1950s that he diverged from his original principles and
became self-indulgent, and verbose. Hemingway's technique
was matched by his highly innovative style —the most
influential prose in the twentieth century. The short words,
limited
vocabulary,
declarative
sentences
and
direct
representation of the visible world appealed to the ordinary as
well as to the intellectual reader. He prided himself on his
purity of expression and simplicity.
Hemingway's style was characterized by clarity and
force.
He stressed the function of the individual word,
wrote five simple sentences for every complex one, and
used very few similes, repeated words and phrases; he
emphasized dialogue rather than narration. He expressed his
violent themes in limpid, focused, perfectly controlled
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prose. He concentrated on sensations in the exaltation of
the instant and found physical details that produced the
aesthetic effect. His style was precise and exact, yet charged
with poetic intensity.
Hemingway's style and themes were so unusual that he
had a great deal of difficulty publishing his poems and
stories in the mid-1920s. The Double Dealer in New
Orleans, the first American magazine (apart from the high
school Tabula) to publish his poetry, printed his quatrain
"Ultimately" on the same page as Faulkner's "Portrait" in
June 1922. When the magazine did not pay him,
Hemingway told the editor that its title reflected his
morality.
Pound helped him place in Poetry six of the ten poems
that later appeared in his first book. “Hemingway did manage
to publish some of his early work in Margaret Anderson's
Little
Review,
Ford's
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Flechtheim's Querschnitt (Cross-Section) in Frankfurt and
Ernest Walsh's This Quarter during 1923-1925.”12 But he
earned only fifty dollars in 1924. The few copies of In Our
Time sold out fast, but the gains were used to balance the
losses of other publications in the Three Mountains Press
series. Hemingway did not to keep a number of copies
(which now sell for as much as $10,000).
Hemingway wrote the first six vignettes of In Our Time
in January-February
1923,
between
the
Lausanne
Conference and his tour of the Ruhr, and published them
in the Little Review in the spring of 1923. He completed
the remaining twelve sketches in a second concentrated
spurt of creativity during late July and early August 1923
between his first trip to Pamplona and his departure for
Toronto. He finished nine new stories, which formed the
12
HOTCHNER, A. E. Hemingway and His World. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication
Data, 1989, page 105.
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core of In Our Time between January and July 1924, his
first six months as a professional writer.
Three Stories and Ten Poems, a fifty-eight page booklet
published privately in August 1923 in a limited edition of
300 copies by Mc Almon's Contact Publishing Company,
was a youthful work. The stories had been fortunately saved
from inclusion in Hadley's lost suitcase and the poems were
insignificant. But the eighteen short, untitled chapters of In
Our Time, a thirty-eight-page booklet also privately printed,
on hand-made paper, in March 1924, in an even more limited
edition of 170 copies, by Bill Bird's Three Mountains Press,
contained Hemingway's techniques, style and themes.
In that novel Hemingway's parents were shocked and
outraged by his habit of placing and naming real people,
well known to the family, in his scandalous fiction. When
Hemingway learned that someone named his name in Oak
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Park had returned five precious copies of the limited edition
of In Our Time to the publisher, he acidly asked his parents
if the descriptions were too accurate and the attitude to life
insufficiently sentimental to please them.
It is somewhat surprising—considering the rigidity of
Ed and Grace's views, the moral gulf between parents and
son, and the pleasure he derived from offending his
family—that Hemingway cared enough about their feelings
to justify himself after their attacks on The Sun Also Rises.
Whenever he sent Grace one of his books, she would
retaliate with a catalogue or review of her latest exhibition
of painting
Though Grace was pleased to be the mother of a famous
son, she confirmed her judgment of his early work in a
newspaper interview of 1951, the last year of her life:
"Some critics and professors consider Ernest’s books are
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among the finest of our times, but I think the essays he wrote
as a school boy were better”.13
Hemingway continued to form friendships with writers
in Paris—John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest
Walsh, Donald Ogden Stewart, Evan Shipman—after his
return to the city in January 1924. His success as an author
gave him a new artistic technique and he took the role of
disciple as he had done with older masters like Pound, Stein
and Joyce. He had being a dangerous opponent; though his
friendships began well, by 1937 he had discussed with everyone.
As soon as Hemingway's domestic life was accepted, he
followed Pound's advice to help Ford Madox Ford edit the
Transatlantic Review. When Pound introduced him to Ford in
January 1924 the older writer was well known for his literary
friendships,
13
his
technical
experiments,
his
fictional
HOTCHNER, A. E. Hemingway and His World. Library of Congress. 1989, page 110.
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achievement and his editorial skill. Ford had close family
connections with the Pre-Raphaelites; he was a good friend of
several distinguished American writers: Henry James,
Stephen Crane, and Ezra Pound; he was a confident and
collaborator of Conrad and in May 1924 promised to take
Hemingway to England to meet the Master.
“Ford was a stylistic innovator who introduced into
English literature some of the Flaubertian techniques that
were later adopted by Pound and Joyce. Pound defined Ford's
lesson as "the limpidity of natural speech, driven toward the
just word and confessed that he learned more from Ford than
from anyone else."14 Ford, who had published The Good
Soldier in 1915, was working on the opening volume of the
Tietjens tetralogy when Hemingway first knew him. He was
also an excellent editor and was the first to publish writers
14
MEYERS, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. Harper & Row, Publishers, N. Y., 1817, page
126.
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like D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis in the English
Review.
Ford's personal qualities might also have appealed to
Hemingway. Though Ford was over forty when the Great
War broke out, he volunteered for service, had combat
experience and was hardly gassed in the summer of 1916. He
had led a terrible bohemian life before Left Bank expatriates
made it elegant. Despite his bad appearance, he conducted a
number of sexual liaisons and had the reputation of a ladies'
man. At the end of his life he was respected by John Crowe
Ransom and Allen Tate, and revered as a teacher by Robert
Lowell.
Ford published Hemingway's early stories—"Indian
Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "Cross Country
Snow"—and several articles in the Transatlantic Review.
Ford allowed him to edit the "American" published in August
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1924, which included work by Hemingway’s friends John
Dos Passos, Nathan Asch, Guy Hickock and Gertrude Stein.
Ford consistently praised Hemingway in print and even carried
the good news to his family in Oak Park who had hardly
disapproved of their son's early fiction.
Ford maintained his admiration despite the hostility of the
younger man. When Hemingway's first deal book, In Our
Time, was published in 1925. Ford said, insolent yet
accurately: "The best writer in America at this moment
(though for the moment he happens to be in Paris), the most
conscientious, the most master of his craft, the most
consummate, is Ernest Hemingway." 15
In his attractive Introduction to the widely read Modern
Library edition of A Farewell to Arms, Ford reminisced about
the early days in Paris when Hemingway published his first,
15
HEMINGWAY, Gregory, Papa: A Personal Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1976, page 57.
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small-press books. Ford handsomely classified Hemingway
with Conrad and W. H. Hudson as one of "the three
impeccable writers of English prose that I have come across
in fifty years or so of reading."16
More particularly, as Hadley confirmed, Ford would
come to the out-of-the-way cafe where Hemingway worked
and disturb him. Ford assumed that Hemingway would be
delighted to benefit from the advice of an experienced writer
and was totally unaware of his intrusion.
Finally, Hemingway rightly thought Ford was liar and
lived in a world of falsehood. All Hemingway's criticisms
became intensified when he agreed to assist Ford in editing
the short-lived Transatlantic Review. Though Pound and
most other writers admired the way Ford edited the magazine, Hemingway disliked both his policy and his taste. He
felt the magazine was an unsatisfactory compromise between
16
(ibid, page 59)
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the traditional and the avant-garde, between conventional
material that could be published in Harper's and surrealist
"shit in French”. Hemingway also said, “not quite accurately
and as an excuse for delays in his own fiction, that Ford had
ditched his work for two months by begging Hemingway to
bring out two issues so Ford could go to America and raise
funds to continue the magazine”.17 Hemingway, in fact,
welcomed the opportunity to gain editorial experience and
publish the kind of American work that he admired.
While Ford was away, Hemingway copied out and sent to
the printer for serialization what seemed to be the complete
works of Gertrude Stein but was merely The Making of
Americans.
Hemingway attempted to save the magazine by
introducing Ford to a bizarre couple: the shell-shocked
17
HEMINGWAY, Ernest. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: The Scribner
Library/Omnibus Volume. 1966. page 13
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Krebs Friend (whom he had known in Chicago) and his
false wife, who promised to give Ford $200 a month for
half a year. But Ford objected to the financial arrangements
Hemingway made with Friend and, as Hemingway told
Stein: "ruined everything except of course himself, by
selling the magazine to the Friends instead of taking money
from them and keeping them outside as originally
planned.”18
In the end, the Transatlantic Review died in January
1925, after running just over a year, and closed off one of
the few outlets Hemingway then had for his stories.
Hemingway's writings on Ford reveal his characteristic
ingratitude toward a colleague who, for all his limitations,
had given him very generous assistance. In The Torrents of
Spring (1926) Ford is portrayed as an old windbag and
purveyor of stale anecdotes. The chapter on Ford in A
18
(ibid, page 16.)
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Moveable Feast (1964), substantially written in 1925 and
originally a part of The Sun Also Rises, precisely reflects
Hemingway's feelings toward Ford at the time the memoir
takes place. In this respect, it is quite different from the
chapters on Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Fitzgerald and Dos
Passos, which were influenced by Hemingway's arguments
with these writers in the 1930s and reveal a hostile attitude
that was formed long after his Paris years.
A third section of The Sun Also Rises, deleted from the
original opening chapters, was an early version of the
chapter on Ford in A Moveable Feast.
The treatment of Ford follows a recurrent vindictive
pattern in his life. He parodied Sherwood Anderson in The
Torrents of Spring, satirized Harold Loeb in The Sun Also
Rises, condemned Scott Fitzgerald in the first version of The
Snows of Kilamanjaro,
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Have and Have Not, savaged Sinclair Lewis in Across the
River and into the Trees, and attacked Stein and Ford in A
Moveable Feast.
Though Hemingway was without money and had to
maintain
his
family,
he
realized
the
dangers
of
commercialism and maintained his artistic integrity. It was
more important for him to write in tranquility, he told his
father, trying to write as well as he can, with no eye on any
market, nor any thought of what the stuff will bring, or even
if it can ever be published—than to fall into the money
making trap which ruined American writers. Like most
authors, he found writing difficult and exhausting process.
He did not believe that writing could be taught; it could be
learned only through long and permanent practice.
On rare occasions, however, he achieved a delighted
breakthrough. On Sunday, May 16, 1926, in Madrid, when
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the San Isidro bullfights were snowed out and he was
confined to the Pension Aguilar, Hemingway, in love with
but separated from Pauline Pfeiffer (who became his second
wife the following year), he was so smart that he completed
three stories in one day: "The Killers," "Today is Friday"
and "Ten Indians."
In 1925 he said his favorite authors were the seaadventure novelist Frederick Marryat, Ivan Turgenev and
Henry Fielding. The literary influence of Tolstoy, Stephen
Crane, Conrad and D. H. Lawrence as well as of Kipling,
Pound, Stein, Joyce and Ford was more important than that
of his early favorites.
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1.5 His Suicide.
Suicide was a recurrent theme in Ernest Hemingway's
life and work. Even before his father's suicide in 1928,
which profoundly influenced his ideas and emotions, he was
obsessed by the theme of self-destruction. Marcelline
recalled that the young Hemingway liked to read
Stevenson's "The Suicide Club" (an appropriate name for
the Hemingway family). As he was recovering from his war
wound in October 1918, he expressed a belief that he held
until the end of his life: "How much better . . . to go out in a
blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and
illusions shattered."19
Hemingway's thoughts of suicide often coincided with
his marital crises. In July 1921, two months before he
married Hadley, he became worried about his new
responsibilities and alarmed her by mentioning suicide.
19
MEYERS, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. Harper & Row, Publishers, N. Y. 1817, page
555.
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Five years later, during the crisis with Pauline, he calmly
told her that he would have killed himself if their love affair
had not been happily resolved. He seemed strangely
comforted by these wrong thoughts, remembered his recent
transatlantic
crossings
and
anticipated
Hart
Crane's
aesthetic mode of suicide: "When I feel low, I like to think
about death and the various ways of dying. And I think
about probably the best way, unless you could arrange to
die some way while asleep, would be to go off a liner at
night."20 As a young man he adopted romantic ideas about
self-destruction to increase his feelings of anxiety, raise his
love affair, and appease his guilt. But he still believed that
life would improve once the bad mood had passed, and was
not serious about suicide.
At Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway was trying to finish a
manuscript and for the first time found that he couldn’t.
20
HANNEMAN, Audre. Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Princeton:
University Press, 1967, page 148.
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That was the final blow to his abilities as a man and as a
writer, the two being interlaced. On April 18, at 11:00 a.m.
on Sunday morning, Mary found Hemingway standing with
a gun in one hand and shells in the other. There was a note
to her propped up on the gun rack. She distracted him just
long enough for Vernon, the doctor, to arrive. Hemingway
gave the gun up without resistance. Vernon confided to
Hotchner about Hemingway’s condition: “Hotch; honest to
God, if we don’t get him to the proper place, and fast, he is
going to kill himself for sure. It’s only a question of time if
he stays here, and every hour it grows more possible. He
says he can’t write any more that’s all he’s talked to me
about for weeks and weeks. Says there’s nothing to live for.
Hotch, he won’t ever write again. He can’t. He’s given up.
That’s the motivation for doing away with himself.”21
21
REYNOLDS, Michael. Hemingway: The Final Years. Princeton University Press, 1960, page
78.
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Ernest Hemingway was then admitted to the Mayo
clinic, where he endured electroconvulsive shock treatment
prescribed for severely depressed patients. Irvin D. Yalom,
psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine,
stated that Hemingway struggled all his life with severe
problems. In 1960, the signs of depression started to
become evident: anorexia, severe weight loss, insomnia,
deep sadness, total pessimism, and self-destructive trends.
The shock treatments he received were known to be
ineffectual when strong paranoid symptoms accompanied
the depression. Hemingway complained that the shock
treatments destroyed his memory and his ability to write.
The treatments were known to cause memory loss and to
cause the patient to become suicidal for a short period of
time. They stopped the treatment in the middle of the cycle
and let him go home to Ketchum. It was there that he finally
fulfilled his plan of suicide.
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Early in the morning of July 2, 1961, two days after he
returned home from the Mayo Clinic, thirty-four years after
his father had shot himself in the head in his own house, and
two months after his old friend Gary Cooper, dying of
cancer, before Hemingway killed himself, he left Mary
sleeping upstairs, loaded a shotgun, crouched in the foyer of
the Ketchum house, placed the twin barrels in his mouth, and
pulled both triggers. In two and a half weeks he would have
been sixty-two. At first, Mary insisted that it was not a suicide but
an accident. That Hemingway had been cleaning the gun not
knowing that it was loaded but later she told the truth.
Hemingway was buried in a simple plot at a cemetery in
Ketchum, with only his family and a few friends present, but
the whole world grieved.
"There are some things which can not be learned quickly
and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their
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acquiring," Hemingway once wrote. "They are the very
simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them
the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the
only heritage he has to leave."22
John Ernest Hemingway, Ernest’s son remembered a
time when his father had warned him after he had become
depressed upon finishing his term in the army, that both had
to promise each other never to shoot themselves because that
was a stupid thing. But perhaps most unexpected was the
short story that Hemingway wrote in 1924, where a man puts
a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his toe, blowing
off the top of his head.
Hemingway's heritage is considerable; almost three
decades after his death his books—with their innovative
style, technical virtuosity, and emotional intensity—are as
22
HOTCHNER, A.E. Hemingway and His World. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication
Data, 1989, page 202.
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widely read as when he lived. Moreover, the unique, vibrant,
achieving person he was remains an enduring figure of mythic
proportions in the eyes of the world.
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CHAPTER II
HIS INVOLVEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF HIS
TIMES.
2.1. World War I.
World War I the tragically unnecessary Great War that
infected the 20th century virtually at its source exploded in
August 1914 after a Serbian nationalist assassinated
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the imperial throne of
Austria-Hungary, while he and his wife were on an official
visit to the Montenegrin city of Sarajevo. When AustriaHungary responded by declaring war on Serbia, the unstable
two-headed empire set off a chain reaction throughout
Europe's complex of interlocking alliances.
Ironically, it was this network of mutual-protection
agreements that, except for the Franco-Russian War of 1870,
had kept the Continent relatively peaceful since the Battle of
Waterloo (1815) brought an end to the Napoleonic wars. This
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time, unfortunately, the multiple attempts had the contrary
effect, for by requiring that Russia enter the fight on Serbia’s
side, it automatically committed Germany to re-arm in sustain
of Austria-Hungary and France to attack Germany with the
purpose of her ally.
“When this sent German troops across Belgium for an
invasion of France, Great Britain declared war on the
German Reich. With the Ottoman Empire joining the Central
Powers (German Austria - Hungary) and Japan as well as Italy
signing up with the Allies (France-Britain-Russia), the whole
of Europe had, by 1916, become engulfed in a four-year-long,
deadly, but stalemated struggle. The Great War would be
marked by the unprecedented inhumanity of rat-infested,
dysentery-inducing trenches, gas attacks, aerial bombardments,
and the wholesale slaughter of troops—"the flower of Vic-
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torian England"—swept by hailstorms of bullets from
batteries of rapid-firing machine guns.”1
“Until 1917 the United States had remained officially
neutral, selling munitions to which ever side could afford to
pay for them. But after German U-boats began torpedoing
ships in the Atlantic even the defenseless passenger liner
Lusitanian- had little difficulty mobilizing American public
opinion to support it in its call for war against Germany,
which Congress declared on April 6, 1917. By entering the
conflict, the United States, with her almost unlimited supply
of arms, raw materials, credit, and manpower, assured an
Allied victory, which, Wilson asserted, would "make the
world safe for democracy."2
Nearly two months after the United States had become an
active participant in the war, Ernest Hemingway arrived to
1
BAKER, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York, 1969, page 134.
ROCHESTER, Stuart. American Liberal Disillusionment in the Wake of World War I.
University Park, 1977, page 18.
2
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Paris, Bordeaux to begin service with the Red Cross in Italy. To
his delight, the French capital was under siege from the
Germans' notorious super-Kanon, known as Big Bertha,
but hardly had Hemingway seen explosion the facade of the
Madeleine Church when he and Ted Brumback, another
Kansas City Star student, were on a train to Milan. Here in
Lombardy, the American Red Cross had been encouraging to
help the Italians cope with the horrible results of Caporetto (
now part of Yugoslavia), the battle, against AustroHungarian troops, that had dealt Italian forces their worst
defeat in modern history.
“When Hemingway returned home to Oak Park the
stories he told about the war were often enlarged and
romanticized, inflated the way Krebs fabricated his
adventures in “Soldier’s Home” He told his hometown
newspaper, “The Oak Parker”, that he had been hit by thirty
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two 45 caliber slugs and that 28 of them had been removed
without aid of anesthesia”.3
In response to a questionnaire sent to returning veterans,
he said that he had been a first lieutenant in the Italian Army,
serving with the 690th Infantry Brigatta Anacona and fighting
the Piave Offensive, on Monte Graappa and at Vittorio
Veneto.
In one writing in Oak Park he explained that the
Red Cross workers had thrown away their revolvers to
prevent the temptation of suicide.
Michael Reynolds observes that Red Cross men, giving
chocolate, were not issued revolvers, but it gave an authentic
note to the story. The conclusion is inescapable that not only
is Hemingway’s fiction an unreliable guide to the truth but
also that his pronouncements in public forums, letters, and
personal comments are suspect.
3
VILLARD, Henry and NAGEL, James. Hemingway in Love and War. Northern University
Press, Boston, 1989, page 46.
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This is true about his military exploits as well as his
personal life. One example is Hemingway’s trip from Milan
to visit Jim Gamble in Sicily in December 1918. His official
travel papers show that he had the permission to leave Milan
on December 15th; they were good for sixteen days.
“Hemingway had invented the romance with Mae Marsh
in New York, the licentious episode in Sicily with an
innkeeper, and, in all probability, a sexual affair with Agnes.
The issue of whether Ernest and Agnes ever consummated
their relationship is of significance beyond prurient gossip,
for it relates to the creative process of his work”.4
That Hemingway’s fiction of World War I shows fully
developed romances has led a number of biographers to
assume the literal transcription of life into art.
4
BUCKLEY, Peter. Ernest. The Dial Press, New York, 1978, page 35.
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2.2 World War II.
Perturbed by the fatigue and frustration of the China trip
the censorship and propaganda that made war correspondence
difficult at best Ernest Hemingway
resisted Martha’s
insistence that, would be wonderful for the world that he must
cover the action in Europe as only he, his unique talent,
experience, and prestige, could do it. Ernest preferred, however
to let his wife compromise journalistic tasks all round the
Caribbean and then in Britain, North Africa, and Italy, while he
concentrated his war effort on the home front.
