Ernest
Hemingway at his trusty Underwood #5 portable hunt-and-peck typing in
the great outdoors with a pile of already completed pages on his
make-shift desk. Just as he imagined himself--the writer as hero.
Ernest
Hemingway, despite being deeply unfashionable these days in some tony circles, was hands down
the most important American novelist of the Twentieth
Century. He was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a comfortable upper middle class suburb
of Chicago which the writer would
later recall as a place of, “broad lawns and narrow minds.”
The son of a depressive physician and a high strung mother with musical and artistic ambitions, the young Hemingway was probably happier there than he dared admit later in life. Despite conflicts
with his mother over practicing the cello, he had a wide circle of friends and excelled at everything he touched in high school—scholastics,
athletics, and the newspaper and yearbook he edited. He summered
at the family’s cabin in Michigan where he mastered fly fishing and trapping
which sparked a lifelong interest in
the outdoors and what he perceived
to be adventure.
Hemingway was a popular golden boy in high school seeming to turn everything he touched golden. He was so successful and happy that he nearly erased the experience to paint a darker picture of his youth.
But he was glad
enough to get out of town when he could, spurning his father’s wishes that he attend college. Instead, he turned
naturally to journalism. He got a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, then regarded as
one of the outstanding newspapers “between
the coasts.” He dutifully covered the re-write desk as other reporters phoned in stories, and covered sports and petty crime. He reveled in the life of a newspaper man, including the heavy drinking camaraderie so attractive to a boy of 17. Although he stayed with the paper only six
months he later claimed his writing
style was straight out of the Star style book, “Use short sentences. Use short first
paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”
With the American entry into World
War I, Hemingway was eager to see action, but his association with politically
radical newsmen may have soured his desire to enlist in the Army as a combatant. Instead he signed on with the Red Cross
and was assigned duty in Italy as an ambulance driver. He arrived
in Europe in May 1918 and saw Paris for the first time in transit to
Italy while the city was under German
artillery bombardment. On his first
duty in Milan he was posted to a munitions factory explosion which killed dozens of young women workers. “After we searched quite thoroughly for the
complete dead we collected fragments,” he later recalled. In the afternoon any thoughts of glory were erased by gore.
Soon he was on duty at the front.
On July 8 after only weeks in combat,
Hemingway was severely wounded by mortar fire. Despite wounds in both legs he carried an injured soldier to safety, earning the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor.
Hemingway in an Italian military hospital in his Red Cross ambulance
corps uniform with Agnes von Kurowsky, the lovely nurse eight years his
senior he fell madly in love with.
After emergency
surgery on his wounds at a field hospital, he was transferred to
a military hospital in Milan where he spent six months recovering
and mooning over Agnes von Kurowsky, a beautiful American Red
Cross nurse seven years his senior.
Although she may have encouraged the attentions of her strapping, handsome patient, she became alarmed with the intensity
of his
adoration and his fantasies of
a life together as man and wife. After Hemingway returned home, she jilted
him in letter claiming to be engaged to an Italian
officer. He was crushed and bitter
but used Agnes as the model for characters in his A Very Short Story, and most
famously, in A Farewell to Arms.
Recuperating
uncomfortably in Oak Park, Hemmingway took solace
in an extended fishing and camping trip to Michigan with old high school
buddies which became the basis for his early short story The Big Two Hearted River which introduced
his semi-autobiographical Nick Adams character.
In September
1919 he casually took a job in Toronto, Canada but was soon wrangling free lance assignments from the Toronto Star, many of them accounts
of his fishing adventures. He maintained
a relationship with the Star when her
returned for a final summer in Michigan in 1920 and then moved to Chicago
to work as an editor under Maxwell Anderson at the moderate
leftist monthly Cooperative
Commonwealth.
He met Hadley Richardson, a vivacious red head from St.
Louis when she visited her brother, then his roommate. Like von
Kurowsky she was eight years older than him and described by friends as “nurturing”
but surprisingly immature for her age.
In an extended correspondence the couple planned an adventure to Europe
together. Married in
September 1921, Anderson urged the couple to go to Paris where they could live
cheaply.
Hemingway and his first wife Hadley--young, in love, and at large in Europe.
Hemingway secured
an assignment as a foreign correspondent from the Toronto Star which assured the couple of
more than an ample income especially when they picked a cheap walk-up
apartment in the poverty stricken Latin Quarter. Hemingway had enough money to rent another
near-by room for his writing and the couple had money to spend on occasional
jaunts around the continent.
