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Hemingway IN 90 MINUTES

By Paul Strathern IVAN R. DEE
Copyright © 2005
Paul Strathern
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-56663-659-9


Chapter One Hemingway's Life and Works

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a prosperous suburb of Chicago, on July 21, 1899. His father, Ed Hemingway, was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a thick black beard who loved hunting. He was a doctor by profession but made money in the Chicago real estate boom. This enabled him to buy a remote farm in the Michigan woods, where he could hunt to his heart's content.

When Hemingway was just seven weeks old he was shipped from Oak Park to the family's holiday home in the backwoods-a journey involving a 250-mile steamer trip up Lake Michigan and a ride on a narrow-gauge railway through the forest, ending in a row across the lake to the homestead. Throughout his childhood, Ernest was indoctrinated by his father in the ways of the backwoods-how to fish, how to chop wood with an axe, how to hunt deer, how to shoot game. The rules of the wild were strict. Nothing was to be killed for killing's sake: anything you killed you had to eat. Young Ernest learned his first lesson by having to eat the tough, malodorous meat of a porcupine he had shot for fun.

Ernest's mother, Grace Hemingway, had been destined for a career as an opera singer, but this was curtailed because of her weak eyesight. On her debut at Madison Square Garden, she was all but blinded by the glare of the footlights, which gave her anincapacitating headache. She returned to Chicago where she became a music teacher, and finally married Ed. She continued to teach music after her marriage, one consequence of which was that Ed cooked all the family meals.

With hindsight it is clear that young Ernest would have enjoyed (and benefited from) the presence of a young brother, but this would not occur until it was too late and Ernest was almost grown up. Ernest's early years were spent in a household of sisters. Such circumstances often serve as a great bolster to the male ego: the child becomes the center of female attention, dressed up and looked after by doting sisters. But Ernest's mother did her best to check this. As a result, the young man developed a grudge against his mother, considering her interfering and manipulative. By his early twenties he was telling his friends that he "hated" his mother, referring to her as "that bitch." In fact, during his earliest years he seems to have been very close to his mother, becoming her favorite. Among other things, she dressed baby Ernest in girl's clothing for his first few years. The effect on his playmates was predictable. As a result, young Ernest seems to have felt the need to assert his manhood forcefully from an early age-in the process developing a pugnacious side to his character.

Another trait that Ernest developed at an early age was fibbing. Initially this was a natural reaction to his father's overstrict rules of conduct in the wild. Everything had to be learned the proper way (invariably the hard, painstaking way), and from then on it had to be performed just right. Young Ernest was eager to shine, but instead he mainly felt bullied. Returning home after expeditions with his father, he began telling his sisters exaggerated yarns about his exploits. As early as the age of four he boasted to his grandfather that he had managed to stop a running horse single-handed. His grandfather, an astute businessman, reckoned the young boy's imagination would either make him famous or land him in jail.

At school, Ernest quickly asserted his presence in sports. He was big and tough, and was soon on the swimming, track, and boxing teams. He also found a place on the football squad, but despite his powerful physique he did not fulfill his potential there. Hemingway was never much of a team player-unless, of course, he was in charge. Although undeniably intelligent, he showed little interest in developing academic skills, preferring to maintain a hearty anti-intellectual attitude. Nonetheless he showed exceptional skill at English-writing pieces for the school magazine that showed a precocious skill in describing physical action. Particularly noticeable was his meticulous attention to detail: here at last was a skill, intimately connected to the life of action he so loved, which he did not have to learn from his father. This was his own skill, his very own form of expression, which he could learn in his own way, and in which he could attempt to express how he really felt.

All this appeared very healthy and normal, but there seems to have been a faint edge of psychological disturbance to his character even at this age. At home the family was not all that it seemed. Big tough Ed Hemingway suffered increasingly from bouts of black depression. Meanwhile sentimental Grace Hemingway developed a somewhat excessive affection for one of her good-looking female pupils. Taking along two of her children, she would occasionally leave and spend the weekend at her pupil's house, a habit that led to local gossip about lesbianism.

Ernest had difficulty with his love, and hate, for his mother, which was echoed in his intense yet ambivalent feelings for his father. Initially Ernest had hero-worshiped Ed, though this had later been counterbalanced by a natural rebelliousness. But his father's depressions resulted in Ed succumbing more and more to Grace's will. Ernest watched in horror as his hero became a defeated man. By the age of seventeen he still felt intensely close to both his parents, even loved them, yet couldn't restrain his deepening feelings of contempt for them. This undertow of contradictory emotions in Hemingway meant that beneath the tough-guy exterior a distinctly complex and contradictory character was developing. Evidence of this disturbance was becoming more evident in what appeared at the time to be merely normal teenage foibles such as fibbing, exaggeration, and self-mythologizing. Hemingway would never outgrow these essentially childish traits.