This meant Cuba, where his proposal of two anti Nazi
schemes received an enthusiastic response from the new
American Ambassador Spruille Braden, who in turn won
approbation from the Cuban government permitting Hemingway
to set up an opposite intelligence operation.
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In this first of his undercover adventures, Hemingway
established
the "Crook Factory”: at the Finca’s guest house,
where he quickly organized six full-time operatives and twenty
secret agents, recruiting them from the ranks of fishermen,
pimps and their whores, refugee grandees, and for good
measure, one false priest. Hemingway even persuaded Gustavo
Duran, a Spanish friend from Mont parnasse days who had
abandoned his career in music composition for the sake of
serving as a General in the Loyalist Army, to travel all the way
from New York and take charge of the Finca specters. The spy
ring went into realize in May 1942, and before finishing it in
April 1943, Hemingway and his "crooks" had indeed kept
guard on the thousands of pro-Franco, pro-Hitler Falangists in
Cuba. Meanwhile, they had also reported a quantity of
unverifiable rumors, enjoyed many picturesque adventures,
and won for the spy master himself a generous fee of scarce
gasoline from the American Embassy's private store.
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“Hardly had Hemingway got the Crook Factory under way
when he received authorization and materiel that enabled him to
arm the Pilar and transform it into a spy ship for the purpose of
foiling German U-boat activity in the Caribbean. Accordingly,
the cabin cruiser set forth camouflaged as a marine research
vessel but, in actuality, equipped with government-issue
bazookas, explosives, 50-caliber machine guns, and radio
equipment. This time the personnel would be an eight-man
crew that included Winston Guest, a Churchill relative and
Phipps heir; a Basque sailor named Francisco Paxtchi Ibarlucia;
and the Pilar's long time mate Gregorio Fuentes.”5
While cruising in open waters off the northern coast of
Cuba, Hemingway hoped to be detained by a German sub so
that once a boarding party had assembled on the deck, he Pilar
hardies could drill them with machine-gun fire and then destroy
the vessel itself by blasting it with bazookas and throwing hand
grenades down the tower. Although Captain Hemingway never
5
EASTAM, Mark. Bull in the Afternoon. New Republic, June 7, 1933, page 94.
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got a chance to carry out this daring and imaginative plan, the
Pilar operation did report useful information on U-boat
movements, making it possible for the Navy to bomb and
probably fail several of the subs that for a while held Cuba
under blockade.
“Subsequently, “Papa said:
I explained to the crew the
dangers involved. since Pilar was no match for any U-boat that
wanted to blast it. Despite the dangers, Gregorio, who was boatmate to me, was very happy to go out because we were insured
ten thousand dollars a man and Gregorio had never figured he
was worth that much. The quarters were very cramped, but the
crew got along fine. No fights. On one tour we stayed out fiftyseven days.”6
Finally, Hemingway accepted to the demanding of his wife,
Martha—who from the start refused the Crook Factory and subhunting as little better than a Keystone Cops farce—and decided
6
HEMINGWAY, Leicester. My brother, Ernest Hemingway. New York: Fawcett, 1962, page 32.
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to go to Europe to cover the war. But, for whatever reason,
Hemingway passed up other offers to accept an offer from
Collier's that he take over from Martha as their correspondent.
Martha naturally resented the loss of her Collier's credentials,
but she continued to cover the war. Understandably, she was
not very sympathetic when, upon her arrival in London, she
found Hemingway in St. George's Hospital with an injury,
suffered in an automobile crash while returning through
correspondence with a good figure and an angry way with
men.
“On the military side of things, Ernest disregarded the
seriousness of his injury and took to the air with the RAF.
On June 6, just two weeks after the accident, he even
boarded an attack transport to observe the D-Day landing
below The Normandy cliffs on what was called Omaha
Beach.
Martha,
meanwhile,
further
exasperated
Hemingway by actually going ashore with the troops,
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thanks to her intrepid act of stowing away on a hospital
ship.
By mid- July, however, Hemingway too was in
France following the advance of the 22nd version exploit
during the war. Hemingway used his fluent French,
commanding personality, and instinct for strategy, to calm
the populace, hold the town for several days, interrogate
prisoners, and direct intelligence-gathering about enemy
defenses on the road to Paris.”7
He also piled an arsenal, removed his correspondent’s
insignia, and bore arms, which so annoyed fellow
correspondents that he scarcely escaped being sent home
after an official investigation caught up with him two
months later. For Hemingway, the war climaxed at the
savage, damaging Battle of Hurtgenwald that raged from
November 15 to early December. To gain a single mile
through freezing rain, snow, pillboxes, land mines,
7
BURGESS, Anthony. Ernest Hemingway and His World. New York, 1978, page 234.
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relentless shelling and dark woods straight out of German
folk tales, the 22nd Regimen suffered more than 300
casualties, among the 24,000 Americans killed, wounded or
captured.
Before it was over, Ernest challenged the Geneva
Convention, took up arms, and fired on the enemy as
German troops penetrated close enough to menace
Lanham’s headquarters. Meanwhile, he also worried about
Lieutenant John Hemingway, his oldest son, Jack or
Bumpy, an OSS officer who was taken prisoner by the
Germans on October 28.
“Finally, Hemingway covered the Battle of the Bulge in
Belgium and Luxembourg, but weakened by pneumonia, he
missed the main action. Here the biggest battle was with
Martha, who joined him for Christmas in Rodenburg,
outside Luxembourg City. Almost two months after she
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had written him for a divorce, they went for a terminal
quarrel and spent their last night together.”8
On March 6, 1945, following two months in Paris
courting Mary Welsh, he went back to New York and told
Perkins of his intentions to write a great trilogy of novels.
Then he went to Key West to meet Gregory and Patrick and
take them to the Finca.
Mary Welsh arrived there on May 2, the same day John
Hemingway got his liberty from the German prison camp.
8
KERT, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York, 1983, page 34.
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2.3 The Cuban Revolution.
Having endured the summer of 1957 the hottest, most
humid summer in memory Cubans were assaulted not only
by the heaviest ever, coldest and most frequent storms from
the north, but also explosions of human violence and covert
brutalities.
“Fidel Castro's underground forces daily displayed
more and more violence against Batista's secret police,
S.I.M., and the army. Batista forces retaliated. Ernest
Hemingway’s Cuban friends had not seen or heard of such
atrocities since the old macabre days of the dictator Gerardo
Machado, twenty-five years earlier.”9
“Some young men from the village had been arrested
by the Batista police or the army, imprisoned and tortured,
and one of them left dead in a ditch down the main road.
9
HEMINGWAY, W. Mary. How it was. New York: Ballentine, 1976, page 516.
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In mid-March Batista reinstated news censorship and
Ernest had little information beyond crop reports, shipping,
weather and pictures of girls engaged to be married. The
Miami papers were slashed into ribbons before they
reached the newsstands. The rumors were that men were
being found head-down in wells, their bodies mutilated,
their faces unrecognizable from beatings, others hanged,
women beaten and tortured,
cane fields
and
tobacco-
drying sheds burned, live phosphorus thrown into busloads
of passengers, particularly one on the Number 7 route
which went through the village to Cotorro, because its
driver was said to have informed against the villagers who
were trying to help Fidel.”10
Cardinal Arteaga, head of the Havana diocese, tried to
set up a commission which would bring the opposing forces
to a talk table, but Fidel, who wore a religious medal on a
10
BRIAN, Dennis. The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew
Him. New York: Grove Press, 1988, page 102.
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chain around his neck, refused the invitation and warned that
a general strike, a powerful weapon of workers against
Batista, might occur. Going for what
seemed necessary
shopping in Havana, it was obvious that tension
was
everywhere in the streets, eyes watching suspiciously, no
more than a dozen customers in Havana's most elegant
women's clothes store, El Encanto, or even in Woolworth's,
and few pedestrians anywhere.
“With the collector of internal revenue in Baltimore,
Maryland, demanding whopping sums of income
from
the people,
taxes
about $20,000 each quarter, Ernest
undertook to find out where his cash was going, noted
every expenditure down to a new broom and paper
napkins, and made charts from which he easily saw that his
liquor consumption and that of his guests in March 1957
amounted to $250.64, more than half the total money spent,
excluding salaries.
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Again in April, his bills for Chianti, gin tonic,
Campari, Pinch Botde, Marques de Riscal, La Ina, White
Horse, Tio Pepe, vodka, and vermouth totaled $240.94, more
than half expenses, since his bounteous garden was giving
Hemingway more vegetables than he and the servants and
the deep freeze could hold, making them marvel at the
miracles performed by seeds stuck in thin topsoil.”11
A new phrase, treinta-tres (thirty-three), caught
Hemingway’s attention. It was a reference to informers
(chibators) because they were said to be paid $33.33 a
month, and Fidel's Revolutionary Council announced it
would "liquidate" all known informers. While the Council
continued propagandizing for a national strike, Batista
authorized workers to shoot employers or anyone else urging
them to strike.
11
BAKER, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner’s, 1969, page 45.
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“One morning Hemingway said: ´It's quite possible
looters will come here when there is no law. We will try to
shoot them. But despite unpleasant weather, Hemingway
went fishing a few days later, Gregorio surprisingly putting
not quite fresh bait on the hooks, with the outriggers
trailing their Japanese feathers and pork rind, customary
for spring trolling.”12
Although there was a fair current offshore, Hemingway
took his family farther and farther out, saying, "We have a
little business to do," and about ten miles out, with no other
craft in sight, slowed the motor, gave Agnes the wheel
topside with instructions to keep in that course, roughly 45
degrees, and went below. Down there Gregorio was opening
drawers and tearing bunks apart, unearthing heavy rifles,
sawed-off shotguns, hand grenades and canisters and belts of
ammunition for automatic rifles Agnes had never known
12
WALDHORN, Arthur. A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Farrar Straus and
Giroux, 1972.
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existed aboard Pilar, and he and Ernest were throwing them
into the sea. It took them half an hour or more to dispose
of the arsenal.
"Stuff left over from the old days," said Ernest, when
he returned topside. "Nobody's going to use it now."
"So many weapons. They must be worth a couple of
grand." Agnes had been watching from above.
"My contribution to the revolution. Maybe we've saved
a few lives. And please remember, kitten, you haven't seen
or heard anything."
"I'll remember. I haven't even seen a filly”13
The
subject was closed.
Coming into the kitchen with supplies for the servants'
table, Rene mentioned that for the first time in his memory
their village housewives were buying tinned food, hedging
13
Consulted from: Concealments in Hemingway’s Works. Columbus, Ohio State, University
Press, 1983.
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against a general strike and the possibility of shortages.
Their custom had been to buy only each day's needs each
day. Lili de la Fuentes, who came out every week from
Havana to wash Agnes’s hair and fix her nails, reported that
police had invaded her building the night before and
without explanation taken away a man from the apartment
below her.
That
Good
Friday
the
Revolutionary
Council
announced that the general strike would begin at midnight.
But Ernest’s family heard traffic on the central highway
moving as usual. A United States citizen, who was
supervising a group of cartographers who were surveying the
countryside in jeeps to make a contour map of Cuba,
telephoned to ask Hemingway's advice on how to insure the
safety of his crews. Hemingway suggested that he bring
them into Havana from the province of Camaguey where
they were working, billet them in the National Hotel,
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equipped them with portable radios from which they could
hear the news from Miami and set them to work in Havana
province, which then seemed comparatively safe for
foreigners.
By April 7 the general strike still had not been
activated, and nobody seemed to know when it would begin.
None of the people was in favor of it, or of any other
violence. All of them were dedicated to their own activities.
Arnoldo, the village plumber was repairing the servants'
bathroom. Cecilio, the carpenter, was making a big new
window for the kitchen and said “Son los politicos, quieren
poder y dinero”. Pichilo, the head gardener, cared not a fig
for politics while he was worried about three dogs of the
village that had been bitten by another dog with rabies.
Ana, although she tended to grow excited about politics,
perhaps because she had few other outlets for her emotions.
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Rene simply wanted peace and contentment for everyone.
Sonia, the cook, who had no room in her consciousness for
affairs beyond her own, or her sister, Lola, the maid, was
relaxed and comfortable to disturb herself with vague
issues were not worried about war, too.
“The morning news of April 10 included the item that
the police sergeant of the Cotorro station down the road,
the same who, they said, had shot Hemingway’s dog
Machakos, had been killed during the night along with
several other people. Roberto Herrera, who came out in the
afternoon, reported he had heard shooting in all directions in
Havana all night, and left again without supper, to reach
home before dark. Hemingway and Agnes reflected that
their arsenal of weapons in the house consisted of nothing
more for protecting everybody than Ernest's small
Wehrmacht pistol and the 22 caliber bottle-shooting rifle.
The rumors and alarms did not deter us from attending the
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opening of the new Trader Vic's restaurant in the Havana
Hilton Hotel.”14
A few days later they heard the tale that Fidel had
ordered the chiefs of his revolutionary groups all over the
island to report to him in the Sierra Maestra to explain why
they had failed to execute the general strike, and to be
excused or punished. Punishment, so they said, was
supposed to be assassination by their subchiefs. He could not
imagine how this strategy would endear him or his cause to
his compatriots.
“Agnes was typing his recollect essays about his early
days in Paris and his friends there, Ford Madox Ford,
Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach and Ezra
Pound, who that April 19 was released from St. Elizabeth's
Hospital in Washington, a joyous day. Hemingway had
written the Attorney General that he would like to send
14
GRIFFIN, Peter. Along with Youth Hemingway. New York: Oxford, 1985, page 19.
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Pound $1,500 to help him return to Italy and that day wired
Washington for an address to which he might send the
check. Years later Olga Rudge, Mr. Pound's devoted friend,
told Agnes they had never cashed the check, instead had it
encased in lucite to use as a below paperweight But too
many visitors, especially strangers, fingered it. They had to
hide it away.”15
The population of the Gulf Stream having apparently
migrated to distant, unknown waters, Ernest gave Pilar long
vacations that summer and more and more splashed up and
down the pool, listening to the news from Miami on the
portable radio. One evening when Hemingway had made
forty-five round trips for the day, Agnes swam the fifty two
trips lengthwise and a double crosswise for an even mile, and
continued with that pleasant diversion until she had swum,
twenty miles in twenty days.
15
LYNN, Kenneth. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, page 23.
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Having finished work, at least temporarily, with his
Paris reminiscences, which, typed in triple space by Agnes,
reached about three hundred pages, Hemingway was
devoting himself to a book of fiction he had started ten
years earlier and worked at intermittently. It began as a
short story set first in the pretty French fishing village of
Le Grau de Roi, and later at Aigues-Mortes a bit inland,
both of them northwest of Marseilles, the time being in the
nostalgic midtwenties. He did not invite anybody to read
this new work each evening, as she had done with other
books, and Agnes did not press him about it. Eventually the
book, titled The Garden of Eden, grew very long and,
when finally she typed it, seemed
to
her
repetitious
sometimes feeling scorned and also containing some spots
of excellent narrative. When a new Spencer Tracy film,
Bad Day at Black Hock, appeared in Havana cinemas, she
went in to see it and was enthralled not so much by the
action or acting as by the settings, vast sweeps of sagebrush
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with violet mountains in the distances, cottonwoods
shining in the sun and bending in the wind, high, clear
skies. At lunch the next day she told Hemingway about
it.
"Montana maybe or Wyoming, or Idaho was a
wonderful empty space out there”. “You loved it, didn't
you?” “I always worked well there." A week or so later
Hemingway suggested a plan for the autumn. "Let's go
up to Ketchum. Do a little bird hunting." "It's a long,
tiring drive." "Not necessarily. Toby Bruce likes to do it."
"The Finca seems safe enough now for us to leave it. We've
had no night intruders." "I'll get on to Toby."16
The telephoning produced plans for travel beginning in
late September. Betty Bruce and she would fly separate
routes to Chicago and on October 4 be collected by the
16
HEMINGWAY, W. Mary. How It Was. New York: Ballantine, 1976, page 526.
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husbands and the four of them would drive west in the
Braces' big comfortable station wagon.
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CHAPTER III
HIS PERSONAL LIFE
3.1 Hemingway in Key West: 1928 – 1929.
Key West, the southernmost town in America, is the last
in a string of small subtropical islands that stretches
southwest from the tip of the Florida peninsula and divides
the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic Ocean.
The island is
only 1.5 miles wide and 4.5 miles long. The weather is
warm, the swimming and fishing superb.
When Ernest
Hemingway was in Key West he loved going to a special bar
even though there was a prohibition for whiskey in several
fine saloons.
Hemingway found an apartment on Simonton Street, got
up soon after sunrise, disciplined himself to write A Farewell
to Arms for three to four hours in the morning, fished in the
afternoon, and was exhilarated by the anticipation of pleasure
and reward after work. During his dozen months in Key
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West he produced a vast amount of writing: A Farewell to
Arms, Death in the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, Green
Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, “ Francis
Macomber”, The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, The Fifth Column,
The Spanish Earth and the beginning of For Whom the Bell
Tolls.
In early April, soon after Hemingway reached Key West,
his parents Dr. Clarence and Grace were introduced to
Pauline. They had been in Florida to look after their real
estate investments and were on their way to Cuba.
Hemingway’s father was thin, nervous and gray, deeply
worried about failing health and financial problems. Grace,
full of her usual energy, seemed to bloom as her husband
wasted away.
Hemingway got on very well with ordinary people, liked
strong simple types, and made several new friends in Key
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West.
He was perceptive, responsive and curious about
everything; liked to test people and see how they would react;
drank a lot but did not get drunk. Down at the docks he met
Captain Bra Saunders, who was born in the Bahamas and
taught Hemingway deep sea fishing.
He befriended Jim
Sullivan, a New Yorker in his forties, with many daughters.
Sullivan ran a machine shop for boat repairs and later helped
build the railroad on the Keys. Hemingway asked Sully to be
a godfather of his third son, Gregory and dedicated Green
Hills of Africa to him and to his closest Key West friend,
Charles Thompson.
Thompson was a well connected local aristocrat. His
family owned the marine hardware store, pineapple factory,
turtle cannery, icehouse and a fleet of fishing vessels, and he
often took Hemingway out on his own boat. Pauline became
friendly with Thompson’s wife, Lorine, who was assistant
principal of the high school and had a house full of books.
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Thompson accompanied Hemingway on his first safari and
was portrayed as Karl in Green Hills of Africa.
Hemingway was eager to share the pleasures of the
island with his friends. Dos Passos, Bill Smith and Waldo
Pierce, whom he had met in Paris in the spring of 1927,
came down to Key West in 1928.
Hemingway, always
faithful to the burly and bearded Pierce, overrated his work
and praised his character:
“As a friend he is loyal,
understanding, and generous and the best company anybody
ever had”1
The couple went to Piggott, Arkansas, in late May to
meet Pauline’s parents. It was surrounded by cotton and
soybeans fields, and Hemingway disliked the dull, over
foliaged, closed-in country. The town was very small and was
very rural.
When Hemingway inquired about coming to
Walloon Lake and suggested that Pauline have the baby in
1
MEYERS, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. Harper & Row, Publishers, N. Y. 1817, page 207
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Petoskey, he was discouraged by Dr.
Hemingway, who
offered his obstetrical services in Oak Park to Pauline, finally
decided on a hospital in Kansas City and they spent the hot
month of June over there. She gave birth on June 28th.
Hemingway believed parents should not name children
after themselves so he called his son Patrick. Hemmingway
disliked infants’, including his own, and he kept away from
them as much as possible.
Pauline did not breast-feed
Patrick, left him with her parents when he was six weeks old
and joined Hemingway on August 18. His frequent trips
from Florida to Cuba to the west, which reminded him of
Spain, put him in touch with the quintessential American
characteristics he had known as a boy in northern Michigan.
Dr. Clarence and his wife left Wyoming in late
September and continued to travel around the country. They
spent a month in Piggot, visited Oak Park, had a week in Mac
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Leish Conway, Massachusetts, and saw the Princeton-Yale
football game with the Fitzgeralds on November 17 before
moving to 1100 South Street, on the Atlantic side of Key
West for the winter. In early December Hemingway traveled
to New York to pick up Bumpy, who had sailed from France
with Jinny. On December 6, 1928, in Trenton, on the way
back to Florida, he got a telegram that had been sent to
Scribner’s by Grace, the telegram said: “Try to locate Ernest
Hemingway in New York to advise him of the death of his
father today; ask him to communicate with his home
immediately.”2
2
MEYERS, Jeffrey. Hemingway A Biography. Harper & Row, Publishers, N. Y. 1817 , page 209.
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3.2 Hemingway in Paris: 1921-1928.
Unlike Henry James and T.S. Eliot, Hemingway did not
become an expatriate because of the cultural vacuum in
America. He did not become absorbed in English society and
letters, as James and Eliot did, but was attracted to the Latin
civilization of Italy, Spain and France.
He wanted to
recapture the excitement of his wartime and adventures and
gain new experience in Europe. But he remained in America,
wanted to write American prose and in his early years,
learned from American authors.
