Ernest Hemingway was a beautiful and troubled man, who adventured, wrote books, and fled from his demons through taxonomy, drink, and thrill. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and succumbed to an inner torment and mental decay by taking his own life with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961.
In 1860, Emily Dickinson wrote “To fight aloud, is very brave &#8211; / But gallanter, I know /Who charge within the bosom / The Cavalry of Wo.” Thirty nine years later, a man who would embody that theme of unspoken suffering in every major work of his writing was born. In stories and novels about war, suicide, survival, love, innocence, nature and death, he wrote about the shared experience of being alive, and the one unspeakable fate we all face. The concept of the unspoken—and unspeakable—went far beyond the element of character development, however. Stylistically, even a single sentence for Ernest Hemingway, the diction he chose, the number of times he repeated any given word—each had its own concealed significance, its own aim toward subtext and varying interpretation, to be explored and discovered again and again.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, the second of six children, Ernest Hemingway would not only become the voice of “la génération perdue”—that generation whose innocence was shivered and uprooted by the First World War—but also change the architecture of English prose and fiction. His early experiences paved the way for this. He took choir lessons as a boy at the behest of his mother, discovering through the compositions of Bach the technique of counterpoint: where two or more melodies in a piece of music weave in and around one another in confluence. Hemingway’s writing carries that idea linguistically, as though often many things are happening at once in a single sentence of his stories and novels. And yet, he was able to balance this kind of writing with his background in journalism where he’d learned to write “a simple declarative sentence.” Later, while in Paris in the 1920s, he would continue to learn and adopt the stylistic repetition of words and rhythms in writing from his mentor, Gertrude Stein, cementing his fluid and effortless narrative style. In Paris he also discovered the work of Paul Cézanne, a 19th century painter famed for depicting the same landscapes and subject matter over and over again in differing iterations; his technique, most notably: thick, repetitive and visible brushstrokes. In a later excised paragraph of Hemingway’s short story “Big-Two Hearted River,” the semi autobiographical protagonist, Nick Adams, claims he wanted “to write like Cézanne painted.” Hemingway did that. Writing with the precision of a painter’s eye, and the ear of a classical composer, the young author found a new, direct, visual, and incantatory style in fiction no one had ever used before, or has ever used since. While those early encounters with music and art helped influence the way his style developed, it was his life experiences that directly inspired his subject matter and themes. If all writers tell stories based in part on their own life, Hemingway was among those who sought out their adventures first—for whom living well was as equally important as the writing itself, claiming it was “as important to be a good man as to be a great writer.” Of course, while his own complex character would be held up for judgment in our 21st century lens—his fanaticism of bullfighting, his misogyny (divorcing three wives, and marrying a fourth)—there is little doubt he knew the inner workings of people: how we suffer and face death, and the demons of living. Fictionalizing his own life with “the dignity of an iceberg”—only one-ninth of it being visible above the water—he chased one courageous exploit after another. When he was 18 years old, he entered World War I as an ambulance driver in Italy. Once, when he was bringing chocolate bars to soldiers on the front lines, a mortar went off and over 200 shell fragments sliced up his legs. After that, because the shell had gone off at night, and he had felt “his soul go out of his body” (he later said), he could never again sleep at night without a light on. That time in Italy would inspire the major novel A Farewell to Arms in 1929, but Hemingway, the man, would not be satisfied, expatriating to Paris and Spain, big-game hunting on an African safari (after his boyhood idol Theodore Roosevelt), fishing, skiing, and sailing, and working as a foreign correspondent in warzones. Each of these led to indelible books: The Sun Also Rises (1926), Death in the Afternoon (1932), The Green Hills of Africa (1935), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and the Pulitzer Prize winning novella: The Old Man and the Sea (1952). In 1954, Hemingway won the nobel prize “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration.” And while his longer works are critically acclaimed, several ending up on lists of the greatest American novels, his style-forming master is perhaps best evinced in the beguiling simplicity of his short stories. If his contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald was the more poetic, perhaps even better “writer,” Hemingway was always the better poet—his short stories, the very sentences in his short stories, poems disguised as prose. He produced such masterpieces as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Indian Camp,” “The End of Something,” “The Killers,” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” the latter for which it would be difficult to describe a “plot,” since it’s only a man and a woman talking at a train station—until you realize the unmentionable thing they’re talking about.
It is heartwrenching to read Hemingway knowing that in 1961 he killed himself; because despite the suffering and pain recounted over and over again in his short stories and novels, today we read him and feel there is some hope amidst the despair, a feeling of mutuality across all human experience, that we share the same fate, and hardships, and can learn from one another how to go on. In one of his masterpieces, and perhaps darkest stories, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” it is past 2am, and two waiters are waiting for an old man sitting on the cafe terrace to leave so that they may go home. The younger waiter complains, going as far as to say the old man “should’ve killed himself last week” (the old man had tried to do so, but was stopped by his niece). But the older waiter sympathizes with the old man, saying he himself and the old man are alike. Later, this character, who you realize is the protagonist, recites the Lord’s prayer to himself using the word “nada” seventeen times: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name…” And yet there is one moment in the story where this waiter also says, “I am of those who like to stay late at the cafe&#8230;With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.” Hemingway was “of those;” you and I are “of those;” and Hemingway knew there was “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” for each of us in the dark.