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 would 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 forbad
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 hated 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 alright until Ernest got to the age when he wanted to be a
"gun-toting Pawnee Bill". He began, at that 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 forbad the word "virgin"
from appearing in school books, 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 he saw as 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. Very much like the hero of A Farewell to
Arms, Ernest is shot in his knee and recuperates in a hospital, tended by a caring nurse
named Agnes. Like Frederick Henry, in the book, he fell in love with the nurse and was
given a medal for his heroism. Ernest returned home after the war, rejected by the nurse
with 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 was 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 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, everything was destroyed. Hadley became pregnant
and was sick all the time. She and Ernest decided to move to Canada. He had, by then
written three stories and ten poems. 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. It was
in Paris that Ernest got word that a publisher wanted to print his book, In Our Time, but
with some changes. The publisher felt that the sex was to blatant, but Ernest refused to
change one word. Around 1925, Ernest started writing a novel about a young man in World
War I, but had to stop after a few pages, and proceeded to write another novel, instead.
This novel was based on his experiences while living in Pamplona, Spain. He planned on
calling this book Fiesta, but changed the name to The Sun Also Rises, a saying from the
Bible. This book, as in his other books, shows Hemingway obsessed with death. In 1927,
Ernest found himself unhappy with his wife and son. They decided to divorce and he married
Pauline, a woman he had been involved with while he was married to Hadley. A year later,
Ernest was able to complete his war novel which he called A Farewell to Arms.
The novel was about the pain of war, of finding love in this time of pain. It portrayed
the battles, the retreats, the fears, the gore and the terrible waste of war. This novel
was well-received by his publisher, Max Perkins,but Ernest had to substitute dashes for
the "dirty" language. Ernest used his life when he wrote; using everything he
did and everything that ever happened to him. He nevertheless remained a private person;
wanting his stories to be read but wanting to be left alone. He once said, "Don't
look at me. Look at my words." A common theme throughout Hemingway's stories is that
no matter how hard we fight to live, we end up defeated, but we are here and we must go
on. At age 31 he wrote Death in the Afternoon, about bullfighting in his beloved Spain.
Ernest was a restless man; he traveled all over the United States, Europe, Cuba and
Africa.
At the age of 37 Ernest met the woman who would be his third wife; Martha Gellhorn, a
writer like himself. He went to Spain, he said, to become an "antiwar
correspondent", and found that war was like a club where everyone was playing the
same game, and he was never lonely. Martha went to Spain as a war correspondent and they
lived together. He knew that he was hurting Pauline, but like his need to travel and have
new experiences, he could not stop himself from getting involved with women. In 1940 he
wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and dedicated it to Martha, whom he married at the end of
that year. He found himself traveling between Havana, Cuba and Ketchum, Idaho, which he
did for the rest of his life. During World War II, Ernest became a secret agent for the
United States. He suggested that he use his boat, the "Pillar", to surprise
German submarines and attack them with hidden machine guns. It was at this time that
Ernest, always a drinker, started drinking most of his days away. He would host wild,
fancy parties and did not write at all during the next three years.
At war's end, Ernest went to England and met an American foreign correspondent named
Mary Welsh. He divorced Martha and married Mary in Havana, in 1946. Ernest was a man of
extremes; living either in luxury or happy to do without material things. Ernest, always
haunted by memories of his mother, would not go to her funeral when she died in 1951. He
admitted that he hated his mother's guts. Ernest wrote The Old Man and the Sea in only two
months. He was on top of the world, the book was printed by Life Magazine and thousands of
copies were sold in the United States. This novel and A Farewell to Arms were both made
into movies. 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 who knows that he will soon die. He suddenly started becoming paranoid
and to forget things. He became obsessed with sin; his upbringing was showing, but still
was inconsistent in his behavior. He never got 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 electric shock treatments for his depression and strange behavior. On a
Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun.
Ernest Hemingway takes much of the storyline of his novel, A Farewell to Arms, from his
personal experiences. The main character of the book, Frederick Henry, often referred to
as Tenete, experiences many of the same situations which Hemingway, himself, lived. Some
of these similarities are exact while some are less similar, and some events have a
completely different outcome. Hemingway, like Henry, enjoyed drinking large amounts of
alcohol. Both of them were involved in World War I, in a medical capacity, but neither of
them were regular army personnel. Like Hemingway, Henry was shot in his right knee, during
a battle. Both men were Americans, but a difference worth noting was that Hemingway was a
driver for the American Red Cross, while Henry was a medic for the Italian Army.
In real life, Hemingway met his love, Agnes, a nurse, in the hospital after being shot;
Henry met his love, Catherine Barkley, also a nurse, before he was shot and hospitalized.
In both cases, the relationships with these women were strengthened while the men were
hospitalized. Another difference is that Hemingway's romance was short-lived, while, the
book seemed to indicate that, Henry's romance, though they never married, was strong and
would have lasted. In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine and her child died while she was
giving birth, this was not the case with Agnes who left Henry for an Italian Army officer.
It seems to me that the differences between the two men were only surface differences.
