This is the third part of the Biography of Ernest Hemingway article.
>>1, 2, 3
Key West - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway moved to Key West where he established his first American home. From his old stone house — a wedding present from Pauline's uncle — Hemingway fished in the Dry Tortugas waters, went to Sloppy Joe's, Havana's famous bar, and traveled to Spain occasionally, gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.
A collection of pieces mostly about bullfighting, Death In The Afternoon, was published in 1932. He became an aficionado of bullfighting after having seen the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, which was fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his writings about Spain he was greatly influenced by the Spanish master Pio Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he travelled to Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him that he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he did) although the extent of Baroja's influence is not fully appreciated in the English speaking world.
A safari led him to Mombasa in fall 1932, Nairobi and Machakos in the Mua Hills. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the literary results.
1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, another nonfiction work, this one based on Hemingway's big game hunting and safaris in Africa
But his good fortune in business, art and marriage was overshadowed by serious attacks on his health (anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids; kidney trouble from fishing in Spain, torn groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching ball, laceration of arms, legs and face from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a car accident resulting in a broken arm.)
Social Criticism - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's leisurely way of life provoked some criticism: Max Eastman and others demanded greater commitment to the affairs of the people. A young left-winger begged Hemingway to give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about truth and justice.
For a while, it seemed he would do so. His article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist newspaper, and his novel To Have and Have Not showed a certain social awareness. Soon, he would take political sides more explicitly
The Second World War - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941 and for the first time in his life, Hemingway took an active part in a war.
Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway was ready to fight and sink Nazi submarines threatening the coasts of Cuba and the United States.
It is worth noting that, according to Anthony Burgess, Hemingway never before shot nor would have shot another human being, and that he was a non-combatant in World War I, in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) he was reporting on after having written For Whom the Bell Tolls and in the Spanish Civil War, where even the money he collected to support the Loyalists was used for non-belligerent purposes.
Perhaps his failure in preventing Fascists from taking Spain — for he was very possessive of this country — had led him to take more drastic actions.
As the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage, Hemingway went to Europe, first as war correspondent for Collier's magazine.
At Villedieu-les-Poêles, France, Hemingway threw three grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding, a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. It was the first time he had killed a man.
Seemingly encouraged, he declared he would be an unofficial intelligence unit. Later, he acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards, he even formed his own partisan group which took part in the liberation of Paris. Some have argued Hemingway tried to emulate the characters he'd created in his fiction.
By firing his machine pistol at a portrait of Mary Welsh's husband after having placed it atop the toilet bowl in his room in the Ritz, he proved he would no longer flinch from killing a man who stood face to face with him.
After the Second World War - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
After the war, Hemingway started and abandoned a novel about the earth, the sea and the air.
He went to Italy where he gathered material for Across the River and Into the Trees, an homage to Venice. He derived the title from the last words of General Stonewall Jackson. In Across..., his now-divorced third wife appeared as the third wife of the protagonist, Adriana Ivancich as his lover Renata, which means "Reborn" in Latin.
The novel received poor reviews, many of which accused Hemingway of bad taste, stylistic ineptitude and sentimentality. Perhaps the last charge was most true, and fit an emerging pattern: Hemingway was growing old.
Criticism - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
While The Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate Hemingway’s literary reputation and effected a reexamination of his entire body of work, it was met with intense critical reaction at publication—ambivalent, despite common conceptions.
Notable in this diametric reading is the critic Philip Young, who in 1952, just following the novel’s publication, provided an admiring review, suggesting that it was the book “in which [Hemingway] said the finest single thing he ever had to say as well as he could ever hope to say it.” Then, in 1966, Young jeeringly professed that the “failed novel” too often “went way out.”
This self-contradicting view establishes the fact that ultimate critical reaction ranged from sycophantic adoration of its mythical, pseudo-religious intonations (exemplified in Carlos Baker and Joseph Waldmeir) to flippant dismissal as pure fakery. The latter is founded in the notion that Hemingway, once a devoted student of realism, falls in his depiction of, among other things, Santiago as a supernatural, clairvoyant impossibility.
Later Years - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
A glimpse of hope came with the discovery of some of his old manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and cholesterol count were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression, aggravated by alcoholism had probably already started.
He also lost his Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula and was forced to "exile" to Ketchum, Idaho after the situation in Cuba had started to escalate.
The very last years, 1960 and 1961, were marked by severe paranoia. He feared FBI agents would be after him if Cuba turned to the Russians, that the "Feds" (Burgess (9.), p. ??) would be checking his bank account, and that they wanted to arrest him for gross immorality and carrying alcohol. (The FBI was in fact surveilling Hemingway due to his activities in Cuba.)
Hemingway was upset by perfectly normal photographs in his Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum for high blood pressure and liver problems - and also electroconvulsive therapy for depression and his continued paranoia.
Death - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received treatment again, but this was unable to prevent his suicide on July 2, 1961 - at 5:00 AM, he died as a result of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.
He is interred in the Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho.
(In 1996, his granddaughter, actress Margaux Hemingway, would take her own life; she is interred in the same cemetery.)
Awards and Honors - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
During his lifetime, Hemingway was awarded with:
* Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) in World War I
* Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man and the Sea)
* Nobel Prize in literature in 1954 (also partly for The Old Man and the Sea)
Thank you for reading the Biography of Ernest Hemingway, please visit the Ernest Hemingway Books page.
READ MORE (first part of the Ernest Hemingway Biography)
>>Ernest Hemingway Biography
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ernest Hemingway"