Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) occupies a prominent place
in the annals of American Literary history by virtue of
his revolutionary role in the arena of twentieth century
American fiction. By rendering a realistic portrayal of
the inter-war period with its disillusionment and
disintegration of old values, Hemingway has presented the
predicament of the modern man in 'a world which
increasingly seeks to reduce him to a mechanism, a mere
thing'. [1] Written in a simple but unconventional style,
with the problems of war, violence and death as their
themes, his novels present a symbolic interpretation of
life.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park,
Illinois, in an orthodox higher middle class family as
the second of six children. His mother, Mrs. Grace Hale
Hemingway, an ex-opera singer, was an authoritarian woman
who had reduced his father, Mr. Clarence Edmunds
Hemingway, a physician, to the level of a hen-pecked
husband. Hemingway had a rather unhappy childhood on
account of his 'mother's, bullying relations with his
father'. [2] He grew up under the influence of his father
who encouraged him to develop outdoor interests such as
swimming, fishing and hunting. His early boyhood was
spent in the northern woods of Michigan among the native
Indians, where he learned the primitive aspects of life
such as fear, pain, danger and death. At school, he had a
brilliant academic career and graduated at the age of 17
from the Oak Park High School. In 1917 he joined the
Kansas City `Star' as a war correspondent. The following
year he participated in the World War by volunteering to
work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where
he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services.
He returned to America in 1919 and married Hadley
Richardson in 1921. This was the first of a series of
unhappy marriages and divorces. The next year, he
reported on the Greco-Turkish War and two years later,
gave up journalism to devote himself to fiction. He
settled in Paris, where he came into contact with fellow
American expatriates such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound. 'From her (Gertrude Stein) as well as from Ezra
Pound and others, he learned the discipline of his craft
- the taut monosyllabic vocabulary, stark dialogue, and
understated emotion that are the hallmarks of the
Hemingway style'. [3]
Hemingway's first two published works were In Our
Time and Three Stories and Ten Poems. These
early stories foreshadow his mature technique and his
concern for values in a corrupt and indifferent world.
But it was The Torrents of Spring, which
appeared in 1926, that established him as a writer of
repute. His international reputation was firmly secured
by his next three books, The Sun Also Rises, Men
Without Women and A Farewell to Arms. This
was only the beginning of an illustrious career, with an
impressive output of several novels and short stories, a
collection of poems and The Fifth Column, a play.
Hemingway was passionately involved with bullfighting,
big game hunting and deep sea fishing, and his writing
reflects this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and
his experiences on the war front form the theme of the
best seller For Whom the Bell Tolls. When the
Second World War broke out, he took an active part and
offered to lead a suicide squadron against the Nazi U
Boats. But in the course of the war, he fell ill and was
nursed by Mary Walsh, who eventually became his fourth
wife and continued to be with him until his death. In
1954, he survived two plane crashes in the African jungle.
His adventures and tryst with destiny made him a
celebrity all over the English speaking world.
Hemingway began the final phase of his career as a
resident of Cuba. There he continued his life of well
advertised hunting and adventure, being often in the
forefront of literary publicity and controversy. This
phase is marked by a decline in his creative genius which,
however, attained its original stature with the
publication of The Old Man and The Sea in 1952.
It was an immense success and won him the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1954.
His fortunes took a turn for the worse, when Fidel Castro
came to power and ordered the Americans out of Cuba. It
proved a great shock to Hemingway and added to his agony
over the decline of his creative talents. He fell victim
to acute fits of depression and attempted suicide twice.
He was hospitalized and treated for his psychological
problems. But after a few months of doubts, anxieties and
depression, he shot himself on the 2nd of July 1961,
bringing to an end one of the most eventful and colorful
lives of our times.
Hemingway's literary genius was molded by cultural and
literary influences. 'Mark Twain, the War and The
Bible were the major influences that shaped
Hemingway's thought and art'. [4] During his sojourn in
Paris, Hemingway also came into contact with eminent
literary figures such as Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, D.H.
Lawrence and even T.S. Eliot. 'All or some of them might
have left their imprint on him'. [5] Hemingway also
acknowledged that he had learnt a great deal from the
writings of Joseph Conrad. Besides these, his early
experiences in Michigan colored his writing to some
extent. The most important influence that left a deep
impact on his genius was the nightmarish experiences
which he himself had undergone in the two World Wars.
