I am so much enjoying my perusal of selections from Johnson's Lives of the Poets that I thought I might write up, in blog posts, very brief biographies of some writers I like. At the least, I will enjoy the exercise. Hemingway is first.
He was born on July 21, 1899, and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb abutting Chicago on the west. His father was a medical doctor and his mother an enthusiastic member of the local Congregational church. The family kept a house on Walloon Lake, between Boyne City and Petoskey, and the short fiction he would publish in the 1920s makes clear that his time spent in this area was the part of his childhood that mattered to him. One of his first published stories is called "Up in Michigan." The title alone suggests two worlds, the unmentioned artificial one and then the one that will be the object of his intense and enduring interest.
The United States entered the war in the year he was graduated from high school. He tried to enlist but was rejected for poor vision and then, lying about his age, which accounts for some books giving 1898 as the year of his birth, landed a newspaper job in Kansas City. But he soon found that he could get in the war by volunteering for the Red Cross. Serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, he saw heavy fighting and was himself seriously wounded in his legs by mortar fire on July 8, 1918. He recuperated in Milan and, later, back in Oak Park. In September of 1921 he married Hadley Richardson and soon moved with her to Paris, where he began writing the sketches and stories that would be published in 1925 as In Our Time.
His status as a major American author rests almost entirely on the fiction he wrote and published over the next ten or twelve years. Besides In Our Time, there were two novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and two collections of stories, Winner Take Nothing (1927) and Men Without Women (1933). After this period, his work became less regular, and much of it would not be read if he hadn't written it. He won the Nobel Prize for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), but by this time he was imitating himself. During the last political season both Obama and McCain named For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel, as a book that had influenced them. I don't think much of it. For one thing Hemingway, in order to achieve a desired effect of elevated solemnity, had this kind of trick of pretending to provide a literal English translation of dialog spoken in a different language. Sometimes it could work, as in the conclusion to one of his best stories, "In Another Country," where the major, who has lost his wife, declares, "I cannot resign myself. . . . I am utterly unable to resign myself." But in For Whom the Bell Tolls it is frequently, though not intentionally, funny, especially all the thees and thous passing between the protagonist, Robert Jordan, and his pliant young lover.
The dichotomy suggested by "Up in Michigan" carries through his work. In another early story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," the wife asks her husband what has upset him and he explains that an Indian has tried picking a fight with him to avoid having to pay with labor for medical services rendered. She says, "Dear, I don't think, I really don't think that anyone would really do a thing like that." Oh, yes, they really would: the first part of the story shows it happening with understated precision. This disgust with conventional attitudes and pieties receives its fullest expression in a celebrated passage from A Farewell to Arms. An Italian soldier has just expressed the view that the war will not be lost because what has so far been gained in battle cannot have been "in vain." Then the narrator:
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
He moved rather quickly through middle age, divorcing three wives and cultivating a celebrity status. On July 2, 1961, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Some of his warmest admirers seem to think he founded a masculine cult but the heroes of his best fiction, wounded sufferers of night terrors and noontide nightmares, struggle to hold things together. In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes, speaking of the bullfighter Romero's technique, observes that he "had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure." This was meant to stand for something else, a versatile ideal to be sought in prose and life.
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