Ernest Hemingway

Anthony Burgess

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780857739759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

He was six feet tall, huge-chested, handsome, ebullient, a warrior, a hunter, a fisherman, a drinker.' Ernest Hemingway was 'a man who lived it up to write it down' and his life became the root from which his novels grew. At the age of 18 he was awarded a medal for bravery in the First World War; he honed his craft in 1920s Paris, amongst the 'Lost Generation': F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot and John Dos Passos; his macho image grew with his love of big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and bull-fighting. And the philosophy of heroism that increasingly pervaded his books and his life was cemented during the Spanish Civil War, where he survived the bombardment of Madrid and was present at the Republicans' last stand at Ebro. But, by the 1940s, the darkness of his alcoholism (three bottles of Valpolicella for breakfast), violent rages and the bad luck of loving many women began to weigh heavily. Although he was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery under fire whilst covering the Second World War, he also spent much of 1944 and 1945 ensconced at the Dorchester or the Ritz, 'basking and boasting, a boor and a bore'. Hemingway had become the patriarch of American literature but he was plagued by unrelenting demons and an insidious disenchantment with life. In this unflinching portrait, Anthony Burgess explores Hemingway's fatal contradictions: his arrogance and self-doubt, his machismo and vulnerability. He reveals a man who was as much a creation as his books yet who, even at his worst, reminds us that to engage literature one has first to engage life.

Ernest Hemingway

If the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea and the Nick Adams stories had been an undersized weed, asthmatic or phthisic, living out strong-man fantasies in the literature he produced, he would still be one of the great American writers. But he was no weed. He was six feet tall, huge-chested, handsome, ebullient, a warrior, a hunter, a fisherman, a drinker. It is the fusion of sensitive and original artist and big-muscled man of action that has made of Ernest Hemingway one of the large international myths of the twentieth century. The myth is rendered intriguing and compelling through the presence, in personality and art alike, of an ambiguous attitude towards life and death, of a self-doubt which seems to contradict the positive stances assumed in war and on safari, of a genuine morbidity whose roots are knotty and resistant to the digger. But the two major aspects of the public Hemingway, the Hemingway of anecdote, canned-beer advertisement, bestseller list, sophomore course in American fiction, represent a junction of parental genes and temperaments.

One need not trouble to trace the ancestors of Hemingway back to their ports of landing on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Both sides of the family were Anglo-Saxon, moderately prosperous, churchgoing, patriotic, undistinguished though worthy. His father was Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, usually known as Ed, a medical practitioner of Oak Park, Illinois, who had graduated at Oberlin and Rush Medical College, Chicago, a son of a Civil War veteran who had done well out of real estate in the Windy City. Ed Hemingway was black-bearded, big-shouldered, six feet tall, a lover of hunting, fishing, taxidermy, snake-pickling, campfire cookery. He not only handed on to Ernest a blacksmith’s physique but gave him a woodsman’s training. Ed Hemingway had first a cottage, later a forty acre farm, in the Michigan woods and, only seven weeks after his birth on 21 July 1899, Ernest was taken on his first visit to the American wilds. It was a strenuous journey: train from Oak Park to Chicago, horse cab to the Lake Michigan pier, steamer to Harbor Springs, narrow-gauge train to Petoskey, branch line to Bear Lake, rowing boat to the cottage called Windemere (Ernest’s mother’s tribute to ancestral waters, but an ‘r’ got lost). He was to make the journey often.

Ed Hemingway taught his boy fishing, the handling of tools and weapons, the cooking of venison, raccoon, squirrel, opossum, wild pigeon, lake fish. There must be no killing for killing’s sake – a rule that Hemingway abandoned in his manhood. If you kill a thing you must eat it, said his father. So the boy Ernest had to chew away at a rank and leathery porcupine he had wantonly shot. The habit of lying, or romancing, about his outdoor prowess began when he was not quite five. He told his grandfather Hall that he had stopped a runaway horse singlehanded. The old man said that with an imagination like that he would end up either famous or in jail.