As a novelist, Hemingway is often assigned a place among
the writers of `the lost generation', along with Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis. 'These
writers, including Ernest Hemingway, tried to show the
loss the First World War had caused in the social, moral
and psychological spheres of human life'. [6] They also
reveal the horror, the fear and the futility of human
existence. True, Hemingway has echoed the longings and
frustrations that are typical of these writers, but his
work is distinctly different from theirs in its
philosophy of life. In his novels 'a metaphysical
interest in man and his relation to nature' [7] can be
discerned.
Hemingway has been immortalized by the individuality of
his style. Short and solid sentences, delightful
dialogues, and a painstaking hunt for an apt word or
phrase to express the exact truth, are the distinguishing
features of his style. He 'evokes an emotional awareness
in the reader by a highly selective use of suggestive
pictorial detail, and has done for prose what Eliot has
done for poetry'. [8] In his accurate rendering of
sensuous experience, Hemingway is a realist. As he
himself has stated in Death in the Afternoon,
his main concern was 'to put down what really happened in
action; what the actual things were that produced the
emotion you experienced'. [9] This surface realism of his
works often tends to obscure the ultimate aim of his
fiction. This has often resulted in the charge that there
is a lack of moral vision in his novels. Leon Edel has
attacked Hemingway for his `Lack of substance' as he
called it. According to him, Hemingway's fiction is
deficient in serious subject matter. 'It is a world of
superficial action and almost wholly without reflection -
such reflection as there is tends to be on a rather crude
and simplified level'. [10]
But such a casual dismissal as this, presenting Hemingway
as a writer devoid of `high seriousness', is not
justified. Though Hemingway is apparently a realist who
has a predilection for physical action, he is essentially
a philosophical writer. His works should be read and
interpreted in the light of his famous `Iceberg theory':
'The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only
one eighth of it being above the water'. [11] This
statement throws light on the symbolic implications of
his art. He makes use of physical action to provide a
symbolical interpretation of the nature of man's
existence. It can be convincingly proved that, 'While
representing human life through fictional forms, he has
consistently set man against the background of his world
and universe to examine the human situation from various
points of view'. [12]
In this aspect, he belongs to the tradition of Hawthorne,
Poe and Melville, in whose fiction darkness has been used
as a major theme to present the lot of man in this world.
Hemingway's concern for the predicament of the individual
resembles the outlook of these `nocturnal writers'. 'As
with them, a moral awareness springs from his awareness
of the larger life of the universe. Compared with the
larger life of the universe, the individual is a puny
thing, a tragic thing. But in this larger life of the
universe, the individual has his place of glory'. [13]
This awareness of the futility of human existence led
Hemingway to deal with the themes of violence, darkness
and death in his novels. By presenting the darker side of
life, he tries to explore the nature of the individual's
predicament in this world.
What attitude should a man take toward a world in which,
for reasons of the world's own making and not of his own,
he is fundamentally out of place? What personal happiness
can he expect to find in a world seething with violence
... what values could one respect when ethical values as
a whole seemed university disrespected? [14]
This metaphysical concern about the nature of the
individual's existence in relation to the world made
Hemingway conceive his protagonists as alienated
individuals fighting a losing battle against the odds of
life with courage, endurance and will as their only
weapons. The Hemingway hero is a lonely individual,
wounded either physically or emotionally. He exemplifies
a code of courageous behavior in a world of irrational
destruction. 'He offers up and exemplifies certain
principles of honor, courage and endurance in a life of
tension and pain which make a man a man'. [15] Violence,
struggle, suffering and hardships do not make him in any
way pessimistic. Though the `vague unknown' continues to
lure him and frustrate his hopes and purposes, he does
not admit defeat. Death rather than humiliation, stoical
endurance rather than servile submission are the cardinal
virtues of the Hemingway hero.
A close examination of Hemingway's fiction reveals that
in his major novels he enacts `the general drama of human
pain', and that he has 'used the novel form in order to
pose symbolic questions about life'. [16] The trials and
tribulations undergone by his protagonists are symbolic
of man's predicament in this world. He views life as a
perpetual struggle in which the individual has to assert
the supremacy of his free will over forces other than
himself. In order to assert the dignity of his existence,
the individual has to wage a relentless battle against a
world which refuses him any identity or fulfillment.
