Ernest Hemingway
(Cfr. Spiazzi, Tavella, Only Connect, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1997, vol.3, p.1023)
Life and main works
Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois in 1899. He was the son of a well-to-do doctor (who later committed suicide) and spent his childhood in an active way hunting and fishing in the Great Lake region with his father, boxing or playing rugby. In 1917 he worked as a reporter for the "Kansas City Star"; this meant a remarkable step forward in his career as a writer since he started learning and gradually mastering the rigorous rules of "pure objective writing" characterised by declarative sentences without any unnecessary words and clichés. In the following year he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was severely wounded, and received a silver medal and decoration from the Italian government. Back in the United States, he got a job as a foreign correspondent and in 1922 he settled in Paris where he joined a group of expatriate writers, called "the lost generation", who had in Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound their most influential writers. In 1924 he published his first collection of short stories, In Our Time, chiefly recalling the experiences of his childhood, and started writing the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) – published as Fiesta in Britain –, which showed his love of exotic settings and extreme situations where violent actions reveal the most important manly virtues: courage, comradeship, endurance. These themes were dealt with again in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a novel about bull-fighting, and The Green Hills of Africa (1935), on big game hunting. In I929 he published Farewell to Arms (1929), a love story set among the horrors and sufferings of the war, and perhaps the best novel ever written on the First World War.
During the Spanish Civil War he was a correspondent for an American news agency, and this experience was recorded in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway’s post-war fiction led to controversial appraisals: The Old Man and The Sea (1952) won him the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, while Across the River and into the Trees (1950) and the posthumous Islands in the Stream (1970) were criticized. In I954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Towards the end of his life, Hemingway suffered from hypertension, diabetes and acute depression; he feared physical decline and committed suicide in 1961.
The experiences of his life
Hemingway rarely wrote in an explicit autobiographical way, but it is as if he were trying to go back to the most important experiences of his life and give them a universal value that could become a model both for himself and his readers. The key experience of his childhood was the encounter with nature, which came about because of his passion for hunting and fishing, seen as forms of struggle against nature in which man is rewarded for having fought skilfully and courageously. In this struggle, life and death are presented as the driving and mysterious forces of existence. The real prey for victory is the moral reward for having fought well and having been regenerated by an immersion in nature. Life is identified with a codified set of actions which gives man the measure of his control over events. Beyond these actions there is nothingness and death.
Meaninglessness of love
According to Hemingway, love appears to be meaningless, since the relationship between a man and a woman is a game with fixed rules and once the game is over, it has no sense at all. Moreover in Hemingway’s vision, there is no true society: it is nothing but a combination of individual units, alienated men, who are unable to know themselves or each other.
The First World War
Another central experience of Hemingway’s life was the First World War which made him understand that the only chance of escaping the horror of death was in some manly qualities: strength, sexual power, lack of sentimentalism and the ability to react. Consequently his heroes are men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as bullfighters and hunters.
Style
His style is equally tough, essential, primitive, characterised by a simple syntax, colloquial, colourful dialogue and brief descriptions (often of landscapes). There is very little introspection, or analysis of personal feelings and sensations, yet Hemingway’s prose creates great emotion in the reader.
Links to learn more about Ernest Hemingway:
http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/default.htm
http://www.lostgeneration.com/hrc.htm
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~lanes/english/hemngway/ehlife.htm
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