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Ernest Hemingway - A Brieg Biography - Michael Reynolds
Ernest Hemingway - A Brieg Biography - Michael Reynolds
1899-1961
A Brief Biography
Michael Reynolds
16 Ernest Hemingway
Americans. At forty-four he reported on the Normandy invasion
from a landing craft off Omaha Beach. At forty-six he married his
fourth wife. At fifty-three he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
and survived two plane crashes in Africa. At fifty-four the Nobel
Prize was his. On the morning of July 2,1961, Ernest Hemingway
slipped two shells into his favorite shotgun and quite deliberately
blew the top of his head away. He was survived by three wives,
three sons, numerous rumors, five unpublished books, and a distinguished if frequently misunderstood body of work.
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Ernest Hemingway
and a large screened porch. Ernest, along with his four sisters and
one brotherMarcelline (1898), Ursula (1902), Madelaine (1904),
Carol (1911), and Leicester (1915)lived in a respectable neighborhood of businessmen, salesmen, doctors, and dentists who took
the train each morning into Chicago proper, where they worked,
returning each evening at supper.
In 1904 horses outnumbered automobiles 490 to 30 in Oak
Park. Within a few years the Village was bragging that it housed
more automobiles per capita than any other town in America.
John Farson, the town's wealthy banker, owned a Franklin, a
Packard, two Wintons, and a white Cadillac. In 1907 Dr. Hemingway's horse ran away down Oak Park Avenue, smashing his
buggy against a tree. When Ernest was twelve, his father still
made his rounds in a buggy. By 1914 the doctor was driving a
black Ford that was stolen from in front of the Municipal Building and recovered the next day in South Side Chicago. By 1912 the
Hemingway house on North Kenilworth was electrified and had
a telephone. Soon villagers who had grown up on farms were
complaining about smelly chickens and crowing roosters disturbing their lives. Times were changing.
In October 1913 Oak Parkers were horrified by the new, lascivious dances that had made their way into the country club
dances and once sedate living rooms:
The music of the bagnio finds its way to every piano, and our
young people habitually sing songs, words and music produced by degenerates. . . . Now the dance has come from
the brothel to take its place beside the nasty music and the sex
gown. Ever since the group dance gave way to the waltz, the
influence of the dissolute has been growing until now. . . .
We must go to South America and bring to Oak Park the
tango and the maxie. Everybody is "doing it, doing it" in the
words of one of our most popular songs. (Oak Leaves paper)
When Grace Hall-Hemingway, as Ernest's mother hyphenated her last name, designed their Kenilworth house, she included a music studio and recital hall thirty-feet square with a
vaulted ceiling and a narrow balcony. It 'was here that she gave
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music and voice lessons and scheduled her student recitals, and
where she composed and practiced her own music, which was
marketed by two different publishing houses. Today her lyrics,
mostly written for contraltos like herself, are as dated as the long
Victorian dresses that she wore until her death in 1951, but they
are no more sentimental than most turn-of-the-century popular
music. Incurably optimistic, she was the energy source in the
Hemingway household, a woman always on stage, a personality
that could not be ignored, a person, in fact, not unlike her eldest
son, Ernest.
In a village filled with amateurs, Grace was a professional musician whose classically trained skills became her identity and her
freedom. Wherever one went in Oak Park, Grace was singing by
invitation. At the Third Congregational Church she was chairperson of the music committee and directed the fifty children in
the vested choir and orchestra. After he left home, Hemingway
obscured his mother's talents and personality by professing to
hate her and to hold her responsible for his father's 1928 suicide.
Ironically, it was from his mother that Hemingway's boundless
energy and enthusiasm came. No one who met mother or son
ever forgot either of them.
When young Hemingway was not hearing his mother practice
her varied musical routines, or her students at her lessons, or himself on his cello, he was attending the annual high school student
opera where he and Marcelline were in the orchestra together for
two years. The impact of his musical training, both formal and casual, was long lasting. He continued to listen to classical music all
of his life. During his courtship of his first wife, Hadley Richardson, piano concerts were part of their shared interests; after their
marriage, Hadley replaced his mother at the piano that they
rented in Paris. Out of this background came Hemingway's compulsion to public performance and his understanding of counterpoint, which he used to advantage in his writing.