Ernest Hall ran a wholesale cutlery business in Chicago. He was a godly man, given to family prayers, and, like his son-in-law’s father, a Civil War veteran, even something of a hero. But – and this was a foible he did not pass on to his grandson – he would never allow war to be discussed in his presence. Ernest Hemingway’s middle name – Miller – came from a great-uncle who manufactured bedsteads. There was metallic commerce, woodsman’s skill and Christian piety for him to inherit, but not much literature. On the other hand there was music, represented by his mother. Grace Hall – whom Ed Hemingway met when they were fellow-students at Oak Park High School – was a very English-looking girl, blue-eyed, ample-bodied, fresh-complexioned. In her youth she looked out to a bigger world than Oak Park, possessing as she did a fine contralto voice and having been urged by her mother and her teachers to take up grand opera as a career. But scarlet fever had weakened her eyes and, when she made her singing debut at Madison Square Gardens in New York, she was put into considerable pain by the glare of the footlights. So she went back to Oak Park and married young Dr Hemingway. On North Oak Park Avenue she established herself as a music teacher and left the cooking to her husband. Ed, when calling on a patient, would sometimes telephone home to tell the hired girl to take the pie out of the oven. He was a notable pie-maker.

Grace Hemingway was given to pious sentimentality all her life and, as was to be expected, never cared much for her son’s books. When Ernest was born she wrote in her diary: ‘The robins sang their sweetest songs to welcome the little stranger into this beautiful world.’ After his christening he was set down as ‘an offering unto the Lord, to receive his name and henceforth to be counted as one of God’s little lambs’. That lamb went astray as soon as it reached ramhood: Ernest’s career may fancifully be seen as an over-reaction to the mother’s boy image. When he was nine months old she dressed him in pink gingham with a floral hat, just like his sister Marcelline, who was eighteen months older. In later life, he spoke of his mother as an old bitch. He was also to turn against his father but only when, anticipating the son, he had shot himself in a state of depression. Ernest’s loyalties were never easily given, and they were always easily withdrawn.

Tough and loud and pugnacious from the start, Ernest craved the punchbag of a younger brother, but he never got one until, in his teens, Leicester Clarence Hemingway came too late to be a foil or a companion. He grew up with four sisters – Marcelline, Ursula, Madelaine and Carol, all big handsome girls – and these were to exert a notable influence on his attitude to women. To the end it was observed that, in the company of women of his own generation, he instinctively assumed the kidding, bossy, easily cowable role of a brother. Even from his wives (also four, the first three sprung of a common mother, the city of St Louis) he demanded sisterly good-sport qualities. He wanted, but never achieved, a daughter, and he made filial surrogates out of pretty young women like Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman (though never of Marlene Dietrich: his attitude to her was interestingly complicated). He called them daughter and they had to call him papa. He became Papa Hemingway to everybody relatively early in life. Brotherly and fatherly enough, he was never much of a son.

He rejected his father’s interest in science and, to some extent, resisted his mother’s attempts to turn him into a musician. She wanted Ernest to become a professional violoncellist, and he did in fact play the easy ‘cello parts of light operatic and musical comedy scores in his high-school orchestra. He also sang in the choir of the Third Congregational Church but, like his father, he was never able to carry a melodic line. In later life he claimed a fair knowledge of music and would even discourse (how learnedly has not been recorded) on counterpoint. In Paris he was to cause offence by saying of the music of George Antheil that he preferred his Stravinsky straight – a very clear-eared judgment on the ‘bad boy of music’, Ezra Pound’s protégé, known now chiefly for his banal film scores. In Havana he made up a song for the voice and guitar consort of his favourite bar, and they would regularly discourse it whenever he came in. What he probably inherited from his mother was the concern with tone and rhythm that was to make him into a major literary stylist. Joyce too had a musical background. One can read neither Ulysses nor A Farewell to Arms without being aware of a preoccupation with words as sound, as well as a structural capacity analogous to that of a musical composer. Ernest’s mother also had an eye for pictures and, in middle age, became a painter of regional reputation. The son’s pictorial taste was to outclass the mother’s, and, while he spoke of trying to do for a novel what Cézanne did for a canvas, critics invoked Goya in connection with some of his grimmer word-painting.

