For Hemingway the bell tolled
By Usha Bande

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." — A Farewell to Arms

THE man who always held that "man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated", should blow his brain with a shotgun, is one of the ironies of life that defies explanation. On July 2, 1961, when the burly, bearded and charismatic Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway shot himself dead in his Ketchum home in Idaho (USA), the world was baffled because Hemingway revered life and condemned suicide as an act of cowardice. He prized "grace under pressure" and "gallantry in defeat". He often felt ashamed of his father for having committed suicide and was proud of his grandfather who had fought bravely in the American Civil War. What then led the 62-year-old novelist to end his life thus — physical ailment or psychological problems?

The answer to these and many such questions were provided, almost a decade later, by Mary Welsh Hemingway in an autobiographical book How It Was.

Hemingway was a courageous man — always a fighter, deeply interested in outdoor and manly activities like sports, war, hunting, yatching, fishing, bull-fighting and going for African Safari. His personal life, at crucial points, is not unlike the life of his heroes. He had modelled them on himself — brave, invincible, accomplished and competitive. For them, as for him, life was overshadowed with pain and suffering, yet it could be colourful and lovely; it was full of despair but it could be heroic.

Hemingway had reverence for life’s struggle and for the dignity of man; he held the Biblical view that the earth abideth forever.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, at Oak Park, Illinois, a middle-class suburb of Chicago. His father was a medical practitioner, but he was fond of hunting, fishing and other outdoor activities. His mother was a religious woman, given to music. She was popular in the neighbourhood for her active role in Church affairs. Though Ernest inherited the interests of his father in outdoor and adventurous activities, he was also religiously inclined. A couple of titles of his novels are derived from the Bible, while religious symbolism and Biblical allusions abound in his works.

In school, Hemingway was an all-rounder. He learned boxing which somehow resulted in damaging an eye; he was a good football player; also a member of the school orchestra and dramatic club and was an acknowledged debater. However, he was acclaimed for his writing skill when he edited his school magazine, composed light verse and tried his hand at some short stories. These compositions were juvenile but the would-be writer in him was discernible in these early pieces.

The temperamental incompatibility of his parents generated conflicting situations and young Ernest seems to have had a tension-ridden boyhood. Twice did he run away, and soon after graduation he dashed off to Kansas City, never really to return home. He desperately tried to join the army but was rejected on accounts of his damaged eye. He had no option but to join as a cub-reporter with the Kansas Star. It was here that he received training in writing vigorous prose and sharpen his critical view.

In the spring of 1918, Hemingway learnt that volunteers were required to drive Red Cross field ambulances on the Italian front. He grabbed the opportunity to be in the war, resigned his job with the Kansas Star and joined active service. He sailed for Italy in the summer of 1918. On reaching Milan, the young Hemingway, became a witness to a macabre scene of death and destruction when a munition factory was blown off shattering the men and women workers to fragments. Hemingway took part in the rescue operations. The incident left an indelible scar on his psyche. Later, he was sent to the Italian front with his ambulance section.

Apart from driving the ambulance, the volunteers had to supply canteen items to the soldiers.Enthusiastic and daring Hemingway persuaded the Italian officers to let him carry the Red Cross supplies right up to the trenches. On one such occasion while distributing chocolates to the soldiers, amid heavy artillery fire, Hemingway noticed a wounded soldier struggling for life. He immediately carried him on his back and ran to the ambulance. A mortar shell pierced his leg.Limping and bleeding, he made it to the first-aid post to save the fellow soldier. Later, he fell unconscious and was operated upon in a hospital in Milan. More than two hundred shell fragments were removed from his leg and body in a dozen operations.

As one of Hemingway’s friend confided, Hemingway was "literally shot to pieces" during World War I. He returned to the USA, bringing with him his shell-ridden uniform, and spent his time in reading, writing and fishing. He got married in 1921 and left for Paris. Friendship with Gertrude Stein and other literary figures of the time stirred the dormant novelist in him and he plunged into the world of creative writing.

The Sun Also Rises came out in 1926 and brought him fame. The novel deals at one level with the love affair of Jake and Brett, but at another level, it shows the inhuman side of man shattered by war and studies the dishonest and fake human beings like Robert Cohn. In his next novel, A Farewell to Arms, the author takes us back to the war to show still another side of war experiences. Now, Frederic and Catherine are the sufferers.

The novel graphically describes the movement of troops, the life in an army mess, the boredom and the tedium. Wounded Frederic is shifted to a hospital where he meets Catherine, the nurse. They fall in love, but are separated on account of Frederic’s involvement in a military debacle. They are re-united only to be parted permanently with Catherine’s death in childbirth.

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Spanish Civil War forms the backdrop while Green Hills of Africa is an account of a hunting Safari in East Africa, Death in the Afternoon is about bullfighting and The Old Man and the Sea records the adventures of an old man who catches the biggest fish of this life.

Hemingway has chosen to write about people in love, in war and in violent action, for which he is often criticised. Nick Adams, for example, the boy (and later young man) in his stories contained in In Our Time is exposed to violence, death and destruction. Critics feel that this over-dosage of killings and wounding is as much harmful for the society as for the writer. On close reading, however, one realises that Hemingway does not relish annihilation, rather, he is trying to stop it by showing the effect of the events on human psyche. Nick is affected by the psychological wound and Nick as a young man in World War I is fed up with it all. He has made a "separate peace" with the enemy and has decided not to fight any more. As a scholar points out, Hemingway, is trying "to expose the reactions of man under the pressure of the extreme in psychological and physical environment" (Joseph Defalco). He is not glorifying war, wound and death.

Hemingway’s Nick Adams is, like his other heroes, an honest, virile and sensitive man. He is an outdoor male, he has guts but he is very nervous. He is the typical "Hemingway hero" following the "Hemingway code". He has seen violence, disorder and misery and now he is learning to live in this world to which he has been introduced early in life.

Despite his disillusionment and despair, Hemingway recognised the invincible spirit of man. Man struggles in life, he fails, falls in existential angst and yet, he can stand up to be a victor. His Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls dies while accomplishing his arduous mission but through him, the author shows what "man can do and what he endures". To his biographer A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway once said, "I’ve always preferred to believe that man is undefeated". He had respect for the dignity, decency and heroism of common man.

Hemingway led a colourful life. He saw adventures and misadventures, love, sex, action and the plunging into the abyss of despair. He married four times and as one of his wives recorded, living with Ernest was a "nightmare", yet it was great. During one of his African safaris, Hemingway encountered death twice within 24 hours. He was reported dead and the American papers carried his obituaries. Recovering from his injuries sustained in the accidents, Hemingway chanced to read the newspaper and he enjoyed his own obituaries. While in Paris in the early twenties, he was struggling to establish himself as a writer. With all his stories coming back, rejected by the editors, he and his first wife were almost starving. Hemingway’s biographers record how he managed to steal a pigeon-a-day for dinner, from the Park Nationale, Paris.On one of his journeys in Switzerland, the young man Hemingway once jumped from the running mountain railway train chugging its way laboriously up the hill, to pluck flowers for a beautiful co-passenger, and jumped back into the compartment to offer her the gift.

This lively man developed "shell shock" or "traumatic neurosis" towards the middle of his life. Like his Santiago (the hero of The Old Man and the Sea) he ventured too far off, transgressed his human limits and got afflicted when physical and psychological troubles made life impossible for him. He was rewarded for his literary excellence when he received the Nobel Prize in 1954. But, the inability to write, the insomnia and nightmares, his preoccupation with death and the phobia of being tracked by the FBI made him highly insecure, obsessed and paranoid. On the morning of July 2, 1961, Mary Hemingway heard a shot and found her husband in a pool of blood with his shotgun lying nearby. What Hemingway in his novel The Sun Also Rises says through Jake, "we pay for all the things we go through", came out to be true in his case.