Category Archives: Ernest Hemingway

Sunday morning coffee

11 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest and Mary Hemingway on safari in Africa, 1953-1954

This past week I twice watched the full six hours of the new Lynn Novick / Ken Burns documentary about Ernest Hemingway. Several years ago an English instructor at my college explained to me and a class how the criticism and historiography about Hemingway has evolved in the twenty-first century. Out are the paeans to Hemingway the hyper masculine hunter, fisherman, boxer, and adventurer; in are explorations of the great writer’s alcoholism, PTSD, concussion-induced mental health issues, and other vulnerabilities. “Hemingway” fits neatly into these academic trends. Watching the story unfold over the course of several evenings was unsettling and emotionally exhausting. There were a few people with whom I was texting and emailing after having watched each installment. One friend was so distraught as to question the necessity of the entire project. I must say I really had no good answer or reply. Part of the reason for my unsatisfactory responses was that I too was trying to process the life and disintegration of Ernest Hemingway myself.

In addition to the documentary, I have been listening to serval podcasts and virtual events with Novick and Burns over these past several days. Burns in particular has turned several times to the evolving nature of celebrity itself in the now six decades since Hemingway’s suicide. We know more about public figures today than was possible decades ago in the time before the internet and other communication advancements. It was easier then for a figure like Hemingway to craft a persona. I would argue that personas are not lies and that public figures have a right to create a public-facing identity. How could they not do so? That the myth and reality inevitably fail to align neatly and perfectly is not something to unduly concern us. There is room for both. Ultimately it is the work that matters.

Of course none of that makes it any easier to watch the physical and mental breakdown of a man, let alone a great artist like Hemingway, so unblinkingly. I totally understood what my friend was getting at. The truth though has a value all its own. One thing I noticed in the interviews with Novick and Burns is that they repeatedly mentioned the importance of self-care and told listeners that if they felt they too might be suffering from chemical dependency or mental health issues to seek help.

(image/Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

Hemingway the Vulnerable

03 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by in Ernest Hemingway, Great War centennial, Writing

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Ernest Hemingway, still a teenager, as he was upon his return to Oak Park, Illinois in late 1918 or early 1919. Note the cane. He had just spent the previous six months recuperating in a Milanese hospital from injuries incurred in Italy in July 1918. It was there that Hemingway fell in love with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, his muse for A Farewell to Arms and several short stories.

I am sorry for the lack of posts in recent days. With the semester in full swing things have been hectic. Enjoyable and busy. Yesterday the English professor and I wrapped up with one class the World War One module in which students watched our film and then read passages from the Library of America WW1 anthology edited by A. Scott Berg. Next week we continue and conclude in the other English 101 section. I will talk more about the readings after we totally finish. On the first day for each English section students read Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.” Hemingway has proved to be a strong thread running through the module. It worked out neatly that the class sessions ran concurrently with the writer’s stint at the Kansas City Star in 1917-18. Students were duly impressed by Hemingway’s conviction that all he needed to know as a writer he learned from the Kansas City Star style sheet. I always stress to students the importance of keeping one’s writing as simple as possible. The irony is that the reader does not see the hard work that goes into making it look effortless. Duke Ellington often spoke about this very thing as a composer. The listener doesn’t see the effort. A student came up to me after class and said she was going to read The Star Copy Style and incorporate its ideas into her own writing. I warned that, while it still has much to offer, the writing guide was written a century ago and so is a bit dated. Still, there is still much there to go on.

Earlier in October I was doing a bibliographic session for another English class with a different instructor that was also studying Hemingway. The instructor mentioned in the class that the Hemingway scholarship used to emphasize Hemingway as a masculine figure. The drinking, boxing, womanizing, war corresponding, hunting, fishing, and the rest of it. Today it is the inverse. Hemingway scholars concentrate more on Hemingway as a vulnerable figure. The family suicides, including his own. The automobile and airplane accidents that damaged him physically. The drinking, now seen from a different perspective than half a century ago. The depression. The struggle with familial relationships. Messy divorces. And love both requited and unrequited. I came across a recent article the other day in which a doctor speculates that Hemingway may have suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease increasingly found in football players due to repeated head trauma. I suppose the intellectual shift in the Hemgingway scholarship is indicative of how every generation must interpret its historical and cultural figures for its own needs and purposes.

(image/Hemingway collection, JFK Presidential Library)

 

The Dirty Secret of War

28 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by in Ernest Hemingway, Film, Sound, & Photography, Great War centennial, Vietnam War, Woodrow Wilson

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This past week we showed to a class the first cut of our World War One film. For homework the students are now reading a series of excerpts from the Library of America’s World War I and America: Told by the Americans who Lived It. Historian A. Scott Berg, the author of a 2013 biography of Woodrow Wilson, edited the work. For Thursday the students read Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” which appeared originally in Hemingway’s 1925 collection In Our Time. While preparing for the class I came across an essay by Philip Caputo that appeared this month in the online journal Literary Hub. Caputo was a marine who in 1965 landed at Da Nang during Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. In 1977 he published his seminal memoir A Rumor of War. That book secured Caputo’s reputation as a writer. Now in his seventies he has written many more works since the publication of Rumor forty years ago. He published a new novel just this year.

Ernest Hemingway in an American Red Cross ambulance, Italy 1918. Though he spent just two weeks at the front, the intensity of the experience influenced Hemingway deeply.

