Another Ernest Miller Hemingway Essay

Ernest Miller Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park,
Illinois. His father was the owner of a prosperous real estate business. His
father, Dr. Hemingway, imparted to Ernest the importance of appearances,
especially in public. Dr. Hemingway invented surgical forceps for which he
would not accept money. He believed that one should not profit from something
important for the good of mankind. Ernest's father, a man of high ideals, was
very strict and censored the books he allowed his children to read. He forbad
Ernest's sister from studying ballet for it was coeducational, and dancing
together led to "hell and damnation".
Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest's mother, considered herself pure and
proper. She was a dreamer who was upset at anything which disturbed her
perception of the world as beautiful. She hated dirty diapers, upset stomachs,
and cleaning house; they were not fit for a lady. She taught her children to
always act with decorum. She adored the singing of the birds and the smell of
flowers. Her children were expected to behave properly and to please her,
always.
Mrs. Hemingway treated Ernest, when he was a small boy, as if he were a
female baby doll and she dressed him accordingly. This arrangement was alright
until Ernest got to the age when he wanted to be a "gun-toting Pawnee Bill".
He began, at that time, to pull away from his mother, and never forgave her for
his humiliation.
The town of Oak Park, where Ernest grew up, was very old fashioned and
quite religious. The townspeople forbad the word "virgin" from appearing in
school books, and the word "breast" was questioned, though it appeared in the
Bible.
Ernest loved to fish, canoe and explore the woods. When he couldn't
get outside, he escaped to his room and read books. He loved to tell stories
to his classmates, often insisting that a friend listen to one of his stories.
In spite of his mother's desire, he played on the football team at Oak Park
High School.
As a student, Ernest was a perfectionist about his grammar and studied
English with a fervor. He contributed articles to the weekly school newspaper.
It seems that the principal did not approve of Ernest's writings and he
complained, often, about the content of Ernest's articles.
Ernest was clear about his writing; he wanted people to "see and feel"
and he wanted to enjoy himself while writing. Ernest loved having fun. If
nothing was happening, mischievous Ernest made something happen. He would
sometimes use forbidden words just to create a ruckus. Ernest, though wild and
crazy, was a warm, caring individual. He loved the sea, mountains and the
stars and hated anyone who he saw as a phoney.
During World War I, Ernest, rejected from service because of a bad left
eye, was an ambulance driver, in Italy, for the Red Cross. Very much like
the hero of A Farewell to Arms, Ernest is shot in his knee and recuperates in a
hospital, tended by a caring nurse named Agnes. Like Frederick Henry, in the
book, he fell in love with the nurse and was given a medal for his heroism.
Ernest returned home after the war, rejected by the nurse with whom he
fell in love. He would party late into the night and invite, to his house,
people his parents disapproved of. Ernest's mother rejected him and he felt
that he had to move from home.
He moved in with a friend living in Chicago and he wrote articles for
The Toronto Star. In Chicago he met and then married Hadley Richardson. She
believed that he should spend all his time in writing, and bought him a
typewriter for his birthday. They decided that the best place for a writer to
live was Paris, where he could devote himself to his writing. He said, at the
time, that the most difficult thing to write about was being a man. They
could not live on income from his stories and so Ernest, again, wrote for The
Toronto Star.
Ernest took Hadley to Italy to show her where he had been during the
war. He was devastated, everything had changed, everything was destroyed.
Hadley became pregnant and was sick all the time. She and Ernest
decided to move to Canada. He had, by then written three stories and ten poems.
Hadley gave birth to a boy who they named John Hadley Nicano Hemingway. Even
though he had his family Ernest was unhappy and decided to return to Paris. It
was in Paris that Ernest got word that a publisher wanted to print his book, In
Our Time, but with some changes. The publisher felt that the sex was to
blatant, but Ernest refused to change one word.
Around 1925, Ernest started writing a novel about a young man in World
War I, but had to stop after a few pages, and proceeded to write another novel,
instead. This novel was based on his experiences while living in Pamplona,
Spain. He planned on calling this book Fiesta, but changed the name to The
Sun Also Rises, a saying from the Bible. This book, as in his other books,
shows Hemingway obsessed with death.
In 1927, Ernest found himself unhappy with his wife and son. They
decided to divorce and he married Pauline, a woman he had been involved with
while he was married to Hadley. A year later, Ernest was able to complete his
war novel which he called A Farewell to Arms. The novel was about the pain of
war, of finding love in this time of pain. It portrayed the battles, the
retreats, the fears, the gore and the terrible waste of war.
This novel was well-received by his publisher, Max Perkins,but Ernest
had to substitute dashes for the "dirty" language. Ernest used his life when
he wrote; using everything he did and everything that ever happened to him. He
nevertheless remained a private person; wanting his stories to be read but
wanting to be left alone. He once said, "Don't look at me. Look at my words."
A common theme throughout Hemingway's stories is that no matter how hard we
fight to live, we end up defeated, but we are here and we must go on.
At age 31 he wrote Death in the Afternoon, about bullfighting in his
beloved Spain. Ernest was a restless man; he traveled all over the United
States, Europe, Cuba and Africa. At the age of 37 Ernest met the woman who
would be his third wife; Martha Gellhorn, a writer like himself. He went to
Spain, he said, to become an "antiwar correspondent", and found that war was
like a club where everyone was playing the same game, and he was never lonely.
Martha went to Spain as a war correspondent and they lived together. He knew
that he was hurting Pauline, but like his need to travel and have new
experiences, he could not stop himself from getting involved with women.
In 1940 he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and dedicated it to Martha,
whom he married at the end of that year. He found himself traveling between
Havana, Cuba and Ketchum, Idaho, which he did for the rest of his life. During
World War II, Ernest became a secret agent for the United States. He suggested
that he use his boat, the "Pillar", to surprise German submarines and attack
them with hidden machine guns. It was at this time that Ernest, always a
drinker, started drinking most of his days away. He would host wild, fancy
parties and did not write at all during the next three years.
At war's end, Ernest went to England and met an American foreign
correspondent named Mary Welsh. He divorced Martha and married Mary in Havana,
in 1946. Ernest was a man of extremes; living either in luxury or happy to do
without material things. Ernest, always haunted by memories of his mother,
would not go to her funeral when she died in 1951. He admitted that he hated
his mother's guts.
Ernest wrote The Old Man and the Sea in only two months. He was on top
of the world, the book was printed by Life Magazine and thousands of copies
were sold in the United States. This novel and A Farewell to Arms were both
made into movies.
In 1953 he went on a safari with Mary, and he was in heaven hunting big
game. Though Ernest had a serious accident, and later became ill, he could
never admit that he had any weaknesses; nothing would stop him, certainly not
pain. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Toward the end, Ernest
started to travel again, but almost the way that someone does who knows that
he will soon die. He suddenly started becoming paranoid and to forget things.
He became obsessed with sin; his upbringing was showing, but still was
inconsistent in his behavior. He never got over feeling like a bad person, as
his father, mother and grandfather had taught him. In the last year of his
life, he lived inside of his dreams, similar to his mother, who he hated with
all his heart. He was suicidal and had electric shock treatments for his
depression and strange behavior.
On a Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway killed
himself with a shotgun.