He had obtained a good job in Paris, which in the early
1920s was a cheap and an interesting place to live and work.
It provided a good climate for literary experimentation; many
of the best writers in English lived in Paris and numerous
little magazines receptive to the work of new authors were
published there.
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Unlike D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway both appreciated the
discoveries of a journey and extracted the maximum physical
pleasure from the place where he lived. He lived in Paris
from December 1921 until March 1928 but he was away
from the city for about half that time. He spoke fluently
French as well as Spanish and Italian. He understood others,
expressed himself clearly and developed an extensive
technical vocabulary in subjects that particularly interested
him: sports, bullfighting, and war. He nourished and really
liked certain places and fixed them in the imagination of his
readers; for example, Paris and Spain in the twenties, Key
West and Kenya in the thirties, Havana and Venice in the
forties.
Also the couple sailed from New York and arrived in
Paris on December 22, 1921, on time for their first Christmas
dinner in Europe. They didn’t calculate well the price of the
meal and did not have enough money to pay the bill, so
Hadley was forced to wait nervously while Hemingway
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returned to their room for more cash. They first stayed at
Jacob Hotel on the street that had the same name; and on
January 9th moved to an apartment on 74
Rue Cardinal
Lemoine.
Because there was a lot of noise in his apartment
Hemingway rented a small writing room in a hotel on the Rue
Mouffetard, where according to the legend started by
Hemingway and accepted by scholars, Paul Verlaine had
died. Hemingway was not poor, for that time $3,000 a year
was a lot of money in Europe. He calculated that two people
could live well and travel on five dollars a day, which would
leave an amount of $1.200. In Paris, with fourteen francs to
the dollar, their hotel was only one dollar a night, a complete
meal cost fifty cents and they used to eat out a lot.
Though their apartment was cheap, they ate well, bet
money on bike races and horses, went skiing in Switzerland
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and Austria, traveled a lot in northern Italy, spent long
summers in Spain and bought paintings by Miro in 1925.
Hemingway was a very dominant man as his father was.
He felt he had to have some emotional and physical
safeguards in order to write. He saw his wife as a cure for
loneliness but thought love made him vulnerable. He felt the
ideal condition for writing was a completely loyal wife. His
wife by that time, Hadley, was often alone; she enjoyed her
new life and was basically happy. She improved her French,
learned to cook, played the piano and traveled around
Europe.
There was a big problem in their marriage when in
December 1922, Hadley traveled from Paris to Lausanne to
join Hemingway for another ski holiday. She brought with
her all the manuscripts, typescripts, copies and carbons of his
unpublished work, which included material written in
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Petoskey in 1919, some good stories about Kansas City and
his latest efforts. The suitcase containing the material was
stolen from the compartment of Hadley’s train while it was
still in the Gare de Lyon. Despite extensive searches, nothing
was ever recovered.
Hemingway was so shocked and hurt by the loss that he
immediately took a long trip from Lausanne to Paris to
determine if Hadley had left anything at all behind. She had
not. He was so mad at her that he started having affairs with
other women and at the same time he was jealous of her and
blamed her for something she didn’t do.
In Paris Hemingway drank too much, he had headaches,
he spoke slowly and couldn’t remember the words he wanted.
He still suffered from the accident he had in London. When
“he tried to stop drinking; he exercised a lot, ate less, fished,
swam, laid in the sun, tried to sleep enough, and wrote a little
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as if he was learning to write all over again.”3 In the year
between February 1922 and January 1923, Hemingway
formed some of his most important and influential
friendships.
Hemingway soon found that many of his friends were
extremely well educated. Hemingway met Ezra Pound by
chance in Sylvia Beach’s bookshop soon after he returned
from skiing in Chamby in early February 1922. Pound, 14
years older than Hemingway, had been living in Europe since
1907, in Paris since 1920.
Both Pound and Hemingway
were passionately devoted to their art and soon established a
creative sympathy. They liked each other personally and
admired each other’s work. Pound, the first significant writer
to recognize Hemingway’s talent, did everything possible to
help him achieve success. Pound helped Hemingway a lot.
They were very close friends until the poet moved from Paris
to Rapallo in 1924. He saw Pound for the last time a decade
later in Paris.
3
BUCKLEY, Peter. Ernest. The Dial Press, New York. 1978, page 150.
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Life in Paris was not all word. Whether he went to
Constantinople, to New York, Madrid, Toronto or Venice,
Hemingway came back to Paris. For years Paris was his city,
and forever Paris was the city he loved.
3.3 Hemingway as a Soldier.
By the summer of 1917 Ernest Hemingway had made a
choice; he spent as much of his time as possible fishing and
hunting and camping with his friends far from Oak Park.
Hemingway had to make another choice after high
school; he could join the army, he could go to college or he
could get a job. Hemingway decided not to go to college, and
his father decided he should not go to war right away. Ed
Hemingway turned to his brother Tyler who lived in Kansas
City and asked him if he could find a job for Hemingway on
a newspaper. When Hemingway was told he would have to
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wait until fall before going to work, he was glad. It meant he
could spent one more summer in the northern woods,
canoeing slowly down the rivers, fishing in the wide lakes,
cutting hay, and planting vegetables.
By October 1917 Hemingway was glad to leave for
Kansas City; he wanted to be on his own.
But the biggest
action in the world in 1917 was the World War in Europe,
and Hemingway wanted to join it. He was rejected by the
army because the vision in his left eye was poor, but by
Christmas he had decided to drive a Red Cross ambulance at
the front.
At the end of 1918, Hemingway left The Star, took the
train to Chicago, spent one night in Oak Park, traveled to
Michigan where he wanted to fish one more time before
going to the war, rushed home, said good – bye, and went to
New York. In New York, he passed the Red Cross physical
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exam, bought himself a pair of expensive leather boots and
on the morning of May 23rd, sailed for Europe on a French
ship. In Hemingway’s mind he was sailing to see a great
game being played by two teams.
Hemingway knew there were German submarines under
the waves waiting to torpedo his ship, and he asked if they
would see one. Hemingway was in a hurry to go to war. He
landed at Bordeaux, took a night train to Paris, hoped to see
the city being shelled, heard one shell land near him, and
within a few days took another train south. Crossing the
border into Italy, Hemingway and the other Red Cross drivers
joked and sang and enjoyed the lovely ride through the
beautiful country on their way to the war.
Hemingway arrived in Milan ready to rescue wounded
soldiers at the front, but within a day of his arrival, what
looked like a battle front lay at the edge of his city. A large
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munitions factory had exploded, scattering the workers into
ten thousand pieces. Hemingway was sent to help clean up.
In a field of northern Italy he was forced to pick the bloody
remains of Italian workers off the strands of the barbed wire
fence which surrounded their factory.
Two days after the
explosion Ernest took a train to Vicenza. From there he
drove a Red Cross ambulance to Schio in the foothills of the
Alps. Hemingway waited for the action he had come to see,
but the front was quiet near Schio, and the beautiful scenery
didn’t interest him.
The enemy increased the attack along the Piave River,
east of Schio. Hemingway asked to go on the Piave. He was
assigned to a Red Cross canteen in the town of Fossalta on
the banks of the river. Nothing happened for a week, even
though now Hemingway could hear the guns. He talked to
the men who fought in the front line at Fossalta and he grew
restless. It was July, and in a few weeks he was going to be
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nineteen. Hemingway wondered if he would ever see action.
Across the Piave an enemy mortar crew fired a shell in a high
arc over the river. Hemingway was hit. Hot metal cut into
his legs and he fell. His boots filled with blood. Next to him
a man was killed.
A few feet away another man cried.
Hemingway stood. He carried the wounded man back, but he
fell again when bullets from a machine gun hit him in the
right knee and foot. Again Hemingway stood, and again he
carried the wounded man.
His own blood mixed with the
blood which poured from the man on his shoulder, until
Hemingway was covered in red. He was close to death.
He prayed. He saw death. He heard the dying. He was
given morphine to stop the pain. He spoke to the wounded
and was blessed by a priest. The doctors took some of the
metal out of his legs, but they left a lot which they couldn’t
quickly cut out and a week later Hemingway was sent to the
hospital in Milan. Hemingway liked the hospital. There
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were lots of nurses and they took good care of him. Two
machine gun bullets were removed from his right leg, one
from his knee, and the other from his foot. He wrote home to
say he was fine and not to worry, and that he was glad to find
out he might win a medal; the Italian Army wanted to honor
him for having carried a wounded man when he himself had
been badly wounded.
In Chicago, Hemingway was a hero; the newspapers
described his courageous act. Hemingway was very glad to
know that he was being taken so seriously. He even told his
family that being wounded was the next best thing to getting
killed and reading your own obituary. Hemingway described
how he felt when he was hit: he tried to breathe, but his
breath would not come. The fact that he had been so near
death at Fossalta seemed to make Hemingway stronger, as if
he had won a fight he had never expected to win. To die, yet
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not really die, was the dream that Hemingway would always
have.
Hemingway had seen horrors of war; he had found the
action he wanted at Fossalta; he was a wounded hero, and he
was in love. “He was proud of having behaved correctly
when he was hit, proud of Agnes, proud of his courage in the
face of constant pain”4
In the fall of 1918 nothing seemed impossible to him.
When Agnes was sent to another hospital, she and
Hemingway wrote each other every day, sending all the love
back and forth between Milan and Florence.
There were
also letters from Oak Park wanting to know when
Hemingway was going to come home. These were difficult
to answer, because Hemingway didn’t want to go home.
Instead of saying it, he wrote about death, and about his
wounds. Hemingway had told his parents he had faced death
4
BUCKLEY, Peter. Ernest. The Dial Press New York, 1978, page 114
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and not been found wanting, and now he was a First
Lieutenant about to be awarded not one, but two medals.
Hemingway made it clear to his family that he was not the
same young man who had left them only a few months ago.
He felt differently about himself now, and he expected them
to behave differently toward him as a result of everything that
happened to him.
3.4 Hemingway in Cuba, 1939.
In the early years of the war Ernest Hemingway spent his
time in Cuba in sporting and social activities: fishing,
shooting, drinking with his numerous friends. He was resting
on his achievement, writing nothing uncertain about what to
do.
When offered the opportunity to join the war effort
without leaving Cuba, he organized a spy network and
gathered information about Nazi sympathizers on the island.
His references to his activity were usually self-deprecating;
he stressed the fun they had and called it the Crook Factory.
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The file was extremely repetitive, and was funny. People
said that it looked like the letters were written on a typewriter
by a typewriter.
Hemingway’s venture into espionage
introduced him to a new set of friends and contacts. The cast
of his tragicomedy included Spruille Braden, the American
ambassador to Cuba; Robert Joyce, the second secretary,
coordinator of intelligence activities and liaison with the FBI
agents; and Gustavo Duran, who had skillfully commanded
Loyalist divisions in the Spanish Civil War.
Both Hemingway and the FBI stated, more accurately,
that Hemingway first approached Braden and volunteered to
investigate the Spanish Falange with the help of his Loyalist
refugee friends. Supported by the ambassador, Hemingway
discreetly established an amateur but extensive information
service with his own confidential agents: priests, waiters,
fishermen, whores, pimps, and bums. He had 26 informants
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composed of six full-time operatives and 20 undercover men.
His expenses came to a thousand dollars a month and he had
122 gallons of scarce gasoline given to him from the
embassy’s private allotment in April 1943.
In
October
1942
Hemingway
achieved
a
great
administrative coup by recruiting Duran to assist him. A man
of complex character and extraordinary experience, Duran
was significant both in Hemingway’s life and his art. Yet
their association in Cuba destroyed their friendship and was,
for Duran, a subsequent cause for regret.
Duran was a confident and charismatic leader who
inspired loyalty in his men. Duran had a reserve commission
in the Spanish army and was called up at the beginning of the
Civil War. He made a rapid transformation from playboy to
an exceptional soldier and strategist and was more brilliant in
battle than in music.
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Hemingway first met Duran in Paris in 1928 and saw him
soon after arriving in Spain in April 1937, during the siege of
Madrid.
Hemingway saw him in action and admired his
courage and skill.
Hemingway was jealous of Duran’s
friendship with Malraux so he asked for Duran’s criticism
while writing the novel in 1939, thanked him for correcting
the Spanish and was pleased to earn his praise. He said the
Spaniards in his novel would not be like the phony characters
in Man’s Hope.
But he was always insecure when
corresponding with professional soldiers and felt the need to
invent his own exploits. Hemingway told Duran that when he
was only 19 he had commanded a company and then a
battalion, which had suffered many losses, but had been
demoted to platoon leader because he could not write.
Hemingway sent $50 to Duran in London, tried to get
him hired as a technical advisor to the film of For Whom the
Bell Tolls and enclosed a check of $1,000 (which Duran
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returned) when this job fell though. The Durans met the
Hemingways three times in New York from 1940 to1941.
Braden, a fierce crusader against corruption in Cuba, had
also directed Hemingway to look into the involvement of
Cuban officials in the all-pervasive local graft. But Ladd,
who called Braden “a very impulsive individual”, warned
Hoover on December 17, 1942, that the Augean stable could
not be cleaned. If they get involved in investigating Cuban
corruption, they would be thrown out of Cuba.
“Patrick Hemingway was involved in one investigation
when the Crook Factory explored the caves of German sisal
planters to see if they contained supplies for German
submarines. Patrick, the only person small enough to crawl
inside, found nothing there except the caps of beer bottleswhich were not even German”.5
5
WALTON, William. Hemingway Women. page 398
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The FBI attempted to thwart Hemingway in two ways:
by discrediting the information that was supplied to Braden
and passed on to Leddy; and by claiming that Hemingway,
like Duran, was a Communist. A week before President
Batista’s visit to Washington in 1943, Hemingway warned
that General Benitez was proposing to seize power when
Batista was out of his country. But Braden reported in June
1944 that General Benitez was meeting in a house in the
outskirts of Havana, making plans to throw out Batista.
On December 9th 1942, Hemingway reported sighting a
contact between a German submarine and a Spanish steamer,
Marques de Comillas, off the Cuban coast while he was
ostensibly fishing with Winston Guest and four Spaniards as
crew members, but was actually on a confidential mission for
the Naval Attache. The FBI duly investigated the incident
and reported negative results.
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Hemingway, after reading about a new type of oxygenpowered German submarine, investigated the supply and
distribution of oxygen tanks in Cuba. The FBI investigated
and checked the supply and distribution of the island’s
oxygen and found everything properly accounted for.
Hemingway’s investigations began to show a marked
hostility to the Cuban Police and in a lesser degree to the FBI.
The best that can be said for the Crook Factory is that it
placed a certain limitation on the activities of the pro- Nazi
Falangists in Cuba by keeping them under surveillance and
did more good than harm at little cost to the nation. Only the
force of Hemingway’s legend and overpowering personality
could
have
convinced
the
ambassador,
despite
the
overwhelming evidence from the FBI, that his spy games had
any real value.
Hemingway had replaced writing with spying; he had to
justify its worth to Martha, Braden and the FBI, and wanted
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Duran to praise the Crook Factory as he had praised the
novel. But Duran soon become disillusioned of the FBI as
Hemingway’s activities. As Hemingway’s rivalry with the
FBI intensified, he demanded absolute loyalty and became
hostile when he failed to receive it. Duran was the only man
in Cuba on an equal plane with Hemingway and his defection
was a serious blow.
Hemingway had many attractive qualities.
He was
handsome, tough, and skilled at sports, witty and tremendous
fun. Almost everyone he met adored him. In Cuba, however,
his capacity for fun changed to a reckless disregard for
common decency and he began to resemble his own
description of the bullfighter Maera: proud, bitter, foul
mouthed and a great drinker.
Hemingway wanted to keep the spy network all-male
operations and was annoyed when Bonte Duran came to
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Cuba in November 1942 to join her husband. When she
arrived at La Finca guest house, above the office of the Crook
Factory, she immediately noticed a change in Hemingway’s
behavior. So kind and charming in New York, Hemingway
now seemed critical and domineering. He insisted Duran
carry a pistol, disliked his trips to Havana and wanted him to
control the agents from the secret isolation of the Finca.
Duran disapproved of Hemingway’s Cuban life, his
values and his rich friends who had supported the Fascist
cause.
A refined and cultivated man, he disliked
Hemingway’s macho affectation, his obscene language, his
feudal attitude toward his servants, and his shooting live
pigeons at the Club de Cazadores. Though grateful to
Hemingway, he was unable to return Hemingway’s affection.
The Duran’s living at La Finca saw the ugly side of
Hemingway, especially when he was drunk, became angry
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and went out of control. Yet even Duran could not tolerate
the boorish behavior that tested the limits of their friendship.
When a dog jumped on Bonte, Gustavo Duran’s wife,
Hemingway shouted: “Don’t bother the bitch”. Bonte at first
thought he referred to the dog and then realized he was
talking to the dog about her. Martha was also having
problems with Hemingway. In public she was affectionate
rather than critical.
Martha complained that the Crook
Factory interfered with her work, and at times she vented her
irritation on Bonte.
During a lunch at the embassy with Robert Joyce,
Hemingway attacked Duran and ended the friendship. They
met for the last time after Hemingway returned from the war
in May 1945, at a farewell party for Braden; he had been
appointed ambassador to Argentina and had asked Duran to
serve on his staff.
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Like everyone, the FBI also suspected that Hemingway
was a Communist and he was privately accused but no proof
was ever shown as evidence. Hemingway was strong enough
to resist the persecution of the FBI and other government
agencies that conducted hunts for suspect Communists, but
Gustavo Duran was not one of these. It was not as dangerous
to be accused of being a Communist in the early 1940s, when
America was fighting a war with Russia as an ally, as it was
in the early 1950’s, when America was fighting the
Communists in Korea.
Hemingway’s spy activities and conflict with the FBI
reveal a great deal about his restless and reckless character in
the early 1940’s. Courageous, faithful to the Loyalists and
intrigued by espionage, he was willing to try a wild scheme
to help his country during the war.
He persuaded the
embassy and the State Department that he was both serious in
his endeavors and able to conduct the spy network. The FBI
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was not able to differentiate between anti-Fascist and proCommunist, and had no evidence to support their accusations
against him, but they saw the Crook Factory as a rival
company and wanted to put it out of business.
3.5 Hemingway’s marriages.
3.5.1 Hemingway‘s First Marriage to Hadley Richardson
1921-1927.
Ernest Hemingway met Hadley Richardson in early
November 1920 when he was living in Kenley Smith’s
apartment on East Chicago Avenue.
She had been a
classmate and a close friend of Kenley’s sister, Katy, at the
Mary Institute in St. Louis and was invited to Chicago just
after the death of her mother.
Hadley came from a comfortable background, but she
had had a tragic early life. A year older than Agnes and eight
years older than Hemingway, she was born in St. Louis in
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November 1981. She was the youngest of six children, two
of whom died in infancy.
As a small child she fell out of a widow, suffered a
serious back injury and was brought in as an invalid. Her
mother was interested in theosophy and psychic phenomena;
her father entered the family pharmaceutical business, and
after financial reverses, shot himself in 1903, when Hadley
was 12. She toured Europe in the summer of 1909 with her
mother, who chosed Hadley’s clothes from a utilitarian
viewpoint.
Hadley’s sister died in 1910 when her clothes caught fire.
In her teens, Hadley told Hemingway, she had a lesbian
friendship with Mrs. Rapallo; “being very suggestible I began
to imagine that I had all this low sex feeling and she for mequite sure now it was nothing.”6
6
KERT, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York: Norton, 1983, page 96
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Hadley was a talented pianist who fell in love with her
teacher, Harrison Williams, and was rejected by him- as
Hemingway had been by Agnes. She gave performances in
St. Louis, but left her musical career because of her lack of
physical stamina- just as Grace had because of her weak eyes.
Hadley’s oppressive mother died of Bright´s disease in the
fall of 1920 and left her with a trust fund of about $3,000 a
year. Her mother‘s death allowed Hadley to shed the role of
dependent invalid and to live her own life.
Hadley was tall and beautifully built, with reddish gold
hair and high cheekbones. Talented, charming, and friendly
she immediately impressed Hemingway. Hadley was the kind
of woman his parents would approve of; she shared
passionate interest in music with Grace and was well liked by
everyone.
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Hadley had a kind and tender temperament, was
intelligent and well-read. She and Hemingway were frank
with each other and discussed Havelock Ellis’ descriptions of
sexual behavior during their courtship. Hadley gave him
French lessons on the boat to Europe and said: “Ernest’s
French was far from perfect and never got much better. But
he could put himself over and could understand.”7
Hemingway, who brought Hadley out of her sheltered
existence, gave her self-confidence and introduced her to
outdoor life, said she was the wife who liked to ski and really
do things. He admired Hadley. She knew as much about
boxing as she did about music, and was a good drinker.
Their
courtship
was
conducted
mainly
by
correspondence, with Hemingway in Chicago and Hadley in
St. Louis. The trials of separation with Hadley as with his
later wives- always intensified his feelings and stimulated his
7
ARONOWITZ, Alfred. Ernest Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Man. New York, 1961, page
57.
