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To judge from the frequency with which biographies of him continue to appear nearly four decades after his death, Ernest Hemingway remains as fascinating a figure now as he was to his contemporaries. The reasons for this fascination have, of course, changed to some extent. The public perception of any writer undergoes an alteration after his or her death, when the facts of the private life--some of them perhaps deliberately concealed--begin to come to light. In his lifetime, Hemingway created and sold to a vast public, including millions who never read a word he had written, a myth of himself as an undisputed master in a wide variety of activities--soldier, fighter, hunter, literary genius, a man whose confidence and authority made him envied by men and adored by women. All of these things were to a greater or lesser degree true of Hemingway, although in most cases not nearly to the extent that they once appeared to be. And it has become clear that for him, as for the protagonists of his novels and stories, the true nature of heroism lay not in the effortless realization of superior gifts, but in the constant, consuming struggle to overcome crippling psychological defects and terror at the emptiness both in the larger world and in the innermost self.
Ernest Miller Hemingway, the second child and first son of Clarence Hemingway, a medical doctor, and Grace (Hall) Hemingway, was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. His family and upbringing were conventional in their middleclass expectations and unimaginative moralism, although Hemingway would in later years characterize them, especially his mother, far more harshly than the realities justified. Much has been made of the fact that in his earliest months his mother dressed him like a girl and treated him as a sort of twin to his sister Marcelline, who was eighteen months his senior. After graduating in 1917 from Oak Park High School, where he was active in both sports and writing, he went to work as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. In July of 1918, in what would prove to be the closing months of the First World War, he went to Italy as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, and there had two experiences that would profoundly affect him psychologically. The first occurred on July 8, when a mortar explosion injured him seriously enough to require the removal of more than two hundred shell fragments from his leg (throughout his life Hemingway would endure a tremendous amount of physical punishment, culminating in two near-fatal plane crashes in Africa in 1954). The other experience was a love affair, during his convalescence in Milan, with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse several years his senior. Her ending of the relationship, after talk of marriage between them, scarred Hemingway as deeply and permanently as had the enemy shell.
After some months of recovery and aimlessness, Hemingway spent four years as a reporter and then European correspondent for the Toronto Star. As in his Kansas City days, his journalistic experience formed the basis of the style--clear, concise, focused on the creation of mood and evocation of sensation--that he would employ in his fiction. In September 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives and the mother of John, the first of his three sons, who would become the father of the actresses Margaux and Mariel Hemingway. The young couple settled in Paris, where Hemingway began to make the acquaintance of a number of expatriate, avant-garde American writers, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. In the fall of 1922, he underwent another devastating loss when, in a Paris railway station, someone stole from Hadley a suitcase she had packed containing all the copies of all the manuscripts of virtually all of the writing that he had done up to that point. Although he sought to reassure her in the matter, his unspoken resentment may very well have been one of the factors that led to the breakup of their marriage.
Hemingway's first two publications were pamphlets of experimental writing issued in Paris in limited editions by American writer friends who had formed their own small presses to bring out new work that commercial publishers were not interested in. Through these booklets and through his appearances in magazines, Hemingway quickly established a sufficiently strong reputation that In Our Time, a book of his stories, was issued by a New York publisher in 1925. Its opening piece, "Indian Camp," established a pattern that would be repeated in many of Hemingway's best stories, such as "The Killers" and "In Another Country." The central character in these works (often the autobiographical Nick Adams)--whether a boy, adolescent, or young man--witnesses a traumatic experience undergone by an older man; he then strives, with varying success depending on his age and maturity, to distance himself from what he has seen, to try to avoid admitting its relevance to his own life and hopes. In a mordant irony that seems quite characteristic of Hemingway's view of life, "Indian Camp" ends with a discussion between a little boy and his father on the rarity of suicide; the models for both these characters, Hemingway and his own father, would subsequently kill themselves. The finest story in In Our Time was "Big, Two-Hearted River," in which a shell-shocked Nick Adams, returned from the war, goes camping and fishing by himself in the Michigan woods of his youth, seeking to heal himself through the performance of increasingly complex, familiar rituals. The great stress upon ritual--upon doing things in a prescribed "right" way, and thus the reliance on pattern to provide shape and coherence against the surrounding emptiness and terror--also helps to explain Hemingway's lifelong preoccupation with such one-on-one sports as boxing, big-game hunting, and especially bullfighting.
