Ernest Hemingway, a tribute on his birthday 

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers.  He changed the shape of American literature for all time.  In his novels and stories he defined the heroic modern man, a definition that in large part, holds sway to this day.  His influence on American literature and men in general, has been immense.      

There are many better qualified than me to write about Ernest Hemingway.  But Ernest Hemingway helped shape my life and has been an important part of my journey as an adult man.  I cannot let this day pass without a celebration of a writer who wrote so elegantly and expressively about the lives of men. 

   

A brief biographical note

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21^st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.  He died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2^nd 1961. 

As a young man, Hemingway was interested in outdoor pursuits, sports, hunting and fishing.  However he was also a gifted writer from very early on in life.  From the age of 15 he was writing seriously, learning his craft.   In 1918 he joined the Toronto Star as a journalist, staying six months.  He left to volunteer to fight in World War 1 and was rejected because of his poor eyesight.  Determined to make a contribution he joined the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver on the Italian front.  At the very end of the war he was wounded by an Austrian mortar-shell and invalided out to hospital.  This willingness to cast himself into the unknown and risk everything stayed with him all his life.  His courage, sometimes recklessness, was an indelible part of who he was and his writing. 

 

He returned to America after the war, then moved to Paris with his first wife and child.  Here in the mid-nineteen twenties, his first successful books were published.  Hemingway took the big subjects, love, war, the knowledge of death and wrote about them through the eyes of a man who was both sensitive and brave.  His books were beautifully written, exciting and meaningful. He became hugely famous and was the first non show business celebrity.  By the end of his life the legend was very mixed up with the man.  However whatever you thought or thought you knew about him, there were always the books, and they stand for themselves.       

  

My introduction to Hemingway

I was sixteen when I picked up a battered paperback copy of The First 49 Stories, the classic collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction.  Literature was alien to me and the books I liked, crime and science fiction were definitively not literature. They had told me told me this definitvely, school.  As far as I could tell, literature meant Victorian novels of manners or novels about middle-class English couples, one or both of whom was having an affair.  This was thin stuff for an adolescent who thought Clint Eastwood was God, and I stayed away from it.

 

I remember how exciting Hemingway’s stories were (and still are).  I was overjoyed to find a writer who talked about things that were part of my world, like boxing and fishing.  That he could make a story around them seemed incredible.  He talked about things that happen with men, how they could become violent when they had been drinking.  Things I knew about.  Ernest Hemingway taught me to value fiction, his work led me to writers as diverse as Herman Melville, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck.  As a result of reading Hemingway I began a life-long love affair with American writers.   

As I grew older, I continued to read Hemingway.  His work spoke to me as a man, about how men fall in love with women, about how there will be times in life when you lose and how you talk to yourself about that.  I read A Movable Feast, his memoir of living in Paris in the nineteen-twenties, and was beuiled by his Paris.  I first went to Paris two years after that, I walked the streets he walked and his writing became even more real for me.  

     

His Writing

We read him because he writes elegantly and beautifully.  His writing is terse, observant, visual and perceptive.  From his earliest work he always tried to write simply yet capture the essence of his subject.  To achieve this, he wrote and rewrote, always seeking to strip away the non-essential words, to build a sentence that would be true.   In A Moveable Feast, he talks about doing this.  Here he talks to himself about writing;

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.  All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”   

                                                                           A Moveable Feast

He would make revision after revision, believing that he could capture feelings and ideas in simple, beautiful language.  Stripped down short sentences, his writing has a virile, staccato drum-like rhythm to it.    

This care over language, his courageous insight into men’s lives and his willingness to speak of courage, honour and love, give us bare understated writing of great beauty and wisdom.    

The popular view of Hemingway is that he was as much showman as writer.  Yet he was a wonderful observer of others and a keen listener.  In 1950, when he was a famous and accomplished writer, he wrote Across the River and into the Trees.  Here is the opening paragraph of the novel;

“They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead.  In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys.  Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.”      