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love. Hadley wrote boring letters. She complained about
being apart and so far away. In a letter of December 17,
1920, she confessed her love and was responsive and
passionate.
They were engaged in St. Louis on June 21st. Hadley’s
friends were impressed by the liveliness and excitement that
Hemingway generated.
Despite their difference in age,
Hemingway was, from Hadley’s point of view, the most
attractive husband.
Since Hadley’s parents were dead and she did not want a
St. Louis wedding that would be dominated by her sister,
they were married in Horton Bay, Michigan. Though Hadley
was
Episcopalian
and
Hemingway
nominally
Congregationalist, the ceremony took place in the Methodist
church on September 3rd, 1921. Hadley’s sister almost held
up the proceedings by insisting that the word “obey” had
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been stricken out. The preparations prior to church reminded
Hemingway of a dressing room before fights and football
games, and he wondered if he would feel the same way if he
was going to be hanged.
The couple spent the two- week honeymoon at the
Hemingway family cottage and after the wedding Hadley
remembered that it was a terrible honeymoon. They both got
food poisoning and influenza, and all she could remember,
when they went to the cottage, was being sick. During the
honeymoon Hemingway, still insecure, took Hadley into
Petoskey and introduced her to Marjorie Bump and several
other old girlfriends to show her how much they missed him.
Because Hemingway had an argument with Kenley
Smith, Hemingway and Hadley were unable to move into his
apartment as originally planned and had to live instead in a
terrible apartment on North Clark Street.
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Hadley’s uncle
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Arthur conveniently died in October and left her an
unexpected legacy of $8,000, which, with her trust fund,
supported them in Chicago and in Europe. Hemingway, who
had no job when they married, arranged with the “Toronto
Star” in November to become their European correspondent.
The post war years marked his transition from Agnes to
Hadley, from the betrayal of love to the commitment of
marriage.
Both women were considerably older than
Hemingway; both were extremely attractive in a similar sort
of way: with soft features and good figures; both wrote the
same kind of conventional love letters. But Agnes, a welltraveled professional nurse, took the dominant role when
Hemingway was wounded, dependent upon her care and
sexually innocent. Hadley was very submissive and Agnes
sophisticated and self confident was well aware of his
youthful limitations; she had a job and was not ready for
marriage.
“With Hadley, Hemingway achieved everything
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he had hoped for with Agnes: the love of a beautiful woman,
a comfortable income, a life in Europe”8
3.5.2 Hemingway’s 12 year Marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer
1927 – 1939.
Ernest Hemingway and Hadley survived the first three
crises of their marriage: the lost manuscripts, the unwanted
pregnancies, the flirtations with Duff Twysden. Though Duff
had resisted her advances, his falling in love with her had
sapped Hemingway’s moral strength and weakened his
emotional commitment to his wife. He was still susceptible
to temptations of love and began an affair with Pauline
Pfeiffer in February 1926.
He and Hadley separated and then she divorced him on
January 27, 1927 and he married Pauline in May. Pauline
was more interesting looking than attractive. Pauline was
8
MEYERS, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. Harper & Row, Publishers, N. Y. , 1917, page 62
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small and fine-boned with black hair and dark eyes, a
vivacious woman rather than a pretty one.
Kitty Cannell introduced Pauline and Jinny to the
Hemingways in March 1925, when they returned from their
first winter in Schruns. Hemingway and Pauline were not
immediately attracted to each other. Hemingway thought that
Jinny was better looking than Pauline.
Hemingway saw
Pauline occasionally, perhaps secretly, during 1925; in the
fall after he had freed himself from the spell of Duff
Twysden, he fell in love with her.
Kitty Cannell was surprised to meet Pauline carrying skis
through the streets of Paris on route to Schruns for a two
week Christmas holiday in 1925.
There she began her
campaign to win Hemingway from Hadley.
Pauline derived her confidence from a secure and
prosperous background. Both her parents were in Iowa. Her
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father, Paul Pfeiffer, was the son of a Lutheran immigrant
and had spoken German as a boy.
Her mother, Mary
Downey, was the daughter of an Irish Catholic. Pauline was
born in Iowa where her dad had a drugstore. The family
lived in St. Louis, where Paul made a fortune as a commodity
broker, from 1900 to 1912.
Paul Pfeiffer then moved to Cherry Street Hill in Piggott
a small, boring, hot southern town of 3,000 people in 1913.
He bought 60,000 acres in northern Arkansas; cleared the
timberland, planted wheat, cotton, clover, corn and soybeans,
and became one of the richest landowners in the state.
Paul’s brother (Pauline’s uncle) Gus, a very rich man,
owned Richard Hudnut Perfumes, Sloan’s Liniment and
William Warner Pharmaceuticals. He was always generous
with Pauline and Hemingway.
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Hemingway do all the things he’d been too busy making
money to do.”9
Pauline graduated from the Academy of the Visitation in
St. Louis and from the School of Journalism at the University
of Missouri (where she was the roommate and close friend of
Katy Smith) in 1918. She worked on the “Cleveland Star”,
“The New York Daily Telegraph” and “Vanity Fair”; and had
been engaged to her lawyer cousin in New York.
She and Jinny came to Paris in the early 1920’s and
Pauline worked as an assistant to Main Brocher, editor of the
French Vogue.
She attended fashion shows and sent in
reports, but never actually published anything in Vogue.
Hadley and Pauline presented a striking contrast in 1926.
Hadley was almost alone in the world; her parents were dead
and she did not get on with her sister in St. Louis. Pauline
had the support of her family and a close friend of her sister
9
DOS PASSOS, John. The Best Times. New York: New American Library, 1966, page 204
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in Paris. She was ambitious, spoiled and wore fashionable
clothes. With no domestic or emotional ties, Pauline was free
to do as she wished.
Hemingway felt his lack of money seriously limited his
freedom and was attracted to her fortune.
Pauline was
sexually exciting and flattering as well as marriageable,
stable and secure.
Hemingway associated Pauline with
Vogue, freedom and the luxurious lives led by the Fitzgeralds
and the Murphys.
Hemingway needed a new wife to match his new status
as a highly respected author. Hemingway, who was
handsome, self-confident, interesting and talented, always
attracted men and women.
Pauline spoiled him with
attention, threw herself at him and made it difficult for him to
resist her. His sister Sunny (who disliked Pauline) claimed
that when she later told Pauline that she herself had fallen in
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love with a married man and could not do anything about it,
Pauline recommended her “to go ahead and get him”. “She
had found who she wanted, and had gotten him, and was glad
she had”10
Hemingway felt it exciting to have two attractive women
in love with him and to sleep with both of them.
The
dangerous secrecy of his affair intensified his pleasure. In
Schurns, Hadley took care of the baby while Hemingway
taught Pauline how to ski. In early February 1926 he went to
New York for 10 days to change publishers. In Paris, he saw
Pauline, who offered to go with him to New York. They
became lovers that month. On February 4th, the day after
Hemingway sailed to Mauretania, Pauline wrote Hadley a
letter that said: “your husband, Ernest, was a delight to me. I
tried to see him as much as he would see me and was
possible”.11
10
11
MILLER, Ernie. Hemingway’s Life, page 104.
MILLER, Ernie. Hemingway’s Life, page 115
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In the spring, when Hemingway returned from the
Schruns, the Pfeiffer sisters invited Hadley on a car trip to the
Chateaux of the Loire. Hadley asked Jinny how Pauline got
on with Hemingway and she responded in a way that Hadley
was very suspicious about the affairs both of them were
having. Jinny told Hadley that she thought Hemingway and
Pauline liked each other very much.
In May when Hadley asked Hemingway if he loved
Pauline, he replied that she was at fault for even mentioning
the subject. He was not sorry at all and he continued to see
Pauline as if nothing happened. Though Hadley was aware
of the affair and told Kitty Cannell that Pauline was stealing
her husband, she held on for several more months.
She
believed in her marriage vows, hoped to protect Bumpy and
feared Hemingway would leave her if she forced a showdown
with Pauline.
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The Hemingways, the Murphys and Pauline went to
Pamplona in early July and then returned to Antibes. A
revealing photograph showed Hemingway and Pauline
together.
Pauline’s Catholicism was a crucial factor in her
character, in her affair with Hemingway, in their marriage
and in their divorce. Pauline was an observant Catholic, yet
she committed fornication and broke up a marriage of a
couple with a small child. She felt guilty about contravening
her religion while pursuing her love; but since the Church did
not recognize his marriage (which made Bumpy a bastard)
she was able to marry him.
Hemingway was a romantic at heart. Every time he fell
in love with a woman, he believed that he had to marry her
and would remain married forever.
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Once Hadley agreed to divorce, she behaved with dignity
and generosity. She found it difficult to accept the role of
abandoned wife, but drew on her reserves of emotional
strength, stopped loving Hemingway, found the end of the
marriage a kind of relief and felt as if a great millstone had
been lifted from her back. She also protected Bumpy and
made it easier for him to accept the divorce by explaining that
Hemingway and Pauline were very much in love. She never
criticized Hemingway nor expressed any bitterness about
him.
Hadley had gained greatly from her marriage and was
much better off- more self-assured and independent- when he
left her than when he met her. He had rescued her from her
oppressive sister, convinced her that she was not an invalid,
taught her sporting skills, introduced her to life in Paris, taken
her to travels in Europe, presented her to the leading writers
and artists of the time, and fathered a beautiful child with her.
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She knew Hemingway during his best years, and did not have
to endure and care for him during his steep decline.
Jack attended the Ecole Alsancienne, The Ecole Montcel
and the Denny School from 1928 to 1934. In 1933 Hadley
married Paul Mowrer, chief editorial writer of the Chicago
Daily News, and Jack attended the Chicago Latin School.
Paul was a good father; Jack felt fortunate to have two fathers
who complemented each other perfectly and gave him
everything he could possibly desire.
For Hemingway, each marriage looked best in retrospect.
He continued to write Hadley, especially during periods of
loneliness and emotional crisis, and to use their familiar
nicknames.
Hemingway’s marriage to Pauline meant he would have
to become a Catholic and bring up his sons in that faith. He
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married Pauline in a Catholic Church, baptized Gregory and
Patrick as Catholics, but ceased to be a Catholic during the
Spanish Civil War.
Despite his suicide, he was given a
Catholic burial. His Cuban friends thought “Hemingway was
no more a Catholic than he was a Moslem”. He confirmed
this by declaring: “Hell, any man could become a Catholic
for a million dollars; only suckers worry about saving their
souls.”12
3.5.3 Hemingway’s Marriage to Martha Gellhorn 19391945.
Ernest Hemingway’s love for Martha Gellhorn was
connected to his participation in the Spanish Civil War, just
as his love for Agnes von Kurowsky was to the Great War
and his love for Mary Welsh to World War II. He was in
hospital when he fell in love with Agnes, and in London, far
from the front, when he met Mary: but his affairs with
Martha were conducted in the midst of the war, which made
12
BAKER, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. N. Y. Scribner’s, 1969, page 220.
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it more exciting. Just as Hadley had tried to prevent him
from reporting the Turkish War, so Pauline attempted to keep
him from going to Spain.
He was with Martha during his four visits to Spain and
separated from her when he returned to Pauline; and these
separations intensified his passion, as they had done during
his courtship of his first two wives. Hemingway’s affair with
Martha was similar to the one with Pauline. Like Pauline,
Martha was a youthful, attractive, glamorous and fashionably
dressed woman.
Also, she insinuated herself into the
household, courted the passive Hemingway, who became her
athletic instructor while his wife was preoccupied with
domestic responsibilities, and wrote endearing letters
thanking the wife for her kind hospitality. In both cases, the
affair was conducted secretly and at a safe distance.
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When Pauline discovered it, she (like Hadley) remained
tolerant, and tried to maintain the marriage. But the mistress
eventually displaced the wife. When Hemingway married
Martha, he felt guilty about abandoning his wife. After his
divorce from Pauline, and from Martha, he turned for
consolation to Hadley and recalled the sentimental memories
of their marriage.
Martha’s father, like Hemingway’s, was a doctor who
specialized in obstetrics. Dr. George Gellhorn, like Hadley’s
mother, died shortly before his daughter met Hemingway;
and he compensated, in part, for the loss of the parent.
Martha, like Hadley and Pauline, came from an upper –
middle- class family in St. Louis and had been educated at
private schools in that city. Like Hadley, Martha attended
but did not graduate from Bryn Maw; like Pauline, she was
trained as a journalist and worked for a time on the Paris
edition of Vogue.
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Martha had recently ended her relationship with the
French journalist Baron Bertrand de Jouvenel, whom she had
lived with for several years. Hemingway had recently parted
from Jane Mason, who had been his mistress for four years.
Martha was much more a threat to Pauline; for she was not,
like Jane, married, a heavy drinker and emotionally unstable.
Just as Hadley was associated with Chicago and Paris,
Pauline with Key West and Africa, so Martha was connected
to the war in Spain and the move to Cuba.
Martha was born in St. Louis in 1908, was nine years
younger than Hemingway. Her Austrian born father was a
professor at Washington University Medical School; her
mother, who graduated from Bryn Maw, was a leading social
reformer and suffragist. Martha had worked as a journalist in
America and in Europe in the early 1930s published two
books: What Mad Pursuit (1934), a novel with an epigraph
from A Farewell to Arms, and The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936),
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a collection of stories based on her experience as an
investigator for Roosevelt’s advisor Harry Hopkins in the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
Martha was a physical contrast to Pauline “If Pauline, as
Hemingway wrote Green Hills of Africa, was like a little
terrier, then Martha could be compared to a wolfhound”13
Martha was tall and shapely, with long blond hair, blue eyes,
fine skin, and very sensual. She could be quite charming, and
was intelligent, capable, and ambitious. Hemingway met her
in Sloppy Joe’s bar in December 1936 when she was on
holiday with her family; they were immediately attracted to
each other and established a sympathetic rapport. Martha
confessed to Pauline that she had spent so much time in Key
West house, she felt like a fixture there. “Most observers
agreed that Martha courted Ernest”14
13
14
KERT, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York: Norton, 1983, page 325.
HEMINGWAY, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. Scribner’s, 1936, page 64.
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After her family had left, he spent a great deal of time
going swimming with his actual love and showing her around
the island. When they were alone, Pauline told him that she
supposed Hemingway was busy again helping Miss Gellhorn
with her writing.
Martha insisted that Hemingway never
taught her how to write, since she had published two books
before she met him. But he claimed to have tutored her, and
many critics commented on Hemingway’s strong influence
on her work.
Martha admitted that he enriched her experience by
teaching her about boats, bulls, fishing and shooting. When
he left by car in January, he flew north to meet her in Miami
and took the train with her as far as Jacksonville. On January
5th, 1937, Martha gave her friend Eleanor Roosevelt her first
impressions of Hemingway as a man and as a writer.
Hemingway and Martha shared an interest in Loyalist
Spain and planned to go to the war together. Hemingway and
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Martha tried to be discreet, corresponded secretly, traveled
separately, behaved tactfully in public and tried to keep their
love secret from Pauline. “He set up a separate bank account
with funds from Scribner’s to pay for his affair.”15 They used
pet names as he had done with Hadley and Pauline: he was
the phallic Scrooby, she was Mooky.
Hemingway’s
attraction to Martha was reinforced when they were in Spain.
The physical hardship and the danger of war- must have been
extremely powerful to overcome both his love for and his
guilt about Pauline.
3.5.4 Hemingway’s Marriage to Mary Welsh 1945-1961.
Ernest Hemingway three marital failures did not affect
his belief in women or in himself, and he returned to Cuba in
mid March to prepare for his fourth marriage. He wanted to
be a good husband to Mary in 1945 as he had been to Hadley
in 1921. While recovering from his injuries and making the
adjustment from war to peace he got the house and boat ready
15
REYNOLDS, Michael. Hemingway’s Reading. Princeton University Press, 1981, page 28.
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for Mary’s arrival. He was eager to show her the places that
had inspired his work, to teach her sporting skills and to
introduce her to his friends.
Hemingway was always lonely without a woman; he was
very desperate for Mary to arrive. She would confirm his
capacity to conquer and to love, help him readjust to civilian
life and re-establish himself as a writer.
Mary was Hemingway’s wife during the years of his
greatest fame and most radical deterioration, of the Nobel
Prize as well as the Mayo Clinic. At the age of 36, she gave
up her independence and professional career, adopted his
sporting passions, matched his numerous accidents with her
own falls and fractures, and even tolerated his affairs with
other women. Mary had been brought up on boats and loved
the Gulf Stream.
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Hemingway noted with pleasure that she fished, swam
and cooked well; she liked the cats, the sea and the Cuban
climate. He thought Mary was forty times more woman than
Martha. Hemingway‘s sons agreed with his opinions. Jack
was impressed, at their first meeting in June 1945, when
Mary came out of the pool naked to greet him. He found her
well-built, well-informed, bright and interesting. She
interrupted Hemingway’s conversation but he was tolerant,
and affectionate with her. She learned Spanish rapidly when
they were in Cuba.
Toby Bruce rarely saw Hemingway arguing with Mary
and thought they were very happy together.
When
Hemingway refused to take her home, she waited patiently, if
angrily, in the car. When he became too friendly with Cuban
women, she threw a “slight fit”- nothing serious.
George
Plimpton described her as a jolly housewife who ran the
house well, made life pleasant and was a generous hostess.
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Mary loved Hemingway much more than the last wife
(Martha) did. Hemingway was kinder to his wives in print
than in person. Though Mary lacked psychological insight
and showed little understanding of his complex inner self, he
exaggerated her talents, and boasted about his own good
choice when presenting his ideal wife to the public in his
“Situation Report” of 1956: “Miss Mary is durable, she is
also brave, charming, witty, exciting to look at, a pleasure to
be with and a good wife.
She is also an excellent fisherwoman, a fair wing shot, a
strong swimmer, a really good cook, a good judge of wine,
and an excellent gardener, an amateur astronomer, a student
of art, political economy, Swahili, French and Italian and can
run a boat or a household in Spanish”16
On June 20th, 1945, Hemingway had his third serious
road accident in 13 months. While he was driving slowly and
soberly in Havana, his car skidded on a muddy road, jumped
16
BAZAN, Zayas. Cuban Friends Remember, page 160.
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a ditch and crashed into a tree. He suffered a smashed knee
and a deep wound on his forehead, which banged into the
rearview mirror. Mary had a deep and bloody cut on her left
cheek, which required plastic surgery. Soon after she met
Hemingway, their sporting life led to a long sequence of
accidents and illnesses. She fractured her right ankle in a
skiing accident in Cortina in January 1949 and her left ankle
in February 1950. She had a blood clot in her right leg in
September 1950, cracked her ribs in a plane crash in January
1954, broke her toe in July 1959, shattered her left elbow
after falling on the ice in November 1959 and fell down the
stairs in April 1961.
The gravest crisis occurred in Casper, Wyoming, on
August 19, 1946, five months after their marriage on March
14th. Mary awoke at seven in the morning with intense pain
and a severe internal hemorrhage.
She had a tubular
pregnancy- a fertilized egg in the Fallopian tube instead of in
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the uterus- and the tube suddenly ruptured. Hemingway, as
usual, responded brilliantly in the emergency and saved her
life taking her to the hospital. Although, Mary’s veins
collapsed and there was no pulse, Mary survived.
Despite Mary’s admirable qualities and his own hopes,
promises and intentions, Hemingway was not a good
husband. He usually woke up in the morning happy, but
could not sustain that mood throughout the day.
He
sometimes distrusted his wife. He once showed Bill Walton
his family albums and said: ““Don’t tell Mary. She’ll sell
them to “Life” right away.” If Mary said or did something to
irritate him, he would burn slowly, erupt into fireworks and
become an absolute devil. When she failed to get his pocket
knife repaired, for example, he called her a “thief”. Mary
like all Hemingway’s wives, would sometimes compete with
him for attention, tell his stories, and criticize him. This
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would lead to high tension, cutting remarks and terrible
arguments.
Hemingway’s increasing obsession with women’s hair
and sexual fantasies coincided with the distressing loss of his
own hair. In Death in the Afternoon he criticized Cayetano
Ordonez as “prematurely bald from using hair fixatives” and
condemned a young homosexual who “had had his hair
hennaed”. But at the Dorchester Hotel in May 1944, while
using an eyedropper to apply hair-growing lotion, he told
Roal Dahl that he needed the implement “to get the stuff
through the hair and onto the scalp”. When Dahl observed:
“But you don’t have much hair to get though”, he irritably
replied: “I have enough.””17
17
BAKER, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner’s, 1969, page 390.
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CHAPTER IV
INFLUENCE OF THE TIME ON HIS WORKS
4.1 Hemingway’s Journeys to War.
Throughout Ernest Hemingway's life, timing was to be a
key factor in what happened to him and in how he reacted.
Hemingway's timing was always very good, whether with
regard to external events or to his own endeavors first at
becoming a writer and then at promulgating his career as one.