Balanced against the propriety and culture of Oak Park were
Hemingway's northern Michigan summers, where the family
cottage was on one side of Walloon Lake and, later, his mother's
farm on the other. Every July and August from his birth through
the summer of 1917, Ernest explored the woods, streams, and the
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Ernest Hemingway
lake. For the first twelve years his father was with him, teaching
him to hunt and fish, but after 1911, when Clarence Hemingway
began to retreat into his deepening depressions, the boy was left
to his own devices. Besides his several sisters for company there
were summer people in cottages like the Hemingway's all along
the lake, summer friends from Horton Bay and Petoskey, and the
last of the Ojibway Indians who lived in the woods close to Horton. Those summers of trout fishing, camping out, hiking, baseball games, and awakened sexuality were as important to the
education of young Hemingway as were his school years in Oak
Park.
Whatever else his culture taught him, young Hemingway
learned early that perseverance and winning were Oak Park virtues. The Village expected its sons and daughters to bring home
blue ribbons; a single loss made a football season mediocre. Like
his boyhood hero, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest was determined to
excel in physical activities: twice he ran the high school crosscountry race; twice he finished last. He played lightweight football
until his late growth got him on the varsity team his senior year.
Slow afoot and a little clumsy, he was a second-string interior lineman. He managed the swimming team, where his event was the
"plunge," swimming underwater for distance. He captained the
water polo team. When he got his height, he also got boxing
gloves. Later in Europe he look up tennis, skiing, and the luge. He
always admired professional boxers and baseball players and, later,
bullfighters.
In high school Hemingway took the then-standard pre-college
curriculum: six semesters of science, four of math, six of Latin,
eight semesters of English literature and composition, four semesters of history, two semesters of applied music, and another
two years of orchestra. In Latin, young Hemingway translated his
Cicero; in history he wrote essays on Greek tyrants and the
Marathon campaign and outlined the Punic Wars. In English
courses, all of which required weekly writing and the study of
composition, young Hemingway read the classic myths, Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, the British Romantics, Walter Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. He spent ten weeks studying the history of the
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Ernest Hemingway
fascism than socialism but distrustful of all government. The experience also provided him with character types, themes, and images that would appear regularly in his fiction to the very end of
his life. Jake Barnes's journalism (The Sun Abo Rises), the socialist
subtext in A Farewell to Arms, Harry's story of Constantinople in
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Colonel Cantwell's return to the
site of his first wound (Across the River and Into the Trees), and the
Paris streets of A Moveable Feast are firmly rooted in Hemingway's Toronto journalism (Stevens 237-78, 362-77).
While covering the Lausanne Peace Conference in the early
winter of 1922, Ernest asked Hadley to join him for a vacation at
Chamby. Packing up most of her husband's Paris fiction, including the novel begun in Chicago, Hadley booked a seat on the
night train to Switzerland. While buying mineral water at the
station, she left her luggage unattended in her compartment. She
returned to find that a thief had stolen the valise containing
Ernest's writing. In tears, she arrived in Lausanne to face him
with what he later reconstructed as one of his most painful experiences. Evidence now indicates that it was less traumatic than he
remembered, for he apparently did not immediately return to
Paris to check with the police or the station lost and found; nor
did he post a meaningful reward (Hemingway: The Paris Years
84-104; Mellow). Shortly after he returned from Paris to Chamby,
Hadley became pregnant, and reluctantly they began talking of
moving back to a full-time newspaper job in Canada.
Despite the loss of his unfinished novel, Hemingway was not
deeply discouraged about his creative future. Two of his best
new stories"My Old Man" and "Up in Michigan"survived his
loss, and Ernest was committed to be part of Bill Bird's inquest
into the state of contemporary letters, edited by Ezra Pound. In
January 1923 six of his poems appeared in Poetry magazine; in
February Robert McAlmon agreed to publish a limited edition of
Ernest's poems and stories. By March, Hemingway had produced
six vignettes that he sent to Jane Heap's Little Review where, with
another of his poems, they were published the following October. In August, two weeks before their ship sailed for Canada,
McAlmon's edition of his Three Stories & Ten Poems appeared in
the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and Ernest finished
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the last short sketches that would complete the book that Bill
Bird was to publish as in our time (1924). These "unwritten stories," as he called them, brought together what he had learned
from Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and his journalism. Some
came from direct experience; some were based on the experience
of others. Readers, then and later, were unable to tell the difference between the two types, which began the false notion that
Hemingway first lived the experience and then wrote about it.
