HEMINGWAY, ERNEST MILLER

Novelist and short-story writer; b. Oak Park, Ill., July 21, 1899; d. Ketchum, Idaho, July 2, 1961. The son of a doctor and a devoutly religious mother, he spent a Tarkingtonian boyhood in a Chicago suburb and enjoyed Huck Finn summers in a still unspoiled, Native American-inhabited upper Michigan. After a job on the Kansas City Star, he took part in World War I as an ambulance driver and was wounded when barely 19. Briefly a journalist in Toronto and a correspondent during the Greek-Turkish war, he began his long expatriation in France, Italy, Spain, the West Indies, and Cuba, plus two African safaris and irregular but intimate involvements in both the Spanish Civil War and World War II. His father's suicide (1929) was a profound shock. A convert to Catholicism, Hemingway was apparently a believer to the end, though his marital status after the third of his four marriages precluded formal membership in the Church. He had three sons. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a protracted illness marked by hypertension and despondency.

The Nobel prize citation's (1954) salute to Hemingway's gift of "tragic pathos" seems prophetic in retrospect. All Hemingway's heroes are "objective correlatives" of his own attitudes; it is clear that his lifelong literary preoccupation with courage meant, in part, that he constantly dreaded that his own courage would desert him. The fact may well account for the disconcerting Byronic attitudes he struck in public. Underneath these he was a genuine saga figure creating an authentic saga art; his characteristic sardonic irony was a rationalization of his own sense of personal doom.

Classic in technique and romantic in thematics, Hemingway's fictional form is a naturalistic romance utilizing symbols from nature to capture the moral situations of his day. However limited in scope, he is a moralist, a historian of nihilism who takes his text from Ecclesiastes and who realizes in art the ritual inherent in the Catholic ethos, and sets priests and the crucified Christ high among his culture heroes.

For a time Hemingway's celebrated style, the mirror of an apparently straightforward but essentially oblique art, revolutionized world fiction. It is clean, staccato, linear, and vernacular, seeking the visual effects of a Braque, and making a curious Biblical music out of the connective "and." Though he attributes his own derivation to Twain, he displays strong affinities with such far-removed predecessors as the old poet of Maldon, and with Stendhal, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Turgenev, and Conrad. The future will probably diagnose his major weaknesses as an oversentimental primitivism and a positively adolescent bravura about sex.

Hemingway's finest work appeared between 1926 and 1936. He was the Froissart of the "lost generation" as Fitzgerald was its troubadour, and his best novels are The Sun Also Rises (1926), a brilliant, tragicomedy "Waste Land" that deploys a freshness of sensibility and incomparably cadenced dialogue; and A Farewell to Arms (1929), very possibly the best novel in English to deal with World War I. To Have and Have Not (1937) is marred by a gauche technique; and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) misses the inimitable tension-in-suspension that is his best work's emotional trademark. His only total failure, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), breaks down into self-parodying bathos. His single novella, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), at once Homeric and deeply Christian, demonstrates a lovely Franciscan empathy with the animal creation and incarnates, in old Santiago, Hemingway's central vision of man "destroyed but not defeated." An unusually high number of his 50-odd short stories are flawlessly executed and may well constitute his chief claim on posterity; such are "Great Two-Hearted River," "The Undefeated," "Twenty Grand," "The Killers," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and that archetypal parable for its century, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Hemingway's ultimate critical status remains in some debate, but he achieved indubitable literature whose dominant note has been well described as a "clarity of heart."

Bibliography: e. hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York 1932); Green Hills of Africa (New York 1935); A Moveable Feast (New York 1964), all contain valuable autobiographical details. c. h. baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (3d ed. Princeton 1963), best biography and major critical source; ed., Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology (New York 1961). c. a. fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York 1954), casts valuable light on the early years. j. k. mccaffery, ed., Ernest Hemingway: The Man and His Work (Cleveland 1950). j. atkins, The Art of Ernest Hemingway: His Work and Personality (New York 1952). p. young, Ernest Hemingway (New York 1952). s. sanderson, Hemingway (New York 1961). e. rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York 1963).

[c. a. brady]