The reason I say all this is because Caputo makes an interesting point in his essay: many of the best war writers actually spent only a small amount of time in combat. The reason these are the writers who write most eloquently about the combat experience, Caputo speculates, is because warfare is just that intense. Endure it too long and it becomes too much a part of you. Caputo uses Ernest Hemingway as the most striking example. For all we associate him with war, Hemingway spent just two weeks on the front lines during the Great War. He graduated high school in June 1917, wrote for the Kansas City Star from that October to April 1918, quit the paper and volunteered for ambulance duty that spring, sailed in May, worked in war torn Paris for much of June, was wounded in Italy on July 8, coalesced in a Milanese hospital for six months, and was home in Oak Park, Illinois by January 1919.

Chronologically the time may have been short, but the intensity of it led to his incredible output over the next decade. A husband and father by the early 1920s, he paid the bills as a foreign correspondent in Europe for the Toronto Star, where among other things he covered the Genoa Conference in 1922; met leaders such as David Lloyd George, Benito Mussolini, and Georges Clemenceau among others; covered the rise of Fascism and Bolshevism; and witnessed the general anomie of European society in the wake of the Great War. In this same decade he published In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929), all of which draw to greater or lesser extent on what he witnessed and experienced during his short time in the war zone.

(image/Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, JFK Library)

“We should feel even sterner indignation”

24 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Base Hospital No. 9, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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First Lieutenant (Dr.) William T. Fitzsimons was an Army surgeon and the first American Army officer killed in the Great War. He died in a German air raid near Pas-de-Calais on 4 September 1917.

In March 2015 I wrote a piece about Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway both beginning their careers with the Kansas City Star in October 1917. Colonel Roosevelt’s contract with the Star began on 1 October but he pounded out a few editorials, the first of nearly 120 weekly contributions until his death in January 1919, prior to his official start date. The first Roosevelt article was about Dr. William T. Fitzsimons, a first lieutenant in the Army Medical Reserve Corps killed in France on 4 September 1917. Dr. Fitzsimons was the first United States Army officer killed in the Great War.

I have been writing during the centennial about the career of Dr. Robert D. Schrock, a surgeon with Base Hospital No. 9. Lieutenant Fitzsimons was part of this same desire that many physicians had to tend the wounded. Like Schrock, Fitzsimons was from the Midwest, graduated from medical school just prior to the war, trained as a young doctor in New York City in the early 1910s (in Fitzsimon’s case at Roosevelt Hospital), and sought his way to contribute to the effort. Fitzsimons sailed to Europe on a Red Cross transport ship from Brooklyn’s Bush Terminal in early September 1914 and began working in a hospital in England on 1 October as a civilian volunteer. Dr. Fitzsimons returned to the United States after his stint, taught medicine at the University of Kansas for a time, and joined the military on 27 March 1917, about ten days prior to Congress’s declaration of war. He was sent to France right away.

First Lieutenant William T. Fitzsimons (seated far left) in England, circa 1915. On 4 September 1917, the same day that Fitzsimons happened to be killed, the Kansas City Star announced that Theodore Roosevelt was joining its editorial staff. Roosevelt’s first piece was about Fitzsimons and published on 17 September, two weeks before his contract officially began.

Lieutenant Fitzsimons was on staff at Base Hospital No. 5 in near Calais by late August. On the evening of 4 September 1917 he was killed in a German air raid. Roosevelt’s tribute, his first article for the Kansas City Star, appeared on 17 September. Roosevelt hammered away at the two themes that would consume him in the coming months: German brutality and American unpreparedness. Fitzsimons was the first American Army officer to be killed in the First World War. Roosevelt’s tribute one of the first but not the last. Army Hospital 21 in Denver became Fitzsimons Army Hospital in 1920. Ten years after that the young doctor’s mother, Catherine Fitzsimons, traveled from Kansas City to the military cemetery at the Somme to see her son’s resting place. In 1955 First Lady Mamie Eisenhower dedicated an oil painting of Fitzsimons at the Colorado hospital named for him twenty-five years previously. Five years after that author A. A. Hochling published The Fierce Lambs, a history/biography of Lieutenant William T. Fitzsimons, Corporal James Bethel Cresham, Private Thomas F. Enright and Private Merle Hay. The latter three of whom were killed later that fall, the first Americans killed in actual combat. Today some of the personal effects found on Dr. Fitzsimons when he was killed are on display at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City.

(image/top, Department of Defense; bottom, unknown)

 

The Hemingway House

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in Ernest Hemingway, Florida, Heritage tourism, Museums

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The Hemingway Home in Key West has survived Hurricane Irma.

Having lived big parts of my life in South Florida and Houston I watched Harvey and Irma unfold with intense concern. Thankfully everyone I know has emerged unscathed. We consider ourselves among the fortunate. I was watching too the fates of various cultural institutions that found themselves in harm’s way. The Menil Collection and Rothko Chapel in Houston seemed especially vulnerable but emerged with no flood damage from Harvey. As Irma bore down on Key West the Hemingway Home seemed destined for major damage or even outright destruction. Hemingway first started going to the Keys in the 1920s, after the First World War and his years in Paris as part of the Lost Generation. He wrote part of The Sun Also Rises in the Keys. It has now been several decades but I remember going there more than once back in the 1970s and 80s. Hemingway seemed so long gone but he had only committed suicide just 15-20 years earlier.

As Irma moved westward the Hemingway Home’s longtime caretakers decided to hold out, much to the consternation of Mariel Hemingway, who urged them to evacuate along with the rest of the residents of the Keys. The staff did not take that advice and held on. Irma is not yet over and many people are still facing serious threat. The assessment and clean-up have yet to begin in the areas that Irma has already touched. And of course it is not just Florida: Texas is still reeling from Harvey and the people of the Caribbean face incredible challenges from Irma. Thankfully there are a few, very few, things for which to be grateful right now. The Hemingway Home along with its dozens of six-toed cats has survived Irma thanks to the dedication of the staff who worked diligently to save the historic structure.

(image/Michelle Maria via Wikimedia Commons)