All of his writing life, he insisted that his best writing was what
he made up, but readers refused to believe it.
Returning to Toronto, Ernest expected to be welcomed as the
Star's foreign correspondent. Instead, he found himself working
with a new editor, who generally disliked primadonnas and particularly disliked Hemingway. No sooner did Ernest report for
work than he was put on the night train to Kinston to cover the
prison break of four convicts, including the bank robber Red
Ryan (Paris Years 145-6). Two years later, while making notes for a
novel, Hemingway vowed to write a picaresque novel about
Ryan's escape from prison. "It will be the story of a tough kid,"
he said, "lucky for a long time and finally smashed by fate"
(Hemingway Collection, Princeton University Library).
Although he never wrote the Red Ryan novel, his next
fictionthe unpublished and unfinished "A New Slain Knight"
has a criminal breaking from custody and a central character
who is a professional revolutionary with criminal tendencies
(Homecoming 45-57). In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway gave us
the fishing guide turned criminal in Harry Morgan who is gutshot while killing three Cuban bank robbers. Many of his male
characters live lives apart from the social norm, men without
family, without homes, lonely, self-reliant men, men not so distantly related to Red Ryan.
Hemingway's first son, John Hadley Nicanor ("Bumby"), was
born that October in Toronto while Ernest was returning from
another out-of-town assignment. Furious with his editor, with
Toronto, and with his inability to write for two mastershimself
and the StarErnest quit his last full-time job in January 1924; he,
Hadley, and their son returned to Paris that same month to live on
her small trust fund and whatever money he could make writing.
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Ernest Hemingway
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In 1925 Hemingway's first collection of short stories was published in America by the avant garde publisher Horace Liveright,
who published Sherwood Anderson and Harold Loeb, friends
of Hemingway. The collection, called In Our Time, used the
vignettes from in our time as counterpoints between stories, several of which became Hemingway classics. This collection, influenced by Joyce's Dubliners, staked out subject matter, perfected
techniques, and crystallized structures that Hemingway would
mine over the next ten years. Here he introduced his sometime
alter ego, Nick Adams, a young boy coming of age in northern
Michigan. In the last and anchor story in the collection, "Big
Two-Hearted River," almost nothing happens on the surface but
palpable subsurface tensions keep the reader riveted. These
stories"Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,"
"The End of Something," and "Three Day Blow"were all written during the wonder year of 1924 and would eventually remake
the American short story, but not immediately. Liveright published only 1,100 copies of the book, which left Hemingway
deeply unhappy but legally committed to the publisher by his
contract, which specified that Liveright had first refusal on his
next three books.
In the early summer of 1925 Hemingway met the inventor of
the flapper and the high priest of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose novel, The Great Gatsby, had been recently published.
Fitzgerald, at the height of his powers, was already a great admirer of Hemingway's writing, having recommended him to his
editor at Scribner's, Max Perkins, on the basis of the in our time
vignettes. Delayed by wrong addresses and the transatlantic
mails, Perkins's letter to Hemingway arrived after he had accepted the Liveright contract. Determined to move Hemingway
to Scribner's, Fitzgerald probably planted the idea that if Hemingway wrote a book that Liveright could not accept, his contract
would be broken. That summer of 1925, after a conflicted feria at
Pamplona, Hemingway wrote the first draft of The Sun Also
Rises, which he finished in Paris that fall, but did not submit to
Liveright. Instead he quickly wrote The Torrents of Spring, a literary satire that made fun of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter,
recently published by Liveright. When Horace Liveright received
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The first substantial return on this investment was Hemingway's first bestseller, A Farewell to Arms (1929), the story of an
American ambulance driver and a British nurse brought together
during the tumult of World War One. Destined to become the
premier American war novel from that debacle, the story of Frederic Henry's wounding, Catherine Barkley's unwedded pregnancy, the Italian disaster at Caporetto, the lovers' desertion of
duty, and Catherine's death in childbirth spoke to America's rejection of the war and its own political isolation during the 1920s. Because The Sun Also Rises was a roman a clef, readers assumed that
A Farewell to Arms was another installment in Hemingway's thinly
veiled autobiography. It would be almost half a century before
anyone would notice that Hemingway was not in Italy during the
Italian retreat from Caporetto (Hemingway's First War).
