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Ernest Hemingway Biography
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899
-
July 2, 1961) was an American author. He was born in Oak Park,
Illinois, and committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.
During his lifetime, he was awarded
with:
Silver Medal of Military Valor
(medaglia d''argento) in World War I
Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man
and the Sea)
Nobel Prize in literature in 1954 (also
partly for The Old Man and the Sea)
In 2001, two of his books, The Sun Also
Rises and A Farewell to Arms, would be named to the list of the 100
best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial
board of the American Modern Library.
Introduction
Oak Park produced a tall, handsome man,
strong, smart and ambitious. He had already learned the art of
hunting and therefore was no stranger to killing. As an infant, he
joined his father on hunting trips. At ten, he got his first shotgun.
He also enjoyed a good fight; boxing was one of his passions. His
father''s prestige as a physician helped him a lot in the small town,
he learned about music and art and grew up in a protected, clean and
safe neighborhood. Some of his Nick stories seem partly based on his
experiences at this time.
World War I showed him a different side
of life, which did not, however, leave him entirely depressed and
broken. His illusions were shattered, but the experiences gathered
were invaluable, and, what''s more, everything turned out to be all
right in the end, the good ones won, his wounds healed completely and
Agnes was a mere "Schwärmerei" (Burgess (9.); page
24). He even got decorated, returned as a hero and earned much fame
and admiration back home. His luck was completed when he married
Hadley Richardson who bore his first son.
Being a Artist in the "City of
Light", as Paris still is called by some, he may have had a hard
time from the financial point of view, but all in all the ''twenties
were days of friendship, the financial and artistic struggle kept
Hemingway fit. He was mentored there by Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound.
Death and
violence were the two great
constants in Hemingway''s troubled, chaotic life. Fifty-one years
later, he used a gun to kill himself. He was a tough, strong man with
strong principles. Hemingway "believed that life was a tragedy
and knew it could only have one end", yet he was blessed with
talent and drive. That may have made it harder for him to admit his
failures and correct them.
In his novels, Ernest Hemingway used
violence extensively, yet subtly. Never is there a description of
death for its own sake, it always contributes to a larger theme, in A
Farewell to Arms it is mainly human commitment, and in For Whom the
Bell Tolls mainly comradeship. It contributes in an unusual way:
Death and violence always act as the opposite, as the imminent threat
and as the jet black background that makes the theme stand out
sharply, and that''s why it is difficult to analyze it. No matter what
exactly happens in those two books, violence and death are always
involved, but just act as a sort of sublime intensification of the
protagonist''s feelings and experiences.
Sadly, Hemingway couldn''t use this
attitude in life. Maybe the pressure simply was too high. The general
public never knew the real Ernest Hemingway, a man with a man''s
problems. They only had an abstract ideal they knew from his books.
Even his close friend James Joyce mixed him up with his characters.
Joyce once said: "He''s a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he
is. He''s a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A
sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never
have it if his body had not allowed him to live it. But giants of his
sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway''s form
than people know."
According to Ford Mth is
not facts but vision. On that principle are Hemingway''s characters
based. But that is what caused Hemingway''s failure. He felt he had to
be as stoic as his characters.
Like Robert Jordan''s father, he was
trapped. On the one hand, he could never surpass his character''s
deeds and on the other hand, the general public demanded him to do
so. He tried and created one myth after the other. He claimed he had
an affair with Mata Hari ("but one night I fucked her very well,
although I found her to be very heavy throughout the hips and to have
more desire for what was done to her than what she was giving to the
man" (Burgess (9.), p. 105)), that he joined the Arditi after
his wounding, etc. And most people were perfectly willing to believe
it, the tale about the Arditi, Italian shock troops, even appeared in
Malcolm Cowley''s preface to the 1944(Cowley (4.), p. xii) edition of
The Viking Portable Library. He was captured in the structure of his
lies, the discrepancy between him and the image he had set up grew
larger every day. To be a liar and worthless in comparison to that
shining idol must have reinforced his alcohol-related depressions and
made him more liable to the hurts he received.
After all, there is a certain
ambivalence of death and violence. It had done some good, and taught
him priceless philosophies. But at the same time, they hurt him so
much, the only thing he could do was to make fiction from them. He
did that superbly well.
Biography
He starting writing for the Kansas City
Star and adopted as his personal standand the main directives of
newspaper''s stylebook: "Brevity, a reconciliation of vigour with
smoothness, the positive approach".
In 1918 he left the Star to travel
overseas. Against his father''s wishes, he tried to join the United
States Army but failed the medical examination. Later, he enlisted in
the Ambulance Corps and left for Italy. On July 8, 1918, at the
Italian front he was wounded by machine gun fire, ending his career
as an ambulance driver. After being discharged from the Army,
Hemingway returned home and in 1920 took a job in Toronto, Ontario,
Canada at the Toronto Star newspaper as a freelancer, staff writer,
and foreign correspondent. It was also at this time when he met up
with Canada''s young literary prodigy, Morley Callaghan who also was a
cub reporter at the same paper. Callaghan, who respected Hemingway''s
work, showed his stories to him and Hemingway praised it as fine
work. The two later joined up in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris,
France with F. Scott Fitzgerald and the other expatriate writers of
the day.
In 1921 he married Hadley Richardson
and moved to Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star covering
the Greco-Turkish War. In 1923, his last year at the Star, his first
book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris by Robert
McAlmon. In the same year, his first son, John, was born in Toronto.
Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the Toronto Star, and
on January 1, 1924, resigned.
Sherwood Anderson gave him a letter of
recommendation to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and opened
the door to the Parisian Modern Movement happening in Montparnasse
Quarter. His other mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of Imagism. In
retrospective, Hemingway once said about them: "Ezra was right
half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never
in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right." (to John
Peale Bishop; Cowley (4.), p. xiii). He even considered giving Mr.
Pound the Nobel Prize gold medal. At the same time, he became a close
friend of James Joyce whose "Ulysses" with its
stream-of-consciousness techniques had a tremendous impact on the
literary scene. These authors and many others met at Sylvia Beach''s
bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 18 Rue de l''Odéon, Paris.
In Montparnasse, Hemingway''s f