With regard to timing, war was one of the areas in which
history accommodated Hemingway-his lifetime spanned four
major wars, three of which he saw close-up, though never as
a soldier, and he often embroidered his war experiences for
presentation to the home audience to make them look as
much as a soldier as he possibly could. In his youth this
would take the form of getting himself seriously wounded.
But young or old, playing like a soldier, whether in real life
or false, living through his fictional characters was something
Hemingway found irresistible.
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When he was young, it was part of his natural desire to
be where the action was. Contemporaries who worked with
the teenager Hemingway during his days as a cub reporter on
the Kansas City Star reported that he would go everywhere to
know where the ambulance went, where the crime had
occurred, and to get information quickly.
He had graduated from high school in 1917, and turning
down the chance to go to college, proceeded directly into
newspaper work after an uncle pulled some strings and
helped him get a job in Kansas City.
In 1917 America entered World War I. Hemingway, like
many young American males at the time, heard the stories
coming back from Europe and was determined to get into the
war somehow. He would have liked to enlist as a soldier, but
his father opposed that idea, and in any case there was his
problem of poor vision in his left eye, too. But while working
on the Star, he struck up a friendship with 22 year-old Ted
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Brumback, who just the previous summer had enlisted in the
American Field Service and spent four months in France as
an ambulance driver. Since it was unlikely that he would get
into the war as a combatant, Hemingway decided to continue.
After persuading his father to drop his objections, he,
Brumback and another friend, Wilson Hicks, signed on with
the Red Cross and by the following spring were in the war.
They ended up serving in northern Italy, not far from Milan.
On July 8, 1918, while he was passing out chocolate
bars, cigarettes and magazines to Italian soldiers on the Piave
River near Fossalta, Hemingway's dream came true that night
when he was wounded by the Austrians. His later
recuperation in a Red Cross hospital would include a brief
romance with a nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. This romance
would result a decade later in his novel A Farewell to Arms,
and many decades later, in 1996, in the movie “In Love and
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War”, although to the end of her life Kurowsky kept denying
that it ever happened.
Hemingway's next trip to war was a short one. In 1922 he
was a Paris correspondent for the Toronto Star, and that
newspaper sent him to Constantinople to cover the war
between Greece and Turkey. He was there only for a few
weeks, but the result was two pages of fiction, later reflected
in his first book of short stories, In Our Time.
In 1937 Hemingway decided to go to Spain. He went as
an “antiwar correspondent”. He tried
to warn the United
States of the danger ahead, hoping to help his country out of
the next World War.
As soon as he reached Madrid,
Hemingway drove to the front. He wanted to see all the
battles and he wanted to talk to the men who fought in them.
He wanted to know how he felt when his own life was in
danger.
But he didn’t have to go to the front to find out;
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death was all around him in Madrid. The hotel where he
lived was hit by an explosion; people were killed in the
streets every hour.
Hemingway studied what interested him. He examined
battle plans; discussed strategy with commanding officers;
spent hours talking military tactics, and everywhere he went
he impressed the professional soldiers with his knowledge of
war science. He had to know how something was done.
Hemingway was very happy about his war experiences.
He felt that this would make him write better than ever
before. To be with the men who were fighting to survive
gave him the feeling that he was with his own kind.
Hemingway insisted on living, even though he was constantly
threatened by death, and he enjoyed being with others who
insisted on doing the same.
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Going to war was like joining a club where all the
members played the same game.
The daily victory over
death made Hemingway feel more alive. He made new
friends with the generals and lieutenants, with Spaniards,
Russians and Americans, with doctors, tank drivers, waiters
and drivers; he was very friendly and anyone he met became
his friend. When he drove to Madrid he saw the troops fight
in the pine forest; he saw the enemy planes; listed the guerilla
fighters, and wondered when victory would come, and if it
would come.
Martha Gellhorn came to Madrid as a war correspondent.
She lived in the same hotel with Hemingway and they went
to the front together. Pauline was in Key West with her two
sons.
The war was a political war; it was not a war to
conquer enemy land.
Spain was her own enemy.
Hemingway saw this and he was on the side of the people.
He helped to make a film which would be used to raise
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money to buy ambulances.
Just as in World War I, he
wanted to help the wounded.
Because Hemingway refused to join one side, he did not
act politically.
He leaned toward the Republicans in the
Spanish Civil War, against the Fascists, but that was because
he believed in freedom. For once Hemingway set out to
work for a cause. He went to the White House to show the
movie he helped to make in Spain, and he went to Hollywood
hoping to raise money for ambulances. Then he went back to
Key West, but not for a long time. After a few weeks he
went back to war. From the fall of 1937 until early 1938 he
stayed in Spain; many times he was almost killed.
After three months of leaving Spain, he had to go to war.
He felt better about bombs and the exploding artillery shells.
In his hotel room in Madrid, Hemingway wrote stories for
magazines in which he tried to make the readers feel what it
was like to be at war. In his stories he wrote what he knew
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about feeling hurt. He felt better when he wrote; it was a way
to feel less helpless.
When he was not writing, when he was at war,
Hemingway was the first to help the wounded. He was not a
man of words; when there was a danger he acted; he cleaned
the blood from the injured men, put on bandages, tried to
make them comfortable, and if they were dying he gently
spoke the last words which they heard.
Hemingway left Spain, left the war, and went home to
Key West. “Wherever he went he made it clear that he hated
the Fascists, hated the war, that he cared for freedom and for
people, and that he didn’t care for politicians anywhere”.1
“In December 1941 The United States was attacked by
Japan. Even though Ernest hated war, once his country was at
war he felt they should fight to win. Ernest decided to fight
1
BUCKLEY, Peter. Ernest. The Dial Press, New York, 1978, page 143.
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in a very strange way. He convinced the staff at the United
States Embassy in Havana that he could help to win if he was
officially helped to do two things. First, Ernest wanted to be
allowed to create a private intelligence agency; his friends
would act as secret agents, and he as chief agent would bring
the intelligence in to the Embassy. Secondly, Ernest was to
be supplied with the weapons necessary to transform Pilar
from a fishing boat into a submarine chaser. Ernest felt that
his great knowledge of the sea would permit him to find
enemy submarines when they surfaced. Once found, Pilar
would approach slowly, like a fishing boat, and then
suddenly, at the last moment, Ernest and his crew would man
their hidden machine guns and move down the German
sailors while, at the same time, throwing grenades down the
open submarine tower”.2
“From the war in the air, Ernest went to the war on land,
in Normandy. He went to an infantry division, and from a
2
HEMINGWAY, Ernest. Hemingway’s Five Wars. London Magazine 1985.
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division he went to a regiment. The commanding officer was
Colonel Lanham; Ernest stayed for 10 days and they became
friends. Ernest captured a Mercedes Benz and a motorcycle
from the enemy; he traveled with the troops; he armed
himself; he moved ahead of the troops; he was pinned down
by the enemy fire; he escaped; he studied the movement of
the armies with the generals; he walked the streets of the
villages with the infantry squads”. 3
Between Normandy and Paris, in July and August,
Hemingway helped his side win the war. No one asked him
to, but he decided to explore for the army. Even though he
was supposed to be writing magazine articles, Hemingway
did not write; instead he moved ahead, and tried to find the
Germans and warn his friends where the enemy was so the
enemy could be destroyed.
Near Paris, Hemingway
organized French guerilla fighters into a band of intelligence
scouts. He was like their leader and he communicated the
3
SANDILANDS H. R., Brigadier. The Fifth in the Great War. Dover New York, 1938, page 321.
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information that they got to the US Army officers in charge
of the battle.
Hemingway was brave because he wanted to know where
the Germans were. He was there on the days Paris was
liberated from the Germans. He cried like everybody else; he
was happy but he found that Paris was dangerous because
there were still Germans and French enemies who wanted to
fight. Hemingway knew that was horrible, but he found that
war was not complicated. In the battle he knew who his
friends were and who his enemies were.
War was one of the most important things to
Hemingway, and he said that war meant everlasting pain, and
that make believe could never make such pain go away.
Nobody could feel safe when his stories were read because
the world is not a safe place; if people felt afraid it was
because there was good reason to be.
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4.2 Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway first met in April
1925 at the Dingo Bar. At the time, Hemingway, who had
been working as a journalist, had only published a handful of
stories and poems, a total of eighty-eight pages. Fitzgerald on
the other hand was the author of three published novels, two
short collections and some individual stories. Two weeks
after the publication of The Great Gatsby and six months
before the appearance of In Our Time, Fitzgerald was writing
for 3 million readers of the Saturday Evening Post while
Hemingway was publishing in little magazines. Fitzgerald
introduced Hemingway to Scribner’s and helped him toward
recognition.
But the meeting led to a friendship often
characterized by insecurity and jealousy – a friendship that
would affect not only the two men but their works as writers
too.
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Fitzgerald
liked
to
tell
admiring
stories
about
Hemingway and invest his life with a special touch of
glamour.
Fitzgerald honestly felt that Hemingway was
essentially superior. From the moment Hemingway began to
appear in print, perhaps it did not matter what he himself
produced or failed to produce. He felt free to write just for
profit, and to live for fun, if possible.
Fitzgerald’s worst
qualities were his inability to hold his liquor and his
compulsion to humiliate himself when he inevitably got
drunk. Once, he threw ashtrays from tables when he was
drunk.
At times Fitzgerald seemed to welcome the
opportunity to display the worst side of his character. After
what happened at the meeting while he was drunk, he
apologized.
In April 1926, Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald
expressing that his novel, The Sun Also Rises; was ready to
be shipped to Scribner's, and seeking Fitzgerald's opinion or
advising of the novel.
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As Hemingway's sponsor with Scribner's, Fitzgerald had
a considerable investment in the success of The Sun Also
Rises. Upon his first reading of the novel, Fitzgerald, a
professional with a talent for revision, realized the book was
not yet ready for publication. Fitzgerald's critiques were
delivered to Hemingway in the form of a ten-page
handwritten letter that alternated between criticism and
praise. Fitzgerald helped Hemingway a great deal in his
writing career. The advice for the novel, The Sun Also Rises,
was to cut not by mere paring but to take out the worst of the
scenes because there were glib statements, maladroit
paragraphs, descriptions that could be found in guidebooks,
unnecessary character information, and flat anecdotes.
Fitzgerald's critiques were taken to heart and Hemingway
decided that, rather than cut down the chapters to eliminate
the first 16 pages entirely. However, in Paris in the 1920s
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Hemingway gave the impression that Fitzgerald had no
influence on the editing of The Sun Also Rises.
It is true that Fitzgerald did not see the manuscript until it
had been sent to Scribner's at the end of April 1926;
Hemingway omitted vital details including the fact that he not
only asked Fitzgerald's opinion, but also incorporated almost
all of his suggestions before the final proof of the novel was
cut.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway were close during those first
years of friendship. As Hemingway's literary career
prospered, he became resentful of the people who had helped
in the beginning of his career: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound
and especially Scott Fitzgerald who took the brunt of
Hemingway's cutting words.
Two decades after Fitzgerald's death, Hemingway who
never knew when to stop competing, continued to defame
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Fitzgerald in stories and interviews, and even posthumously
in A Moveable Feast.
4.3 Perkin’s death and the decline of Hemingway.
Maxwell Perkins was both Ernest Hemingway’s and
Scott Fitzgerald’s editor at Scriber’s and he was also a good
friend, one of the few men whose advice Hemingway asked
for and listened to. When Hemingway wrote The Sun Also
Rises, Perkins thought it was like life itself, very real. It was
after reading the book, people could see what Hemingway
had seen. Work was going well, but life was not. His stories
were translated into French and German; more and more
people read his work; for the first time he was published in
England; book sales in the United States grew month by
month and at the same time the price he could ask for a new
story increased.
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Hemingway was happy to know that more and more
people enjoyed reading what he wrote; his words were being
read. Hemingway was becoming famous, but he was sad. He
said that the people in his novels were people who hurt
themselves, who hurt others, and who didn’t know how to
stop hurting.
This was the way he thought about himself,
Hadley, and Pauline. Hemingway hurt as much as in his life
as the characters he had written about hurt in theirs. He said
he was unhappy. He had no idea what to do.
“Max Perkins published a fourth book for Ernest, a new
book of short stories, and immediately it sold well. It seemed
that Ernest could do no wrong when he wrote; everyone
enjoyed his stories, except those who found them to be dirty
and vulgar. Ernest read what people said about him, all of it;
articles in the press, the letters sent to him, and he became
angry every time he was told to clean up his dirty world. To
Ernest this meant he was supposed to lie. But there were
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many who said he wrote with a knife, cutting the pain from
their lives so as to show it to them so they might know better
what to do with it. They agreed with Ernest that silence was
a lie, and they said he wrote the truth”4.
When Hemingway finished his second novel, he invited
Max Perkins to come to New York; at dawn every day he
took his editor out fishing, and brought him back to shore in
the evening. Hemingway liked to share what he liked and
Max Perkins, who rarely ever left his desk, had the best time
in his life. He also liked the new novel; he thought that A
Farewell to Arms was excellent, he predicted success, and he
said that he hoped to go fishing again with Hemingway.
When Max Perkins went back to New York he was very
red from the sun. A Farewell to Arms was written ten years
after Hemingway lived the story. In 1918, he went to war; in
1928 he wrote about war, about the pain, the love, the
4
BUCKLEY, Peter. Ernest. The Dial Press – New York, 1978, page 132.
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wounds, the battles, the tears, the terrible waste, the
explosions and the dead.
Going fishing with Max every day, all day, was
Hemingway’s way of celebrating the end of his novel. It was
impossible for him to know whether what he had written was
good or bad; he was still too close to his own feelings in the
story to be able to decide. He turned to his friends who were
writers, and asked them what they thought. He waited while
they read and eagerly hoped to hear they liked his book; it
felt as if he was being judged, and he was as impatient as any
man waiting for the jury to bring their decision into court.
The friends liked A Farewell to Arms; they said it was the
truth and Hemingway was happy.
Two separate, highly significant and not necessarily
unrelated catastrophes struck Hemingway in the years
immediately following World War II. The first was the death
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in 1947 of his beloved and trusted editor Max Perkins, and
the second, three years later, was the publication of his first
full-length novel since For Whom the Bell Tolls, the
disastrous Across the River and into the Trees.
Perkins had been Hemingway's editor since 1929, and he
worked with Hemingway on A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway's father had committed suicide not long before
Hemingway first met Perkins, and from the earliest days of
their association, Perkins took on something of a fatherly role
with Hemingway.
Over the nearly 20 years of their association, Perkins got
the reputation of being the editor at Scribner's, best qualified
to handle the man who was well known as the best named
author in that time. Perkins knew how to deal diplomatically
with the vain and moody, and Hemingway could gauge when
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it was safe to offer him honest criticisms of his work and
when it was a better idea to remain in silence.
The 30s had been a busy and productive time for both
men. But when Perkins died, Hemingway did not publish a
novel for seven years.
Perkins' death could not have come at a worse time for
Hemingway. He was physically out of shape, overweight and
always drinking. His body including his head, was tired from
a long history of injures and accidents. Journalism had taken
up a lot of his time during the war years, and despite
continued work on such projects as the last one called
Garden of Eden.
Hemingway was not in condition to be his own editor
because there was no Max Perkins around any more to gently
guide him and persuade him to cut here or condense there.
The result was an unqualified disaster when he tried to be his
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own editor. Hemingway was constantly falling in and out of
love with one woman after another during his life.
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CHAPTER V
ANALYSIS OF ONE OF HIS NOVELS A FAREWELL
TO ARMS
5.1 General Introduction.
There is nothing really complicated about the plot of A
Farewell to Arms. It is the story of two people who meet in
an unlikely place and fall in love. There is a war going on,
however, and this makes a slight difference.
In the classic formula, the plot goes: boy meets girl, boy
loses girl, boy gets girl back, and later a happy life forever.
As in almost every great novel, there are elements of the
auto-biographical in this one. Hemingway was a Red Cross
ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, and he
was severely wounded in the legs by mortar fragments and
heavy machine gun fire. But al1 this was after the disastrous
retreat from Caporetto, and we can only presume that he
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writes about this from what he heard. Also, the love story is
obviously an invention of the novelist's mind. But he knows
his place, and his people, and in the way of a writer who
should write only about what he knows, he is true to his art.
This is not a nice story. In some of the descriptions of
war, Hemingway’s novel is every bit as depressing as some
novels about World War II. With one difference: he writes far
better. And at the same time it is a shining and beautiful story
of the love of two people who need each other in a period of
upheaval.
"Ernest Hemingway was already regarded (before the
publication of A Farewell to Arms in 1929), by a limited
literary public, as a writer of extraordinary freshness and
power, as one of the makers, indeed, of a new American
fiction, says Robert Penn Warren. A Farewell to Arms more
than justified the early enthusiasm of the connoisseurs for
Hemingway and extended this reputation from them to the
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public at large. Its great importance was at once
acknowledged, and its great importance has survived through
the changing fashions and interests of twenty years."1
A Farewell to Arms was the novel that made Ernest
Hemingway. He was becoming recognized as an American
writer of some merit, and other writers, such as F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson, who were already
famous, helped him so that Charles Scribner's Sons, and more
particularly the great editor, Maxwell Perkins, took an
interest in his work. A Farewell to Arms was Hemingway's
first commercial success, sel1ing over 80,000 copies in the
first four months.
This is one of the Great War and love stories of all time.
Some critics cal1 it the greatest book to have been written
about World War I, although it is not only a war novel. A
1
-(ed). Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology. New York: Hill & Wang. 1961,
page 74.
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Farewell to Arms is a great deal more than a war story; it is a
great love story, a modern Romeo and Juliet in its intensity
and tragedy. The love story could not have taken place
without the background of war, however, and therein lays its
tragedy and its beauty.
In judging any of the characters in this book, any of the
motivations, the war must be kept in mind. Catherine, for
example, is a little crazy when she first meets Henry, because
her boyfriend has been kil1ed on the Somme. Henry is not
normal, either, by peace-time standards. Nor is Rinaldi, nor
the priest, nor Miss Ferguson, nor the barman at the hotel in
Stresa. Only occasional1y, someone comes on the scene that
does not seem to be touched by the war. The old Count Greffi
might be one, but he is so old that the inference might be that
he is not living in this age at all.
All of Hemingway's novels are tragedies. Some critics
have accused him of being obsessed by death, and others say
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that he is simply showing life as it is. In any case, do not read
Hemingway expecting a happy ending. There is a bad luck
that hangs over this novel from the very first chapter, and
Hemingway's mastery is in not dragging it down to hard
tragedy, but in maintaining a kind of rol1er-coaster, happysad, life-death time that brings us to the last chapter uplifted,
only to be cast down into the depths of sadness.
In many ways A Farewell to Arms might be considered
Hemingway’s greatest work. It was written by a young man,
and while it is not technically perfect, it has life, energy and
enthusiasm. Without a doubt, it will remain as a great book of
war and love.
5.2 List of Characters.
There are good characters in this war novel, but it is in
essence the story of Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley,
and no one else plays much of a part in the story. All the
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others are extras or at the most small-part. They play their
parts, but in the end there are only two people that count:
Frederick Henry and Catherine. Those who have any bearing
on the story are listed below in order of appearance.
Frederick Henry
An American second lieutenant in the Italian army.
The Priest
The chaplain in Henry's group.
Rinaldi
An Italian surgeon, a friend to Frederick.
Catherine Barkley
An English volunteer nurse.
Helen Ferguson
A friend of Catherine.
Passini, Manera, Gavuzzi, Gordini.
Henry's ambulance drivers.
Mrs. Walker
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An American nurse.
Miss Cage
Another American nurse and friend to Henry and
Catherine.
Miss Van Campen
Superintendent of nurses.
Dr. Valentini
An Italian surgeon.
Meyers
A mysterious old American.
Ettore Moretti
An Italian from San Francisco.
Ralph Simmons
An American studying singing in Italy.
Bonello, Piani, Aymo
Ambulance drivers.
Count Greffi
Patriarch who plays billiards with Henry in Stresa.
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5.3 Analysis: Book One.
The locale and the background of the novel are not
indicated, but it is apparently in the Julian Alps where the
frontier area between Italy and Yugoslavia is now. Italy, as
an ally of Britain and France and Imperial Russia, was
engaging the forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The
front ran from the Swiss border in the Otztaler Alps across
the Austrian border in the Carnic Alps to the Julian Alps
along the Yugoslavia frontier, and down into the plains
around Trieste. It was Italy's job to keep the AustroHungarian forces occupied so that they could not actively
help Germany on the Western and Eastern fronts. This Italy
succeeded in doing, but the collapse of Russia and sufferings
at home brought on revolutionary riots in Turin in 1917 and
affected the morale of the troops at the front. This is the
period of which Hemingway writes. In the end the Italians
were victorious, but at a terrible cost. They had lost 600,000
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soldiers and had over one million wounded, of whom some
220,000 were permanently maimed.
The locale and the background of the novel will help to
keep in mind that the fighting went on in the mountains and
also in the plains and finally that Italy has a common border
with Switzerland. Switzerland was neutral in World War I,
just as it has been neutral in all wars for hundreds of years.