                                         Across the River and into the Trees

I believe that the visual beauty and simple accessibility of Hemingway’s writing is one of the key reasons he is still read so widely today.   

    

The big questions

We read him because of his ability to address the big subjects in men’s lives, love and war.  He wrote his greatest works when the old certainties of the nation state were slipping away, and individuality took on a new emphasis.  In A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell tolls, he wrote about war and its fascination for brave men.  Hemingway had found a truth about men and courage, that brave men measure themselves against Death.  That they see every risk, every battle, as preliminary contests for the final one, the one they cannot win. 

In the Snows of Kilimanjaro he writes about love and the tragedy of men, how they are unable to see happiness when they have it.  How there always has to be something better, and how they break what they have for what-might-be.   In the Sun Also Rises he shows us why men chase unattainable women, and even why they are unobtainable.   

 

His heroes are surprising vulnerable.  They often lose their battles and Hemingway writes in the knowledge that the world often wins.  However Hemingway’s men have an inner integrity which is rarely defeated.  What Hemingway’s novels were telling us was that if a man is not defeated on the inside, then he has not lost.  If he knows that he can hold his head up and try again then he is still a man.  Hemingway wrote “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places”  I believe there is considerable truth in his view of the world.

 

Truth and love.

We read him and love him because he is true. 

I once took a class in creative writing where the teacher, a famous feminist author, told me that “Hemingway was full of swank”.

The truth is he was not.  All the things he wrote about he did.  The fishing, the boxing, even the brawling in bars.  He wrote about danger and courage so well because he had forged his own feelings in the heat of battle in several wars.  Apart from the First World War, he also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2, as a war correspondent.  He was always on the front line, trying to get a better story, often in danger. 

Men know the truth when they read it, and it is what they do with that knowledge that counts.  Hemingway’s men were tough but sensitive.  He writes “A tough man is a man who makes his play and backs it up”.  That commitment, keeping going when you are afraid, is the hardest part.  Hemingway’s men are brave but afraid, they act despite their fear. He wrote about the little rituals that men have when they are about to do something difficult, or dangerous.  About how men talk to themselves when they are in extreme situations. 

The greatest that men can hope for is to have grace under pressure, to act with courage and clarity in the gravest danger.  I identify with Hemingway’s men because they are fallible and uncertain, yet always strive for the courage to do the right thing.  He writes about this in ways that most men can understand.  In the 20’s and 30’s writing about fear and courage so simply and cleanly was new to literature and men revered him for it.   

            

Honour

One of the big reasons that Hemingway is still relevant today is his belief in honour.  Having seen the brutality of war, Hemingway rejected glory and honour, said that they were scant reward for the horrors of battle, the dead and the maimed.  However he knew the attraction of both honour and glory and his protagonists feel the old pull, the compulsion to believe in something greater than themselves. 

Hemingway knew that men have to have honour, to believe they stood in good regard.  Hemingway’s men have personal honour.  Their honour lies in being true to themselves, to their own concept of what is right.  And this is very much how we are today. Our bonds to our country are weak and we know so much, maybe too much, of how our countries are governed.  Men today are a lot like Hemingway’s heroes, obliged to fall back on their own concept of honour.  Like Hemingway’s heroes, we find this difficult and in his stories and his men we find a kindred spirit.  We see the tug-of-war of personal and group values in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose protagonist, Richard Jordan, is prepared to die for the truth (as he sees it) but not for glory. 

   

Style and men

Almost as soon as Hemingway became famous for his writing, he became famous for his lifestyle.  He personified a type of man that many man found attractive, the virile talented  sportsman who was at home all over the world.  Combine this with his democratic American charm and you had a man who was equally happy to talk to commoners and kings.  It was a potent mixture and the press loved him, he became the first jet-set celebrity, long before the term was coined. 

 

  

Ernest hemingway with his fourth wife, Mary.