But young Ernest was big enough to carry off, or at least defend, most of his boasts. His fellow pupils learned not to question his claims: Ernest's need to believe such boasts seemed to be unnaturally strong. It was already becoming part of a carapace that protected a clear-eyed sensitivity, developing separately of its own accord. The innocent eye was becoming detached from the tough guy who seemed so necessary to protect it.

With the outbreak of the First World War in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson declared his determination to keep America out of the war and maintain a policy of "peace at any price." Yet many young Americans were determined to get involved. Some, such as the young Southern would-be writer William Faulkner, traveled north to Canada to join the British Flying Corps. Others volunteered for noncombatant duties in ambulance units. At first Hemingway showed little interest in the war, which attracted only minor attention in suburban Oak Park. Even after America finally entered the war in April 1917, Hemingway seems to have taken no more than a normal patriotic interest.

That year, at age seventeen, Ernest graduated from high school. He had no intention of becoming a doctor, as his father had hoped. Instead he took a job as a junior reporter on the Kansas City Star, then regarded as one of the country's leading newspapers. Kansas City was one of the rough and ready, prosperous new cities of the Midwest, equally renowned for its jazz and its whores. (The main street in the red-light district was nicknamed "Woodrow Wilson Avenue" because there you could get "a piece at any price.") But it remained something of its pioneer innocence. Its values were those of an energetic, optimistic America which believed that a man could achieve anything if he set his mind to it and worked hard. He could be stymied only by his own character flaws. Hemingway thrived in this atmosphere, and his editors were soon beating his style into shape. Articles had to be brief, clear, and to the point: he soon got the message. There was only one complaint about the eager new reporter: when sent on a story, he was liable to become distracted by what he regarded as a better story. Sent to cover a story in a hospital, he would end up riding off in an ambulance in pursuit of a sensational accident. According to a former colleague, "He seemed always to want to be where the action was."

In the dance halls of Kansas City, filled with farm hands on a binge, and increasingly by soldiers going off to war, there were frequent fights. Inevitably Hemingway soon decided that he wanted to go to war too. But his attempts to enlist were rejected. He had poor sight in one eye, a legacy inherited from his mother. Characteristically, he claimed that this resulted from a boxing match, in which a dirty opponent had "thumbed" his eye. Late in 1917, he ran into someone who told him that the Red Cross was accepting volunteers. Hemingway offered, was accepted, and after a brief training period was shipped across the Atlantic. He ended up in northern Italy where he was employed as an ambulance driver, and quickly volunteered for duties closer to the front line. Three weeks later he was seriously wounded when the mortar shell landed near him in the trench, and was shipped back to the Red Cross hospital in Milan.

The newly established Ospedale Croce Rossa Americana had eighteen nurses and just four patients. Perhaps inevitably, the eighteen-year-old wounded hero soon fell in love with one of the nurses who looked after him on the night shift. This was Agnes von Kurowsky, a tall, dark-haired volunteer who had been brought up in Washington, D.C. Their attraction was mutual, though they reacted in different ways. Hemingway was essentially a sexual innocent, despite his boasts to his schoolfriends and young fellow reporters in Kansas City. He found himself smitten by the full force of teenage love. Agnes, on the other hand, was almost thirty and wary of a deep involvement which she felt sure could not last. They kissed, but she would not allow things to go further, telling him that she must remain "professional" in her work. When Hemingway was sufficiently recovered to leave the hospital, and had outfitted himself in his smart new uniform, they made up a party with some of the other nurses and their American soldier friends and went to the races at San Sciro. Hemingway would remember this as an idyllic day, every detail of the track and the autumnal weather etched with utmost clarity in his memory. When Agnes was later transferred to Florence, 170 miles to the south, they wrote to each other every day.

Although Hemingway liked to play the hero in public, his private thoughts on this subject did not include such an element of show. He may have felt the need to fool others, but he wasn't about to fool himself. At the front, before being wounded, he had encountered a grey-haired fifty-year-old Italian soldier, and joked to him in his pidgin Italian: "You're troppo vecchio [too old] for this war, papa." But the old man had replied seriously, "I can die as well as any man." Hemingway had been deeply struck by this remark, which took on a new significance after his own brush with death. Later, when he encountered Major Dorman-Smith in the Milan Officers' Club, he was particularly struck by the Britisher's laconic modesty about his bravery. This, Hemingway felt, was how a genuine hero should behave: with reticent, understated grace. This was how he too would now conduct himself in public-to begin with, at any rate, until he was "coaxed" into telling his story. But less superficially, he was inspired by Dorman-Smith's attitude toward death, which the British officer modestly illustrated by quoting from Shakespeare: "I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death." This was how a hero faced death. Just like the fifty-year-old Italian soldier, Dorman-Smith did not ignore death: he faced up to it. Inside Hemingway, the public boaster was a young man who was forming his own ideas about heroism. At the same time, the very idea of death became a kind of talisman. He was developing an undeniably morbid streak, though at the time he had no idea how much this was a matter of psychological inheritance. (As we shall see, the three immediate generations of Hemingway's family would be blighted by suicides.)

