Hemingway's Life and Fiction

For those who come here looking for a discussion of Lebanese politics (approximately all of you), I am sorry to disappoint you today. This is going to be a post about Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway experiences often mirrored those of his characters. He was an avid fan of bullfighting, he loved fishing off Key West, he was an ambulance driver in World War I, and he reported on the Spanish Civil War -- all material that would later be used to animate his many characters. But there was one thing that Hemingway did, which one of his characters would never consider. On July 2, 1961 he placed a double-barreled shotgun just above his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

To understand the signifigance of this, you have to understand Hemingway's protagonists. They are uniformly tough, macho men. They think in short, declarative sentences. They act according to a personal code. They never admit to weakness. It is one of Hemingway's great methods for giving the reader a heightened sense of his characters' sensations. When Frederic Henry winces in A Farewell to Arms, it has a greater impact than a more emotive character screaming out in agony. We know that Henry doesn't show his feelings easily.

Just as certainly as his characters are stoic, Hemingway's plots are almost inevitably tragic. Again, it is the great emotional payoff from the strength and stoicism of his characters; their final destruction is given a sense of grandeur because we know their strength. Hemingway's tragic worldview was not just a literary tool, it was his fundamental view of the world. The most famous passage from A Farewell to Arms reflects it best:

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

Despite Hemingway's many strengths, he oftens stretches this worldview to a point of absurdity. Everything inevitably ends badly; the world inevitably breaks the good and strong and everyone else too. Ether you are killed by Franco's troops, your true love dies in childbirth, impotency prevents you from having a relationship with your beloved, you ruin your marriage by being unable to resist your children's nanny, or sharks eat your prize fish on the way back to shore (the respective endings of For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises,A Moveable Feast, and The Old Man In the Sea). If his characters are just a little too macho to be believable, the pervasive tragedy of his plots sometimes borders on comical.

So what message can we take away from Hemingway's suicide, in light of his life's work? One possible lesson is that even the great writer himself could not live up to the characters in his novel: in the end, the great patriarch of realism was portraying characters that had never existed.

As for my pet theory, I have no evidence for it apart from the widely available facts of Hemingway's life. But, if his fiction is any guide, Hemingway expected and needed his life to end in tragedy. He gave fortune plenty of chances to comply -- he observed the D-Day landing in Normandy during World War II, and took plenty of other risks that could have cost him his life. But he kept on surviving: he was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He seemed destined to die at a ripe old age as a literary giant with millions of fans worldwide, not broken by the world. So, when the world failed to provide him with his tragic ending, he provided it himself. Whatever else it was, it was certainly an ending that no work of fiction could ever do justice.