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Ernest Hemingway
two sons, Patrick and Gregory, what safer place to conduct a love
affair than Madrid under seige. The immediate results were his
journalistic coverage of the war for the North American News
Alliance and the short-lived Ken magazine; a film, The Spanish
Earth, to which he contributed narrative; and his only play, The
Fifth Column (1938), in which the counterintelligence agent Philip
Rawlings says that the world is in for fifty years of undeclared
wars and that he has signed up for the duration.
In February 1939, with his marriage to Pauline over in all but
name, Hemingway took his fishing boat, the Pilar, to Havana,
Cuba, where he took his favorite room in the Hotel Ambos Mundos and began writing what would be received as his finest novel,
For Whom the Bell Tolls. In April, Martha Gellhorn rented and made
habitable property outside of Havana, La Finca Vigia, where she
and Ernest set up their writers' workshop. Ernest worked steadily
on his Spanish Civil War story of the American dynamiter Robert
Jordan and his epic task of destroying the bridge behind Republican lines, a story he earlier intended to use in To Have and Have Not.
Martha, who had seen almost as much of Spain as Ernest, wisely
chose to write instead about her recent stay in Prague as it prepared to face the approaching Nazi invasion.
On December 24, 1939, Hemingway left his empty Key West
house for the last time as Pauline's husband. Taking with him
eight hundred books and his personal belongings, including several paintings by Miro, Leger, and Juan Gris, he moved permanently into La Finca, his penultimate residence. In Europe,
Hitler's blitzkrieg had overrun Poland; the war Hemingway had
predicted had begun, but America was not yet a part of it. That
March, Martha's new novel, dedicated to Ernest, was published
as A Stricken Field, the title taken from a pseudo-medieval quote
written for her by Hemingway. That same month, The Fifth Column, rewritten for the stage, opened in New York with mixed
reviews.
By the end of July 1940 Hemingway delivered his completed
typescript of For Whom the Bell Tolls to Max Perkins. On October 21 the novel appeared to ecstatic reviews; four days later
Paramount Pictures offered Ernest $100,000 for the film rights.
On November 4 Pauline's divorce suit against her husband on
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36 Ernest Hemingway
planes, the German raiders also centered on the British and
Dutch Guianas, which then produced most of the ore in the
western hemisphere.
The evening of February 16 was calm and warm at the entrance to Lake Maracaibo, where Venezuelan crude oil came
across the bar in shallow draft tankers to be refined at Aruba. At
the Lago refinery on Aruba, the graveyard shift came to work
with the nightlights fully lit and flare gas burning. Each month
this refinery, the world's largest, was producing 7 million barrels
of gasoline, aviation fuel, and lubricants, most of which was
going to support the British war effort. At 1:30 A.M., in a coordinated attack, German U-boats turned seven tankers into burning
hulks, shelled the refinery with surface guns, and left without a
scratch on their gray hulls. Observing the smoking ruins the next
morning, the Chinese crews refused to sail without protection,
forcing the refinery to shut down and Lake Maracaibo oil production to stop, having no more storage space. Nineteen ships
went down that month in the Caribbean; nineteen more the next
month; eleven in April; thirty-eight in May. Between February
and November 1942, almost twice as many ships were sunk in
this confined area than were sunk on the North Atlantic convoy
routes. By the end of November 1942, 263 were on the bottom of
the Caribbean Sea.2
While tankers were going down all around the island of
Cuba, the new American ambassador, Spruille Braden, became
worried about the loyalties of the 300,000 Spanish residents of
Cuba, as many as 10 percent of whom were thought to be dedicated Falangists and therefore potential sources of aid to the
Nazi cause. Until the FBI could find the right men for the Havana
station, Braden recruited Hemingway to organize a makeshift intelligence service, an assignment that Ernest accepted enthusiastically. As Braden remembered it, Hemingway
enlisted a bizarre combination of Spaniards: some bar tenders; a few wharf rats; some down-at-heel pelota players and
former bullfighters; two Basque priests; assorted exiled counts