This has a bearing on the story.
The description of the troops passing sets the mood for
a book that does not glamorize war. The troops marching in
the mud, the officers going by in their cars splashing mud,
and the almost daily inspections by the King all add up to a
campaign that was going very badly. The chapter ends on the
throw-away line, “when winter came there was an epidemic
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of cholera in the Army, but only seven thousand died”2. All
of this sets the scene for the tragic happenings to come.
Hemingway reaches what we might call second gear in
Chapter 2. He is setting the physical scene more firmly, and
introducing the theme of the book which may be stated as
love against hate, good against evil. Here the cast of
characters is being introduced, and, more importantly, the
mood is being set.
Gorizia is a town behind the lines that once belonged to
the Austrians. There is located the headquarters of Frederick
Henry's detachment. The existence of two brothels, one for
officers and one for the enlisted men, should not surprise
Americans: that was common practice in most armies, except
the American.
2
BAKER, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms en La Novela Norteamericana,
México, Editorial Diana S.A. 1970, page 68.
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The scene in the mess hall appears to be no more than the
lazy soldiers joking about the priest; however, it carries a
significant symbolic importance for the whole novel. One
important thing to note is that Henry does not enter into the
conversation about the priest. It is the common and the
ordinary officer who delights in ridiculing the priest. Even
though the values that the priest sets forth are values which
are totally strange or foreign to Henry, yet he does not
recognize that the priest exists by a definite system of values.
What Henry is searching for throughout the novel is some
consistent system of values in which he can believe;
consequently he will respect the values of the priest. He will
accept him as a type of code hero even though his code varies
significantly from that of the Hemingway man.
The temptation functions in another way also. Henry is
attempting to decide where to go on his leave. After that he
decides to go to the houses of prostitution, where he remains
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drunk for most of his leave time. At this point in Henry's life,
drink and sex are both escape symbols. He is trying to erase
the meaninglessness of this world of war and is trying to
escape by submerging himself in a series of sensual
experiences. He blinds himself to any true system of values
by dedicating himself to fulfillment of the appetites.
Therefore, he refuses to go to what the priest calls the clear,
cold, and dry country. When Henry returns from his leave he
tells the priest that he regretted not going to this clear, cold,
and dry country which in the meantime will have taken on the
symbolic meaning of being a place of values, or of being a
place where a man can find his inner self.
Referring to additional symbolism, the critic Carlos
Baker makes a comparison between the Mountain and the
Plain. The priest from the country of Abruzzi is the symbol of
the mountain - the good - while the captain from the lowlands
is the symbol of the plain - the bad.
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In the introduction of Lieutenant Rinaldi in Chapter 3, we
find an exuberant, emotional and fiery Italian. For the first
time the cast of characters is being introduced. Rinaldi speaks
of the beautiful English girls and of a certain Miss Barkley.
Rinaldi is, of course, always in love with someone, and
Henry's casual acceptance of the declaration is indicative of
how much interest he puts in Rinaldi's romantic attachments.
But the introduction of the character has been made and it
will be significant later. This is a dramatic device, to
introduce a character before actually bringing the person on
stage and Hemingway is performing the function of the
dramatic at this point.
The symbolism of mountain and plain is again shown in
the talk that Henry has with the priest. Henry says he had
been to no place where it was clean, but to places in the
plains where he had gotten drunk, referring to the smoke of
cafes. The difference between the places he had been and the
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clean and cold places is brought out in a typical Hemingway
paragraph where Henry tries to explain to the priest why he
had not gone to Abruzzi. Saying that the plains are where evil
is, while the mountain is a place where there are many things,
including good hunting.
The end of Chapter 3 catches the meaning of the uneasy
Hemingway man. Here is the man who can not face the
darkness of the night, can not face sleeping in a dark room,
who remains walking, hunting, searching, and seeking the
whole night. Henry characterizes the world as all unreal in
the dark. This is the fear of "nada," which forces man to
search for some type of sensation during the night. As he
realizes that he has wasted his leave time, Henry wishes that
he had gone to the country of the Abruzzi, which symbolizes
for him the clean, cold, and pure type of life in which man
can find a discipline to live by. He recognizes that the priest
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had known this, and says that it will be some time before he
will learn it.
Hemingway shows that Henry is the only officer who is
apparently kind to the priest. The other officers, being Italian,
are probably Roman Catholics, but Henry is not, although he
is the only one of the group who shows respect for the man of
religion.
The problem that Henry faces represents a type of
religious contrast for him. Also this novel has been seen in
religious terms. As has been noted, Henry does not ridicule
the religion of the priest, which is represented by the cold,
clear, and dry country. Later Catherine makes a religion of
her love for Henry. But Henry is the modern hero; he is lost
between two worlds. He can no longer accept the world of
tradition and security, but he is at this point unable to
completely give up this world. Therefore he is living in the
exciting yet uncertain world of the twentieth century where
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man can only often find a substantial meaning to life, a
meaning which will make people like Henry stop moving in
circles from one house of prostitution to another. Upon return
from his leave, Henry realizes that he has been living for the
moment, giving in to any type of sensation, thinking that
through a lot of sensations man can discover some truth. But
finally he realizes that truth must come from within a man
and can not be found in a transitory existence which involves
too much to drink, too many prostitutes, and too many
sensual experiences. At the end of Chapter 3 Henry's
dilemma is the choice between a reasoned and ordered
existence involving a discipline growing within him as
opposed to an existence dedicated to sensuality. The priest
himself exists by some type of pure forms and pure order,
while Henry's life is one of disorder, a lack of form, and a
lack of meaning.
Hemingway's description is of Henry stopping to drink a
cup of coffee or the description of the pale, gray, and sweet
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condensed milk which he uses in the coffee or the description
of the drinks, and the other beverages that Henry consumes.
It is because the point is that the Hemingway code hero must
give himself over to an appreciation of a certain amount of
sensual experiences.
From the moment that Henry and Rinaldi visit the
hospital, the story is carried almost all in dialog. We can
know only that Miss Barkley is a tall blonde woman with
brown skin and gray eyes, and that Henry thinks she is a very
beautiful girl.
One of the first things that Henry notices about Catherine
Barkley is her hair. He comments that she has beautiful hair.
She explains that she was going to cut it off when her
boyfriend died, but Henry tells her never to cut it off.
Throughout most of Hemingway's novels the woman who
wears long hair is generally considered as the most feminine
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and sensual woman. Later in the novel Catherine again
wishes to cut her hair when she is pregnant and therefore
unable of carrying on the sexual part of the marriage partner.
But even so Henry disapproves of it again. This is about the
only physical detail that we have about Catherine's looks.
Hemingway never paints long word pictures of his characters,
and aside from references such as these, we have to draw our
own imagination-portrait of the person through his actions.
For instance, while Rinaldi is never described, we should
deduce that he is dark and good looking.
At their first meeting, Miss Barkley talks about her
young boyfriend who was killed in the Somme. At that
moment she asks Henry if he has ever loved anyone, and
Henry says he has not. This should be remembered, just as
Miss Barkley's note should be that her late boyfriend could
have had anything he wanted.
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During their first dialog, Henry makes a declaration that
has meaning throughout the whole novel. Speaking of her
boyfriend she says that he was killed and that was the end of
their relationship. Henry protests and Catherine finishes the
comment by repeating that death ends everything. Henry can
not accept this point of view until the end of the novel. When
Catherine dies, he comes to the realization for the first time
that death is the end of all things. Until then he has never
accepted this particular point of view. Thus at the beginning
of the novel Catherine is more of the code character than
Henry because involved in the code hero's philosophy is an
acceptance that death is indeed the end of all things.
The British somehow thought of the Italian front as a
"picturesque" one as distinguished from the French front,
which was where a war was really being fought. Why an
Anglo-Saxon American should be in the Italian army is
something that Miss Barkley can not understand. Because of
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it, her incredulity will later allow her to accept Henry's
desertion from the Italian army without any question.
In Chapter 5, Henry indicates that he is not in love with
Catherine but would like to have an affair with her. All this is
in keeping with his character as it has been shown before. He
has planned his moves, and after Catherine slaps him when
he tries to kiss her and then apologizes, he feels that he is
succeeding. Then there is the kiss itself and Catherine's
weeping, which confuses Henry. This is something he had
not expected. When he returns to his room and Rinaldi jokes
with him, Henry does not want to talk about the progress that
Rinaldi says he is making.
In Chapter 6 Hemingway again stresses that Henry is not
in love with Catherine, but Henry is willing to play along in
the game and pretend that he is. Henry is still interested only
in satisfying his physical appetites. For him it is better to be
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associated with Catherine than go every evening to the
houses of prostitution. It is important to note that Henry has
absolutely no intentions of falling in love. His relationship
with Catherine is expressed in terms of a game like cards in
which he had to pretend he was playing for money or playing
for some bets. Nobody had mentioned what the bets were. In
fact throughout the entire first book, Henry's relation to
Catherine is like a game where a man plays for bets but
doesn't know what bets are. Henry's determination not to fall
in love is a determination not to get him involved with
another human being.
Henry does not understand Catherine in these scenes. She
is obviously in a highly nervous and anxious state as a result
of having lost her boyfriend sometime earlier in the war.
When she asks Henry if he loves her, she is simply
pretending that he is her last boyfriend who has returned to
her. But she can pretend only so far and later she will tell him
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that he plays the game nicely but that it is a bad game to play.
In general, her intuition into any particular situation seems
superior to that of Henry. It will take him some time before
he learns what Catherine already knows.
The early episodes in Chapter 7 are about the scenes of
love and scenes of war. The senselessness and gloominess of
war are illustrated. Henry sees the soldiers without spirit,
fatigued and tired. The incident of the English-speaking
soldier with the hernia has significance, because it illustrates
how little enthusiasm most of the participants have for the
war.
Hemingway gradually introduces little scenes to illustrate
the basic reactions that most people have toward the war.
This is necessary so that when Henry deserts from the Italian
army his desertion is in conformity with the general opinion
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of the war and the uselessness, the total hollowness of this
war.
In the long passage where he comments on the war,
Hemingway is at this point, explaining that the Austro-Italian
front was very different from the front in France. He has
brought this out before in Catherine's talking about the
Somme, for example, where her boyfriend was killed. Henry
notes to himself that he knew he would not be killed and that
war did not seem to be more dangerous than it was in the
movies. At the same time he expresses the wish that it would
soon be over. At one point in this reflection he says that he
could go to Spain if there was no war. These are words from
Hemingway because he retained his love for that country to
his dying day.
Later when Henry deserts from the Italian army and
attempts to make his separate peace it is because his small
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unit of the ambulance drivers has been broken up and he feels
no sense of loyalty to the Italian army or to all the causes for
which war is being fought. This is Henry’s posture that has
been brought out before and reinforced in many ways. Both
Catherine and Miss Ferguson, for example, find it strange
that Henry should be in the Italian army. Henry himself
wishes that he was with the British, except that it might be
dangerous. This is not necessarily contempt on Hemingway's
part toward the Italian army, but his way of establishing that
Henry is in a strange position as a foreigner in a group so
different from what he is used to. There were a lot of
Americans fighting with the British. But for a solitary
American to be in the Italian army, on a strange and
mysterious front, was just as strange and mysterious. This
part of the war story is autobiographical; Hemingway was a
Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front, and some of
the things that happen to Lieutenant Henry later also
happened to him. But the love story is probably pure fiction.
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Henry is still interested only in the physical conquest of
Catherine Barkley, as shown in the daydreaming he does
about the long stay in a Milan hotel, but as the chapter ends
without his having been able to see her, he has what might be
called a sincere emotion toward her for the first time. It is not
love, but he feels lonely and empty.
This feeling therefore foreshadows the involvement
which Henry later finds himself in with Catherine. Earlier, he
had decided definitely that he did not want to fall in love,
wanted to have nothing to do with love. But as Chapter 7
ends, he realizes that he feels this lonely and empty feeling
when he is unable to see her. Thus he is becoming involved
with her in spite of himself.
At the same time, the strange and mysterious safe front is
no longer safe. War is war, and shells fall on Piave just as
they do on the Somme. The mechanics who are Henry's
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drivers have no more interest in the war than he does,
although for different reasons, but they are involved in it
whether they like it or not. The talk in the dugout may be
pacifist, but what is going on outside is pure war. When
Henry and Gordini return to the dugout from the dressing
station with the macaroni and cheese, Manera asks Henry if
he had been afraid, and Henry says that he certainly had. This
is very different from the day before when he tells himself
that he will be safe on this front.
In the short scene where Henry and Gordini return with
the macaroni, cheese and wine, the men sit in the middle of
the war and are able to eat the cheese, drink the wine, and
enjoy their meal. In other words, appetite is present even in
the ritual of eating and the savoring of each individual bit of
food or wine.
In the discussion between the types of men in the army
and the different types of divisions within the army, there is
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the question of the discipline and order that are necessary for
behavior in a war. Henry's defense of people is always in
terms that in the army the soldiers are brave and have good
discipline. The concept of discipline and order is very
important to the Hemingway code hero. When Henry decides
he will no longer be in the Italian army -that is when he
deserts - part of the reason is that the army is no longer
disciplined, and Henry does not want to be in an
undisciplined world.
This is not a nice scene, and it is what makes this not
only a great love story but a Great War book. The description
of the dressing station, the dying driver in the dugout, and
Henry's own trials are all brutal and simple. This is the war
where men are killed, and Hemingway is a master at
describing war.
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After Lieutenant Henry has been wounded terribly, he is
visited in the field hospital by Rinaldi, and later by the priest.
Whether Hemingway did this deliberately or not, the contrast
is evident. Rinaldi is cheerful and kind, but he brings with
him an aura of the houses of prostitution and the officers'
mess; Rinaldi is by no means an evil man but he is a man of
war. War to him is still an adventure, a chance to further his
skills as a surgeon and to make love to girls. Henry denies it
when Rinaldi says that they are really alike underneath.
Rinaldi is Henry’s friend, and he is also a war brother.
As with the typical Hemingway code hero, Henry is not
interested in the empty forms of receiving a medal for any act
in the war. When Rinaldi asks him if he did any heroic act,
Henry answers that he was hit while eating cheese. Henry is
not interested with forms and thus refuses to accept a medal
for any reason because to him a medal is an empty form
itself.
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The priest's visit is very different. He is a man of peace
as contrasted to Rinaldi, a man of war. From this moment
Henry wants something more out of life than simply a good
time and adventures. During this visit with the priest Henry
understands why he admires such a man. The priest has a
concept of values and a concept of the ideal that attracts
Henry. In their discussion of love the priest says some things
that have meaning; he tells Henry that the affairs in the
brothels are not love; there is only passion and lust. He
maintains that when a man loves someone he will want to do
things for her. At this point Henry admits that he doesn't love
anyone. But later when he is in love with Catherine he
realizes that the priest was right, because Henry wants to
sacrifice and wants to serve. More important is the fact that
the priest's clean, cold, and dry country represents a
discipline and a pure form of life that is impossible in this
rotten world of blood, war and corruption. Henry wants to
escape from this complex and empty world and find a life
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that is good and simple, a life that is dedicated to order,
cleanliness, and discipline.
After the priest leaves, Henry thinks about what the priest
has told him about his home country in the mountains. Here
the symbolism of the mountain, the pure place is presented
again. Hemingway has shown by implication, by use of the
priest as a symbol, that Henry is more than just another
soldier satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of the flesh.
Now in the second stage of this story of war and love,
Catherine will be at the American hospital in Milan to which
Henry is going.
5.4 Analysis: Book Two.
Book I has introduced the main characters, the main
themes, and ideas of the novel. Frederick Henry has met
Catherine Barkley, is attracted to her physically, but is not in
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love with her. Book II begins the development of the love
affair between Catherine and Henry. The stage takes place in
an American hospital far away from the war. The formal love
play has ended and now begins the development of the true
love affair. Book II will end with Henry returning to the war,
but the return will not be the separation from Catherine. Both
of the main characters are trapped by the war. In other words,
their love is seen against images of death and the ravages of
war that Henry must return to at the end of the book.
In this book a series of characters are presented; some are
accepted and some are rejected. In order to understand the
code character (the "in" character) we have to be aware of the
various personages who are considered acceptable and those
who are considered unacceptable. An example of controlled
or uncontrolled reactions of the main characters is when
Henry does not like Miss Van Campen, the superintendent
nurse. As a result of this, the people who read the story do not
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like her either. She represents those forces which obey the
rules and the formula without taking any consideration for the
individual human being. Her life is one that is controlled by
silly rules. In contrast, the younger nurse, Miss Gage, ignores
the rules in favor of responding directly to individual human
beings.
At the end of Chapter 13 the idea of the sleepless man is
reintroduced. Henry can not sleep well until it is daylight.
During the course of the night, as was indicated in the section
on the code hero, Henry is unable to relax because of the
darkness and the various images connected with darkness.
Only in the light is he able to sleep deeply.
The first time that Henry has sexual relations with
Catherine, it is a hurried affair, in a hospital room, but it is
the start of the relationship which is the main theme of this
Great War novel. “Today, when such books as Henry Miller's
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Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's
Lover are readily available, this scene and subsequent love
sequences in the novel would be considered tame. But at the
time (1929) that A Farewell to Arms was published, Henry's
affair with Catherine was considered very carnal indeed.”3
Now, that affair between them has changed from the
strictly carnal desires that Henry had to the first realization
that he is in love. With it is a sexual desire, but when it is
over, he says to himself that he did not want to fall in love
with anyone, but now he knows he has. Thus the game has
ended; Henry has been caught in love. In another sense the
gratification of the sensuous appetite forces Henry to become
involved in a responsibility to Catherine. He is now
committed to something in life.
3
WEEKS, Robert P. (ed.). Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1962, page 48
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The love story is further advanced in Chapters 15-17.
Their love is still in the beginning stage, but by the end of
Chapter 17, a certain union has been reached. Here, Henry is
now definitely in love with Catherine and it is not simply a
carnal affair. Tenderness is coming into the story.
The contrast between the incompetent hospital doctors
and the competent Dr. Valentini continues with Hemingway's
development of some characters as opposed to others. The
house doctor brings with him two associates. Henry observes
that doctors who lack competence and self-confidence turn to
their own kind for mutual support. These doctors are not
men; they are failures and do not have self-discipline. They
are filled with the empty forms which Hemingway or Henry
can not tolerate. In contrast with the other doctors; Dr.
Valentini is strong and self-confident. Hemingway identifies
the incompetent house doctor with non-alcoholics, while
Valentini says certainly he will have ten drinks, because he
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knows that a drink will not interfere with his sense of
discipline, whereas with the weaker doctors a bit of alcohol
might destroy their concept of themselves.
When Catherine gets her schedule changed to the night
shift, she likes it very much because she can spend more time
with Henry. This is very convenient because it allows them to
continue their love affair. However, it is equally important for
the code characters to not sleep at night because night is a
troublesome time for a Hemingway character. Making love
all night allows them to sleep during the day.
As pointed out in the section on the code hero, the
Hemingway character does not like to talk about something
that has been gotten. Thus it is Catherine who tells Henry not
to talk, not to brag, and not to have anything to say, after their
first love affair. As noted before, Catherine is more of the
code character in the novel than Henry, and he is in the
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process of learning from her. It will be some time before he
realizes that the value-system of the code by which Catherine
lives is the same as the love that she feels for him.
In this way Henry is the one who worries about the
traditional concept of morality, not Catherine. This is not to
indicate that Henry is not a potential Hemingway character or
does not possess many of the qualities of the character; he is
simply not as far developed as a code character as is
Catherine. But one aspect of his personality is worth noting
here. He emphasizes several times during the course of the
novel the beauty of Catherine's hair. He notes here that it falls
about him when they are making love. The stress on
Catherine's hair is an emphasis on the feminine qualities of
Catherine. Similarly, in other novels women who have short
hair are often considered sterile or masculine. As was
indicated in the commentary on the preceding chapter,
Catherine makes a religion of her love for Henry, which she
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now states excessively. She tells him that the only thing that
worries her is being sent away from him because he has
become everything in life to her.
Again, it is brought out that when Henry first met
Catherine, she was a deeply troubled woman. But later she
accepts that they are happy and love each other. That is
enough for Catherine, and in a sense it is enough for Henry;
by now Hemingway indicates that while Henry really wants
to marry Catherine he supposes he enjoys not being married,
really. This is only one part in the stage of their love,
however, and this feeling will change as the story progresses.
The American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Meyers, Ettore
Moretti, an Italian from San Francisco, a captain in the Italian
army, who is a professional hero, and two American students
of opera, have a direct impact upon the Henry-Catherine
relationship. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Meyers are
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professional gamblers who know the inside on all of the
horses.
Catherine
places
a
bet
at
Mr.
Meyers'
recommendation, but after she wins on this race, she doesn't
like it. She feels dependent upon someone else. She asks
Henry to allow her to choose her own horse without any
inside knowledge of the winner. Afterwards, even though she
loses, she feels so much cleaner. This is a part of the code
character; the honor that they feel, and the refusal to rely on
someone else.
