BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

SEEING WITH OTHER EYES
A Reflection on the Hemingway Message

Ibought a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Scribners, 1926, 1970) in a secondhand store. I read it and asked myself, Is this all there is? It seemed that Hemingway was saying very little although he said it well. Later I decided to review Hemingway’s works and so I read it again, this time in The Hemingway Reader (Scribner’s, 1953) with a foreword and introductions by Charles Poore.

My attention was called to the two quotations at the beginning of the book. One is from Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation." The other is Ecclesiastes 1:4-7, a reflection on life’s futility from which the book’s title comes. So it is suggested that Hemingway’s novel intended to represent the dilemma of young people disillusioned by World War I savagery. But the lesson, if intended, was lost on many, for "All over America and in the world at large young men and women took uninvited guidance from it, though Hemingway viewed this development moodily. . . .

"The heart of the story . . . is the tragedy of limited responsibility in the face of limitless temptation" (Poore, 88).

The characters in this story who are found to be in Paris seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in restaurants and bars eating and drinking and drinking and drinking, sometimes getting drunk. There is endless conversation and sometimes, by implication, fornication. Considerable space in the story is taken up by a trout fishing expedition in Spain and even more time by a bullfighting festival.

A femme fatale defeats a series of "lovers" and in the end is left with the narrator; their relationship, which has been casual throughout the story, now appears to be uncertain. Hemingway’s own description of the theme of the book was "Promiscuity—no solution" (Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway. A Life Story, Scribner’s, 1969).

Regardless of what he said about the theme, Hemingway’s life was to become much like that of his characters. He had been a correspondent in Paris and had spent considerable time with bullfights in Spain. One of the distinctive features of all his fiction is a clear and detailed description of places. He had an eye for geography.

Raised by pious middle-class Protestants in Oak Park, Illinois, he rejected their morality and developed his own pragmatic ethical perspective. Married four times (which did not prevent additional sexual assignations), he proposed to the fourth wife that they not follow her parents’ Christian Science or his own Congregational tradition "as well as the various Puritanical misconceptions about human conduct. The substitute he proposed was hedonistic and sentimentally humanistic. He and Mary must evolve their own rules of behavior, said he, believing in each other" (Baker, 450).

Hemingway’s father was a physician, his mother a musician. The family had a Michigan vacation home. One thing Ernest accepted from his father was the love for hunting and fishing he would pursue throughout his life. The family style was rigid. His father "forbade all recreational activity on the Lord’s Day—no play with friends, no games, no concerts. . . . Major infractions of the rules were swiftly punished with a razor strop . . . followed by injunctions to kneel and ask God’s forgiveness. Grace [his mother] was on the whole a good deal more permissive" (Baker, 9).

As an adult, however, Ernest was more critical of his mother than his father. "He frankly condemned his mother as a domineering shrew who had driven his father to suicide" (Baker, 452).

Hemingway’s life, as described by Baker, began in 1899 and ended in 1961 when he committed suicide. After serving briefly as a newspaper reporter, he went to Italy during World War I as a Red Cross ambulance driver, where he was wounded by an Austrian shell.

After the war he became a correspondent in Paris, where he evidently gathered material for The Sun Also Rises. He became a correspondent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Later he went to England and then to Europe during World War II. All of these experiences became grist for his fiction writing.

Near the end of his life, Hemingway showed unmistakable signs of mental illness and was twice sent to the Mayo Clinic, where he was treated with electric shocks. But according to Michael Reynolds, mental instability had affected Hemingway throug adulthood "ever since 1919 when he returned from World War I: when euphoric nothing could daunt him; when bottomed out he was increasingly paranoid, moody and implacable" (Hemingway. The Final Years, 235-236).

Twenty-six books by Hemingway are listed in Baker’s biography. But it appears to me that the following four are his more notable works: The Sun Also Rises (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). For the last of these he received the Pulitzer Prize.

I have summarized above the plot of The Sun Also Rises with a lesson Hemingway himself evidently did not follow. Baker reports that Hemingway "boasted that he had bedded every woman he had ever wanted and some that he hadn’t" (465). A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are war stories each with a romantic ingredient. As Baker comments regarding a later novel, "The background, as always, was love and death. In the foreground stood the embattled hero" (475). "War," Hemingway said, "was the best subject of all. It offered maximum material combined with maximum action" (Baker, 161).

