HEMINGWAY. In the hundred years since his birth, Earnest Hemingway has seen many incarnations: as

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1 HEMINGWAY In the hundred years since his birth, Earnest Hemingway has seen many incarnations: as a hero of modernism, a Nobel laureate, a larger than life Time magazine cover, representing a reckless rampage of machismo, a burnt out, and a not so noble savage who refused the ambiguous softness of the 60's. His final and recent post-modem appearance is as the inspirational force in the pages of home furnishings - the Earnest Hemingway of the Thomasville furniture collection ", "every piece as individualistic as Hemingway himself. And as individualistic as the one who brings them home." Here, at last, he is reduced to the bagger of big home furnishings. Those who want to be big game hunters need merely carry a 3030 AMEX card into the heart of American shopping darkness. The use of the word 'individualistic' in these ads shows how indeed the mighty have fallen: not even "individual" but "individualistic" - a knock off of individual, an attempt at individual as if individuality could be cloned and commodified. What does it say about our century, at its end, that our physically robust heroes of our early twentiethcentury have been reduced to coming home, not in body bags, as they had dreamed, but in shopping bags, the consumer nightmare from which they strove to escape as early as WWI. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21 st, 1899, Earnest Miller Hemingway was the child of successful suburban parents: his father a doctor, his mother a cultured and musical schoolteacher. Despite his professional career, Dr. Clarence Hemingway was addicted to the outdoors. " His father came back to him in the fall of the year, or, if, in the early spring, there had been jacksnipe in the prairie, or when he saw shucks of corn, or when he saw a lake, or

2 if he even saw a horse and buggy or when he saw or heard wild geese, or in a duckblind" But the places Earnest was to live in: Paris, Madrid, Key Coast, Cuba, Austrian ski slopes, and Italian villages at the front, tom by WWI, were not towns his father knew: "After he was fifteen he had shared nothing with him." Hemingway's boyhood cult of masculinity, of hunting, shooting, and sex, was fostered at the family summer place in northern Michigan, the setting for many of the author's short stories, particularly the Nick Adams sagas. While grateful for his father's expertise in the manly arts, Hemingway declared him "unsound on sex". The doctor had exhorted him to celibacy through threats of disease and perversion. But Hemingway made his own way with the third leg of a man's virility: "all the equipment you will ever have is provided and each man learns all there is for him to know about it without advice, and it makes no difference where you live." His own experience in these matters was acquired in the hemlock woods behind the Michigan Indian camp with a sexually free thinking native Ojibway girl "who did first what no one has done better." By 17, Hemingway was eager to test his mettle on the world outside Illinois. There was a war on in Europe where fortunes and reputations could be made and by 1916, like Earnest, the US was fretting to be in the fray. Refused by the army, ironically for "weak vision", Earnest joined the Italian army as an ambulance driver and infantryman. Wounded in the leg and decorated, he spent time in Italian hospitals, experiences he would publish in Farewell to Arms in 1929, the same year as his father's suicide. "Nick had loved him very much and for a long time. Now, knowing how it had all been, even remembering the earliest times before things had gone badly was not good

3 remembering. If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them but it was still too early for that...it was a good story but there were still too many people alive for him to write it." Hemingway's war experiences were written about in a Paris in the' 20s where the ground was thick underfoot with rich American expatriates and poorer European ones,allof whom had come to be at the centre of the cultural and literary universe. As Morley Callaghan recalls, when he and his wife left for Paris, his Scribner's editor, Maxwell Perkins, shook his head in dismay at the lively disaffection which American writers had for post-war America. This perception of America as the glittering husk of a busted up dream, a dream reduced to fast cars, jazz, and consumer frenzy in a mass-produced wasteland, had been brilliantly depicted by F. Scott Fitzgerald in In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's portrayal of a verdant, fresh green America, filled with possibility, was tragically reduced to a valley of ashes, populated by drunken and careless upwardly mobile people who smashed up automobiles and lives with equally fecklessness. This also was the verdict of the whole "lost generation" who despised the producers and developers of war. In their view, the language of honour, moral rectitude and right action was hopelessly corrupt. Joseph Conrad had foreseen the abyss in The Heart of Darkness. 20th century man was a hollow mannequin, dressed in the rags of a dead civilization, a civilization Ezra Pound was to declare "an old bitch gone in the teeth". This same "hollow man" was taken up as an image by Yeats, Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Picasso, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, MacLeish, Fitzgerald, - all in Paris. T.S. Eliot, an American fled to London, would stun the modem literary world with

