In the Mind of Hemingway

There are two categories of people in the world: cat lovers and dog lover. Several famous cat lovers influenced the world we live in today and our culture as societies. One of the most famous writers that were obsessed with those furry friends was Ernest Hemingway.

Before jumping into the author’s accomplishments, you might enjoy knowing that his property was filled with a population of polydactyl cats. Polydactyl cats have an anomaly called polydactyly which causes cats to born with more than the usual number of toes on one or more of its paws. It touches their front paws and appears less frequently on the back paws, and his very rare on all four. Those cats genetically inherited this trait and are mostly found along the East Coast of North America in the United States and Canada, and also in the South West of England and Wales. Around forty to fifty cats, referred to as Hemingway cats lived on his property in Key West in Florida and are six-toed. The story of Hemingway and his polydactyl cats started with a kitten called Snow White. Snow White was a gift given by the captain Stanley Dexter given to the author in the 1930s. The captain believed they brought good luck, that the extra toes made them better hunters and that it provided better balance to the ship on rough seas. To this day, the descendants of Snow White live on the property of Hemingway’s home.

Ernest Miller Hemingway is an American novelist and journalist from Illinois. He deeply influenced the American and British fiction of the 20th century thanks to his succinct prose and realist vision of the world he lives in. He also develops the “iceberg theory” where the true message of the narrative lays underneath the plot.

Hemingway is an important figure of history: after high school, he did not proceed into higher education and started working for the Star, a newspaper based in Kansas City, in 1917. When the First World War happened, he was not able to join the army as a soldier because of a defective but he managed to participate to the war effort by joining the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He was injured during the war on the 8th of July 1918 when he was not even 19 yet. He got decorated for his acts of bravery and hospitalized in Milan. There, he fell in love with a nurse who declined to marry him. Those experiences at a young age truly changed him and influenced his future writing.

He went back to America after that and started working odd jobs in Chicago while starting to write again. He then went to France as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. In Paris, he encountered other American writers like Fitzgerald who pushed him to pursue his non-journalistic writing. Thus, in 1924, his collection of stories titled In Our Time was released in Paris, and published in 1925 in New York City. He knows his first big success with the publication of the novel The Sun also rises in 1926. This novel underlines the pessimistic feeling of the “Lost Generation” a phrase made famous by Hemingway. More generally, the Lost Generation refers to the post-World War I generation, those who came out of age during the war. It is more particularly describing American writers and artists who came to live and work in Paris.

The success of his first novel put Hemingway under the spotlight which he desperately wanted for his career, he wanted to be known for his writing and successful but he also hated the attention. He occupies his post-war year with the writing of several short stories which he becomes renown for and with a lot of travels although still living in Paris. In 1929, he publishes A Farewell to Arms, a novel which overshadowed his shorter fictions. This novel is truly inspired by his life during the war, his life as a young soldier in Italy who falls in love. With A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway develops his style as an author, a lyrical but quite dark mixing war narratives and love story, making a powerful narrative.

Hemingway is fascinated by the war and it stays a point of focus throughout his narratives. It started with A Farewell to Arms which depicts the pointlessness of the war where the main character loses everything dear to him. With later works like For Whom the Bell Tolls published in 1940, Hemingway uses his love and knowledge about Spain to talk about the Spanish Civil War. For Whom the Bell Tolls is composed of dialogue, flashbacks and different stories which permit to Hemingway to give a vivid portraiture of Spain at that time and the different characters involved. Moreover, it gives a detailed narrative of the cruelty and inhumanity created by the civil war. Unlike A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls focuses on the comradeship during the war.

Then, when the Second World War progresses, Hemingway goes to London as a journalist. He is involved with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on the 6th of June 1944. He saw a lot of what happened in Normandy and during the Battle of the Bulge which is the bloodiest battle for the US forces during World War II. He then participated in the liberation of Paris (19th to the 25th of August 1944) which ends the occupying of the French capital. Although he did not fight, he impressed soldiers by being a man of courage in the battle and a man of knowledge in military matters, guerrilla activities and intelligence collection.

After the war, he returns to his home to Cuba and starts working on his writing again. He travels a lot during this period and is injured during a plane crash to a trip to Africa. Shortly after, in 1953, he receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea published in 1952. It is a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who knows extended struggle until he dies eaten by a shark during the long voyage home. This book plays an important role in Hemingway gaining the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 which was praised by critics and the public. This was much needed for Hemingway since his previous novel Across the River and into the Trees published in 1950 had been damned by the critics. This novel about an army officer who dies while on leave in Venice is built on successive layers of symbolism, following on the “iceberg theory”. Only a few contemporary critics praised the novel which deeply wounded Hemingway, especially since most people close to him agreed with the majority of critics, like his wife Mary who said: “I kept my mouth shut. Nobody had appointed me my husband’s editor”. Thankfully, later literary scholars consider the novel better than the contemporary reception: Carlos Baker even compares it to The Tempest by Shakespeare, both being not major works for the authors but on with an “elegiac tone”. Likewise, Jeffrey Meyers considers Across the River and into the Trees as a turning point for Hemingway with the new confessional mode that is present in the work. