This is the second part of the Ernest Hemingway Biography article.
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WW1 - Ernest Hemingway Life
Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army. He did not pass the medical examination.
Later, he enlisted in the Ambulance Corps and left for Italy, then mired in World War I. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris. The city was under constant bombardment from German artillery.
Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Ernest Hemingway asked the cab driver to bring him to the place where the shells were falling. Hemingway wouldn't stop looking for enemy fire until one shell tore apart the facade of a church at the Place de la Madelaine nearby. (He later said: "I was an awful dope when I went to the last war...")
Not long after arriving in Italy, Ernest Hemingway saw the brutalities of war: On his first day of duty, an ammunition factory near Milan suffered an explosion. Hemingway had to pick up human remains, mostly of women who'd worked at the factory.
This first and extremely cruel encounter with human death left him shaken. The soldiers he met later didn't lighten this horror: Eric Dorman-Smith quoted Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe god a death . . . and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next" (Burgess (9.), p. 24). A 50-year-old soldier, to whom Ernest Hemingway said "You're troppo vecchio for this war, pop." replied "I can die as well as any man." (Burgess (9.), p. 24). Hemingway, for his part, would conjure this very same Shakespearean line ("we owe god a death") in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his later famous African short stories.
On July 8, 1918, at the Italian front Ernest Hemingway was wounded, ending his career as an ambulance driver.
The exact details of the July 8 attack remain mysterious but two facts are certain: A trench mortar shell hit him leaving fragments in both legs, and he was awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government. He may have saved another soldier's life by carrying him on his back
Ernest Hemingway later transferred to the Italian infantry, and was seriously injured.
Convalescing in the Ospedale Croce Rossa Americana, Via Alessandro Manzoni in Milan, he met Sister Hannah Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse from Washington, DC, and one of eighteen nurses looking after just four patients. He fell for her, but they never were together. Soon after his departure, she fell in love with another man.
(Ernest Hemingway once wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: "We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get a damned hurt use it - don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist" (Lynn (13.), p. 10). Some ten years after his painful World War I experiences, A Farewell To Arms was published. The work is heavily autobiographical.)
After the First World War - Ernest Hemingway Life
After being discharged from the Army, Hemingway returned home and in 1920 took a job in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Toronto Star newspaper as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent.
About this time, Ernest Hemingway met Canada's young literary prodigy, Morley Callaghan who also was a cub reporter at the same paper. Callaghan, who respected Hemingway's work, showed his own stories to him and Hemingway praised it as fine work. (The two later joined up in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, France with F. Scott Fitzgerald and the other expatriate writers of the day.)
In 1921 Ernest Hemingway married Hadley Richardson and moved to Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star covering the Greco-Turkish War.
In 1923, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, his first son, John, was born in Toronto. Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the Toronto Star, and on January 1, 1924, Ernest Hemingway resigned.
The Hemingways decided to live abroad for a while, and, following the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris. Anderson gave Hemingway a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced Ernest Hemingway to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in Montparnasse Quarter. Hemingway's other mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of imagism. He was so impressed with Pound that he considered giving him the Nobel Prize gold medal. Ernest Hemingway later said of them: "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right." (to John Peale Bishop; Cowley (4.), p. xiii).
At the same time, Ernest Hemingway became a close friend of James Joyce. These authors and many others met at Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 18 Rue de l'Odéon, Paris.
In Montparnasse, Hemingway's favorite restaurant was La Closerie des Lilas. Here, in just over just six weeks, Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises.
A tragedy became an unexpected boon when Hemingway's manuscripts, including A Farewell to Arms were stolen at Gare de Lyon. In re-writing A Farewell..., Hemingway had time to reconsider it, thus improving the work. The second version was a great deal less ornate. Ernest Hemingway compressed his prose to its bare essentials, related in a nearly journalistic, matter-of-fact style. These features would become essential components of Hemingway's style.
Things Turn Sour - Ernest Hemingway Life
His books sold very well and were approved by critics, but with Hemingway's success came bad behavior. He told F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write, and told Allen Tate that there was a fixed number of orgasms a man had. He also claimed Ford Madox Ford was sexually impotent . This was perhaps a hint of Hemingway's own sexual neurosis.
In return, Ernest Hemingway himself was criticized — and, some claim, bothered by the criticism. The journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. McAlmon, the publisher of his first, non-commercial book said, according to Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway was "a fag and a wife-beater" (Burgess (9.), p. 57) and that Pauline was a lesbian. Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She claimed Hemingway had derived his prose style from her own and from Sherwood Anderson's, and that this shameful origin was "yellow" (Burgess (9.), p. 64).
Max Eastman was even more confrontational in his attacks, suggesting that Ernest "come out from behind that false hair on the chest" (Times 1961 (15.), p. 6). Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the Afternoon, a parody and a satire of Death in the Afternoon, a book dear to Ernest Hemingway.
It is worth noting that these attacks on Hemingway's pride and talent were accompanied by the already-mentioned injuries which kept him almost constantly in poor physical shape.
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