In another sense the patriot Ettore might be called a
professional patriot. He has won his medals; and he boasts
about them. In an earlier chapter Henry was not interested in
winning medals, he found in a medal a symbol of an empty
and useless form. But also Catherine is the more developed
character, and she does not accept Ettore. She has reached a
stage in her development where she can not accept the fraud,
the pretense that is connected with Ettore, even though this
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time Henry can tolerate him. This scene suggests again that
Catherine is already the developed character and that Henry
has not yet reached her stage of development.
Chapter 19 emphasizes the rain symbolism. In this
chapter we realize that it is the first time that Catherine is
afraid of the rain; for her rain is symbolism of death. It is the
one thing that she is frightened of; she sees herself sometimes
as being dead in the rain. She also knows that nobody can
help themselves. This is again a part of the code hero's
makeup. The failure of man to be able to help himself
indicates that man possibly is the victim of a hostile universe,
of circumstances beyond his control.
The mood of happiness that has been built up is changed
in Chapters 21-24. Everything is different: the weather, the
conditions at the front, the situation between Henry and
Catherine.
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Nothing goes right for Henry or Catherine in this section
of the book. Even on the last night the two lovers have
together when they go to a hotel, the room they are given is
so rococo, so geared to an assignation that Catherine feels
like a whore. But in time this feeling passes, and the
symbolism of home that is ever present when the two are
together is brought out again.
The separation between Henry and Catherine is a simple
and pathetic one, because of their lack of strength.
Hemingway deliberately minimizes the importance of what
might well be the final separation of the lovers; one is going
off to war, and the other is going to have an illegitimate child.
When Henry asks Catherine how she feels, she answers by
saying that she is sleepy. At the station neither of them cries
and when they part, after the carriage takes off, Catherine
smiles and waves good-bye. But all this occurs while it is
raining; rain is a symbol of tragedy.
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The ideal code character lives by a view which will allow
him to lose nothing. The love between Catherine and Henry
modifies this ideal because when they are faced with the loss
of each other they can not act with the freedom that is often
demanded of the code hero. As Catherine says life isn't hard
to manage when a person has nothing to lose. Finally, also
the fact that Catherine is pregnant begins to trap Henry into
an involvement that is not typical for the code character.
Catherine wonders if he feels trapped after he knows that she
is pregnant. Henry's response is that man always feels trapped
biologically. In the Hemingway world "biologically" can
cover just about everything. A man is trapped in almost
anything that he does and all he can do is to face that with a
certain amount of stoicism, as Catherine faces her death at the
end of the novel. The introduction here of the concept of
being trapped will later be developed because when Henry
discovers that Catherine is hemorrhaging to death, he
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comments that it is the end of the trap. And he even asserts
that a man is trapped by whatever he does.
An interesting conversation between Catherine and
Henry occurs when Catherine maintains that the brave person
dies, maybe a thousand deaths if he is intelligent. The
difference between the brave man and the coward is that the
brave man simply does not mention his confrontation of
death. The brave man is the one who accepts his fear and
accepts his situation but does not complain of it. When
Catherine dies at the end of the novel her only comment is
that everything in her life was only a dirty trick.
In Chapter 23 when Henry and Catherine observe a
young Italian couple entering a church, Henry wishes that
they had some place to go because they only have their hotel
room. The Italian couple finds some type of sanctuary in the
cathedral; the priest has his cold, dry, clear country, and the
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atheists have their houses of prostitution. By this analogy
Henry and Catherine's love is different from that of the
average individual.
In the first book the characters and themes with
interchangeable scenes between the war and the developing
love affair were presented. Book II is dedicated almost all to
the love affair between Henry and Catherine. It ends when
Henry returns to the war and to the symbol of death and
destruction involved in his return in the rain.
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5.5 Analysis: Book Three.
The beginning of Book III reveals a great deal about the
feelings of men who have been at war much too long. All the
energy has gone out of the combatants. The major is older
and drier, Rinaldi looks tired, and the priest says that a
terrible summer has passed.
There is a good deal of dialog in these two chapters; in
fact, it is almost all dialogs and a very good example of
Hemingway's skillful use of it. When Henry and Rinaldi talk,
it is the conversation of good friends even though they are
from two different cultures. Behind the facade the playboy
Rinaldi wears, he is truly a dedicated surgeon and essentially
a very decent and good man. Even when Rinaldi tempts the
priest, it is only because it is part of the game, and the priest,
the major, and Henry know this.
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These are what might be called sick chapters. There is
deliberately no life in them. And they are a beginning to what
is more than sickness, death. Many of the images in Chapter
25 suggest death, destruction, and sterility. The beginning of
the third book speaks of hostility, the death, and rain. Here
the town of Caporetto is presented as a clean, well-lighted
place which becomes the place where the retreat actually
starts, turning the beautiful front into anarchy, confusion, and
disorder.
Hemingway's masterful description of one of the biggest
retreats in history is found in Chapters 27 and 28. The
Austrians and Germans began their drive on October 24,
1917, under the command of General Otto von Bulow, and
the Italian troops commanded by General Cadorna fell back.
In these chapters the retreat is still orderly, although the
mounting disintegration is starting in Chapter 28.
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This is the theme that Hemingway is presenting. It is a
story of war, and a retreat is part of war. Before he is
finished, Hemingway will show that what is at the start an
orderly retreat can turn into a stampede. But that will come
later.
The key to the war situation in these chapters is the word
"Germans." This was the first time that the Germans had
entered the war on the Italian front, and that development had
aroused general distrust.
In the moment that Henry hears one of the men saying
that their actions that summer had not been in vain, he
observes that high-sounding abstractions always make him
feel anxious. For Henry and the code character, words with
emotional connotations have no tangible meaning. Instead,
the names of a village or the number of a road are things that
men can see and touch. These are what Hemingway would
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call objective reality. By objective reality Hemingway means
that the action or the act itself is more important than the
concept or the idea of the act. Thus a man should perform
something without talking about it later. The performing of
the act is the important thing, not the emotions or the
intellectualization or the talking about it.
Chapter 29 starts almost with violence when Henry
shoots one of the sergeants. Now the time of the retreat and
of the war is going into high speed. When Bonello, one of
Henry's drivers, finishes the job of killing the sergeant, it is
only another indication of how chaos has taken over from
reason.
This theme builds up secretly. The killing of Aymo by
his own countrymen is just another indication of the
senselessness and confusion of war. Bonello's desertion and
longing to be taken a prisoner rather than die is equally
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senseless. And finally, the last insanity is illustrated by the
actions of the battle police. Hemingway is showing that
Henry is faced with military justice similar to that which he
had so briefly dealt out to the sergeant.
The scenes that Hemingway has described in the
previous chapters on the retreat from Caporetto now build up
to a climax. There is almost a complete confusion: the
soldiers cursing all officers, the cries of Hooray for peace, the
discarding of arms, the insane battle police dealing out their
kangaroo-court justice. This is the Great Retreat, and it is
possibly the best description of military chaos. The whole
atmosphere of the retreat is one of confusion and anarchy.
This is no longer the picturesque front mentioned in the early
chapters but a night-marish scene of a complete war.
The increase in the disorder, the increase in the lack of
discipline, all lead toward Henry's last decision to desert from
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the Italian army. It is noted in the section on the code hero
that the Hemingway character believes in loyalty only to a
small group. As the small ambulance group is dispersing, the
sense of loyalty that Henry felt is also disappearing. Henry
has never recognized an obligation to the whole war. He has
been tied only to the small ambulance group and has felt
loyalty only to this group. The dispersion of this group gives
him another motivation to desert from the Italian army.
Furthermore, the code hero believes in discipline, respect,
and order. As these fail there is nothing worth adhering to in
the whole Italian army.
Then Henry comes face to face with the military police,
the men who had never themselves been tested in battle, men
who had remained behind the lines and who can as a result of
this say such things as consecrated soil of the father, the fruits
of victory, and so forth. These are broad abstract words,
words that have no meaning to the Hemingway hero. They
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are words that have no relationship to the reality of the
situation, to the actual objective fact. With all of these things
in mind, Henry deserts from the Italian army, if for no other
reason than he would be immediately shot as a spy and a
foreigner.
Henry's dive into the river is considered by several critics
as a symbolic thing. Malcolm Cowley has compared Henry's
plunge into the water to escape as a baptism, a symbol of his
entering the world of the initiated. Carlos Baker also “finds it
significant as an indication that Henry is washing himself of
the past, of the war in which he does not really have any
interest. Whether the author himself intended symbolism of
this type is not known, of course, but critics have dissected
Hemingway in several books and dozens of articles. In any
case, the plunge into the river ends one phase of this war
book.” 4
4
(ed). Hemingway and his Critics: An International Anthology. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961
page, 85.
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The Chapters that gave birth to the title are 31 and 32.
Henry is through with war and is making his own farewell to
arms.
In Chapter 31 Hemingway does not dwell on Henry's
thoughts in any great detail. Henry is too occupied with
keeping alive to be doing much abstract thinking. But after he
gets on the train, he has time to reflect on the things that have
happened.
The anger has been washed away in the river along with
any obligation, Henry goes on to explain that all that had
ceased when the carabiniere had put his hands on his collar at
the inspection point. Henry has done his share of fighting for
the Italians, who are strange people to him. He was prepared
to do more, but when they treated him with injustice, he had
had enough. As he says he was not against them, he was
simply through.
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This theme has been dwelt on for some time. What he
does on earth in the Italian army, the English nurses want to
know. There is a difference that we are led to understand
between an American deserting from the Italian army and an
American deserting from the United States Army. There is no
sense of guilt on Henry's part. While he does not say it, we
are led to believe that he has done all he can do, and that now
he feels he can not do anything else. This ends Henry's active
role in the war. But the war is still going on, and its influence
on the protagonists remains.
The end of Book III is the middle of the novel, and in this
section we have seen Henry make his climactic decision to
desert from the Italian army, to make his separate peace, to
return to Catherine, and to create a life apart from the war.
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5.6 Analysis: Book Four.
These chapters are the civilian interlude in Italy. Things
start off well with the offer of help from the coffee shop
owner, the kindness of the hospital porter and his wife, and
the assistance Henry receives from the American, Simmons.
The entire fourth book presents the idea of escape.
Henry's reason tells him that he has not escaped, that he is
playing the idle. Several times he mentions that he feels like a
traitor, that he is masquerading. To carry this image further,
Henry as a code character must always test his manhood in
some type of confrontation with other men. He can not
escape or can not develop into a man unless he has this
encounter which can not be while he is living with Catherine
in an idyllic existence.
Henry is a bit suspicious of the help the coffee shop man
offers him, but it is apparently meant to indicate how
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thoroughly disgusted the little Italian is with the war by this
time. The hospital porter and his wife reinforce this feeling.
In neither case do they care at all whether Henry has deserted
from the army or not.
In Stresa the lovers are joined, and except for Miss
Ferguson's denunciation of their immoral conduct-as she
views it- there is a brief interlude of peace and happiness. At
some former period Henry has been at Stresa on several
occasions, for he is friendly with the bartender at the hotel
and with Count Greffi, who functions as the code character
who has retained his discipline even at the age of ninety-four.
In Chapter 34 there is a passage that has been much
quoted, and perhaps sums up Hemingway's thinking about
the love of a man for a woman, or of any man for a woman.
This touching key passage starts: That night at the hotel. . . ,
In many of Hemingway's other writings he has spoken of the
horrors of the night for those who are alone, physically or
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spiritually. In this case, he also goes on to point out what
Carlos Baker calls the “"home and not-home," of this novel.
Where Catherine is, is "home," and where she is not is "not
home," according to this critic. "When they awaken after
their reunion night," Dr. Baker says, "the rain has stopped,
light floods the window, and Henry, looking out in the fresh
early morning, can see Lake Maggiore in the sun 'with the
mountains beyond.' Towards those mountains the lovers now
depart."5 But before their departure there is another storm.
And in the rain Henry and Catherine head toward
Switzerland. Again, it is the intervention of an ordinary
Italian that makes this possible, for it is the bartender who
wakes, gives his boat, and sends them on their way.
Hemingway always writes with the greatest respect of the
little man.
5
BAKER, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as an Artist, 2nd. Ed. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1956, page 57.
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There is nothing dramatic about the escape from Italy,
although at one time there is a danger that Henry and
Catherine will be caught by customs agents. Even though
Henry works very hard rowing the boat there is a certain
sense of happiness throughout the episode as though both he
and Catherine know that they will make it all right. Now
Henry and Catherine have made their escape and the war
phase of the novel is definitely over. In contrast to the horror
of war, they are starting a happy life together.
5.7 Analysis: Book Five.
From now on begins the happy chapters, the satisfied
chapters. Everything that happens is what Hemingway feels
about the way people should live. The rooms and lovers are
warm and pleasant and from the windows they can see the
lake and the mountains. Hemingway's powers of description
are very evident here when he describes the location of the
woods and the country around it. The descriptions are not
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long, for Hemingway is never wordy, but they sing, and it is a
very good example of the writer's singularly masterful way of
setting the scene. It is doubtful if any other writer is able to
describe a setting as simply as Hemingway and yet at the
same time to paint it so vividly. The first chapter of this book
is one example. The few paragraphs in these chapters are
another.
The critic, Carlos Baker, in his book Hemingway, The
Writer as Artist, who strongly advances the mountain (good)
and plains (bad) symbolism in this book says of this
interlude: "Soon they are settled into a supremely happy life
in the winter land on the mountainside above Montreux." It
is, he adds, "... the closest approximation of the priest's fair
homeland in the Abruzzi that they are ever to know." 6
6
BAKER, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as an Artist, 2nd. Ed. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1956, page 89.
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On one visit into Montreux, Henry and Catherine talk
about getting married, but Catherine says she wants to wait
until she gets thin again. As they are sitting and drinking beer
in a cafe, Catherine remarks that a small child has to be
hoped for, as the doctor has told her that she has a narrow
pelvis. It is a significant point.
Two related images are significant in terms of the code
character, since Henry has been removed from the scene of
battle and of confrontation; he no longer feels that he is
testing his manhood. Furthermore, on a more physical level,
since Catherine is too far along with child to participate in the
sexual act, Henry tries to affirm his manhood by growing a
beard. In an opposite way Catherine, whose hair has
functioned as a symbol of her femininity, wants to have her
hair cut short; but Henry does not allow this.
In the beginning of chapter 41, the entire mood that has
been built up in Book V changes completely. The happy days
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in Switzerland are abruptly coming to an end. From the
moment that Catherine's labors start an element of bad luck is
felt terribly. She suffers horribly, but bravely, and Henry
suffers with her.
After Henry has his breakfast and leaves the cafe, he sees
a dog nosing in a garbage can. Henry looks in and sees only
coffee grounds and says that there isn't anything, to the dog,
and in this way sets the bad luck for what is to come.
This is a masterfully designed chapter. It accumulates
emotion on emotion until it reaches an almost unsupportable
height of tragedy. Catherine's labor pains that grow worse
and worse are the base. When she cries “give it to me”,
reaching for the laughing-gas, the doctor tells Henry that he
has to be prepared for what is to come, the Caesarean, the
dead baby, and then the hemorrhage.
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Hemingway shows in this chapter a great deal of his
philosophy. The key sentences are possibly: "So now they got
her in the end. You never get away with anything. And
Catherine says: I'm not brave any more, darling. I'm all
broken. They've broken me. I know it now."7 But she is brave
to the end, as are all of Hemingway's heroines. This bravery
compounds the tragedy.
Here is a tragic and classic chapter, possibly the saddest
in the sense of emotion that the great modern tragedian ever
wrote. Every one of Hemingway's novels is a tragedy, and
there are some terrible final chapters in such books as For
Whom the Bell Tolls when Robert Jordan lies dying on a hill
in Spain, but for a complete naked tragedy, the final chapter
in A Farewell to Arms probably exceeds them all.
7
BAKER, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms. En la Novela Norteamericana.
México. Editorial Diana S. A. 1970, page 74.
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Henry's final learning experience is in this chapter. He
realizes that there are forces against which he can not fight,
that Catherine's death was the trap that he felt earlier. He
learns also that man must be totally independent in this
world. If a person puts his trust in someone he loves, he can
be easily defeated because that person can die as does
Catherine. In this way he has the idea of the defeat and
futility of life.
Many times in the commentaries Catherine was the
principal character. She was the perfect or the true code
character. Henry's arrival at this point comes gradually. He
learns about war, love, and finally about death. Catherine's
death is the final stage of his initiation. Henry has never yet
accepted that death is the end of all things. But now he knows
that the only value in death is man's knowledge that it must
come and that those who live like heroes will also die like
heroes. In the final analysis Catherine's death, the futility of
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all death is emphasized because when she is dying she says
that she is not a bit afraid and that it is just a dirty trick,
referring to her death. Catherine does not become noble or
admirable through her death; it is simply that she has
remained admirable throughout her life. She dies according to
her view of what the brave should do in death as in life. She
had earlier said that the brave man dies a thousand deaths,
and that he just does not mention it. Thus at the end Catherine
dies according to her stoical and disciplined beliefs.
After her death Henry goes to see her. He can not yet
accept the idea that death is the end of all things.
Nevertheless when he looked at her it was like saying goodbye to a statue. And now he accepts that death is the end of
life, and his realization that if man is to live he must live
according to some inner discipline, he can not put his trust or
faith in other things.
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5.8 General Interpretation.
Henry and the central character of the novel can not be
seen as the perfect Hemingway code hero until the end of the
novel. One approach to the novel is to see it as an initiation
story, that is, as Henry's initiation into certain aspects of life
or into a certain way of life. The initiation type story is
typical of many of Hemingway's works.
If Henry is to be initiated into an aspect of life, he can be
called a static character. In other words, a character against
whom his change, development, and reactions can be
measured with respect to certain aspects of life. In one way,
Catherine serves as an already established Hemingway code
character. When we first meet her in the novel, she has come
to certain suppositions about life which Henry has not yet
reached. Thus during the course of the novel we observe him
in relationship to Catherine, and furthermore, how much he
matures and progresses toward the set of values which
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Catherine possesses. For example, in the beginning pages of
the novel, Catherine knows that when a man is dead, he's
dead and that's all. Henry has not accepted this view. In other
words he has not yet left all his ties with the traditional values
inherent in western civilization and particularly western
Christianity. To be the pure Hemingway character, it is
necessary for a man to realize that death is the end of all
things. Furthermore, Catherine laments the fact that she
allowed her boyfriend to go away to war without having
consummated their love through the physical act. With his
death, she realizes that she had missed a great opportunity
because, again, death ends all things.
Throughout many sections of the novel, Catherine
advocates a more liberal view toward traditional matters. It is
true that Henry, as the man, is the pursuer; he is the one who
makes love to Catherine. But at the same time Catherine is
the more advanced and the more liberal individual who
allows him to make love. In a sense, we can say she chose
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him. In another sense, Catherine is the one who faces life
realistically. Catherine is not interested in the traditional
concepts of morality. It is of no concern to her that sleeping
with Henry might be viewed by some people as being
immoral. She considers her action to be only a result of her
natural physical desires.
When the two discover that they are in love with each
another, Henry is the one who suggests that they have to be
married. He wants to place some type of traditional tie
between them, and the only way that he knows is to suggest
that they become officially married through the church. This
is somewhat ironic because neither character believes in the
sanctions of the church, but of the two Henry has least
loosened the hold of traditional church values. In Catherine's
opinion, they are married already; she sees no benefit in
standing before some priest and repeating a formula of empty
words. This for her does not consummate their union; it was
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consummated by the love that they had for each other.
Consequently, Henry is, by comparison inferior as a code
character to Catherine.
In a later section of the novel it is again Henry who
thinks of having the child baptized, who wants to give again a
traditional Christian sacrament to the child. And one more
time it is Catherine who is not interested in these empty
forms.
Henry finds it difficult to accept a life apart from
established patterns. He instinctively deserts from the Italian
army because he knows that the lack of order and lack of
discipline found in the Italian army made it impossible for a
sensible man to remain a part of that army. Nevertheless,
after his desertion he still feels like a traitor. He is unable to
make his separate peace with the rest of the world. He is
disturbed and troubled by the fact that he has run away from
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something as traditional as the army. But at the same time
Catherine is not at all disturbed. She says it is not their army,
it is not their war. For her, meaning comes only through the
love that she has for Henry, and she is not at all interested in
the meanings or values that other people might assign to their
lives. She has been able to insulate herself from the rest of the
world and has dedicated herself to the loyalty of a small but
understanding group.
In these terms Henry does not become the true
Hemingway code character until the closing sections of the
novel. Throughout the work he has never accepted
Catherine's belief, mentioned first in the early chapters, that
with death everything ends. When Catherine is in the hospital
and is dying, he is still deeply anxious. He tries to pray and
tries to turn to any of the traditional sources of comfort but he
does not find anything. After her death he insists upon
returning to her room to see her body once again. When he
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does this, he comes at last to the realization that death is final.