A second collection, Men Without Women (1927), contained many of Hemingway's finest stories, including "The Killers," "In Another Country," "Fifty Grand," and the stunning "Hills Like White Elephants." In "Hills," he uses his perfect pitch for dialogue and his ability to suggest depths of feeling and complexity through seemingly casual details to convey a great deal about the inner lives of the story's two characters, solely through the recording of their conversation and the description of their outward behavior. But it was the two novels that he published before and after this collection that firmly and permanently established Hemingway in the public mind as the dominant American writer of fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. The Sun Also Rises (1926), through its protagonist Jake Barnes, who has been emasculated by a war wound, chronicled the frustration and futility of the "Lost Generation." And A Farewell to Arms (1929), a bestseller as well as a critical triumph, described how Frederick Henry makes his own "separate peace" with the First World War, only to lose everything. This novel became Hemingway's classic treatment of the tragic disillusionment of human hopes. It is remarkable that Hemingway has enjoyed such huge success with the broader public, when one considers the unremitting bleakness that informs his finest fiction.
At the age of thirty, Hemingway was at the pinnacle of public and artistic success, apparently poised to reach ever greater heights of achievement, but in fact most of his best work had already been done. The 1930s saw several excellent short stories, such as "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," but the only novel published in this decade was the deeply flawed To Have and Have Not (1937). Where there had previously been a fusion of theme and treatment, Hemingway's prose began to harden into mannerism, at times seeming to become a rigid instrument constricting the expression of the increasingly complex themes he wished to treat. In attempting social satire, for which he had no discernible gift, he produced some of his most inept and sophomoric pages. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was something of an artistic recovery, and an unmitigated commercial success, but Hemingway published no books for another decade, and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) earned, and has successfully retained, a reputation as one of the worst novels ever written by anyone with a claim to be taken seriously as an artist. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) was a rebound from that novel (almost anything would have been). It helped secure Hemingway the Nobel Prize in 1954, and has remained his most popular book, but there are those who feel that it was at best a tired reworking of material he had handled much more effectively a quarter-century earlier in "The Undefeated."
Hemingway's public image as "Papa"--wise, assured, masterful in art and in all things--became an increasingly hollow pose in the last decade of his life, as his physical and mental health deteriorated to the point where he could not bring any writing projects to completion and he required hospitalization several times because of profound depression and paranoid delusions. After having previously attempted suicide, Hemingway shot himself to death in the first light of day on July 2, 1961, in his home at Ketchum, Idaho. According to one psychological interpretation, after a lifetime of stalking surrogates, he had finally trained his sights on the greatest trophy of all.
His legacy, precisely because it is so pervasive, is difficult to perceive. Those who have grown up reading American short fiction written after Hemingway cannot appreciate the startling originality of his work. If, to them, he sounds a lot like everyone else, it is because everyone else has learned almost everything from him. Like Elvis Presley, another American original, he used his unique vision and enormous gifts to utterly transform his chosen art and remake it in his own image. Sadly, also like Presley, he did his best and purest work at the beginning of his career, descending thereafter into a drawn-out process of self-destruction and becoming a grotesque self-parody.
As the facts of Hemingway's life have emerged, biographers and critics have fastened on his personal flaws. There is no question that he was a seriously disturbed--and, to many, a repellant--personality, vain, boastful, self-deluding, capable of great cruelty (especially toward those to whom he owed the most), appalling in some of his attitudes. And inevitably these personal limitations translate into artistic ones: one of the most frequently observed weaknesses in his work is its depiction of women. It has been observed, for example, that the central male characters of his novels tend to be about his own age at the time of writing, while their female counterparts are progressively younger, more beautiful, and more absurdly compliant toward their men.
But the greatest works of literature, including Hemingway's, have always taught us that insight into the doubts and fears of the human psyche is the first step toward understanding of otherwise inexplicable behavior. One cannot but feel sympathy and even admiration for Hemingway in his lifelong struggle against crippling emotional shocks and scars, and be sustained and uplifted by the fact that out of that struggle he created some of the most beautifully and powerfully written stories and novels of our time, works that somehow console us through their own refusal to take consolation anywhere but in the pride that comes from staring without flinching into the void at the center of experience.
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