Anderson’s letters
of
introduction to expatriate poet
and arts patron Gertrude Stein and others soon put him at the
center of a vibrant bohemian arts community. Poet Ezra Pound mentored him,
as he had done to so many others, and accompanied Hemingway on a long trip to
Italy in 1923. James Joyce was an
especially close friend
and favorite drinking companion, the frail Irishman often relying
on the muscular American
to bail him out of bar brawls.
Through Stein’s famous salon he also met and associated
with artists Pablo Picasso and Jean Miro. He
began chronicling what Stein called the Lost Generation in notes
and short stories.
Meanwhile he
filed regular dispatches for the Star,
including an account of the burning of Smyrna in the Greco-Turkish War. He also filed travel pieces, an account of fly
fishing across Europe, and significantly, his first account of the Running
of the Bulls at Pamplona. In December 1922 Hadley was on the way to
meet him in Geneva when she lost a suitcase containing almost all of the story manuscripts Hemingway had been working on for a year and a
half. The writer was devastated and sank into an inconsolable depression and heavy drinking.
The following year the couple returned
to Toronto for the birth of their son, John (nicknamed Bumby)
and Hemingway worked as a reporter at the Star.
While they were in Canada, a small private
edition of a 36 page collection
of vignettes, including A Very Short Story was published in Paris under the title in
our time.
After returning to Paris in 1924 he worked with Ford Maddox Ford on the influential
literary magazine Transatlantic
Review in which some of his
first Nick Adams stories were published.
Ford provided the dust jacket blurb for Hemingway’s full scale
book, In Our Time which
incorporated the vignettes from the earlier pamphlet between several Nick Adams
stories. The book received strong,
even glowing reviews for the writer’s “reinvention” of
narrative prose in deceptively simple, short declarative sentences.
Hemingway was
modestly on his way to becoming a literary celebrity. He enjoyed a friendly rivalry with F. Scott Fitzgerald whose recent success with The Great Gatsby encouraged him
to try his hand at a novel,
which he recognized was becoming the most important literary form of the
post war period.
The family’s
now annual trip to Pamplona in 1925 was in the company of a mixed
group of American and British expatriates, who
inspired Hemingway to begin work on The
Sun Also Rises. He dashed of a first draft in two
months but then spent six months doing a painstaking rewrite before
sending it to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s in New York. The novel was published to sensational
reviews in October 1926 just as his marriage to Hadley was deteriorating.
Earlier that
year Hemingway had begun an affair with Pauline
Pfeiffer, even inviting
her on the annual trip to Pamplona.
Hadley asked for a divorce in
November. The couple amicably divided their property and Hemingway, feeling guilty gave her all of the
proceeds from The Sun Also
Rises. He married Pfeiffer, an heiress from Arkansas who worked on the Paris
edition of Vogue. The smitten
writer even converted to Catholicism for her, a major slap in the face to his
father.
Hemingway in Paris with the fresh head scar from the freak accident when
he pulled his bathroom skylight frame down his head. In later years he
would encourage people to assume that the scar was related to his war
wounds or a hunting accident.
On their honeymoon Hemingway somehow contracted
anthrax, just one of the serious
illness and bad accidents that
seemed to plague him for the rest of his life. A few months later he accidentally pulled the
frame of a skylight in his Paris
bathroom down on his head giving him a concussion and the large
crescent shape scar on his forehead
evident in all of his later photographs. He seldom admitted to the accident letting people believe that it was a war wound or a hunting accident, just one of the many little myths he let flourish
to burnish his growing reputation as a macho
man.
Recovering from the illness and
accident, Hemingway pulled together his next short story collection, Men
Without Women which included revised
versions of ten pieces
previously published in magazines and four new stories. The collection featured some of his strongest
stories, most notably his bleak gangster tale, The Killers.
Pauline and Ernest returned to the
United States in 1928, permanently leaving
Paris behind. On the advice of John Dos Passos, they found a home in Key West. But Hemingway was restless. The couple was in Kansas City for the birth
of their first son Patrick. Pauline nearly died in childbirth, an
experience Hemingway would incorporate
in his next novel, A Farewell to Arms, which he was beginning to work on. In the next few months he was hunting in Wyoming and visited his editor Perkins
in New York.
The family, along with his first son
Bumby, were aboard a train
from New York to Florida when they got word that Hemingway’s father had committed suicide with a shot gun. Grief
stricken and guilt ridden he
told Pauline, “I’ll probably go the same way.”