He sees that the live body that he once knew is now only a
statue.
5.9 The Hemingway Code Hero.
Native to almost all of Hemingway's novels and in fact to
a study of Hemingway in general is the concept of the
Hemingway hero, sometimes more popularly known as the
"code hero." When Hemingway's novels first began to appear
they were easily accepted by the American reading public; in
fact, they were enthusiastically received. Part of this
reception was due to the fact that Hemingway had created a
new type of fictional character whose basic response to life
appealed very strongly to the people of the 1920's. At first the
average reader saw in the Hemingway hero a type of person
whom he could identify with in almost a dream sense. The
Hemingway man was a man's man. He was a man involved in
a great deal of drinking. He was a man who moved from one
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love affair to another, who participated in wild game hunting,
who enjoyed bullfights, who was involved in all of the socalled manly activities which the typical American male did
not participate in.
As more and more of Hemingway's novels appeared and
the reader became more familiar with this type of person,
people began to formulate a theory about the Hemingway
code hero. They observed that throughout many of
Hemingway's novels the code hero acts in a manner which
allows the critic to formulate a particular code. It must be
emphasized, however, that the Hemingway character or code
hero would himself never speak of a code. He makes broad
generalizations. To actually formulate a set of rules of
conduct to which the Hemingway character would adhere is,
in one sense, a violation of the essential nature of the code
hero. He does not talk about what he believes in. He is a man
of action rather than a man of theory. Therefore, the
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following concepts of the code hero are those enunciated not
by the hero himself, but by the critics and readers who are
familiar with the total body of Hemingway's works and of his
views.
Behind the formulation of this concept of the hero lies
the basic disillusionment of the American public, the
disillusionment that was brought about by World War I. The
sensitive man in America or the sensitive man in the world
came to the realization that the old concepts and old values
embedded in Christianity and other ethical systems of the
western world had not served to save mankind from the
catastrophe inherent in this World War. Having endured the
great calamity of World War I, Hemingway found that he
could not return to the quiet countryside of America, could no
longer accept those values that had previously dominated all
of America. Instead, he searched for some principles based
upon a sense of order and discipline that would endure in any
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particular situation. Hemingway's values then are not
Christian; they are not the morals that people grew
accustomed to in twentieth-century Protestant America.
A basis for all of the actions of all Hemingway key
heroes is the concept of death. The idea of death penetrates or
lies behind all of the characters' actions in Hemingway's
novels. This point of view involves Hemingway's concept
that when a man is dead he is dead. There is nothing more. If
man can not accept a life or reward after death, the emphasis
must then be on obtaining or doing or performing something
in this particular life. If death ends all activity, if death ends
all knowledge and consciousness, man must seek his reward
here. Consequently, the Hemingway man exists in a large
part for the gratification of his sensual desires; he will
dedicate himself to all types of physical pleasures because
these are the rewards of this life.
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Hemingway's characters first attracted attention because
they drank a lot and had many love affairs. This appealed on
a simple level to the public. In its most elementary sense, if
man is to face total forgetfulness at his death, there is nothing
then to do but enjoy as many of the physical pleasures as
possible during this life. Thus the Hemingway man will
drink, make love, enjoy food, and enjoy all sensuous
appetites-all the sensuous pleasures that are possible. For
example, we need only to recall small insignificant scenes in
Hemingway works, such as in A Farewell to Arms, when in
the middle of the battle Henry and his two ambulance drivers
sit down in the middle of the battlefield among all of the
destruction and thoroughly dedicate themselves to relishing,
enjoying, savoring every taste of their macaroni, cheese, and
bottle of wine.
Returning to the primary consideration, that is that death
is the end of all things, it then becomes the duty and the
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obligation of the Hemingway hero to avoid death at almost
all cost. Life must continue. Life is valuable and enjoyable.
Life is everything. Death is nothing. With this view in mind it
might seem strange then to the casual or superficial reader
that the Hemingway code hero will often be placed in an
encounter with death, or that the Hemingway hero will
choose often to confront death. The bullfighters, the wild
game hunters, and characters like these are in constant
confrontation with death. The concept of grace under
pressure is one according to which the character must act in a
way that is acceptable when he is faced with the fact of death.
In other terms the Hemingway man must have fear of death,
but he must not be afraid to die. By fear he must have the
intellectual realization that death is the end of all things and
as such must constantly be avoided in one way or another.
But-and this is the significant point-man can never act in a
cowardly way. He must not show that he is afraid or
trembling or frightened in the presence of death. If man
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wishes to live, he lives most intensely sometimes when he is
in the direct presence of death. This will at times bring out
man's most innate qualities, test his manhood, will contribute
then an intensity, a vivacity to the life that he is at present
leading, and it is for this reason that Hemingway often places
his characters either in war, in bullfighting rings, or on the
plains of Africa where they must face an animal determined
to kill them. It is then that the Hemingway man shows the
coolness, the grace, the courage, the discipline which has
incited the idea of grace under pressure. The man who never
finds death, who never faces any danger at all, this man has
not yet been tested; we don't know whether he will withstand
the pressures, whether he will prove to be a true Hemingway
man. It is thus only by testing, by coming into confrontation
with something that is dangerous that man lives with this
intensity. In the presence of death, then, man can discover his
own sense of being, his own potentiality.
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5.10 Character Studies.
Frederick Henry
Frederick Henry is a disillusioned man of the modern
world searching for some values or some system that he can
believe in. As a representative of this modern man, Henry has
observed that the traditional values inherent in Christianity
are no longer operative in the modern world. This
observation comes as a result of his having been involved in
World War I. For him the traditional values by which the
world had functioned led to this disastrous world war.
Consequently these values must be discarded in place of
others which are more valid.
Henry is a confused and restless man. One of the first
images of the novel depicts him as a man wandering from
one house of prostitution to another, incapable of discovering
any meaning in life. In conversations with the priest from
Abruzzi, Henry hears about the cold, clear, and dry country
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of the mountains and associates that country with a system of
values which would include an ordered and disciplined life.
Apparently Henry does not function well in this whirlwind
existence of disorder and confusion. His basic desire is to
find some code of life by which he can live and this causes
him to attach himself to Catherine. His reactions to Catherine
at first are physical. He would prefer to sleep with her than to
go to the houses of prostitution. But as he becomes more and
more involved with her, he sees in their relationship a type of
order, a type of commitment to a regular existence.
Having discovered this basic value in his relationship
with Catherine, Henry returns to the front and sees the Italian
army in total disorder and confusion; he can not stay more
time as part of this large group. When his own small group to
which he felt a great amount of loyalty breaks up and when
Henry sees members of the Italian army trying and executing
their own soldiers on supposed charges of desertion, he
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decides that this is the time to desert too. Basically Henry's
desertion can be justified on the grounds that he is loyal only
to a small group, he does not have loyalty to a large group,
and he is always searching for order and discipline in life.
When he sees the Italian army totally undisciplined and in
total disorder, he does not feel anymore allegiance to this
abstract organization. In contrast, he feels a deep sense of
loyalty to Catherine, and he feels that in the love they have
for each other he can discover a sense of duty, a sense of
order, and can develop a code by which he can live.
Principally, the Hemingway man can not live in a world
separated from other people. More clearly, the Hemingway
man can not dedicate himself only to the love of a woman.
Any Hemingway man must be in a constant confrontation
with other men; he must test himself in severe encounters
with danger and can never isolate himself from the
mainstream of action in the world. Henry's attempt to make a
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separate peace with the world and live in isolation with
Catherine is fated to end in failure. There are suggestions that
Catherine and Henry escape to Switzerland to live a perfect
life, but Henry is dissatisfied with the existence. He feels
guilty, he feels like a lazy person in school because he has
deserted. These feelings are not caused by a sense of loyalty
to the Italian army but by the inner feeling that a man only
achieves his full measure of life by coming into contact with
danger, and Henry apparently has run from the field of
danger. These ideas are ingrained in many small symbols
throughout the work. For example, since Henry is no longer
in an encounter with men where he can assert his manhood,
he feels the need of growing a beard. This small episode is
symbolic or indicative of Henry’s feelings of separation from
the mainstream of his manhood.
At the end of the novel, Henry comes to the realization
that life can be faced only if he develops within himself an
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inner strength and inner discipline which will allow him to
meet all encounters with the same grace under pressure. He
had thought that he could share with Catherine and through
their mutual love could find some peace, and happiness. This
is denied to the Hemingway man. Also at the end of the novel
Henry looks at the dead body of Catherine and realizes that
she was like a statue, and he leaves her knowing that in the
future he can never again attach himself to any one thing or
one person. His strength then must come from facing all
encounters alone.
Catherine Barkley.
Catherine Barkley is a static character because she is the
same at the end of the novel as she was at the beginning. In
one sense her function is to measure the amount of
development seen in Frederick Henry. At the beginning of
the novel Catherine knows that death is the end of all things,
a fact that Henry does not accept until the end of the novel.
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Many times Catherine is the one who has totally rejected all
of the traditional values. She does not want to be married,
even though Henry has suggested it. At one level, this is the
practical aspect of her nature speaking because if they were
married they would be separated and Catherine prefers to
remain with Henry. But on another level, this is the code
character speaking, realizing that marriage is just another
empty form and therefore meaningless. Or later on, when
Henry speaks of having the child baptized, Catherine does
not see any necessity to do this.
Catherine has made a religion out of her love for Henry.
A physical description of her suggests that she is the eternally
feminine woman with long beautiful hair. She is perfectly
content to dedicate herself only to the man she loves. She has
already confronted the reality of death when she lost her
boyfriend. And she has arrived at the conviction that this life
and the pleasures of this life are the most important things.
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Therefore she dedicates herself completely and unselfishly to
loving Henry.
Catherine’s response to her own imminent death
indicates the exact stature that she has attained as a person.
Some critics have suggested that Catherine died a noble and
stoic death. A more accurate judgment might be that
Catherine died as she had lived, nobly and stoically. Her view
of her own death is expressed most c1early in her statement,
"It's just a dirty trick." She knows that death is the end of all
things, and she realizes that with death she is losing all the
pleasures that she has looked forward to in life. She meets her
death with courage, with bravery; there is no coward
whimpering or cringing in the face of death. Thus she dies as
she had lived, with honesty, discipline, and courage.
Rinaldi.
Rinaldi is a secondary character in the novel. Rinaldi is a
person of great skill as a surgeon. As noted in the section on
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the Hemingway code hero, a skill is one of the characteristics
of the Hemingway code character. At one point in the novel,
Rinaldi suggests that he can only find himself when he is
operating, that he feels his true manhood when he is testing
his skill against the ravages of war wreaked on the human
bodies of soldiers.
Outside of his operating skill, he is only a man whose
responses to life, to love, to death, are those of the
Hemingway character. Because he is a good friend of
Frederick Henry he is one of the accepted people. Rinaldi
functions as another of the code heroes, or code characters, in
the Hemingway novel, showing that each code character has
different qualities and does not need to be exactly like the
main character in the novel.
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Count Greffi
Without the appearance of people like Count Greffi in a
Hemingway novel, the average reader or critic would be
tempted to dismiss the code character as being able to
function only as a young man. Certainly the descriptions of
the code character imply a man of strength and physical
action, a man in the prime of his life. With the appearance of
people such as Count Greffi the code character can exist to
the ripe old age of ninety-four. Count Greffi is a code
character first because he has never adhered to the traditional
values, but instead has sought his own code of behavior. He
still enjoys and responds to many of the physical stimuli of
life even at his age. He has told people to pray for him
because he has not yet found religion himself. His comment
is that he thought when he grew old he would become
religious and would be able to pray for himself. But now, he
still does not feel religious, so he asks all his friends to pray
for him.
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Count Greffi enjoys playing billiards. He still enjoys
drinking a glass of champagne and giving large birthday
parties. He is not a man who has resigned from life. Like the
old man in The Old Man and the Sea, he has remained like an
active participant in life and has continued to live by his
strong, disciplined code of values. In conclusion, he is proof
that the values inherent in the code characters are still
operative even in old age.
The Priest.
The priest is opposed to everything that Frederick Henry
believes in, and the priest stands for a type of religion which
Henry himself cannot accept. It might seem strange that these
two have apparently a good relationship with each other. The
basis of their relationship, however, is the fact that the priest
does have a system of values. He does follow a code and his
life has become meaningful by this code. Even though his
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values do not fulfill Henry's needs, Henry still is able to
accept this character because he can admire any person who
has a rigid or disciplined set of values by which to live. In
view of the fact that Henry himself is searching for a code, a
set of values, he can admire someone else whose values are
strong even though he can not accept those particular values.
In terms of images the priest seems to stand for something
like the cool and dry country of the Abruzzi, an image that to
Henry seems good and ordered and disciplined when
compared or contrasted to the disorder, the lack of discipline,
and the ugliness found in the war. Therefore, Henry or the
code character will not reject a person because of views
different from his own. But, as mentioned in the earlier
chapters when Henry does not tempt the priest, Henry has a
certain respect for this man and for his ideas, although he
disagrees with them.
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5.11 Style.
A great deal has been written about Ernest Hemingway's
special and probably unique style. Ever since he came to the
attention of English-speaking readers in the 1920's, he has
been the subject of much praise and sometimes strict
criticism. He has never been ignored.
To explain Hemingway's style in a few paragraphs in
such a manner as to satisfy the various critics who have
analyzed it in numerous articles and even books is
impossible. It is, essentially, a simple style, straightforward
and without frills. Hemingway avoids the adjective as much
as possible. He tells the story in what might be called straight
journalism, but because he is a master of transmitting
emotion without extra details, the result is even more
believable. Hemingway's prose is the difference between an
excellent steak and a Boeuf a la Cardonierre. Both are good;
both are made of beef, but the one is simple, while the flavor
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of the other depends on the quality of the sauce and the spices
that go into it. In this century we might say that Proust would
be the great chef, while Hemingway was the one who knew
how to grill a delicious steak.
When Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms, he was
still a young man, but he had perfected his style, and it was to
change little, except for refinements. He was already
recognized as a new force in English literature, and he did not
fail his critics. When, in 1954, he was awarded the Nobel
Prize, he was noted for “forceful and style-making mastery of
the art of modern narration”. Hemingway's ability to create
dialog is keen, and he has often been described as a master of
dialogue. A study of his dialog will reveal that this is rarely
the way people really speak. It is rather that by calculated
emphasis and repetition he makes us remember what has be
en said, or is being said. Comedians can make fun very easily
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by caricaturing Hemingway's dialog, and few other writers
can imitate it convincingly. It is artificial, but it is effective.
In Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway, the
critic Levin says at one point: "Hemingway puts his emphasis
on nouns because, among other parts of speech, they come
closest to things. Stringing them along by means of
conjunctions,
he
approximates
the
actual
flow
of
experience."8
Hemingway's unique style was by no means a
spontaneous one. It was the result of several years of
newspaper writing, where he learned to report facts “crisply”,
then a refinement from voluminous reading of the masters
and a study of their different styles, then of writing and
rewriting. Writing did not flow out of Hemingway as it
apparently did from Thomas Wolfe, but the end product was
a masterfully constructed piece of work.
8
LEVIN, Henry. Contexts of Criticism. Harvard University Press, 1957, page 31.
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No two critics can agree on Hemingway's style. Perhaps
the best way to sum it up is to quote the writer's own words.
Shortly before his tragic death on July 2, 1961, in his home in
Ketchum,
Idaho,
Hemingway
gave
to
the
Wisdom
Foundation in California a collection of his observations on
life, and art, love and death. Playboy magazine published
them in the issue of January, 1963. Of his own style,
Hemingway had this to say:
“I do most of my work in my head. I never begin to write
until my ideas are in order. Frequently I recite passages of
dialogue as it is being written; the ear is a good censor. I
never set down a sentence on paper until I have it so
expressed that it will be clear to anyone.
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Yet I sometimes think that my style is suggestive rather
than direct. The reader must often use his imagination or lose
the most subtle part of my thoughts.
I take great pains with my work, pruning and revising
with a tireless hand. I have the welfare of my creations very
much at heart. I cut them with infinite care, and burnish them
until they become brilliant. What many another writer would
be content to leave in massive proportions, I polish into a tiny
gem.
Hemingway goes on at some length, but the essence of
what he says may be summed up in this paragraph:
A writer's style should be direct and personal, his
imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous.
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The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard
workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists”.9
9
HOTCHNER, A. E. Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir. New York: Random House, 1966,
page 28.
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CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSIONS
We remember Ernest Hemingway as an action man, a
man filled with security and authority. But in reality he was
shy and bitterly frustrated. He was a man with great
intelligence and well educated.
His mother thought him culture and took him to operas,
concerts and art galleries because she wanted her son to be as
she was. On the other hand, his father was rude and taught
him outdoor life, how to use an axe, a gun, and to be strong.
Both parents were strong and each one felt secure and
enthusiastic in teaching Hemingway their own ideals. Also he
and his five brothers and sisters were educated in a deep
religious atmosphere.
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Hemingway's childhood and adolescence gave him an
insight into all aspects of life. Being an investigator and a
person with a great determination, he described in detail what
he felt and he was exceptional at everything he did.
He felt very frustrated when his health or poor eyesight
kept him from reaching his goals. From adolescence when he
wanted to join the armed forces, he was unable to become
part of the army. He could only join the ambulance corps as a
driver. This might have been enough for some people, but not
for Hemingway. He wanted to excel, to be thought of as the
best.
He felt himself damned because of his numerous
accidents, starting with his being badly wounded in World
War I; it was his first serious frustration.
Barred from achieving his first goal of being a war hero
according to his father's demands that he be a strong,
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dominant, fighting man, afraid of nothing, he turned to his
mother's love of culture and began to write.
He was a newspaper reporter after leaving school, but his
first choice was to follow his father's example, to become a
rude, outdoor, independent man. In spite of his father wishes
it was his father himself who refused to let him join up for
World War I.
He quickly got married after recovering from his injuries
in World War I. He married a woman eight years older than
him, although it was said that she was simple, wise, and
inexperienced.
Maybe Hemingway married Hadley for her money
because although he was not earning much as a newspaper
reporter, he was determined to travel. He knew he needed
some financial support for his plans and Hadley was able to
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give him all the money he needed. However, his marriage to
Hadley did produce a son, John Hemingway.
He had a number of affairs during his marriage to
Hadley, but she decided to divorce him only when she
discovered his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer.
All his life he had affairs; it was impossible for him to be
only with one woman. Even though he finally married a
woman that he considered equal to him, Martha Gellhorn, he
betrayed her too, because he discovered he could not be
faithful to a woman who had her own career.
Hemingway did not know what he wanted. He wanted
everything and nothing. His writing was his way of reporting
on life, of exorcising his ghosts, of achieving fame and glory;
he had a natural talent, too.
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He felt unable to become an adventurous, outdoor man.
He had many illnesses such as anthrax, digestive problems,
and pneumonia. Each illness seemed to occur after a long
period of activity: fishing, hunting, and shooting. Maybe he
was frustrated by his bad health, and at his tendency to get
sick every his body’s resistance was low.
He eventually fell into a period of mental illness,
overwhelmed by the demands put on him by others and
himself. His father’s suicide made him think that he could do
the same thing. His medical treatment to overcome his mental
problems did not help; he found his memory had gone and
that he could not even write as before.
His bad physical state prevented him from carrying out
his usual activities of fishing, shooting and hunting. As far as
he was concerned, there was no other choice but to end his
life.
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BIBLIOGRAPY
- BAKER, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to
Arms. En la Novela Norteamericana, México, Editorial
Diana S.A. 1970.
- BAKER, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as an Artist.
2nd. Ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956.
- BRIAN, Dennis. The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait
of Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him. Grove Press,
New York, First Edition, 1988.
- BUCKLEY, Peter. Ernest, The Dial Press, New York,
1978.
- BURGESS, Anthony. Ernest Hemingway. Barcelona,
Salvat Editores, S.A., 1984.
- CLARK, Frazer. American Red Cross Reports on the
Wounding of Lieutenant Ernest Hemingway. 1918.
- FUENTES, Norberto. Ernest Hemingway en Cuba.
Ciudad de La Habana, Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984.
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- GRIFFIN, Peter. Along With Youth Hemingway. The
Early Years. New York: Oxford, 1985.
- HANNEMAN, Audre. Ernest Hemingway: A
Comprehensive Bibliography. Princeton University
Press, 1967.
- HEMINGWAY, Gregory. Papá: A Personal Memoir.
Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
- HEMINGWAY, Leicester. My brother Ernest
Hemingway. Cleveland and New York, 1962.
- HEMINGWAY, M. Madelaine. Ernie. Crown
Publishers New York, 1975.
- HEMINGWAY, W. Mary. How It Was. New York,
Knopf, 1976.
- HOTCHNER, A.E. Hemingway and His World.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data,
1989.
- KERT, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York,
1983.
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- LYNN, Kenneth. Hemingway. New York. Simon and
Schuster, 1987.
- MEYERS, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography.
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ESCUELA DE LENGUA Y LITERATURA INGLESA
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