Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

1. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) • Focus of Study : • Life Experience • Literary Career • Point of View • Writing Style • Major works • Significance

2. Life Experience • 1899: In Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway is born on 21 July, the second child of six. • 1905-1917: Ernest attend grade school in Oak Park and Oak Park and River Forest High School . • 1918: Hemingway enlists with the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver. In June he is wounded in Italy and sent to the Milan Red Cross hospital where he falls in love with his nurse, the prototype of Catherine in A Farewell to Arms. • 1921: Ernest and Hadley are married in Sep. Advised by Sherwood Anderson, the couple moved to Paris in December.

3. Young Hemingway (far right) with his family, 1906

4. 1922: In February and March, Ernest meets Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein. • 1926: In October The Sun Also Rises is published in New York. • 1927: In April, Hadley and Ernest are divorced. In May he and Pauline marry in Paris. In October, Scribners publishes his Men Without Women. • 1928: On 28 June his second son is born. On 6 December his father, Clarence Hemingway, commits suicide in Oak Park. • 1929: In September A Farewell to Arms is published in New York.

5. 1937: In March he is in Madrid, where he is joined by Martha Gellhorn and he returns to the Spanish War in August. To Have and Have Not is published on 15 October. • 1938: On 22 October The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories is published in New York. • 1940: At the end of July, Hemingway delivers to Scribners the finished draft of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is published on 21 October. In November, Hemingway divorces Pauline and marries Martha. • 1941: At the end of January, Ernest and Martha set out as journalists to the China-Japan War zone. Between February and April, they are in Hawaii, Hong Kong, Canton, Chungking.

6. 1943: In September, Martha leaves for England to report on the war. Hemingway refuses to join her, their marriage having become a series of arguments and accusations. Alone at Finca, he is morose, lonely, and drinking too much. • 1945: In March, Hemingway departs from Paris to return to Cuba, where he is joined by Mary Welsh in May. In Dec. he divorces Martha. • 1946: In the first half of the year, Hemingway sinks into one of his recurring depressed periods. In June he and Mary are married in Havana. • 1947: On 13 June, Hemingway is awarded a Bronze Star for his several activities during War II. • 1948: After returning to Cuba, the Hemingways sail in September from Havana to Italy, where they revisit Ernest's War I sites and experience Venice for the first time.1951: On 28 July, Hemingway's mother, Grace, dies in Memphis, Tennessee. He does not go to the funeral.

7. 1952: The Old Man and the Sea is published on 1 Sept. It becomes an immediate best-seller. • 1953: On 4 May, Hemingway is awarded the Pulitzer Prize. • 1954: On 21 July, Hemingway's fifty-fifth birthday, he is awarded the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes by the Cuban government. On 28 October he is told that he has received the Nobel Prize in literature, but he pleads ill health as a reason not to attend the ceremony.

8. 1959: In January and February, Hemingway works steadily on The Garden of Eden. Throughout the summer his erratic behavior puts an added strain on his marriage with Mary threatening to leave him. The year ends with Ernest becoming more and more withdrawn and paranoid. • 1960: In August, Hemingway flies to Spain to collect more information for his book. There, Ernest's mental condition grows steadily worse. He returns to N.Y. in Oct., after which he and Mary return to their house in Ketchum. That fall his erratic moods, paranoia, and despondency become worse. On 30 November, Ernest is flown to Minnesota to accept electroshock treatments. • 1961: After being released from the Mayo Clinic, he remains withdrawn and morose, feeling that he cannot write. On 21 April, after attempting suicide, Hemingway is sedated and hospitalized in Ketchum. Three days later, a second attempt to kill himself is thwarted. The next day he is flown back to the Mayo Clinic for more electroshock therapy. On 26 June, and he and Mary return to the Ketchum house. At 7:30 A.M. on 2 July, he takes his life with his favorite shotgun.

9. 1923 Three Stories and Ten Poems 1925 In Our Time 1926 The Torrents of Spring (Novel) 1926 The Sun Also Rises(Novel) 1927 Men Without Women (Short Stories) 1929 A Farewell to Arms(Novel) 1932 Death in the Afternoon (Novel) 1933 Winner take Nothing (Short Stories) 1935 Green Hills of Africa (Novel) 1937 To Have and Have Not (Novel) 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Novel) 1942 Men at War 1950 Across the River and into the Trees 1952 The Old Man and the Sea(Novel) Writing Career

10. Point of View • His illusions being destroyed early by his experience in the war, he needed to create a new code for his existence. The establishment of his new code is based on his disillusioned conviction that the old Christian concepts and values could not save people from the catastrophe of the War. Here is a world of “waste land” permeated with wars, wounds, violence, death, dead love, hedonism.