Hemingway had great style.  His outdoor lifestyle led him to casual clothes that naturally suited him.  He was a connoisseur of food and wine.  He understood and loved guns, especially hunting weapons.  He had an eye for quality and gives his characters beautiful things to illustrate this knowledge, like Colonel Cantwell’s Solingen clasp knife in Across the River and into the Trees.  Here again Hemingway shares something with modern men.  Men of style look for quality, look to know and have the best.  Hemingway presented a big, rugged style and it still works today.  The rugged man of the world is still a look, a style, that can be worn and lived.

    

Ernest Hemingway’s world was vast and he wrote bravely of men, their courage and their inevitable death.  However he loved and celebrated men, for all the good and bad within them.  For me he has always been an inspiration. 

The last words here are not mine, but those of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife and a critically acclaimed writer in her own right.  She said;

“He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language.”     

  

   

Below are some of my favourite Hemingway books and movies. 

Books 

   

A Moveable Feast

A memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris, as a struggling writer in the Nineteen-Twenties.  Beautifully observed and the love and happiness of Hemingway and his first wife Hadley are palpably.  Funny, joyful and just plain beautiful.

  Available in the UK here

  Available in the United States here  

   

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway’s story of the Spanish Civil War.  Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the republican guerillas, falls in love with a Spanish woman while on a deadly mission.  Modern warfare and it toll on brave men is the theme, with meditations on love and duty.   

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here      

   

The Old Man and the Sea

The story of an aging Cuban fisherman and his struggle to capture and land a gigantic Marlin.  Hemingway’s most profound meditation on the courage and steadfastness of men.

 Available in the Uk here   

 Available in the United States here       

  

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Short Stories of love, war and the intensity of living courageously.  From a white hunter lying wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro to simple stories of Americans and their lives.  Stories both sharp and poignant, this collection is the best introduction to Hemingway.

 Available in the UK here   

Available in the United States here       

   

A Farewell to Arms

Henry Frank is an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War 1. In the pain and madness of war he falls in love with a British nurse.  A passionate story of love, honour and manliness.

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here       

Movies

Ernest Hemingway’s work is difficult to adapt to the screen.  We lose his language and his simple dialogue needs to be carefully handled if it is not to be lost to images and movement.  Here are five movies that did it well.

   

Islands in the Stream

This should not have worked as well as it does, being based on Islands in the Stream, one of Hemingway’s least well-regarded books.  However the combination of Hemingway and Geroge C Scott, directed by the superb Franklin Schaffner is magical and moving.  George C Scott absolutely nails it as the Hemingway/Artist character and all the other performances are equally good.  Franklin Schaffner had a deep understanding of powerful men and he gets every once of emotion and drama from the story.

 Available in the UK here

 Available in the United States here

  

The Old Man and the Sea

Directed by John Sturges and Fred Zinneman, with Hemingway employed as a consultant, this is a faithful adaptation of the book.  Spencer Tracy is perfect as Santiago, the aging fisherman, and the movie is a true celebration of the human spirit.

 Available in the United States here   

  

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Gregory Peck, a writer and hunter, lies wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro.  In flashback he re-traces his life, from his one true love in Paris thru his adventures as a writer.  Crafted from several other stories besides the Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Gregory Peck bringing a sympathetic cast to the character of the world-weary writer.  One of the best Hemingway adaptations and a real adventure movie.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here  

   

The Killers

Directed by the great thriller director Don Siegel, with Lee Marvin in the lead, the Killers is violent, fatalistic and cynical.  Hemingway’s dialogue was never handled better than in this movie. 

 Available in the UK here   

   

For Whom the Bell Tolls

This story of a squad of guerilla fighters in the Spanish Civil War had superb leads in Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.  Gary Cooper had the real life gravitas of a Hemingway hero and really filled the part, as did Bergman.  A surprisingly fast-paced movie for its time, true to Hemingway’s story, mood and spirit.  It is also a classic Hollywood movie, with an epic sweep and exciting action.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here

    

There are also many websites which offer further information about Ernest Hemingway.  Here are some I like:

http://www.lostgeneration.com/

http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/

http://www.timelesshemingway.com/