“It was a rotten way to be wounded. .”[1]
The career of America’s most famous writer divides itself in two. Before he took the world by storm, Hemingway’s primitive innocence protected him. He could do no wrong in the first half of his career, which lasted until he closed in on forty. As a young man he went camping, hunting, and fishing up in Michigan; he volunteered in an Italian ambulance unit in World War I, was wounded, knew hospitals, nurses, and fellow survivors. Writing for the Kansas City Star, he recognized the virtues of journalism, the value of simple, declarative sentences, the strength of nouns, the weakness of adjectives. He would bring the knowledge to bear in the great stories he turned out in the 1920s and in his novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farwell to Arms.
The World War and his part in it was the experience to which his response, in his novels and stories, defined a generation.
Came the armistice and then the Paris years, about which he would later write A Moveable Feast, romanticizing “the early days when we were very poor and very happy.” Ah, Paris in the 1920s! Le Dome on Blvd. Montparnasse, and across the street La Rotonde, and further down the block Le Select and the memory of a late night fine.
Hem and Hadley, his first wife, visited Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas at 27 rue de Fleurus. He learned a lot from Stein, especially about repetition as a rhetorical strategy. “You are all a lost generation,” Stein said, and Hem chose that as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises. A second epigraph, the one explaining the book’s optimistic title, came from Ecclesiastes.
Stein on Hemingway in The Autobiography of Alce B. Toklas: “He looks like a modern but smells of the museums,” meaning he balanced the dictates of art with the ignoble facts. She had a weakness for him because, she wrote, he took her “training” and applied it to his work “without understanding it.” Stein felt he was very good at inventing himself. “But what a book . . .would be the real story of Hemingway,” who was, she said, “yellow. . . just like the flat-boat men on the Mississippi river as described by Mark Twain.”
The bitchiness went both ways. Hemingway admitted he learned from Stein, but the friendship had a curious ending on the day he and Hadley visited and overheard Stein throwing a hissy fit. In A Moveable Feast he wrote that, except for Ronald Firbank and Scott Fitzgerald, he never heard her “speaking well of a writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career.”
Born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway was a Cancer on the cusp, with either Leo or Virgo rising – a case can be made either way– backed up by a nice mix of Gemini, Sagittarius, and Scorpio. His Mars and Mercury in Leo presage the vocation of a writer whose greatest subjects include war, adventure, and sports ranging from fly-fishing and deep-sea fishing to boxing, bullfighting, and big-game hunting.
In his short stories and in his two great early novels Hemingway fathered the distinctive modern American prose style: a succession of short sentences, few modifiers, much dialogue, a strict economy. His influence was spectacular. Hard-boiled stylists from Raymond Chandler to Raymond Carver followed in his footsteps. Even John Updike, whose own sentences are at a far remove from Hemingway’s, has acknowledged a major debt to Hem’s dialogue-driven short stories.
So seductive was Hemingway’s style, so laconic and masculine, proceeding by implication or indirection, that it was as though the novels’ wounded main characters, disillusioned and frightened beneath a cool exterior, were role models for young college men uncertain of their manhood. Hemingway, wrote Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds (1942), “is the bronze god of the whole contemporary literary experience in America. Yet in a sense he marks an end as clearly as he once marked a beginning.” Hemingway’s work is “a stationary half-triumph.” For while “the whole lost generation conception of art and society reached its climax in him,” the writing that followed “had only the surface of his brilliance, when it had that at all.”
Hemingway idolized bullfighters, boxers, fishermen, men of action who displayed “grace under pressure.” It was as though each man was testing his courage each time he stepped into the ring, the arena, the fishing craft. The emphasis on manliness and the martial arts, reveals a certain hyperbolic anxiety, as if every day your average fellow faced the prospect of jumping out of an airplane hoping the parachute will open.
Hem had a flair for titles. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Killers,” “A Way You’ll Never Be.” He called a collection of his best stories Men without Women. It is accurate. Women in his stories figure as accessories, nurses, spectators, saloon singers, and high-class lovers who would be available to the Hemingway hero if only he weren’t impotent. “It was a rotten way to be wounded,” as Jake Barnes puts it in The Sun Also Rises.
