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EARLY LIFE AND WORKS OF HEMINGWAY

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P u b l i s h e d b y : T R A N S A s i a n R e s e a r c h J o u r n a l s

AJMR:

A s i a n J o u r n a l o f

M u l t i d i m e n s i o n a l

R e s e a r c h

( A D o u b l e B l i n d R e f e r r e d & R e v i e we d I n t e r n a t i o n a l J o u r n a l )

EARLY LIFE AND WORKS OF HEMINGWAY

Dr. B. Mohan*

*Associate Professor,

S.V. College of Engineering and Technology, Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, India.

ABSTRACT

A few writers have been so deeply autobiographical as Hemingway. Besides being a famous writer, he was well-known as hunter, fisherman, skier, boxer, reporter, soldier, bullring and saloon aficionado. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July, 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Hemingway was severely wounded by an Austrian mortar shell while he was handing out chocolate to a group of Italian soldiers. Hemingway was excruciated by the horrors of the war front, its gruesome sights and metallic sounds. For a long time he could not forget that hell. He was in a state of shock. He suffered from insomnia and so did many of his fictional characters. In 1922 and 1923, Hemingway travelled extensively through Europe as a free-lance journalist for his assignment with the Toronto Daily Star. Most of the characters in The Sun Also Rises have suffered somehow either in the war or as a result of the war. Drink, sex and sports like fishing and bull-fighting are opiates at best because they are a temporary means of escape from inner turmoil.

KEYWORDS: Temperament, fictional, frustration, hysterical, sacrifice, excitement,

distorting, patriotism, consciousness, disintegrating, disillusionment, intelligence, bullfighter, admirable, irresponsible, fascinating, connoisseur, wounded, psychological.

_________________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION

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fisherman, skier, boxer, reporter, soldier, bullring and saloon aficionado. Waldhorn remarks, “Hemingway drew more attention to himself as a man and has had more non-literary copy written about him than any other American writer in the twentieth century”.1 As Hemingway derived most of his raw material for his short stories and novels from his personal experiences, it is quite necessary for us to know the man. In this connection Robert P. Weeks remarks: To an extraordinary degree Hemingway and what he has written exist in a synergetic relationship, reinforcing and fulfilling each other; he has created a personal legend which serves as an ambience in which we read him”.2

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago. He was the second of the six children. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a prominent physician. He was essentially an „outdoor‟ man, who loved fishing, hunting and unending rambles through the Michigan woods north of Chicago. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a woman of religious and artistic temperament. She possessed immense musical talent and made the boy practice the cello. He disliked the cello and cared little for music altogether. It was from such a divided upbringing that Ernest‟s own fondness for the outdoor life of sport and hardship developed.

Hemingway received his early education in the Oak Park High School in which emphasis was laid on liberal arts. It was in the school that the boy Hemingway had his grounding in the Bible and the English classics. But he was not a book-warm. He took an active part in extra-curricular activities, school athletics, boxing, and football. “At High School Class of 1917”, says Arthur Waldhorn, he was a prototypically zealous and competitive all American boy: good student, all round athlete (swimmer, football player, riflist and privately, a student at the local boxing gymnasium) debater, cellist in the school orchestra, editor of the school newspaper, The Trapeze, and contributor or stories (that already hint at his mature style) and poems to the literary magazine, Tabula”.3 In his school days Hemingway was a handsome, friendly, and courteous boy. It is alleged that his was a rebellious temperament and twice he ran away from home. In this connection Edward Wageknecht, the class-fellow of Ernest Hemingway, recalls, “I have since read that he was lonely in high school, that he had once run away from home, and that he was sometimes regarded as a „tough guy‟. These things may or may not have been true; all I can say is that there was nothing in my contacts with Hemingway to cause me to suspect them. I had no classmate whom I recall with greater pleasure”.4

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It was during his brief stay with the Kansas City Star that Hemingway felt a strong urge for an active participation in the war, for he craved action and adventure. He made as many as twelve efforts to enlist and every time he was rejected because of poor eye-sight. But he never lost hope. He tried again and finally he was able to get into the war as a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver. In the spring of 1918 Hemingway left the Star and signed on with the Red Cross. He was allotted to ambulance Unit 4 and sent to Italy on May 12, 1918.