Ernest Hemingway takes much of the storyline of his novel, A Farewell
to Arms, from his personal experiences. The main character of the book,
Frederick Henry, often referred to as Tenete, experiences many of the same
situations which Hemingway, himself, lived. Some of these similarities are
exact while some are less similar, and some events have a completely different
outcome.
Hemingway, like Henry, enjoyed drinking large amounts of alcohol. Both
of them were involved in World War I, in a medical capacity, but neither of
them were regular army personnel. Like Hemingway, Henry was shot in his right
knee, during a battle.
Both men were Americans, but a difference worth noting was that
Hemingway was a driver for the American Red Cross, while Henry was a medic for
the Italian Army. In real life, Hemingway met his love, Agnes, a nurse, in the
hospital after being shot; Henry met his love, Catherine Barkley, also a nurse,
before he was shot and hospitalized. In both cases, the relationships with
these women were strengthened while the men were hospitalized. Another
difference is that Hemingway's romance was short-lived, while, the book seemed
to indicate that, Henry's romance, though they never married, was strong and
would have lasted. In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine and her child died while
she was giving birth, this was not the case with Agnes who left Henry for an
Italian Army officer.
It seems to me that the differences between the two men were only
surface differences. They allowed Hemingway to call the novel a work of
fiction. Had he written an autobiography the book would probably not have been
well-received because Hemingway was not, at that time, a well known author.
Although Hemingway denied critics' views that A Farewell to Arms was symbolic,
had he not made any changes they would not have been as impressed with the war
atmosphere and with the naivete of a young man who experiences war for the
first time. Hemingway, because he was so private, probably did not want to
expose his life to everyone, and so the slight changes would prove that it was
not himself and his own experiences which he was writing about.
I believe that Hemingway had Catherine and her child die, not to look
different from his own life, but because he had a sick and morbid personality.
There is great power in being an author, you can make things happen which do
not necessarily occur in real life.
It is obvious that Hemingway felt, as a young child and throughout his life,
powerless, and so he created lives by writing stories. Hemingway acted out his
feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness by hunting, drinking, spending lots of
money and having many girlfriends.
I think that Hemingway was obsessed with death and not too sane. His
obsession shows itself in the morbid death of Miss Barkley and her child.
Hemingway was probably very confused about religion and sin and somehow felt or
feared that people would or should be punished for enjoying life's pleasures.
Probably, the strongest reason for writing about Catherine Barkley's
death and the death of her child was Hemingway's belief that death comes to
everyone; it was inevitable. Death ends life before you have a chance to learn
and live. He writes, in A Farewell to Arms, "They threw you in and told you
the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. ...
they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they
would kill you."
Hemingway, even in high school, wrote stories which showed that people
should expect the unexpected. His stories offended and angered the principal
of his school. I think that Hemingway liked shocking and annoying people; he
was certainly rebellious. If he would have written an ending where Miss
Barkley and her child had lived, it would have been too easy and common;
Hemingway was certainly not like everyone else, and he seemed to be proud of
that fact. Even the fact that Hemingway wrote curses and had a lot of sex in
his books shows that he liked to shock people. When his publisher asked that
he change some words and make his books more acceptable to people, Hemingway
refused, then was forced to compromise.
I think that the major difference between Hemingway and Henry was that
Henry was a likable and normal person while Hemingway was strange and very
difficult. Hemingway liked doing things his way and either people had to
accept him the way he was or too bad for them. I think that Hemingway probably
did not even like himself and that was one reason that he couldn't really like
other people.
Hemingway seemed to use people only for his own pleasure, and maybe he wanted
to think that he was like Henry who was a nicer person.