Ernest’s career at grammar school and at the palatial Oak Park and River Forest Township High School was academically distinguished only for his achievement in English, and, at the end of it, he showed no inclination to move on to university. There was always a good deal of the anti-intellectual about him. He wrote stories and pieces of school-magazine reportage that, in their concern with the recording of physical action and their eschewing of romantic lexical display, foreshadowed his mature work. His main ambitions were athletic but, as a high-school freshman, he was ashamed of his lack of height and beef. Too small for football, he worked at rifle marksmanship and recorded a consistent score of 112 out of 150 at a twenty-yard range. This was in spite of a defective left eye that he cursed as an inheritance from his mother, though he was later to blame it (being loath to accord his mother anything) on the filthy tactics of boxing opponents. He shot up suddenly at fifteen and soon attained his father’s height and weight – as well as propensity for copious sweating and putting on fat. He became well known for large and clumsy feet, on football field and dance floor alike. He did not play football well, but he ran, boxed, swam, and was made captain of the water basketball squad. And, of course, he wrote.

His model was Ring Lardner, who produced a popular column in the Chicago Tribune and had developed a mock-illiterate style that Ernest sought to imitate. Lardner’s skill was greater than appeared on the surface; his medium was an original, though very American, invention – funny, subtle, capable of quiet pathos. Ernest was merely facetious, but facetiousness was a prized aspect of provincial American utterance in those days (Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt is probably the ultimate compendium). Wit was a product of intellect, and intellect was suspect, being European and decadent and ungodly. Facetiousness came out at its most excruciating in nicknames. Hemingway was a great nickname man, calling his little brother Leicester de Pester after a comic-strip character, liking himself to be called Porthos, Butch, the Old Brute, and, best of all, Hemingstein. There is a whiff of antisemitism here: all Jewish names are comic. He never got over subdued kike-baiting, as he never got over his fondness for being called Hemingstein. In the Second World War, as a variation, he would introduce himself to GIs as ‘Ernie Hemorrhoid, the poor man’s Pyle’.

Those were good expansive days in the Middle West, with huge steaks and baked Idahos, root beer, back-slapping, chauvinism and optimism. American neurosis had not yet set in, and the little old US was the best God-damn country in the whole God-damn world. Hemingway’s Oak Park was a good deal more innocent than Joyce’s Dublin, nor can we imagine the young Hemingway moaning through the night-time streets like a beast, desperately wanting a woman. He certainly yearned for certain girls and was later to boast of never failing to have a woman he wanted, but it is evident that he kept his virginity a great deal longer than Joyce did. The religiosity of the town kept children in ignorance of the facts of life. Even a professional medical man like Ed Hemingway was prepared to assert that masturbation was a sure way to madness. Oak Park was proverbially the place where the bars ended and the churches began. There were no loose ladies around and the high-school girls were respectable. Ernest’s body, anyway, was dedicated to athletics in termtime and the great Michigan outdoors in the summer vacation. It was a good wholesome life, and very loud, but the time inevitably came when the young Hemingway wanted more than the call of the chipmunks and the constraints of happy but stuffy Oak Park.

On 6 April 1917, the United States broke two and a half years of peace-at-any-price neutrality and declared war on Germany. Many young men were eager to get over there – indeed, many were already there in ambulance units or, at least, up over the 49th Parallel in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps – but Ernest was in no hurry. He had an instinct about priorities, and he wanted to learn how to write before he was taught how to fight. Anyway, his father had authoritatively declared that that defective left eye would keep him out of combat. Ernest had an uncle – Tyler Hemingway – in Kansas City; he also had an admiration for the Kansas City Star, still one of the great newspapers of America. Hearing that his chances of becoming a cub reporter on it were good, he said goodbye to his father, who kissed him fondly at the railway depot, tears in his moustache and a prayer on his lips. Ernest fictionalized that little scene many years later in For Whom the Bell Tolls, making his hero feel ‘suddenly so much older than his father and sorry for him that he could hardly bear it’.

To speak of the young Hemingway’s possessing a ‘literary ambition’ would probably be false. Scott Fitzgerald, fresh from Princeton, was at this time working on Compton Mackenzie type fiction, garnished with Keatsian tropes, a book-writer from the start, but Hemingway was already possessed of an instinctive aim both simpler and more complex – to draw the aesthetic disposition of language away from its traditional locations in the head and heart and to attach it to the nerves and muscles. This meant a genuine revolution that, for the moment, disguised itself as a desire to work well in the simple popular medium of journalism. But to say that Hemingway’s ambition was to be a journalist would be as false as to say he wished to be a new Tolstoy or Dickens.

