Titans of History

HEMINGWAY

1899–1961

Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

The essence of man’s—and Hemingway’s—indomitable spirit captured in The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Ernest Hemingway was arguably the most important American writer of the 20th century. His novels and short stories, rejecting the stuffy 19th-century values he saw in his own family and in the world around him, introduced a new and powerful style of writing: sparse, economical, tough, masculine prose that captures the horrors of war and the trials of love, and advocates a strong moral code for conducting life in a complex world of pain and betrayal. Hemingway could be unpredictable, violent, bad-tempered, vainglorious, ridiculous and drunken, but these were all aspects of a troubled yet brilliant mind. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of his work and his distinctive and unique contribution to literature.

Hemingway grew up in a Chicago suburb. His father, physician Dr. Clarence Hemingway, urged him toward manly outdoor activities like hunting, shooting and fishing. His mother, Grace, instilled in him a familiarity with literature. He used to claim that the first words he said as a baby were “Afraid of nothing! Afraid of nothing!” probably untrue but typical of his famed machismo. As a young man Hemingway went to Italy to serve in the First World War. He was blown up by a mortar in 1918, but, despite being injured by shrapnel and coming under machine-gun fire, he managed to carry two comrades to safety.

Though he later embellished this experience, it was an outstanding act of bravery for which the Italian government awarded him the Silver Medal of Honor. While recuperating, Hemingway fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. He never forgot the experience.

When he returned to America, his mother reprimanded him for his “lazy loafing and pleasure seeking,” accusing him of “trading on his handsome face” and “neglecting his duties to God.” Hemingway had always despised his mother’s written style, her sermonizing and her religion, which he saw as running counter to human happiness. Now he began to despise her wholesale. The breach with his family was never reconciled, and when in 1921 Hemingway took a job as foreign correspondent on the Toronto Star, based in Paris, he cut himself free and became his own man.

In Paris Hemingway fell in with prominent literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and the other American literary genius of the time. In 1924–5 Hemingway published his short-story cycle In Our Time, and in 1926 the successful novel The Sun Also Rises, which dealt with the lives of the aimless socialites of America’s postwar “Lost Generation,” who decadently drifted around Europe without purpose.

Hemingway’s first masterpiece was A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. It was heavily autobiographical, telling a love story set in the First World War. A young ambulance man, Frederic Henry, falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse tending to his recuperation. After Henry deserts his post, the couple flee to Switzerland, but Catherine and her baby die in childbirth, leaving Henry desolate.

Spain played a dominant part in Hemingway’s life and works. He wrote a sensitive study of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, in 1932, and when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he became deeply involved in the Republican cause, raising money to assist the struggle against General Franco’s Nazi-backed Nationalists. His experience was the basis for his second masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940. Set during the Civil War, this tells the story of an American volunteer guerrilla, Robert Jordan, who is sent to blow up a railway line in support of a Republican attack. Jordan’s love for a Spanish girl, Maria, develops in a narrative that skillfully explores the Spanish character and the brutality of war.

Hemingway covered the Second World War as a journalist, flying several missions with the Royal Air Force, seeing action on D-Day and taking part in the liberation of Paris. After the war he spent most of his time working at Finca Vigía, his home in Cuba. The jewel of this final period was The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the tale of an elderly fisherman and his struggles to land an enormous marlin. This short book won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize the following year.

Alcohol, age and various serious accidents, including two plane crashes, took their toll on Hemingway. During the 1950s he spiraled into depression, and the more unpleasant aspects of his nature—he could be sour, quarrelsome, prone to violence—all came to the fore. Forced from Cuba in 1960 by Fidel Castro’s revolution, Hemingway settled in Ketchum, Idaho. Aware that his creative powers were in terminal decline, and realizing that the electric-shock therapy he was receiving for depression was useless, he killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. He was sixty-two years old.

Hemingway may have been a troubled and troublesome character, but he was also a figure of enormous energy and dynamism who left an indelible mark not just on modern literature but on language too.