Hemingway Essay, Research Paper
Ernest Hemingway: His life and his stories
Ernest Hemingway was man of many words. He wrote many novels and short stories. Ernest Hemingway also led a hard life. He often incorporated his life into his stories. His life and work was a direct result of his life. Some of his stories show a direct relationship between his life and his work. Looking at three of Hemingway’s short stories, ” Soldier’s Home,” “A Cat in the Rain” and ” A Clean Well-Lighted Place, in terms of their relationship to events and experiences in Hemingway’s own life. His stories from World War I reflect deeping despairs, and a conviction that life ultimately was without meaning.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21,1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was the owner of a prosperous real estate business. His father, Dr. Hemingway, imparted to Ernest the importance of appearances, especially in public. Dr. Hemingway invented surgical forceps for which he did not accept money. He believed that one should not profit from something important for the good of mankind. Ernest’s father, a man of high ideals, was very strict and censored the books he allowed his children to read. He forbade his Ernest’s sister from studying ballet for it was coeducational, and dancing together led to “hell and damnation”
Grace hall Hemingway, Ernest’s mother, considered herself pure and proper. She was a dreamer who was upset at anything which disturbed her perception of the world as beautiful. She hater dirty diapers, upset stomachs, and cleaning house; they were not fit for a lady. She taught her children to always act with decorum. She adored the singing of the birds and the smell of flowers. Her children were expected to behave properly and to please her, always.
Mrs. Hemingway treated Ernest, when he was a small boy, as if he were a female baby doll and she dressed him accordingly. This arrangement was all right until Ernest got to the age when he wanted to be a “gun-toting Pawnee Bill”. He began, at the time, to pull away from his mother, and never forgave her for his humiliation.
The town of Oak Park, where Ernest grew up, was very old fashioned and quite religious. The townspeople forbade the word “virgin” from appearing in schoolbooks, and the word “breast” was questioned, though it appeared in the Bible.
Ernest loved to fish, canoe and explore the woods. When he couldn’t get outside, he escaped to his room and read books. He loved to tell stories to his classmates, often insisting that a friend listen to one of his stories. In spite of his mother’s desire, he played on the football team at Oak Park High School.
As a student, Ernest was a perfectionist about his grammar and studied English with a fervor. He contributed articles to the weekly school newspaper. It seems that the principal did not approve of Ernest’s writings and he complained, often, about the content of Ernest ’s articles.
Ernest was clear about his writing; he wanted people to “see and feel” and he wanted to enjoy himself while writing. Ernest loved having fun. If nothing was happening, mischievous Ernest made something happen. He would sometimes use forbidden words just to create a ruckus. Ernest, though wild and crazy, was a warm, caring individual. He loved the sea, mountains and the stars and hated anyone who saw him a phony.
During World War I, Ernest, rejected from service because of a bad left eye, was an ambulance driver, in Italy, for the Red Cross. Ernest was injured in his knee and recuperated in a hospital, tended by a caring nurse named Agnes. He fell in love with this nurse. When he returned to the U.S. he embellished his war stories he won a medal for bravery. The is similar to the character Krebs in Hemingway” short story “Soldier’s Home.” When Krebs returned to the United States everyone had already told their war stories and his were not as exciting. So he felt the need to embellish his stories. ‘ Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it.”(Pg. 145 Hemingway) Hemingway was against telling people about the war at first because it caused him such pain, but later he felt that he had to talk about it.
Ernest returned home after the war, rejected by the nurse whom he fell in love. He would party late into the night and invite, to his house, people his parents disapproved of. Ernest’s mother rejected him and he felt that he had to move from home
He moved in with a friend living in Chicago and he wrote articles for the Toronto Star. In Chicago he met and then married Hadley Richardson . She believed that he should spend all his time in writing, and bought him a typewriter for his birthday. They decided that the best place for a writer to live is Paris, where he could devote himself to his writing. He said, at the time, that the most difficult thing to write about was being a man. They could not live on the income from his stories and so Ernest, again, wrote for the Toronto Star.
Ernest took Hadley to Italy to show her where he had been during the war. He was devastated, everything had changed, and everything was destroyed.
Hadley became pregnant and was sick all the time. She and Ernest decided to move to Canada. Hadley gave birth to a boy who they named John Hadley Nicano Hemingway. Even though he had his family Ernest was unhappy and decided to return to Paris. Ernest was still unhappy with his wife and son. They decided to divorce. After he divorced Hadely He married four other times, to Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh.
