ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

by Brian Gordon Sinclair

Ernest Hemingway was a true American icon who spent a lifetime fighting for freedom. That freedom came in many forms – freedom from his family, freedom from artistic restrictions, freedom from fascist tyranny and finally, freedom from a life that had become a dark and shadowed enemy.

Growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, young Hemingway was subjected to the “broad lawns and narrow minds” of a well-groomed and well-behaved society and the overbearing attentions of his mother. His desire to escape these restrictions led to a life of adventure that took him around the world and encompassed the major events of the 20th century.

The First World War defined Ernest. After some early experiences in journalism, he joined the ambulance corps of the Italian Red Cross and suffered a wounding that destroyed his knee and riddled him with shrapnel. Out of this pain, came the novel A Farewell to Arms, which portrayed the devastation of both nations and individuals. “There is no such thing as a good war,” Hemingway said, “there is only war and it only destroys.”

In Paris, he joined the Lost Generation searching for meaning and experience, as Gertrude Stein opened her doors to the world of art and literature. He discovered Shakespeare and Co., James Joyce, Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, who with Stein, helped Hemingway become a great writer who would change the direction of modern literature.

In Spain, Hemingway went to war again, supporting the Republic in its battle against the forces of fascism. He raised money for ambulances and criticized Franklin Delano Roosevelt for doing nothing while Hitler and Mussolini sent planes and tanks to General Franco’s Nationalist forces. They were using the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for World War II. This was the most politically active period of Hemingway’s life, and it resulted in the brilliant novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Ernest then turned to espionage. As a spy for the U.S. Treasury Department, he reported on the financial and military implications of the China-Japan war. Included in his report was a recommendation that ships at Pearl Harbor should not be anchored in the same compound, where they were vulnerable to simultaneous attack. We know what happened on December 7, 1941.

After the Second World War and a Nobel Prize, Hemingway succumbed to depression brought on by the demands of fame, age, alcohol, prescription drugs and the memory-stealing horrors of electroconvulsive therapy. He sought the final freedom. His fingers tightened around the steel coldness of the trigger and he remembered the question a young boy had asked his father a long time ago: “Is dying hard, daddy?”

“No son, I think it’s pretty easy. It all depends.”

As Ernest Hemingway removed the clichés from life and from writing, he created a sense of adventure and individualism that was America. He was destroyed but not defeated.

RECOMMENDED READING

Donaldson, Scott. By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

Hotchner, A. E. Papa Hemingway. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.

Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1983.

Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway. At the Hemingways: with fifty years of correspondence between Ernest and Marcelline. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1999.

Sinclair, Brian Gordon. Hemingway’s HOT Havana. Stratford-upon-Avon: Newman Books, 2008.

BRIAN GORDON SINCLAIR

Brian Gordon Sinclair, author of Hemingway On Stage, is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada and holds a Master of Arts degree in Theatre from the University of Denver. He has also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, England and at the National Film Board of Canada.

Mr. Sinclair is the author of a five-play series, Hemingway On Stage: The Road to Freedom. Each play had a world premiere at the Hemingway Days Festival in Key West, Florida. Other works by Brian Gordon Sinclair include Hemingway’s HOT Havana and Easter Rising: The Last Words of Patrick Pearse. The latter is now available in audio book format. Easter Rising is the only complete stage dramatization of the 1916 struggle for freedom in Dublin, Ireland.

A recipient of the Sir Tyrone Guthrie Award for acting at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Mr. Sinclair has performed in Cuba, Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, the Moscow Art Theatre, Poland and throughout the USA. He is now the Artistic Director of Ontario’s “Children of Erin” Theatre Company. Mr. Sinclair is a proud dual citizen of Canada and Ireland.

Brian Gordon Sinclair is considered “the foremost dramatic interpreter of Ernest Hemingway in the world today.” (Statford-upon-Avon Herald, UK)

HEMINGWAY QUOTES

“Any war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is still a criminal act.”

“The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.”

“About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

“Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

“Anyone can be a writer. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

BULLETS

Hemingway’s tough, terse prose changed the direction of 20th century literature.

Hemingway sustained over 200 shrapnel wounds at the Italian Front in WW I.

During World War II, Hemingway organized and operated a spy network known as “the crook factory” out of Havana, Cuba.

Hemingway introduced the world to the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona in Spain. 

Hemingway organized a campaign which freed the poet Ezra Pound from a mental institution.

“Sinclair reaches into the writer’s soul and becomes him”. (The Miami Herald)

TIMELINE

1899    Born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

1917    Works as a reporter for The Kansas City Star and learns the “rules” of writing.

1918    Drives ambulance for the Italian Red Cross and is seriously wounded while on canteen duty.

1921    Marries Hadley Richardson and moves to Paris as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. He hones his writing skills with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

1926   Publishes The Sun Also Rises which popularizes bullfighting.

1927   Marries his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, whose uncle later finances an African safari.

1928    Ernest’s father, Dr. Clarence E. Hemingway, commits suicide.

1931    Purchases the house at 907 Whiteside Street in Key West, Florida. From this base, he writes, drinks at Sloppy Joes and fishes for marlin in the Gulf Stream.

1936-37  Meets Martha Gellhorn, who will become his third wife, and travels to Spain to oppose the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls describes this conflict.

1943    Now living in Cuba at Finca Vigia (lookout farm), he arms his boat, the Pilar, and works with Naval Intelligence to track Nazi U-boats.

1944    Covers D-day for Collier’s magazine from inside a landing craft. He later meets and marries his fourth wife, Mary Welsh.

1953-54  On safari in Africa. After two plane crashes, the newspapers mistakenly report his death. After receiving the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea he is awarded the  Nobel Prize for Literature.

1960    Leaves Cuba and the Castro revolution to settle in Ketchum, Idaho. Suffering from depression, he is admitted to the Mayo Clinic and undergoes electroconvulsive therapy.

1961    On July 2, Ernest Miller Hemingway commits suicide.