11. Two Types of Hero: 1. the Code Hero • Hemingway wrote all his life about one theme—“grace under pressure” and his code hero with stoic courage lives by a pattern which gives life meaning and value. • His code hero lives constantly with the idea of death. He lives intensely when he is in the direct presence of death. He is often restless, staying awake at nighttime and sleeping during the day, because the darkness of night for him suggests the darkness man has to face after death. • He realizes human dignity and integrity cannot be bargained for with the forces of darkness. In such chaotic and meaningless world, man fights a solitary struggle against a force he does not even understand. The awareness of his final defeat and inevitable death, however hard he strives against it, engenders a sense of despair—despairing courage—a code of honor. This enables a man to behave like a man, to assert his dignity in face of adversity.

12. His code hero often devotes himself to all types of physical pleasures as rewards of this life. • The code hero possesses his disciplines to manage any difficult situation, his code of honor and courage to face the forces of the enemy. He is a hero because he teaches us how to live. • He is highly competent at a particular skill and intentionally alienates himself form the ordinary person. • He is reticent, never talking about his concepts. He is a man of action rather than a man of theory, which leads to the concept of loyalty that he feels for other people. • He cannot feel a sense of loyalty to sth. abstract, he is more concerned with a smaller and more personal relationship.

13. 2. The “student” character is blessed or condemned with his self-consciousness or mind. He is simple and shallow, trying to understand the experience of the code hero. • To sum up， Hemingway’s fictional world is comparatively limited. His characters are stereotyped and always confined in a small world of war, blood, violence and death.

14. Writing Style • I always try to write on the principle of Iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that does’t show. --Ernest Hemingway 1958 • One must go deep beneath the surface to understand the full meaning of his writing.

15. General Qualities of his fiction: the regular appearance of the simple declarative sentence, a concrete, non-abstract diction, repetition of words and phrase, the concentration on an image of physical sensation and masterful control of dialogue. • His use of the simple declarative sentence is in keeping with his avoidance of adj.s and adv.s.

16. 2. One of the effects of repetition is that it helps drive home a point by insisting to the reader that it is important. 3.Hemingway’s commitment to the life of physical sensation is persistent in his fiction. 4. The dialogue or conversation is equally remarkable because Hemingway had an excellent ear for the accents and mannerisms of human speech.

17. Major works • The Sun Also Rises • The most important text to understand the “lost generation”. A group of young English and American expatriates caught in the war and cut off from the old values and unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandering pointlessly and enjoying various pleasures. • Jake Barnes, wounded in the war, the Fisher King, whose physical impotence is a token of modern man’s spiritual impotence. • Main idea: Nothing leads anywhere.

18. A Farewell to Arms(1928) • Henry goes to the war and discovers the insanity of the universe. He becomes an embittered man, fighting single handed against overwhelming odds. There is nothing sacred and glorious but the slaughterhouse. • Theme: It stresses the normality and righteousness of the male-female relationship. Anything which distorts or destroys it will ends in a kind of tragedy. Hemingway dramatizes the conflict between personal happiness and the larger drama of war that is a miniature of an absurd world.

19. For Whom the Bell Tolls (40) • The novel is permeated with a sense of involvement in the lives and sufferings of others, a loyalty to brotherhood. • It enriches Hemingway’s heroic codes in striking a more confident, affirmative and optimistic note. • Jordan: a wounded man living all the time in the shadow of Fate and doom. He is keenly aware the losing battle but keeps on striving. He grows up in learning that there are causes that are worth dying for(the Spanish people), as the novel ends with his words: “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere.”

20. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) • Santiago and his battle with big Marlin. He is contending with a force he knows it is futile to battle with and living with such belief that “a man is not made for defeat… A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” He begins to experience a feeling of brotherhood and love not only for his fellowmen but for his fellow creatures in nature—a proof of the change of Hemingway’s vision of the world.

21. Significance • Hemingway is interested in conveying a deep emotional feeling. This is the goal of many modernist writers—recreate proper feelings of the situation or experience in the reader, arouse an involuntary subjective response. • Hemingway deserves “the attention of posterity as he captured in his works the uncomfortable realities of his age and forced into public consciousness a realization of the brutalities of war and their lingering psychological effects”. (Martin, James)

22. Study Questions • A Farewell to Arms is one of the most famous war novels ever written. Unlike many war stories, however, the novel does not glorify the experience of combat or offer us portraits of heroes as they are traditionally conceived. What is the novel’s attitude toward war? Is it fair to call it an antiwar novel? • Discuss religious symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. To what effect does Hemingway employ such images? • What is the role of the sea in The Old Man and the Sea?

23. Reference • Donald, Miles. The American Novel in the Twentieth Century. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1978. • Monteiro, George, ed. Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1994. • Reynolds, Michael S. Ernest Hemingway. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. • Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998.

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