The Life of Ernest Hemingway

1 The Life of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous American authors of the twentieth century. His name is internationally recognized, even by many people who have never read any of his books. His familiar image has been used to sell cars, clothes, and furniture. He is famous in part for how he lived—spending time in exotic and glamorous settings (including Paris, Pamplona, Key West, Havana, Sun Val- ley), witnessing frontline combat in several wars, traveling to East Africa to hunt dangerous game, fishing in the Gulf Stream, and of course running with the bulls in the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. Wealthy and glamorous, he befriended film stars like Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Gary Cooper, and Ing- rid Bergman. As his youngest son, Gregory, wrote in his memoir, Papa, He had always had everything. Handsome as a movie star in his youth, with an attrac- tion for women you wouldn’t believe unless you saw it; extremely sensitive, blessed with a constitution, energy, and resiliency that allowed him to abuse his body and re- cover from trauma, both physical and emotional, that destroyed lesser men; supremely imaginative and yet possessed of tremendous common sense, perhaps the rarest combi- nation of qualities; and luck, almost always good, the genetic good luck to have all of the above, and the luck to survive a major war wound with the knowledge of what the edge of nothingness is like. (4–5) As his son’s tribute suggests, Hemingway is also famous for the pain he experi- Copyright © 2001. Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Group, Incorporated. Publishing © 2001. Greenwood Copyright enced—including his World War I wounding, alcoholism, three divorces, Tyler, Lisa. Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway, Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/inflibnet-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3000515. Created from inflibnet-ebooks on 2021-03-03 23:30:38. STUDENT COMPANION TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY mental illness, self-destructiveness, and eventual suicide. But he is best known for the quality of his writing. CHILDHOOD Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, now a suburb of Chicago. The Oak Park of Hemingway’s childhood was affluent, Protestant, and deeply Republican, as well as sometimes prudish, nar- row-minded, racist, and anti-Semitic. His parents were Clarence Hemingway, an obstetrician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, who had trained as an opera singer before choosing to marry and start a family. Ernest was the second of six children and the first son. He had an older sister, Marcelline, and three younger sisters—Ursula, Madelaine, and Carol—as well as a younger brother, Leicester. His mother gave music lessons and at times earned more than her husband; the family hired servants to handle much of the housework. The family spent its summers at Bear Lake (later WalloonLake) in the upper peninsula of Michigan, which at that time was rural, heavily forested, and still populated by the remnants of the Ojibway Indian tribe. The family stayed in a cottage called Windemere, and eventually Grace had a separate cottage built across the lake for her to retreat to when she wanted to get away from her family. Hemingway’s mother encouraged his creativity and knowledge of the arts, although he later came to prefer literature and the visual arts to the performing arts that she enjoyed. His father taught him hunting, fishing, and camping skills and fostered what became a lifelong love of nature and the outdoors. Er- nest may also have inherited from his father a genetic predisposition to manic depression, for his father often had dark moods and spent occasional vacations away from his family in an effort to restore his mental health. Hemingway’s mother twinned him with his older sister Marcelline, dressing both children in dresses until Ernest went to kindergarten (Lynn 42). At the time, it was common for young boys to wear dresses until they reached the age of two and a half, but few parents kept boys in dresses until age four or five (Lynn 39). In Michigan, both children wore overalls and other boyish clothes but sported long, girlish hairstyles (Lynn 38). Ernest and Marcelline had similar haircuts as well, and in her family scrapbooks Grace described them as twins, even though they were 18 months apart in age. Grace even had Marcelline repeat kindergarten so that she and Ernest could begin first grade together. There is a great deal of speculation about what effect this forced “twinning” had on Ernest’s sense of himself and his sexuality. Scholar Carl Eby suggests that Ernest’s childhood experiences left him confused and anxious about his Copyright © 2001. Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Group, Incorporated. Publishing © 2001. Greenwood Copyright gender identity and that he later drew on fetishes—certain physical objects like 2 Tyler, Lisa. Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway, Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/inflibnet-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3000515. Created from inflibnet-ebooks on 2021-03-03 23:30:38. The Life of Ernest Hemingway hair, fur, silk, ivory, suntanned skin, and cats—to relieve that anxiety in both his private life and his work. Certainly Ernest’s experiences of twinning seem to have influenced the posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden,in which characters talk about transforming from one gender to another. Hemingway was not particularly athletic or popular with girls in high school. He rarely dated in high school, and his mother insisted he take his sister Marcelline to the junior prom. He wrote for the school newspaper, the Trapeze, and became its editor in his senior year. He also began writing short stories for Tabula, his high school’s literary magazine. Those early short stories seem to have been influenced by the stories of Rudyard Kipling, O. Henry, and Jack London (Meyers 19–20). Some of that fiction still exists, including “The Judgement of Manitou,” “A Matter of Colour,” and “Sepi Jingan.” His high school courses were fairly demanding by today’s standards. A list of the works he was assigned to read in high school appears in the book Heming- way’s Reading by Michael Reynolds (39–43). Ernest’s parents wanted him to go to college; his father, in particular, had hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps by attending Oberlin College in Ohio and then going to medical school to become a doctor. At one time Hemingway apparently intended to major in journalism at the University of Illinois, but he eventually decided to take a job his Uncle TylerHemingway helped him land at the Kansas City Star in the fall of 1917. In the winter of 1917, the Red Cross asked for American volunteers to drive ambulances on the Italian front. Unable to join the American armed forces be- cause of a bad eye, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve with the Red Cross. He later lied about his service, claiming to have fought for the Italian army. He spent only about three weeks as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy before he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel on July 8, 1918, while passing out choco- late and cigarettes to Italian troops along the Piave River. He sustained multi- ple shrapnel wounds in his right leg and at one time feared he would have to have the leg amputated. Recuperating from his wounds in a hospital in Milan, Italy, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a well-educated American nurse who was eight years older than the young man who fell in love with her. Hemingway later drew on and embellished this romance in A Farewell to Arms. Jim Gamble, a captain who befriended Hemingway during their service with the Red Cross, offered to pay for Hemingway to travel with him for a year. Agnes, uncomfort- able with this idea, urged Hemingway to go home and get a job, telling him they could not get married until he could earn his living. He returned home, and soon afterward, Agnes wrote him to announce her engagement to an Italian. The forgettable 1997 film In Love and War, starring Sandra Bullock Copyright © 2001. Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Group, Incorporated. Publishing © 2001. Greenwood Copyright and Chris O’Donnell, was loosely based on this relationship as it was depicted 3 Tyler, Lisa. Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway, Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/inflibnet-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3000515. Created from inflibnet-ebooks on 2021-03-03 23:30:38. STUDENT COMPANION TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY in the book Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, which, in addition to Agnes’s diary and her and Ernest’s letters to each other, also contained essays written by fellow Red Cross veteran Henry Villard and Hemingway scholar James Nagel. In November 1919, not long after his return from the war, Hemingway began working with Bill Smith on a series of sketches that they called “Cross Roads.” Hemingway briefly took a job as a paid companion to Ralph Connable, a young man whose father headed the Woolworth chain of stores in Canada, but soon Ernest began writing features for the Toronto Star. The summer of 1920 in Michigan, when Hemingway turned 21 years old, he finally compelled his mother to throw him out of the nest. Ernest unwisely stayed out most of the night with some friends, including two girls who were only 13; the understandably anxious mother of one of the girls confronted Grace Hemingway, and when Ernest arrived at home, a furious Grace kicked him out of the house.

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