The American Ambulance Field Service consisted of boys with strong literary, academic and newspaper background. Hemingway‟s Ambulance Unit 4 included students from several American institutions. These American volunteers who were attracted by the romance of serving in a foreign country with a foreign army were the very pick and flower of American life, and worked in day and night shifts in a spirit of camaraderie. At first Hemingway was posted to drive in a quiet sector. Soon he was fed up with driving ambulances in a peaceful area. At his own request he was transferred farther east to ted Cross canteen duty at the village of Fossalta on the Piave River, where the Italians were about to launch an offensive. Still he was far away from the place of action. He wheedled permission to take chocolate, tobacco, and post-cards directly into the trenches. The Austrian army was dug in a few hundred yards away. So far the whole experience had been more of a lark than anything else. But, at mid-night on July 8, 1918, Hemingway was severely wounded by an Austrian mortar shell while he was handing out chocolates to a group of Italian soldiers. According to Theodore Brumback‟s letter to the Hemingways, an Italian standing between him and the explosion was killed instantly; a second, standing a few feet away, had both legs blown off. A third soldier, another of those who had been waiting for chocolates, was seriously wounded. Hemingway fainted from shock. When he regained consciousness, he somehow got to his feet, picked up one of his comrades, and carried him to a first-aid dugout. On the way he was hit in the leg by machine-gun fire. For some time he was removed to a field hospital and his wounds were attended to. Afterwards he was admitted to the red Cross Hospital in Milan. A dozen operations were performed on his knee and as many as 237 shell splinters were taken out of his legs. While convalescing in Milan, he fell in love with a nurse from Pennsylvania named Agnes H. Von Kurowsky, but this bitter-sweet late adolescent love ended in failure. He proposed to Agnes, but she turned him down in favour of an Italian count. For his valour in the field the Italian government presented him the silver medal „Croce ad Merito di Guerra‟ with three citations and the „Medaglia d‟Argento al Valore Militare‟, the second highest Italian military decoration, and allowed him to enlist as an infantry-man in the Italian army. After the Armistice on 11th November, 1918, Hemingway returned to the United States as the worst disenchanted and disillusioned man that went home after participating in the First World War.

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ghoulish sights of violence and death which remained embedded deep in his psyche conditioned his outlook on, and approach to, life.

Early in the 1950s Hemingway said, “Any experience of war is invaluable to a writer. But it is destructive if he has too much”.6 months after the trench mortar explosion that shattered his body metaphorically. Hemingway was excruciated by the horrors of the war front, its gruesome sights and metallic sounds. For a long time he could not forget that hell. He was in a state of shock. He suffered from insomnia and so did many of his fictional characters. Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Nick Adams in Now I Lay Me, Mr Frazer in The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio‟, Harry in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and the old waiter in A Clean, Well lighted Place are among those who suffer from insomnia. Many of his fictional characters returned from the front, as he did, quite disillusioned. Harold Krebs in Soldier‟s Home, provides a minute study of the post-war jitters suffered by Hemingway himself. Krebs returned home disillusioned, and his faith in the traditional values of life completely shattered.

Sherwood Anderson had sent the Hemingway off with a bunch of laudatory letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Hemingway found no difficulty in entering the circle of the American expatriates who were living in Paris. He met Gertrude Stein whose apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus was the meeting place of artists and writers like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford. Gertrude Stein was much impressed by Hemingway. She advised Hemingway to give up his job as a journalist and become a more restrained writer. He submitted his writings for her comments. In the words of Sheridan Baker, “He showed her the incipient novel. She told him to condense, to start all over again, to prune his description.

