to tell anybody anything, because it is this that causes a person to start
missing others.
A FAREWELL TO ARMS
SOME INFO ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall
Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was
educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he
was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most
were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On
graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less sheltered
environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was
employed as a reporter for the Star. He was repeatedly rejected for
military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World
War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918,
not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at
Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell
in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry
him. These were experiences he was never to forget.
After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing,
for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a
foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other
American writers in Paris--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound--
he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1923
his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was
published in New York City. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a
novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but
sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and
Spain--members of the postwar "lost generation," a phrase that Hemingway
scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the
limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life.
Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer
Sherwood Anderson's book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.The writing
of books occupied him for most of the postwar years. He remained based in
Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, or
hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background
for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been
advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the
stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933.
Among his finest stories are "The Killers," "The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." At least in the public
view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works.
Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway
developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with
war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World
War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the
English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation
after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his
post. Henry deserts during the Italians' disastrous retreat after the
Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the
border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during
childbirth, leaving Henry desolate at the loss of the great love of his
life.
Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in
Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more
as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933-34 in
the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in The Green Hills of Africa
(1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he bought a
house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel
of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is
set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence
in Key West during the Great Depression.By now Spain was in the midst of
civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips
there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in
their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and
he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged
Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on
the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war he purchased Finca
Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba, and
went to cover another war--the Japanese invasion of China.
The harvest of Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war and
peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and
impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference
to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books as
measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert
Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind
the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel
concerns Jordan's relations with the varied personalities of the band,
including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue,
flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the
Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity
stirred up by the civil war. Jordan's mission is to blow up a strategic
bridge near Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he
realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he
blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave
him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist
pursuers.All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war--in A Farewell to
Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the
comradeship it creates--and as World War II progressed he made his way to
London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force
and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6,
1944).
Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he
saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He
also participated in the liberation of Paris and, although ostensibly a
journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage
in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla
activities, and intelligence collection.Following the war in Europe,
Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again.
He also traveled widely, and on a trip to Africa he was injured in a plane
crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short, heroic novel about an old Cuban
fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin
only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home.
This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his
previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a
professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had been
damned.By 1960 Fidel Castro's revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba. He
settled in Ketchum, Idaho, and tried to lead his life and do his work as
before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was
twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he
received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in
Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had married four times
and fathered three sons.He left behind a substantial amount of manuscript,
some which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of
his years in Paris (1921-26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964.
Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly out
of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana
during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in
1970.Hemingway's characters plainly embody his own values and view of life.
The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For
Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence
nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by
their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the
world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and
offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such
a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with
honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as "the
Hemingway code."
To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show "grace
under pressure" and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme
clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.Hemingway's prose style was
probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to
strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of
verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as
objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of
describing a series of actions using short, simple sentences from which all
comment or emotional rhetoric have been eliminated. These sentences are
composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and
rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting
terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant
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