To be the greatest writer of his generation was an ambition Hemingway took very seriously. He wanted to be the champ and employed boxing metaphors to describe his ambition to knock out competitors. While he didn’t have Scott Fitzgerald’s native talent or his capacity for invention, Hemingway’s influence surpasses that of any of his peers. He established a style of reticence with a romantic sense of place – strong on foreign locales, like a hospital in Milan, a café in Madrid, the train station in the provinces where the estranged “American” is having a drink with the girl he got into trouble, and “the war” is still in the background even if we did not go there anymore.
The lean style was the thing. It may consist of one word (“please”) repeated eleven times by a woman who knows she is not going to win the argument with the guy who wants her to get an abortion. Or it may be “nada” substituted for “God” in the Lord’s Prayer, “utilize” as an all-purpose verb in The Sun Also Rises, or “cooked” in A Farewell to Arms: “He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.”
Is the style the man? Harold Bloom in his book Genius: Hemingway “is the first instance of a recurrent American phenomenon: a minor novelist with a major style."
The second half of Hemingway’s life, his last three decades, had its high points: a Pulitzer, the Nobel Prize. For Whom the Bell Tolls, his last big novel, became a cinematic vehicle for Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, and the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Hem became “Papa.” He grew a big beard. Spencer Tracy made him look good in The Old Man and the Sea. For the young mustachioed Hemingway in Paris and Madrid, the right star would have been Clark Gable.
The older Hemingway spent mucho (macho) time in Cuba and Key West. He remained twenty-six but his body aged. He loved cats. He collected them. People made much of him. He was a genius with the soul of a peasant. They named drinks after him. He felt he was to the craft of writing what Joe DiMaggio was to the craft of baseball. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway’s old fisherman bucks himself up by saying: “I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.”
By 1941 Edmund Wilson had Hemingway figured out. Yes, his was the voice of the Lost Generation, the widespread disillusionment and restlessness following World War I just as Scott Fitzgerald sounded the tones of a Jazz Age peopled with cocktail-party philosophers and flappers with bobbed hair. But the era ended with the crash of October 1929 and the depression that followed. Yes, Hemingway’s style was a marvel; “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and “The Capital of the World” were but two of his masterpieces of brevity.
But (wrote Wilson) Hemingway had no real feeling for, or even interest in, his characters. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry, the wounded ambulance driver, and Catherine Barkley, the British nurse he loves, form “an idealized relationship, the abstraction of a lyric emotion.” Their ill-starred affair ends with her death after giving birth to a stillborn baby boy. She dies either because the author didn’t know what else to with her or because he had Romeo and Juliet in his head. If life was a test of courage, it was also an allegory of impotence. In Green Hills of Africa, Wilson wrote, Hemingway accomplishes the difficult feat of making that continent and its exotic beasts seem dull. “Almost the only thing we learn about the animals is that Hemingway wants to kill them.” The worst of all Hemingway characters was the self he marketed for publicity purposes: arrogant, belligerent, obnoxious.
People bowed and indulged and glorified Hemingway and it went to his head. He seldom came to New York, but when he did, he let Lillian Ross do a New Yorker profile of him, and this was disastrous. You saw him preening as an egomaniacal braggart with strong prejudices, a caricature of himself: “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in the ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”
The boxing metaphors extended to Marlene Dietrich who visited Ernest and Mary Hemingway in their suite at the Sherry-Netherland. He served her champagne.
”Thank you, Papa,” she said.
“You’re the best that ever came into the ring,” he told her.
On rereading the profile, I felt that Hemingway’s application of sports metaphors to writers is a brilliant poetic conceit. He told the interviewer that he was influenced by “Mr. Flaubert, who always threw them perfectly straight, hard, high, and inside. Then Mr. Baudelaire, that I learned my knuckle ball from, and Mr. Rimbaud, who never threw a fast ball in his life.” When the profile was reprinted as a book, Lillian Ross claimed she hadn’t written the piece to derogate Hemingway. But readers were not charmed by the chest-thumping. “I’ll make the prettiest corpse since Pretty Boy Floyd,” he told Ross. “Only suckers worry about saving their souls.” Hemingway was playing the role of famous writer, which is even harder than imitating your own prose.
