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Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, an upper middle-class suburb of Chicago. It seems that his childhood experiences contributed to his later ambiguous personality. His mother Grace was a dominant, imperious person who had her own ideas about raising children. She therefore made her small son wear girl's dresses for a number of years, which was a humiliating experience for young Ernest. His father was a puritanical loner with a rather violent temper. His only joy was hunting, and he was happiest when he was able to share this art with his son alone in the woods or by a stream, far away from his wife. These factors contributed to young Ernest's psychological burden, and were to have dramatic effects on his adult life.

Ernest Hemingway

Early in his life, he realized that the only thing he wanted to be was a writer. In 1916, he became a columnist for the Kansas City Star. One year later, he served in World War I as a volunteer for the Red Cross in Italy where he was wounded. After his return, he let himself be treated like a hero. In fact, he had already started stylizing his own personality at quite an early age. In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, who was the first of his four wives. Hemingway's relationship towards women deserves special attention. He was a hermaphrodite who had never had an operation; he denied his condition vigorously and only admitted to it in his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden.

His career started in 1923 when Three Stories and Ten Poems was published. Although not much notice was taken of this work, his first novel, Fiesta (1926), was a different matter. Men Without Women, a collection of short stories, came out in 1927. It was then that Hemingway became a star and was regarded as an innovative force in American literature, especially for the traditional short story. His direct, concise style was an inspiration for many other authors.

Also in 1927, Hemingway's father committed suicide, which led the desperate writer to finally break with his mother, whom he had hated all his life. His subsequent extended travels through Africa improved his image as a big-game hunter. The 1930s were his most creative period. He wrote Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa and, finally, in 1939, the epic For Whom the Bell Tolls, a magnificently written love story set during the Spanish Civil War. After that, everything changed for the worse. Hemingway began to suffer from writer's block. It took him a whole decade to finish his next novel Across the River and Into the Trees. The book got devastating reviews, and the author became an object of derision.

The passionate boxer was knocked down but not yet out. One last time he convinced his critics with his best performance The Old Man and the Sea. This famous parable about a poor fisherman's fight with a swordfish was the essence of Hemingway's philosophy: "A man can be beaten but cannot be completely defeated!" The book won him the Nobel prize, but this was a Pyrrhic victory because later Hemingway made the prize partly responsible for the loss of his creativity. His writing career was coming to an end. He became deeply depressed and pathologically envious of his successful colleagues Faulkner and Dos Passos.

Sometimes he felt persecuted by the FBI, but his fears later proved to be true. A shock therapy in the Mayo hospital was unsuccessful. The great novelist was no longer willing to live with his humiliation, so he made up his mind to end it all. In the early morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway killed himself with a double-barrelled shotgun in his house in Ketchum, Idaho.

The old Man and the Sea

Hemingway's most famous parable was probably the one about the old Cuban fisherman. Alone at sea, he catches a marlin and is only able to defend the bones against the sharks.

Ernest Hemingway in Peru preparing for the filming of "The old man and the sea" 1956

Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords." Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame:

Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.

If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career.