Biography Of Ernest Hemingway Essay, Research Paper

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