and dukes; several Loyalists and Francistas. He built up an excellent organization and did an A-One job.3
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Although Martha and others thought the "Crook Factory" something of a joke, Ambassador Braden thought Ernest's reports on
the activities of Spanish Falangists in Cuba significant enough to
include them almost verbatim in several long reports to the State
Department.4 The crucial diplomatic question was what would
Cuba do if Franco's Spain joined the Axis in the war, a very real
possibility given the German-Italian support of Franco's successful rebellion. In October 1942 Spruille Braden's cogent review of
the Cuban situation documented the Spanish Embassy's clandestine support of the Falange, which was generating Axis rumors
and propaganda. There was also the strong possibility that the
Falangists were gathering information on military installations,
communicating with and refueling German U-boats, and planning and executing "attempts at sabotage." Despite being outlawed by the Cuban government, the pro-Nazi Falange was both
active and dangerous to American interests.5
Ernest's long-standing fascination with spies and counterspies
was, for this brief period, completely in synch with prevalent
American war fears. We were a nation on edge, expecting the
worst. When crude sound detection gear picked up what seemed
to be two flights of unidentified aircraft, the entire San Francisco
Bay area was blacked out all the way to Sacramento for almost an
hour. When Jacob Steinberg's lights failed on the Williamsburg
Bridge, he made the mistake of stopping his truck. Unable to fix
them, he continued on toward his Brooklyn home, never hearing
the warning whistle from the soldier on guard duty at the bridge.
Jacob did hear the five warning slots, however, one of which flattened a tire, another almost hitting him. In Indiana the Civilian
Defense Headquarters was asked by a county official, "Would it
be possible to have a bomb dropped in our county to have the
people realize this country is at war?" He was told, "We're saving
all bombs for Tokyo."6 On June 13 the fears became a reality
when a Nazi U-boat landed four saboteurs on the south shore of
Long Island. Four days later another group of German agents
was put ashore close to Jacksonville, Florida. On June 27 J. Edgar
Hoover, head of the FBI, called a late evening news conference to
announce that all eight agents were under arrest, their caches of
explosives recovered, and the safety of the nation for the mo-
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ports did not contribute to the tanker traffic, the island, which
barricaded a major section of the Gulf, had primary shipping
lanes on all sides. In June and July of 1942, more than thirty ships
were torpedoed within easy reach of the Cuban coast. Cuba was
no longer an American protectorate, and the coming of war put
its neutrality in a precarious position, which quickly resolved in
its own best interests by declaring war against the Axis powers
and cooperating with the U.S. anti-submarine efforts. Small tent
outposts were established quickly on remote islands and keys off
the north coast to support Sykorzky seaplanes and to act as supply bases when Anti-Submarine Warfare cutters were in the area.
By mid-April Army Air Force planes using bases in Cuba were patrolling the Yucatan and Old Bahama Channels by day and later
by night.
Initially undermanned and out-planned, the United States did
what Americans have always done best: it improvised solutions
with whatever materials were at hand. Less than a month into the
war, the Coast Guard began organizing East Coast yachtsmen and
small boat owners into auxiliary units. Larger private sail and
motor driven ships were "rented" at a dollar a year for submarine
patrols in coastal waters.14 In late June, with shipping being sunk
at unsustainable rates, the navy took desperate measures:
Washington, June 27 (AP)In a move to put a great fleet of
small boats into the war against submarines off the Atlantic
and Gulf coasts, the navy called today for all owners of seagoing craft to volunteer their services of themselves and their
vessels. . . . Approximately 1,200 small boats are in such service now . . . [and] it is hoped that upward of 1,000 additional small boats for offshore navigation may be added to the
auxiliary. . . . Boats found to be qualified will be equipped
with radio, armament and suitable anti-submarine devices as
rapidly as possible.15
In July the recruitment for the auxiliary patrol was intensified.