Then the war was over, and it was time to go home. He and Agnes promised to write to each other. The arrival of the public hero back in Oak Park, in his flamboyant Italian cloak, soon began to pall. He seemed to want just to sit around the house all day, with no intention of taking on anything so unheroic as a job. The letters from Agnes became less frequent; then she told him that she had fallen in love with an Italian officer from Naples. Hemingway would later describe how he "cauterized" his feelings for her by embarking upon a binge of "booze and other women." The truth was rather more mundane, if nonetheless painful. He retired to bed with a severe bout of hypochondria, then dashed off an angry letter to one of Agnes's nursing colleagues in Italy. In it he expressed the vehement hope that when Agnes returned and stepped off the gangplank at New York she would fall flat on her face and smash all her front teeth. It took time, but gradually he got over the hurt to his pride and public image. His private feelings were another matter: they lay in his memory, their immediacy undimmed, their fineness untainted by acrimony. Eight years later, Agnes would reappear as one of his most deeply felt female creations.

After a certain amount of friction, Ernest's family encouraged him to move out. He decided to try his luck across the border in Toronto, where his credentials as a former reporter on the Kansas City Star were good enough to get him a job writing pieces for the weekly magazine section of the Toronto Star. In between times he began producing short stories. Contrary to his parents' opinion, he had not been simply loafing about the house-he had in fact begun writing. At first he tried recounting experiences from the war; later he turned to telling anecdotes from his days as a reporter in Kansas City; then he began really enjoying himself by writing stories about his hunting, fishing, and shooting trips in Michigan. He sent his stories to magazines, but no one was interested.

Eventually he returned to Chicago, where he took a cheap room. He still sent occasional stories to the Toronto Star, and managed to supplement this income by going a few rounds at the boxing gyms as a professional sparring partner. This was a hard, brave, and dangerous way for a middle-class young man to earn a few bucks, but it didn't last long. Nonetheless it quickly gained its permanent place in the Hemingway hall of mythology as he established himself in his own way among the young bohemian crowd in Chicago.

"Hem," as he liked to be known, was soon a leading figure at the parties given by penniless young artists and writers. At one of these he met Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, who had recently arrived in Chicago from St. Louis and was recovering from the depressing task of looking after her dying mother. Hadley was attractive, had inherited a small private income, and was eight years older than Hemingway. As with Agnes, the age difference seemed to have an effect on him, and he soon fell in love with her. For her part, she was bowled over by the attentions of this apparently larger-than-life figure-who seemed to be around her age, a misunderstanding that Hemingway did nothing to discourage. Hadley had lived a sheltered life, and responded to Hemingway's tales of wartime heroism with wide-eyed admiration. Europe was the place to be, he assured her, that was where they knew how to live properly. It was a whirlwind romance, and they were soon engaged. They would marry and then go to live in Italy. Hemingway had no money, but both of them could easily live on Hadley's income in cheaper Europe.

Another important influence on Hemingway's life at this time was the writer Sherwood Anderson, who had just returned from Paris. The forty-four-year-old Anderson was already an established writer and had just published his finest work, Winesburg, Ohio. It contained twenty-three thematically linked stories conveying the "lives of quiet desperation" lived by the inhabitants on all levels of society in a small Midwestern town. Particularly striking was Anderson's ability to convey how the life of apparently simple ordinary people could be as rich and subtle as that of more privileged and sophisticated citizens.

Anderson became Hemingway's mentor, advising him on what books to read so that he could make up for his lack of a college education. Hemingway also learned from Anderson's style, particularly his combination of everyday speech and sparse, unvarnished description. When Hemingway told Anderson that he planned to go to Italy after he was married, Anderson advised him to go to Paris instead. That was the artistic capital of the world, where a young writer could be taken seriously and learn of the latest literary developments as well as mixing with the coming generation of writers.

(Continues...)

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<%TOC%> Contents Introduction....................7
Hemingway's Life and Works....................17
Afterword....................101
Hemingway's Chief Works....................105
Chronology of Hemingway's Life and Times....................107
Recommended Reading....................111
Index....................115