In the meantime, in 1922 and 1923, Hemingway travelled extensively through Europe as a free-lance journalist for his assignment with the Toronto Daily Star. In 1922 he covered the Economic Conference at Genoa. He also covered several political conferences in Germany, Italy and the Near East. He interviewed Mussolini, Clamenceau and Lloud George. He roamed through Spain, Switzerland and Germany, and later that year (1922) covered the bloody conflict between Turkey and Grece not only for the Daily Star but also for the Heast syndicate. He observed minutely the fleeing of Greek refugees across Thrace. He used the incidents from the Greco-Turkish War not only in a sketch for In Our Time, in his story On the Quai at Smyrna, but also in the long Caporetto sequence of A Farewell to Arms.

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stories under the title In Our Time. Next year appeared its American edition with capitalized letters In Our Time.

In the autumn of 1923, the Hemingway returned to Toronto. He accepted a steady job with the Star. Here in October was born John Hadley Hemingway, their first child, whom they promptly nicknamed Bumby. Early in 1924, they returned to Paris. „It was a courageous move‟, says Stewart Sanderson, „for it marked the end of full-time journalism and, for the future a whole hearted devotion to the craft of fiction‟. He set about his work earnestly with the intention of carving his name as a writer of repute. Two of his friends, Sherwood Anderson and Scott F. Fitgerald, sponsored him. Sherwood Anderson urged his New York publishers, Boni and Liveright, to bring out Hemingway‟s collection of stories. In October 1925 they brought out the first American edition of In Our time. At Scott F. Fitgerald‟s instance, Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner‟s wrote a letter to Hemingway, but because of postal accidents his letter arrived ten days after Hemingway had signed a contract with Boni and Liberight who agreed to publish In Our Time with an option on his next two books. Hemingway began his work on his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, but in between In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises he tossed off The Torrents of Spring in just over a week. In The Torrents of Spring(1926) which Allen Tate was to call the most economically realized humour of disproportion he has read in American prose. Hemingway kidded Sherwood Anderson‟s mannerisms without mercy. It is a parody of the works of Sherwood Anderson, especially his Dark Laughter, but an equally significant aspect of this novel is Hemingway‟s presentation of modern man‟s disillusionment and frustration in the post-war period. The world lay in utter ruins both physically and spiritually when the horizon was free from the smoke of mortars after the First World War. The traditional values of religion and morality were shattered. Moral apathy spread all over Europe. In such an atmosphere of moral void all talks of truth, justice, dignity and honour seemed meaningless. Pub, alcohol, and sex dominated the scene. Sex was cheap, love scarce. Most of the people had few family ties. This general atmosphere of the war-worn world was depicted by Hemingway through the two main characters Scripps O‟Neil and Yogi Johnson-in The Torrents of Spring.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) is Hemingway‟s first major novel „that set the flags for a generation‟. It is not a war-novel in the sense A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are because there are no battle scenes, no soldiers, no bullets fired. In spite of the fact that there are no battle scenes, its background is that of the First World War. In this novel Hemingway concentrates on the artificiality and desperation of the life bred by the First World War. It deals with the post-war disillusion and moral disorder. In its pervasive mood of cynicism and disillusion with established values The Sun Also Rises caught caught the mood of its times. The Sun Also Rises is the definitive account of the war-oppressed sterile society. Its characters, with the possible exception of Romero who is not sick, physically, emotionally, suffer acutely because of the War. Jake Barnes is the worst affected by the war, being emasculated by a war wound. Hemingway, who also emerged scarred and wounded from the trenches of the Italian field in the First World War, transmuted his biographical experiences both thematically and artistically into the texture of The Sun Also Rises.

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similarly Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkely become the victims of a cruel and hostile age. By fleeing the battlefield Henry makes a separate peace, and escapes with Catherine to Switzerland, but he cannot evade death completely. The book ends with Catherine‟s death in child-birth and Henry‟s lonely return to the hotel in the rain which is a symbol of disaster and an omen of death in the novel. It ends on a tragic note but has no depressing effect on us. In this connection Hemingway said “The fact that the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could only have one end”.8 It implies the essential tragedy of existence and also the need to meet that tragedy with resigned stoicism.