Secretary of the Navy Prank Knox issued a call for "patriotic
yachtsmen and small-boat owners" to come to the aid of their
country, offering them
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the cook and most experienced sailor; Pachi, the jai alai bomb
thrower; and two other Cubans passed under the battlements
guarding Havana harbor, moved out into the Gulf Stream, and
turned eastward on their first patrol. For the next twelve months,
the Pilar conducted several patrols, mostly in the Old Bahama
Channel on Cuba's eastern edge. Although never able to attack a
sub, Hemingway's crew performed needed patrol duties, including checking inlets, bays, and unhabited islands for signs of German activity.
Drinking heavily and arguing with Martha whenever he was
in port, Hemingway was suffering through the longest hiatus he
had ever experienced in his writing career. Since finishing For
Whom the Bell Tolls thirty months earlier, he had written nothing
but an introduction for Men at War (1942). During this same period, Martha had published a short story collection, The Heart of
Another (1941), and begun her next novel, Liana (1944), which she
finished in June 1943. All that year and into 1944, Hemingway
stayed in Cuba, where he returned to his self-appointed submarine patrols and wrote nothing. At the end of 1943 Martha left the
Finca to cover the European war for Collier's magazine; she urged
her husband to come with her. He brooded alone at the Finca,
where his typewriter continued to gather dust until 1945. At the
peak of his career, the foremost American male novelist went six
years without writing any new fiction. Only later would he recognize this hiatus as the onset of the severe depression that
would eventually destroy Hemingway just as it destroyed his father before him. By this point, the Hemingway-Gellhorn marriage was finished in all but name. In April 1944 Ernest signed on
as a war correspondent for Collier's, displacing Martha; by the
end of May, he had met Mary Welsh Monks, his fourth wife to
be, and Martha had closed the door behind her.
Between June and December 1944 Hemingway covered the
European war with manic energy, deliberately putting himself in
dangerous situations. On D-Day, June 6, rather than observe the
Normandy landing from the relative safety of the correspondents' ship, Hemingway went aboard a landing craft to get a
closer view. The result was his essay, "Voyage to Victory," which
remains vintage Hemingway:
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Ernest Hemingway
the author, and because he seems to have been working simultaneously on what we later received as discrete texts that he saw as
a trilogy (Islands, Garden of Eden, A Moveable Feast), nothing definitive can yet be said about this period's texts. It is, however, becoming increasingly evident that these three posthumous texts,
mixing fact and fiction, engage thematically the role of the artist
in modern times and have at their core, for good or ill, the experience of Paris in the 1920s. It was to be a trilogy unlike any other,
bringing to closure the experiments begun in Paris twenty-five
years earlier. Because these posthumous publications were edited
by three different editors, one of whom's credentials included
knowing nothing about Hemingway, neither the general reader
nor most scholars yet have access to the texts as Hemingway
wrote them.
From September 1948 through April 1949 Ernest and Mary
lived in northern Italy, principally Venice and Cortina, and visited
sites from Hemingway's first war. Nostalgic returns to previously
good places became a feature of Hemingway's later yearsItaly,
Pamplona, Africa, Parisand each return was less than happy. In
Italy, between duck hunting in the Venetian marshes and skiing
in the Dolomites, Hemingway met and became infatuated with
an eighteen-year-old Venetian beauty, Adriana Ivancich. Mary
tolerated her husband's behavior with what grace she could
manage. In January, Mary broke her leg skiing, and in March,
Hemingway's eye, infected with erysipelas, put him in the Padua
hospital. Before they returned to Cuba at the end of April, Hemingway had begun the story of a Venetian duck hunt.