In the book, Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms,
Malcolm Cowley focuses on the symbolism of rain. He sees rain, a frequent
occurrence in the book, as symbolizing disaster. He points out that, at the
beginning of A Farewell to Arms, Henry talks about how "things went very badly"
and how this is connected to "At the start of the winter came permanent rain".
Later on in the book we see Miss Barkley afraid of rain. She says,
"Sometimes I see me dead in it", referring to the rain. It is raining the
entire time Miss Barkley is in childbirth and when both she and her baby die.
Wyndham Lewis, in the same book of critical essays, points out that
Hemingway is obsessed with war, the setting for much of A Farewell to Arms. He
feels that the author sees war as an alternative to baseball, a sport of kings.
He says that the war years "were a democratic, a levelling, school". For
Hemingway, raised in a strict home environment, war is a release; an
opportunity to show that he is a real man.
The essayist, Edgar Johnson says that for the loner "it is society as a
whole that is rejected, social responsibility, social concern" abandoned.
Lieutenant Henry, like Hemingway, leads a private life as an isolated
individual. He socializes with the officers, talks with the priest and visits
the officer's brothel, but those relationships are superficial. This avoidance
of real relationships and involvement do not show an insensitive person, but
rather someone who is protecting himself from getting involved and hurt. It is
clear that in all of Hemingway's books and from his own life that he sees the
world as his enemy. Johnson says, "He will solve the problem of dealing with
the world by taking refuge in individualism and isolated personal relationships
and sensations".
John Killinger says that it was inevitable that Catherine and her baby
would die. The theme, that a person is trapped in relationships, is shown in
all Hemingway's stories. In A Farewell to Arms Catherine asks Henry if he
feels trapped, now that she is pregnant. He admits that he does, "maybe a
little". This idea, points out Killinger, is ingrained in Hemingway's thinking
and that he was not too happy about fatherhood. In Cross Country Snow, Nick
regrets that he has to give up skiing in the Alps with a male friend to return
to his wife who is having a baby. In Hemingway's story Hills Like White
Elephants the man wants his sweetheart to have an abortion so that they can
continue as they once lived. In To Have and Have Not, Richard Gordon took his
wife to "that dirty aborting horror". Catherine's death, in A Farewell to Arms,
saves the author's hero from the hell of a complicated life.

ENDNOTES

. Peter Buckley, Ernest, The Dial Press: 1978, p.96
. Peter Buckley, p.97
. Peter Buckley, p.98
. Peter Buckley, p.104
. Peter Buckley, p.104
. Peter Buckley, p.112
. Peter Buckley, p.114
. Peter Buckley, p.117
. Peter Buckley, p.123
. Peter Buckley, p.127
. Peter Buckley, p.129
. Peter Buckley, p.135
. Peter Buckley, p.138
. Peter Buckley, p.144
. Peter Buckley, p.152
. Peter Buckley, p.152
. Peter Buckley, p.154
. Peter Buckley, p.160
. Malcolm Cowley, "Rain as Disaster", Twentieth Century
Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970,
pp.54-55
. Wyndham Lewis, "The Dumb Ox in Love and War", Twentieth Century
Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970,
p.76
. Edgar Johnson, "Farewell the Separate Peace", Twentieth Century
Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970,
pp.112-113
. John Killinger, "The Existential Hero", Twentieth Century Interpretations
of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, pp.103-105