In the former of these two war stories, the protagonist is an ambulance driver and an officer in the Italian army as Hemingway had been. He is injured, as Hemingway was, gets sent to a hospital where a friendly and available nurse works the night shift and provides him with more than the usual medical attention. After convalescing he gets back to the front, participates in a retreat, and as an officer is accused of deserting his men. Such deserters are being shot, but he avoids it by diving into a river, running away, catching a ride on a slow-moving military freight train, and finding his way back to the nurse.

But he must run farther because the police are after him. So he and the nurse escape to Switzerland by rowing across a lake during the night. Here they find pleasant living conditions and in due time her baby comes, but she dies in childbirth. "Love and death," as Baker observes.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is set in the Spanish Civil War. The direct action in this 500-page book takes place within 68 hours, although there are a number of flashbacks to fill in background. The hero, Robert Jordan, is an American who has come to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans in opposition to the Fascists. Much of the interaction takes place in a mountain cave. Here with what appears to be a group of irregular troops are two women: one a hardheaded middle-aged mama and the other one young, nubile, and available to Robert Jordan.

The battle is not successful, and the survivors are retreating when Robert Jordan’s horse stumbles and Jordan’s leg is broken. He cannot continue with the group and expects to die because the enemies are in hot pursuit. But it is implied that before he dies he will at least be able to kill Lieutenant Berrendo.

The Old Man and the Sea is a tale of a Cuban fisherman who caught and subdued a prize marlin after a long struggle which took his boat far out to sea. When he finally has captured the fish, it is too large and heavy for him to lift into the boat, so he lashes it to the side and sets sail for the shore. The fish is attacked by sharks and the old man kills the sharks one after the other, but as he nears the shore, the fish has been half eaten by sharks.

At the end the old man finds himself talking to the fish. "‘Half fish,’ he said. ‘Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for nothing.’"

It is a Hemingway ending. And there’s one last word. "‘Fight them,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight them until I die’" (Poore, 651- 652).

What about Hemingway and his writing justifies our attention after this passage of time? In An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, 1961) C. S. Lewis asked why read literature. "The nearest I have yet got to an answer," he said, "is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own" (137).

Can reading Hemingway do this for us? Certainly it can let us "see with other eyes." At the end of the volume in which he describes Hemingway’s decline, Reynolds observes, "Ernest Hemingway was the embodiment of America’s promise. . . . Before he burned out, he lived constantly on the edge of the American experience. In the process, he fathered sons, wrote books, influenced friends, and won every prize available as a writer" (360).

As he came to his 60s, not only was Hemingway’s mental capacity failing but his body was also worn out. The story of his life itself serves as a cautionary tale for those who can hear it.

So this is the message of Hemingway: Life is hard, much of it is banal, and sooner or later we die. His citing of a text from Ecclesiastes in The Sun Also Rises indicates that he had already noticed this early in his career. Do we need to read Hemingway to comprehend this lesson? Maybe not, but it could help.

The efforts at religious education by his parents and the Congregational Christian Church seem to have gone largely awry. Baker observes that Hemingway, "turning to and away from the Church, arriving finally at a kind of intellectualized humanism while protesting that he missed the ghostly comforts of institutionalized religion as a man who is cold and wet misses the consolations of good whiskey" (viii).

His father was troubled by Hemingway’s portrayal of the underside of life. In response to In Our Time, one of the early novels, he wrote, "The brutal you have surely shown the world. Look for the joyous, uplifting and optimistic and spiritual in character" (Baker, 160). From what I have noted above about his father’s rigid method of child-raising, it appears that his father was late with his suggestion.

I have found myself reflecting on the question of why the compilers of the Hebrew Bible included the sordid tales of sexual promiscuity and violence which appear in Judges 19–21. If such material appeared in our mass media, citizens would be aroused. Yet we make the Bible available to our children and urge them to read it.

It appears the compilers wanted readers to know how badly it went when "there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes" (Judg. 21:25 NRSV). As those of us who have read farther know, they did get a king, but this did not solve all of their problems. Yet the story leads eventually to Jesus, crucified as King of the Jews, a different kind of king from what many had expected. This part of the story seems not to have impressed Hemingway.

Hemingway’s characters had to deal with the cold, hard realities of life and death. Like them, he himself had edged up toward death several times, and when his body no longer served him, he ended his life. As Reynolds observes, "Always looking for others to blame for his problems and quandaries, Ernest usually found women to be the responsible party" (25).

But he could craft a story and he turned them out one after the other. Even as we reject the primitive and pagan morals of Hemingway’s characters, we may take note of their courage in the face of violence. Love and death are important realities.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, a longtime editor and writer, contributes a monthly column to the Daily Courier (Connellsville, Pa.).