For six months at the Finca, Hemingway, having put aside
his trilogy, used the duck-hunt story as a framing device for a
novelAcross the River and Into the Trees. Aaron Hotchner, acting as Hemingway's sounding board and agent, negotiated an
$85,000 price for the novel's serial rights. Hemingway took Mary,
Hotchner, and the manuscript back to Paris, where he finished
the story in a hotel room at the Ritz. Just before Christmas
1949, the group drove through the south of France, revisiting,
among other places, Aigues Morte and Grau-du-Roi, where
Ernest and Pauline once honeymooned. The Hemingways spent
two months in Venice before returning to Paris and eventually to
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Life magazine, having paid $40,000 for the serial rights, published and sold five million copies of its September 1, 1952, issue
containing The Old Man and the Sea in its entirety. The Book of
the Month Club bought the novella, and Scribner's sold out its
5O,000-copy first run. Critics and readers delighted in the simple,
moving story of an old fisherman's losing battle with sharks over
the carcass of his giant marlin. In early April 1953 the film crew
arrived in Havana to begin filming Hemingway's pocket-sized
epic. In May, Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which had been denied his For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In June, with a sizable advance from Look magazine to do a series of articles on a return safari to the Serengeti, Ernest and
Mary left Havana for Europe and eventually Africa. Beginning
with the Pamplona feria, Hemingway returned for the first time
since 1931 to the Spanish bullfight circuit, which he and Mary followed for a month. By September they were in Kenya on safari
that did not end until January 21, when Ernest treated Mary to a
small-plane trip to see Africa from the air. Two days later at
Murchison Falls, the plane struck a telegraph wire and crashlanded. Newspapers worldwide banner headlined Hemingway's
death. Soon afterward, the Hemingway party, bruised but alive,
boarded another small plane, which crashed in flames on takeoff.
More death notices appeared, but Hemingway again survived,
badly injured internally and with serious burns. The couple returned to Venice to recuperate until Ernest was ready to drive
back to Spain in May. On June 6, 1954, they departed Europe for
Havana, where on October 28 Ernest received news that he had
been awarded the Nobel Price for Literature, but he could not
make the trip to Stockholm because of poor health.
Between 1955 and 1961 Hemingway's life alternated between
ever-shortening cycles of euphoric writing and paranoia-ridden
depression. His weight rose and fell alarmingly; his hypertension
worsened. Medication for his blood pressure exacerbated his depressions. The public did not see his vulnerability, but close
friends became increasingly concerned. Yet, when his health did
not prevent him, Hemingway wrote steadily on his trilogy. The
Garden of Eden expanded in several drafts, and he was now working alternately on A Moveable Feast. This pattern continued well
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Envoi
Ernest Hemingway took us with him to Africa, whose dark heart
beats deep within his writing in ways not always obvious. He
studied trout streams in several countries, studied Gulf Stream
marlin, studied Spanish bulls and African game. He studied the
flight of birds, the bends of rivers, and the flow of country. But
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what he studied first, last, and always was that strange animal, his
fellow man, rampant in his natural setting. Like his mother,
Ernest was an artist; like his father, he was a natural historian.
Like both, he found his calling in Oak Park. But like neither parent, he was a child of the twentieth century, born too late for the
frontier and too soon for outer space, leaving only that dark
country within himself to explore. Despite wives, children, wars,
injuries, mental and physical illness, and his strenuous life, Hemingway left, permanently embedded in our literary history, several of the finest short stories written in the twentieth century, at
least threepossibly fourmajor novels, and a writer's life carried out on an epic scale. His influential style has, at some point,
influenced most American writers of his time. That he selfdestructed affirmed his humanity. That he wrote as well as he did
promises his permanence.
NOTES
This essay has been adapted from the entry "Hemingway, Ernest"
by Michael Reynolds that appears in the American National Biography,
10: 545-53, published by Oxford University Press 1999 American
Council of Learned Societies, use of portions of the text of the
entry by permission of the ACLS.
1. Gerald Murphy to Sara Murphy, 4-9 Sept. 1937, in Letters from
the Lost Generation, ed. Linda P. Miller (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1991), pp. 199-200.
2. Cdr. C. Alphonso Smith, USNR. "Battle of the Caribbean,"
United States Naval Institute Proceedings (Sept. 1954), 976-82.
3. Spruille Braden, Diplomats and Demagogues. (New Rochelle,
N.Y.: Arlington House, 1971), pp. 282-84.
4. National Archives and Records Administration (College Park,
Md.) Record Group 84, E-2359, Confidential Letter File, American
Embassy, Havana, 1942-43.
5. "The United States and Cuban-Spanish Relations," October
28, 1942, copy in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy
Library, Boston.
6. New York Times, Jan. 4, 1942, p. 1; New York Times Jan. 2, 1942, p.
11;New York Times, Feb. 1, 1942, p. 6.
A Brief Biography
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Ernest Hemingway