They allowed Hemingway to call the novel a work of fiction. Had he written an
autobiography the book would probably not have been well-received because Hemingway was
not, at that time, a well known author. Although Hemingway denied critics' views that A
Farewell to Arms was symbolic, had he not made any changes they would not have been as
impressed with the war atmosphere and with the naivete of a young man who experiences war
for the first time.
Hemingway, because he was so private, probably did not want to expose his life to
everyone, and so the slight changes would prove that it was not himself and his own
experiences which he was writing about. I believe that Hemingway had Catherine and her
child die, not to look different from his own life, but because he had a sick and morbid
personality. There is great power in being an author, you can make things happen which do
not necessarily occur in real life. It is obvious that Hemingway felt, as a young child
and throughout his life, powerless, and so he created lives by writing stories. Hemingway
acted out his feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness by hunting, drinking, spending lots
of money and having many girlfriends. I think that Hemingway was obsessed with death and
not too sane. His obsession shows itself in the morbid death of Miss Barkley and her
child. Hemingway was probably very confused about religion and sin and somehow felt or
feared that people would or should be punished for enjoying life's pleasures. Probably,
the strongest reason for writing about Catherine Barkley's death and the death of her
child was Hemingway's belief that death comes to everyone; it was inevitable. Death ends
life before you have a chance to learn and live. He writes, in A Farewell to Arms,
"They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base
they killed you. ... they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and
they would kill you."
Hemingway, even in high school, wrote stories which showed that people should expect
the unexpected. His stories offended and angered the principal of his school. I think that
Hemingway liked shocking and annoying people; he was certainly rebellious. If he would
have written an ending where Miss Barkley and her child had lived, it would have been too
easy and common; Hemingway was certainly not like everyone else, and he seemed to be proud
of that fact. Even the fact that Hemingway wrote curses and had a lot of sex in his books
shows that he liked to shock people. When his publisher asked that he change some words
and make his books more acceptable to people, Hemingway refused, then was forced to
compromise. I think that the major difference between Hemingway and Henry was that Henry
was a likable and normal person while Hemingway was strange and very difficult. Hemingway
liked doing things his way and either people had to accept him the way he was or too bad
for them. I think that Hemingway probably did not even like himself and that was one
reason that he couldn't really like other people. Hemingway seemed to use people only for
his own pleasure, and maybe he wanted to think that he was like Henry who was a nicer
person.
In the book, Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Malcolm Cowley
focuses on the symbolism of rain. He sees rain, a frequent occurrence in the book, as
symbolizing disaster. He points out that, at the beginning of A Farewell to Arms, Henry
talks about how "things went very badly" and how this is connected to "At
the start of the winter came permanent rain". Later on in the book we see Miss
Barkley afraid of rain. She says, "Sometimes I see me dead in it", referring to
the rain. It is raining the entire time Miss Barkley is in childbirth and when both she
and her baby die. Wyndham Lewis, in the same book of critical essays, points out that
Hemingway is obsessed with war, the setting for much of A Farewell to Arms. He feels that
the author sees war as an alternative to baseball, a sport of kings. He says that the war
years "were a democratic, a levelling, school". For Hemingway, raised in a
strict home environment, war is a release; an opportunity to show that he is a real man.
The essayist, Edgar Johnson says that for the loner "it is society as a whole that
is rejected, social responsibility, social concern" abandoned. Lieutenant Henry, like
Hemingway, leads a private life as an isolated individual. He socializes with the
officers, talks with the priest and visits the officer's brothel, but those relationships
are superficial. This avoidance of real relationships and involvement do not show an
insensitive person, but rather someone who is protecting himself from getting involved and
hurt. It is clear that in all of Hemingway's books and from his own life that he sees the
world as his enemy. Johnson says, "He will solve the problem of dealing with the
world by taking refuge in individualism and isolated personal relationships and
sensations". John Killinger says that it was inevitable that Catherine and her baby
would die.
The theme, that a person is trapped in relationships, is shown in all Hemingway's
stories. In A Farewell to Arms Catherine asks Henry if he feels trapped, now that she is
pregnant. He admits that he does, "maybe a little". This idea, points out
Killinger, is ingrained in Hemingway's thinking and that he was not too happy about
fatherhood. In Cross Country Snow, Nick regrets that he has to give up skiing in the Alps
with a male friend to return to his wife who is having a baby. In Hemingway's story Hills
Like White Elephants the man wants his sweetheart to have an abortion so that they can
continue as they once lived. In To Have and Have Not, Richard Gordon took his wife to
"that dirty aborting horror". Catherine's death, in A Farewell to Arms, saves
the author's hero from the hell of a complicated life.
ENDNOTES
Malcolm Cowley, "Rain as Disaster", Twentieth Century Interpretations of A
Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, pp.54-55 .
Wyndham Lewis, "The Dumb Ox in Love and War", Twentieth Century
Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, p.76 .
Edgar Johnson, "Farewell the Separate Peace", Twentieth Century
Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, pp.112-113 .
John Killinger, "The Existential Hero", Twentieth Century Interpretations of
A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, pp.103-105
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