Returning to Key West, he finished a
first draft of the new novel in January 1929 and Scribner’s announced plans to serialize it in their monthly magazine prior to publication
as a book in May. But Hemmingway struggled with the ending and went to France to collect
notes from his hospitalization
in Italy, then went on to Spain for research
on his next project, a non-fiction
book on bullfighting. The book was finally published in
September. Again it was a major achievement. Royalties from the book, and the motion picture adaptation starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes which was released two years later made the family financially secure.
Happy years in Key West--Hemingway with wife Pauline and a marlin.
Pauline’s uncle bought them a two
story home in Key West with a writing
room in a converted carriage house. Another son, Gregory, was born, and Bumby stayed with the couple for extended
periods of time. Hemingway was probably as happy as he ever would be. They went to Wyoming for trout fishing in the
summers and big game in the fall, returning to Key West for the winters. He took up serious deep sea fishing, entertained
visiting pals like Dos Passos and Perkins, caroused at a sea side dive called Sloppy Joe’s, dashed off to
Europe or Cuba for quick trips,
writing magazine pieces and working on his bullfighting book Death
in the Afternoon which was published in 1932. It received praise, but also criticism for its worshipful meditation on what was after all a brutal blood sport.
In 1933 Hemingway and Pauline flew to Africa to research a planned collection of big game hunting stories. A ten
week safari provided ample material,
but Hemingway was struck with amebic
dysentery causing the collapse of
his intestines and requiring him to
be air lifted to a Nairobi hospital. The episode became fodder for the story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. He finished his collection, The
Green Hills of Africa in 1935.
It sold well but met with mixed
reviews despite containing stories now
considered classic like The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
That year he bought his beloved fishing boat Pillar, outfitted like the boats of professional
fishing guides who catered to rich, bored customers. He sailed often to Bimini and to Cuba posing
for pictures with his family in front of a huge hanging black marlin. He captured that world and the seedy
intrigue of smuggling in the Caribbean in his only novel of the
decade, To Have or Have Not.
Hemingway
at the Battle of Teruel in the Spanish Civil war. Not just a war
corespondent, he was a passionate Republican partisan and in the heat of
the moment could not resist joining the battle.
By the time it was published in 1937 he
was covering the Spanish Civil War as a war
correspondent for the North American
Newspaper Alliance (NANA). Returning to a latent radicalism, he became passionately
involved in the Republican cause,
collaborating with Dutch film maker Joris Ivens on the script and narration of the film The
Spanish Earth. While making the film
he broke with his old friend John Dos Passos, who left Spain after
his friend José Robles was arrested and executed by Republican
authorities. Dos Passos became disillusioned with the left and began
his long drift toward political conservatism. Hemingway railed against him for cowardice
and deserting the cause under fire.
With the intervention of the Nazis
and Italian Fascists on the side of General Franco, the war was turning against the politically divided Republicans.
In Madrid under artillery barrage he wrote his only play, the bitter Fifth Column.
He was also dallying with journalist Martha
Gellhorn, an acquaintance he had
met in Key West. The combination of war and romance was irresistible. Hemingway traveled back and forth between the
States and Spain two more times before he was present for the end in 1938. He and other correspondents were among the last to escape across
the Ebro when the Republican last stand collapsed.
Another war, another woman--Hemingway and third wife Martha in Idaho shortly after their marriage.
Crushed by the Republican loss, he separated from Pauline upon returning to the States and moved to
Cuba in 1939 where Martha soon joined him.
Together they set up residence at rented Finca Vigia (Lookout
Farm) near Havana. After an attempted reconciliation with Pauline on the annual Wyoming trip with the
children, the couple filed for divorce. He married Martha in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1940. After the marriage
Hemingway moved his summer base to Ketchum, Idaho near Sun Valley and also began making winter trips there from Cuba to ski.
All during this turmoil and drama he was
working on his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bells Toll. He purposefully molded his hero, Robert Jordan, on Gary Cooper, the star
of A Farewell to Arms and a Sun Valley skiing
companion. The book was published in
October 1940 and became his most successful, becoming a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, selling half a million copies in
a few months and earning the author the unanimous
recommendation of the jury for
the Pulitzer Prize. But Columbia
University President Nicholas Murray
Butler, ex-officio head of
the Pulitzer Board and a fascist sympathizer, vetoed the
choice and no prize was awarded for 1941. In 1943 Hemingway got his wish when Cooper was cast opposite Ingrid Bergman in an Academy
Award winning film of the book.
Returning to
Cuba with the outbreak of war, Hemingway outfitted the Pillar as an amateur U-boat hunter and played at
chasing Nazi subs in the Caribbean. But he yearned for action, and better yet revenge, for the
bitter loss of Spain. In 1944 he was
accredited a war correspondent for Colliers
Magazine.