As for Hem’s anti-Semitism, it was par for the course. When Princeton-educated Fitzgerald introduces a Jew into The Great Gatsby, he picks the fellow who fixed the 1919 World Series. When Hemingway needs a Jew in The Sun Also Rises, he thinks of a Princeton graduate who was once middleweight champion in the Ivy League but is now broke, insecure, a loser.
When Hemingway took his own life (Idaho, 1961), everyone felt it was retrospectively inevitable given that the writer’s father had committed suicide. Perhaps he felt anachronistic in the Kennedy era as did, say, Clark Gable, who lived long enough to see Kennedy elected but died while Ike was still in office.
Although it is the fashion to ridicule Hemingway, it would be foolish to ignore the way he revolutionized the craft of writing. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over,” he wrote in the underrated Death in the Afternoon, his book on bullfighting which surely has earned a place on the Woke Index of Prohibited Books but which, in the guise of the ultimate insider’s book on bullfighting, sets out Hemingway’s world views. Bullfighting illustrates the difference between a sport and a tragic spectacle. Morals have nothing to do with it: “What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” After a bullfight, he felt fine, “very fine.” He had just witnessed “the most fundamental” of all things, “violent death.”
If the pleasure principle is the key, and feelings are more important than principles, then taste is a greatly undervalued thing. Hemingway fancied himself an aficionado of the bullfight – an insider, an enthusiast, an expert – and the Spanish word became part of our vocabulary.
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes, “The greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action.” (A measure of the difficulty is conveyed by the three adverbs in this sentence from one who abhorred adverbs.) Death in the Afternoon may be Hemingway’s most earnest account of his lifelong pursuit of “the real thing.”
There is an ambiguity at the heart of Hemingway’s astrological profile: his rising sign is seen by some as Leo (fire), by others as Virgo (earth). This has led critics to wonder about Hemingway’s sexuality and the different postures he took with his four wives. In the Garden of Eden, maybe it didn’t matter what the size of Scott Fitzgerald’s penis was.
In a widely-discussed article for the Astrological Press, Velma Voberil (nee Gonif) made much of the fact that Grace Hemingway, the opera singer who was Hemingway’s mother, dressed the toddler in little girl clothes. Gonif contended that “grace under pressure” meant more than what meets the eye. Clifford House has argued that the author’s Venus in Gemini explains his sports obsession, but astrologists continue to debate the meaning of the opposition between Saturn in Sagittarius in the Fourth House and Pluto in Gemini in the Tenth House.
In “Indian Camp,” an early story, Nick Adams, the Hemingway hero, witnesses a suicide. He asks “Why did he kill himself, Daddy?” To which Papa replies, “I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.” That may sound like evasiveness. As far as Hemingway was concerned, it was the truth in all its terseness.
[1] The full paragraph containing this famous sentence from The Sun Also Rises should be quoted in full. It epitomizes the writer's "major style":
<<< My head started to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded and flying on a joke front like the Italian. In the Italian hospital we were going to form a society. It had a funny name in Italian. I wonder what became of the others, the Italians. That was in the Ospedale Maggiore in Milano, Padiglione Ponte. The next building was the Padiglione Zonda. There was a statue of Ponte, or maybe it was Zonda. That was where the liaison colonel came to visit me. That was funny. That was about the first funny thing. I was all bandaged up. But they had told him about it. Then he made that wonderful speech: “You, a foreigner, an Englishman” (any foreigner was an Englishman) “have given more than your life.” What a speech! I would like to have it illuminated to hang in the office. He never laughed. He was putting himself in my place, I guess. “Che mala fortuna! Che mala fortuna!” >>>
See this post explaining the methods and the madness of David Lehman's astrological profiles: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2025/06/david-lehman-reveals-all-about-his-astrological-profiles.html