4 poems like The Wasteland and The LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock which begins "Let us go then you and I, when the evening sky is spread out like a patient etherized on a table". The fabric of society was torn, the body beneath moribund. Earnest Hemingway would provide the fitness program. W.B. Yeats, in his poem, The Second Coming, 1920, wrote The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stoney sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? It is into this post-war twilight world of existential terror and despair that Hemingway brought his credo of physicality. Like his contemporary, D.H. Lawrence, who viewed the British bourgeois as beastly toadstools blighting an ancient and noble England, Hemingway wanted to resuscitate the ancient physical cultures of the Greek and Roman gymnasium: men, "mano a mano", wrestling each other into sanity: a sound mind in a sound body, language reduced to a stripped down minimum with actions alone proclaiming the virtue of the protagonist. Being alive in your skin and communicating life force was the only duty, to "work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body". To faithfully chronicle, without flinching or turning your face away was the mission". "He had seen the world change; not just the events... but he had seen the subtle change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and

5 watched it and it was his duty to write of it." But despite the singularity and loneliness of Hemingway's narrators, the author himself was borne about his transatlantic vision quest on the backs of 4 wives: rich and independent but ultimately compliant women. He viewed the sexual battle the way he viewed the contest with brute and giant beasts. He admired women who, like the great fish in Old Man and the Sean, battled exhaustively but who finally acquiesced. His four wives would battle him and his insatiable need for novelty, distraction and prowess until, like dying delicate trout from the great two hearted river, their rainbows would fade and die. He had arrived in Paris accompanied by his first wife Hadley, whose trust fund was a match for Hemingway's ambitions. They wintered in Austria, a sojourn strikingly recapitulated in Farewell to Arms; having Springed in Paris, in the Summer they ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Hemingway s job was as a stringer for The Toronto Star, an brief stint recalled as mystifying by Greg Clarke who took Ernie salmon fishing on the Credit River. Hadley produced John, nicknamed Jumby, and Hemingway took to signing himself "Papa", a patriarchal soubriquet he would keep for the rest of his short, not so happy life. By 1927, he had married another heiress, Pauline Pfeifer, who bought his Key West estate and lived with him throughout his Cuban game fishing phase. Divorced from Pauline November 4, 1940, he married Martha Gelhorn November 5th, a war correspondent covering WWII with Hemingway. She contributed Finca Vigia in Cuba to the author's real estate holdings but, a scant 6 years later, he married Mary

6 Welsh whom he widowed in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, when he turned his sights and his shotgun on himself. Hemingway had not lasted more than one year into the 60's. He was famous only as a macho dinosaur, a devourer of women, a rough beast whose political incorrectness was intolerable in a world populated by androgynous hippies and cool analytical writers like Joan Didion and Truman Capote. He was a relic of two wars and a depression, events yuppies would know of only through history books and his perception was that he was the last one at the party, left alone with the dreaded hostess. "He had loved too much, demanded too much and he wore it all out". He had lived in a world where war was just a shot away, He had won his Pulitzer in '52 for Old Man and the Sea and his Nobel Prize in But between his Pulitzer and his posthumous Moveable Feast (1964), recalling Paris days, he wrote little and published less. By 1960 he was hospitalized with high blood pressure, cirrhosis, diabetes and depression. Death was not deterrent to his publications however. Eight of his books were revived and published after his suicide, including True at First Light, assembled by his son. The epigram to his perhaps most famous short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, reads this way: Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai Ngaje Ngai, the House of God. Close to the Western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude". Perhaps no one will ever satisfactorily explain what Hemingway was seeking in Paris, Madrid, the Spanish Civil War, WWI and II, Cuba, Kenya, Key West or

7 Idaho. But clearly we are no longer seeking what he sought there. If you troll the Internet you will find thousands of Hemingway entries, most for fishing and hunting vacation spots. You can go to the Northern Michigan recreation sites to fish in the trout pools haunted by Nick Adams. You can fish for Marlin in the Cuban International Earnest Hemingway competition, then relax at Papa's Restaurant or you can take in Papa's birthday party, July 21st in Key West, entering the Hemingway look alike contest if you look alike. But you won't find him in these places now. He would have despised mass production Hemingway more than he loathed mass produced America. And, for the coup de grace, his influence on contemporary style has been reduced to sending brave men into an adventurous bedroom decorated with a manly leather bed, sporting faux leopard sheets. Us post modernists no longer care to confront the beast, either within or without. We've come prepared to air freight Godzilla and market him as Barney. "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know" Hemingway once observed. He should know. But despite our disinclination to do what he did, his prose still speaks to us, limpidly and lucidly across the decades, like a clear flowing stream of visceral perceptions and animal awareness. But we have no taste for what he has to say. We just like the style with which he says it. And if we hurry, we will be just in time for the running of the housewares at Bloomingdales.

Ernest Hemingway ( )

Ernest Hemingway ( ) Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Oak Park Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899 (a Chicago suburb) Father was Clarence Hemingway, an obstetrician Mother Grace Hall Hemingway, a music teacher Childhood Some biographers