Hemingway's war corespondent credentials from SHAFE--Supreme Headquarters Allied Forced Europe.
He observed
D-Day landings from an LST but Army authorities, fearful
of losing the most famous American writer in action, refused to
allow him to personally make the landing with the men, although his
later accounts of the day inferred that he did come ashore.
In July he attached
himself to the 22d Infantry Regiment under the command of colorful and able Colonel Charles “Buck”
Lanham, who was spearheading the
drive to Paris. Lanham became the
model for Colonel Cantwell in
Hemingway’s last war novel, Across
the River and Into the Trees.
As the regiment approached Paris,
Hemingway encountered a loose band of French Resistance fighters
and somehow assumed command of the
group through a series of sharp skirmishes with the Germans. He would later be charged with violating
the Geneva Convention by participating in combat operations while an accredited
correspondent. Charges were dismissed when he claimed to have acted only in an “advisory capacity,” although testimony by the French involved made it clear that he was in
actual command—and acquitted himself
more than ably.
He reconnected
to the Regiment as it entered the Paris
Suburbs with orders to
wait for Charles de Gaulle’s
Free French Division to enter the city first. He famously
claimed to have jumped in a
reconnaissance Jeep and entered the city without resistance ahead
of all other troops and to have “personally
liberated the Bar of the Ritz Hotel,”
This account was later proved to be highly
exaggerated, though Hemingway was indeed one of the first Americans to enter his former city.
While in Paris he attended a reunion
hosted by Sylvia Beach owner of Shakespeare & Company Bookstore and
the publisher of the first version of in
our time, and made peace with
Gertrude Stein, from whom he had been estranged
since the mid ‘20s.
After a period of carousing in Paris,
Hemingway rejoined Lanham’s men for the
brutal fighting in the Hürtgen Forest, where he fell ill. None the less, he commandeered a Jeep
and driver to take him to Luxemburg in December to cover the developing Battle
of the Bulge. Collapsing on arrival with pneumonia, Lanham personally
had him carried to a hospital. In
1947 Hemingway was awarded a rare Bronze Star for a civilian
citing his repeated “bravery under fire in combat areas in
order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions.”
Earlier while in England awaiting the
D-Day invasion Hemingway had met Mary
Welsh, a Time Magazine correspondent.
Repeating his war time pattern
he became smitten, which became obvious to Martha, when she arrived dramatically but inconveniently on the scene having crossed dangerous Atlantic waters on an
explosive laden cargo ship. Although Hemmingway was once again laid up with injuries from an auto
accident, it took Martha no time at all to figure out what was going on, call Hemingway a bully, and announce she was done
with him forever. He
last saw his third wife when he left London to return to Cuba in
1945.
In 1946 he married Mary. Both were plagued with health problems.
She suffered an ectopic pregnancy
five months after the wedding, he had another auto accident that severely smashed his knee and put another deep gash on his forehead. She broke both ankles in separate Sun Valley Ski accidents. He slipped into another prolonged depression
after the death of Maxwell Perkins, his long time friend and editor, in 1947
just another in a long list of old
literary and drinking palls to pass on. His weight
ballooned, blood pressure soared,
and he developed diabetes, all of which he handled by drinking
more heavily than ever.
Hemingway with Veronica "Rocky" Cooper, fourth and final wife the former Mary Walsh, and his pal Gary Cooper in Idaho.
He was also experiencing a kind of
writer’s block. He worked sporadically on a new novel, The
Garden of Eden with unusual
androgynous sexual themes based loosely on his own honeymoon with his
second wife, Pauline on the French
Riviera. Eventually we wrote more
than 800 pages but was never satisfied and continued to tinker with the book until he
died. It was published, unsuccessfully and posthumously by Scriber’s with more than two thirds of the manuscript cut and major changes to sequence.
In 1948 he and Mary went to Italy where
they revisited the scene of his
World War I injury and he conducted research for his brooding novel of coming to grips with
love, loss, war, and death, Across the
River and Through the Woods.
Published in 1950 the book was such
a departure from his pre-war
novels that both the public and critics rejected it, although it has found an appreciative audience in retrospect among scholars. His first real literary failure was another cause
for depression.