A Farewell to Arms presents a world in which destruction is the ruling motif. A harrowing description of death, destruction and despair covers the major portion of the book. The anti-war attitude is brought to our notice even from the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms which hints at, though ironically, the disintegrating and crumbling effect of war. Disintegration in the world of vegetation also affects the human world. Written in the first person singular, A Farewell to Arms is intimately personal and largely autobiographical. In this novel Hemingway has drawn heavily on his own experiences of the First World War. His memory of the First World War haunts this novel. Hemingway was severely wounded in the legs by mortar fragments and heavy machine gun fire, and this experience he could never forget. But the novel is not just in the nature of a memoir. It shows the synthesis of the autobiographical and the observational.

Frederic Henry is an early example of a typical Hemingway hero who is sleepless, wounded and sensitive. Sheridan Baker says, “He is not one of the undefeated, nor is he one of the defeated so sweetly drawn in the alienated Nick and the sleepless Nick, so commendably drawn in Barnes”.9 He was wounded severely by the explosion of Austrian mortar shell but he did not lose his mental coolness. Frederic Henry is essentially a rootless character, an uprooted American disguised in an Italian uniform. He is a long way from America and only slightly connected with it. Fraderic Henry is an uncommitted man. He is in the Italian army for no understandable reasons. Hemingway had joined the war because it was glamorous, because he craved action and adventure.

The wars being over, Hemingway went to the bullring to see violent action. He took delight in violent action, because he wanted to show to the world that in spite of the traumatic shock and wound he suffered in the First World War, he was not yellow. This became an early focal point of his art. Death in the Afternoon is his homage to the ritual of bull-fighting. It is an expert primer of bull-fighting. It was born out of Hemingway‟s first-hand experience with the life of a matador. He lived with a bull-fighter in order to learn the tricks of a matador‟s trade, so that he could tell honestly the things which he had found true about it.

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quite irreplaceable that they had missed”.10 He forgot that Shakespeare, Balzac, Henry James, Dickens, Hardy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev were never soldiers, and war was scarcely irreplaceable to them.

From what has been discussed in the preceding pages, it is clear that Hemingway‟s being wounded seriously by a mortar shell in the First World War had left an abiding scar on his life and works. His „baptism of fire‟- to use a common phrase of the times- provided not only ample material for his future fictional endeavour, but gave him a new outlook on life and an essential humility and sympathetic understanding of things, which were generally concealed by a rough exterior. How far his experiences on the Italian front changed his outlook on life is made clear in a letter at all hard-boiled since 8th July, 1918- on the night of which I discovered that was all vanity”11. This shows the impact of his serious injury at Fossalta di Paive on his future writing which is mainly concerned with the theme of the vanity of all human endeavour against heavy odds over which a man has no control.

REFERENCES

1. Arthur Waldhorn, “Artist and Adventurer: A Biographical Sketch”, printed in Ernest Hemingway, A Collection of Criticism, ed. Arthur Waldhorn (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), p.1.

2. Robert P. Weeks (ed), Hemingway, A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), p. 7.

3. Arthur Waldhorn, p.4.

4. Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the American Novel (Delhi: Oxford and I.B.H Publishing Co., 1969), p.370.

5. Malcolm Cowley, “A Portrait of Mr. Papa”, printed in Ernest Hemingway: The Man and His Work, ed. J. K. M. McCaffery (Cleveland : The World Publishing Company, 1950), p.47.

6. Quoted by Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, The Early Years (New York: A Mentor Book, 1954), p. 61.

7. Carlos Baker, Hemingway The Writer as Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Third Editon, 1963), p.12.

8. Quoted by Sheridan Baker, p.63.

9. Sheridan Baker, p.66.

10. Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1966), pp.63-64.

References

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