Kansas City is two cities. There is one in the state of Kansas, with a population of about 130,000, and another in the state of Missouri, with nearly half a million citizens. It is this latter which is usually meant when there is talk or song about Kansas City, and it was here that Ernest Hemingway started as a professional, or paid, writer. Today Kansas City is an elegant centre of trade and culture, with wide boulevards, much Spanish-style architecture, fine villas, restaurants in which mannequins exhibit the haute couture while the best beefsteaks in the world are served, a great Jesuit college, and a sumptuous hotel that incorporates a whole hillside, with trees and a running stream, into its décor. In 1917 it was a growing town whose tough frontier status was still a living memory, full of sin and crime and a cynical attitude to the law even among the magistrates, and its Twelfth Street had so many prostitutes that it was nicknamed Woodrow Wilson Avenue (a piece at any price). Ernest did not engage in either brawls or bought dalliance; he was a mere observer of the world of tough action. He was given fifteen dollars a week and a copy of the Star style-book which, in effect, told him to write in the style of the mature Hemingway. Brevity, a reconciliation of vigour with smoothness, the positive approach (say what is there rather than what is not there) – these were the Star rules. It was his later task to adapt them to the making of literature.

There was no shortage of material on the reporter’s beat for depositing in the bank, later, with the interest of imaginative insight accrued, to be dispensed as Hemingway fiction. The remarkable story ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen’, for instance, draws on something Ernest heard of on one of his regular trips to the City Hospital – the strange case of the youth who had, like the Church father Origen, castrated himself for the love of God. The impairment, physical or psychological, of sexuality evidently fascinated Hemingway: there was undoubtedly something in himself that feared sexual commitment. But in general he discovered that real life always outdoes fiction; literature is not primarily invention: it is the ordering into aesthetic patterns of the données of a wide-ranging experience.

Kansas City showed him life, but he soon began to hunger for the bigger life of Europe at war, life with danger and death in it. Ted Brumback, a fellow cub, had not merely a weak eye but a glass one, and yet he had spent four months in the American Field Service, driving ambulances in France. Fired by this precedent, Ernest drew his last pay from the Star on the last day of April 1918, and was in May swaggering along Broadway, Manhattan, in the uniform of an honorary second lieutenant. He was in the Red Cross and was never to be officially a combatant in any war, but the myth of Hemingway the warrior was not slow now to come into existence. He wrote thumping lies to his friends in Kansas City, boasting that he was having an affair with Mae Marsh, star of The Birth of a Nation, and had sunk the 150 farewell plunks donated by his Pop on an engagement ring. He genuinely saw President Wilson and even, as right guide to his platoon in a parade of 75,000, marched down Fifth Avenue in his honour. His letter-style is excruciatingly ebullient: ‘Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Tis none other than the greatest of the Hemingsteins that indicts this epistle.’ Soon, on a ship of the French line called the Chicago, a touch of welcome or homage that pleased him, he was on his way to the war and a diminution of his Middle West innocence.

∗ ∗ ∗

He was taken, via Bordeaux and Paris and the Mount Cenis tunnel, to Milan. On his very first day there, he and his fellow ambulance men were hurled into the horror of the war when a munition factory exploded and they had to pick up bodies and pieces of bodies – mostly of women. It was a profound shock to a young innocent who had slain more than his share of small harmless animals but had never before met human death, let alone death on such a scale and of such gratuitous obscenity. On his third day he was sent, in a group of twenty-five, to Schio in the Dolomites. The war was going on over the hills, and there were many Italian wounded to be evacuated. At Dolo Hemingway met John Dos Passos, another Chicago man doing ambulance work and destined, in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre, to be the greatest American novelist of them all. Neither seems, at this first of many meetings, to have caught the other’s name. The Austrians were attacking all along the Piave, north of Venice, and on the west bank the Italians were digging in. Volunteers were required to man the Red Cross canteens in the small towns behind the lines, and Ernest – who, as they said in Kansas City, always wanted to go where the action was – got himself sent to Fossalta, a much-punished village on the river.

One hot and moonless night he bicycled to a forward command post and, helmeted and crouching against the crossfire, took cigarettes and chocolate to the men in the trenches. Soon after midnight the Austrians hurled a projectile across the river – a five-gallon canister crammed with scrap metal – and many Italians were hit. Ernest picked up a man who was crying in agony and, in a fireman’s lift, tried to get him towards the command post. After about fifty yards an ...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Bookreview
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Patrick Marnham
• Preface
• Ernest Hemingway
• Chronology
• Bibliography