In 1951 the literary damn broke when Hemingway completed a draft of The Old Man and the Sea in just six
weeks. The deceptively simple story of the battle of a humble Cuban
fisherman and an enormous marlin
was published in 1952 and immediately restored
Hemingway’s reputation as the nation’s foremost novelist. Quickly translated
into Spanish and other
languages, the book reached a greater international audience than any
of his earlier work. And he finally got
the Pulitzer Prize denied him ten years earlier. He personally regarded it as his best work.
Despite
the severity of their injuries, Hemingway was much amused by the
erroneous reports of his death in his second plane crash in two days.
Refreshed and invigorated
Hemingway and Mary embarked on a trip to Africa to hunt and do research on
another book. On a sightseeing flight in the Belgian
Congo, the couple’s bush plane struck a utility pole and crashed. Hemingway sustained another head wound and Mary
broke two ribs. The next day a second plane carrying them for medical treatment exploded on takeoff
giving Hemingway another concussion
and painful burns over much of his
body. Eventually reaching Entebbe, Uganda for medical
treatment, Hemingway was amused to learn that he was reported killed in the crash. While recovering he took delight in reading obituaries printed in the world press.
But his injuries were painful and serious and would nag him for the rest of his life.
A few months later he suffered fresh burns attempting to put out a brush fire in Idaho
on fishing trip with his son Patrick and his wife. A full
physical conducted while on a visit to Venice
finally revealed the seriousness of his accumulated injuries which included a fractured skull, fused
spinal discs, a dislocated shoulder,
and tears to the kidney and spleen in
addition to the burns, which were slow
to heal and subject to infection. Hemingway would never again be free of
pain and his already heavy drinking increased as he attempted to self medicate.
While recovering he received surprise word that he had been awarded
the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. Unable
to go to Stockholm to receive
the award, he sent an acceptance speech to be read for
him. Hemingway remained bed ridden
through 1955 and into early 1956 when he felt well enough for a trip to
Europe. Although falling ill again, he retrieved a trunk of notebooks and
papers from his early years in Paris that he had left behind in the basement of the Ritz Hotel when he moved to Key
West in 1928.
Armed with the source material and his own
increasing nostalgia for those days, Hemingway began work on his memoir of the era, A Moveable Feast at his Cuba home in
1957. It was the beginning of another intense period of activity. He finished
his memoir in 1959 while simultaneously resuming work on The Garden of Eden; adding to another lengthy unpublished
manuscript, True at First Light; and nearly completing work
on another novel, Islands in the
Stream.
He was publicly supportive of the Cuban Revolution and personally friendly with Fidel Castro. But hoards of visitors and tourists were now swarming his favorite haunts
hoping to meet him or simply walking
up to his door. He attempted
to be gracious but became more annoyed with the distraction. Late in ’59 he decided to permanently leave
Cuba for year round residence in
Ketchum. Although he made it clear that
he was not leaving for political reasons, an angry Castro had his home expropriated after the Bay of
Pigs Invasion. Caught behind in Cuba
were Hemingway’s extensive 600 book
personal library, memorabilia, art works, and manuscripts.
The summer of 1959 Hemingway made a
trip to Spain for a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by Life Magazine. The manuscript ballooned far out of proportion from what the
magazine would use, and a clearly
distracted Hemingway called in friend and ghostwriter A.
E. Hotchner to organize the
work. Hotchner would later draw on this experience for his memoir
of the ageing icon, Papa Hemingway.
Drinking
heavily and medicated for the excruciating pain he was under
nearly every day, Hemingway began to exhibit
paranoia and delusions. Mary caught him one day with a shotgun in his mouth. He was sent for treatment to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
Minnesota where he was treated for hypertension. He was also given electroconvulsive shock treatment at least 15
times. In January, 1961 he returned to
Ketchum in worse shape than when he entered the clinic. He was returned for more treatments a few
months later.
Life's famous cover portrait of Hemingway--perhaps the
most iconic image of him, but not one he would have chosen. He would
prefer to have been remembered as a swashbuckling writer and adventurer,
not a pensive old man.
On the
morning of July 2, 1961 Hemingway somehow eluded the vigilance of
his wife Mary and slipped unobserved into a bedroom with his favorite
shot gun. He placed it in his mouth and
pulled the trigger, blowing the back of
his skull off and killing
him instantly. Cooperative local authorities went
along with Mary’s story that he was accidently shot while
cleaning his gun. He was quickly
buried with Catholic rites by a priest unaware of the
circumstances.
Life Magazine memorialized
Hemingway with a memorable cover portrait of the old man with a
graying beard in an Irish fisherman’s sweater. The world
mourned. Five years later Mary Hemingway finally confirmed that her
husband died at the age 61 by his own hand.
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