Hemingway plus 50

This past week was the fiftieth anniversary of Ernest Hemingway taking his own life.  Hemingway is my favorite American author.  On trips to Key West I would tell my sons the story of Hemingway living above the bar called “Sloppy Joe's” (the real Sloppy Joe's is across the street from the tourist stop today).  How every morning he would sit in front of his typewriter and churn out 500 to 1,000 words then head downstairs and drink himself into unconsciousness. 

In the summer of 2006 I brought my family to Sun Valley, Idaho for a conference.  Just outside Sun Valley was the small town of Ketchum.  It was there that Hemingway lived…and died.  He’s buried there, a simple tombstone, a powerful voice, a tragic end.

I think the reason I love Hemingway so much is because there is (notice the present tense) eloquence in his simple words.  He doesn’t bowl you over with polysyllabic words to make his point.  When he writes “the soldier bled and died”, you get the imagery.  He wrote uncomplicated prose and lived a complicated life.

I’ve read “A Farewell to Arms” perhaps a dozen times.  It is a novel, one of his earliest, yet it discloses more about the heart and heartbreak of the man than any other book he wrote.  It is the story of an American expatriate who volunteers to serve in the Italian Army at the beginning of World War I.  He is wounded, falls in love with an English nurse and embarks on a dangerous course of action, jeopardizing his own freedom, for the love of this woman.  There is a pain and honesty in the tragic ending beyond words.

Hemingway’s story mirrored his own life.  He did serve in the Italian army during the first World War.  He was seriously wounded.  He fell hopelessly in love with the English nurse who cared for him.  And, she broke his heart.

Hemingway’s power as a writer came from that heartbreak.  I don’t believe he ever truly recovered.  Oh, he led an adventurous life:  he ran with the bulls; he watched firsthand the Nazi’s help Franco’s forces in Spain defeat the republicans in ’36; he went on safari; he sailed, he drank, he had three wives and dozens of female lovers; he wrote masterpieces like “The Sun Also Rises”, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, “The Old Man and the Sea”, and “For Whom the Bell Tolls”; and his heart never recovered from the lost love of the English nurse.

Hemingway understood rejection; he felt it and lived it and no pain is worse.  Where he tragically missed the mark was how he dealt with it.  You can’t run away, can’t hide in a bottle or in taking risks.  You have to live with it.  A recent visitor told me she worried I was “too hopeful about things working out when I leave this place”.  You keep holding on to hope, you’ll get your heartbroken.  I laughed.  My heart’s already broken.  It can’t break more.  Hope is that thing we hang onto for dear life when everything around us tells us otherwise.  Hope keeps us going when it would be more than reasonable to give up.  Hemingway was brilliant, but he lacked hope.  And, hope matters.