In 1953 he went on a safari with Mary, and he was in heaven hunting big game. Though Ernest had a serious accident, and later became ill, he could never admit that he had any weaknesses; nothing would stop him, certainly not pain. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Toward the end, Ernest started to travel again, but almost the way that someone does whom knows that he will soon die. He suddenly started becoming paranoid and too forgets things. He became obsessed with sin; his upbringing was over feeling like a bad person, as his father, mother and grandfather had taught him. In the last year of his life, he lived inside of his dreams, similar to his mother, who he hated with all his heart. He was suicidal and had electrical shock treatments for his depression and strange behavior
On a Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway killed himself
Ernest Hemingway takes much of the storylines of his short stories from his personal experiences.
In “Soldier’s Home” Hemingway expresses the alienation from bourgeois American culture that many returning soldiers felt. Harold Krebs, who is the main character in the story, feels this alienation when he returns to the U.S. He came back much later than the other soldiers. Everyone heard the same stories from all the soldiers, so Krebs felt the need to lie about the stories to make people listen and so he would feel like he belonged. Krebs is the story’s protagonist. He is bored with his town and disgusted by his parent’s bland piety. He also felt isolated from his family and their world. Hemingway put his experiences of when he came back from the war in this story. He incorporated the fact that he also embellished his own war stories to be accepted when he came back. Hemingway was also alienated form his family when he came back from the war. His family was against him going to the war in the first place, and when the nurse that he fell in love with dumped him, he began to party and drink a lot more that usual. His family was against that, so they banished him from his home.
Hemingway’s own values were stated explicitly in the story, where he wrote, “Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to the experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration”(Pg. 146 Hemingway) The Hemingway pattern had begun by contrasting life and war, devaluating one in terms of the other. Now life became only another indication of war. As a soldier, Krebs had preserved his sanity by rebelling quietly and alone.
Hemingway began to make some notes for a short story to be called “Cat in the Rain” It was about himself and Hadley and the manager and the chambermaid at the Hotel Splendide. “There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel,” it began. “They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs? Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument?The American wife stood at the window looking out?(Pg. 167, Hemingway) these are the notes Hemingway took down. The American wife and husband he is describing are himself and Hadley.
The story “Cat in the rain” is basically describing the disintegration of Hemingway’s marriage to Hadely. This is a deceptively simple story about a young American, married couple vacationing in Italy. As her husband reads, the wife looks out of a window and notices a cat crouching underneath a table to evade the rain. Motivated by compassion as well as boredom, she decides to go get the cat, but the cat was no longer there. She therefore returns to the room. Still reading, the husband tells her to “Shut up and get something to read”(Pg170 Hemingway) The husband’s crass words in conjunction with his inattentive attitude characterized him as a stereotypical male who sees little benefit in taking his wife seriously. Her need seem uncomplicated, even meager, yet he ignores them. The way the husband is and the way he is acting shows the marriage of Hemingway and Hadley coming apart. The story reflects certain strains in the marriage that Hemingway went through with his wife, like communication.
In one of the stories, ” A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” there is a good description of the world that underlies Hemingway’s world of violent action. In the early stages of the story there is an old man sitting late in a Spanish caf?. The two waiters’ are speaking about him.
“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.
“Why?”
“He was in despair”
“What about?”
“Nothing”
“How do you know it is nothing?”
“He has plenty of money” (Pg. 379, Hemingway)
The despair is beyond plenty of money, or beyond all the other gifts of the world. It’s nature becomes a little clearer at the end of the story when the older of the two waiters is left alone, reluctant too to leave the clean, well-lighted place:
“Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not nada but deliver us from nada pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine. (Pg383, Hemingway)
And the sleepless man, the man obsessed by death, by the meaninglessness of the world, by nothingness, by nada, is one of the recurring symbols in the work of Hemingway. Death is the great nada.
Toward the end of Hemingway’s life there became more noticeable relationships between his life and his writing. “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” was a good example. The nada that is talked about in the story is not only thought about in the story but in Hemingway’s mind. The fact that one of the characters in the story was suicidal, very depressed and was in despair about nothing portrays Hemingway. The sleepless man is Hemingway in this story. In more than one occasion Hemingway describes himself as being obsessed with death and since death is the great nada, it leads to Hemingway’s suicide.
Hemingway portrays himself in all of these stories. Whether it’s Krebs the alienated soldier, the American husband in an Italian hotel, whose marriage is disintegrating, or the sleepless man in the Spanish caf? obsessed with death. After Hemingway comes home from World War I he loses the nurse that he falls in love with and becomes alienated from his parents. Soon after he marries a woman, but that falls apart, and then he finally becomes obsessed with nothing. He becomes suicidal and obsessed with death. “A Clean-Well Lighted Place” was the best description for Hemingway’s suicidal tendencies. Once he became suicidal and depressed his stories reflected deeping despairs and were seen even clearer as a conviction that life was ultimately without meaning.