To sum up, Hemingway, in his novels and short stories,
presents human life as a perpetual struggle which ends
only in death. It is of no avail to fight this battle,
where man is reduced to a pathetic figure by forces both
within and without. However, what matters is the way man
faces the crisis and endures the pain inflicted upon him
by the hostile powers that be, be it his own physical
limitation or the hostility of society or the
indifference of unfeeling nature. The ultimate victory
depends on the way one faces the struggle. In a world of
pain and failure, the individual also has his own weapon
to assert the dignity of his existence. He has the
freedom of will to create his own values and ideals. In
order to achieve this end, he has to carry on an
incessant battle against three oppressive forces, namely,
the biological, the social and the environmental barriers
of this world. According to Hemingway, the struggle
between the individual and the hostile deterministic
forces takes places at these three different levels.
Commenting on this aspect of the existential struggle
found in Hemingway's fiction, Charles Child Walcutt has
observed that, 'the conflict between the individual needs
and social demands is matched by the contest between
feeling man and unfeeling universe, and between the
spirit of the individual and his biological limitations'.
[17] This observation is probably the right key to
understand Hemingway, the man and the novelist.
Endnotes
1. Cleanth Brooks, 'Ernest Hemingway, Man On His Moral
Uppers' The Hidden God (New Haven and London:
Yale Press, 1969), p. 6.
2. Mark Spilka, 'Hemingway and Fauntleroy, An Androgynous
Pursuit', American Novelists Revisited ed. Fritz
Flishmann (Boston, Massachusetts G.K. Hall and Co., 1982),
p. 346.
3. Abraham H. Lass, A student's Guide to 50 American
Novelists (New York: Washington Square `Press, 1970),
p. 175.
4. Mrs. Mary S. David and Dr. Varshney, A History of
American Literature (Barilly: Student Store, 1983),
p. 315. Hereinafter cited as Mary S. David.
5. Mary S. David. p.312
6. Mary S. David. p. 315.
7. P.G. Rama Rao, Ernest Hemingway, A Study in
Narrative Technique (New Delhi: S. Chand and Co.,
1980). p. 4. Hereafter cited as Rama Rao.
8. Rama Rao, p. 31.
9. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London:
Grafton Books, 1986), p. 8. Hereafter cited as Death in
the Afternoon.
10. Leon Edel, 'The Art of Evasion' in Hemingway, A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), p. 170.
11. Death in the Afternoon, p. 171.
12. B.R. Mullik, Hemingway Studies in American
Literature (New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1972), p. 8.
13. Chaman Nahal, The Narrative Pattern in Ernest
Hemingway's Fiction (New Delhi: Vikas Publication,
1971). p. 26.
14. W.M. Frohock, The Novel of Violence in American
Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cambridge
University.
15. Philip Young, 'Ernest Hemingway' Seven Modern
American Novelists, an Introduction ed. William Van
O' Connor (Minneapolis - The University of Minnesota
Press, 1966), p. 158. Hereafter cited as Philip Young.
16. W.R. Goodman, A Manual of American Literature
(Delhi: Doabe House, n.d), p. 357. Hereafter cited as
Goodman
17. Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary
Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1974), p. 275.
Bibliography
Brooks, Cleanth 'Ernest Hemingway, Man On His Moral
Uppers' The Hidden God. New Haven and London:
Yale Press, 1969.
David, Mary S. and Dr. Varshney, A History of
American Literature (Bareilly: Student Store, 1983.
Edel, Leon 'The Art of Evasion', Hemingway, A
Collection of Critical Essays, Ed. Robert P. Weeks
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962.
Frohock, W.M. The Novel of Violence in American
Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge
University Press, 1957.
Goodman, W.R. A Manual of American Literature.
New Delhi: Doaba House 1968.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon.
London: Grafton Books, 1986.
Lass, Abraham H. A student's Guide to 50 American
Novelists. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970.
Mullik, B.R. Hemingway - Studies in American
Literature New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1972.
Nahal, Chaman. The Narrative Pattern in Ernest
Hemingway's Fiction. New Delhi: Vikas Publication,
1971.
Rao, P.G. Rama. Ernest Hemingway, A Study in
Narrative Technique. New Delhi: S. Chand and Co.,
1980.
Spilka, Mark. 'Hemingway and Fauntleroy, An Androgynous
Pursuit', American Novelists Revisited Ed. Fritz
Flishmann .Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1982.
Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism
- A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1974.
Young, Philip. 'Ernest Hemingway', Seven Modern
American Novelists,- An Introduction. Ed. William
Van O' Connor. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota
Press, 1966.
© Februaruy 2003
Professor Ganesan Balakrishnan, Ph.D.
Head
PG & Research Dept. of English
Pachaiyappa's College
(Affiliated to the University of Madras)
Chennai-30, Tamil Nadu, India
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