Ernest Hemmingway- Essay, Research Paper

Ernest Hemmingway-

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

. 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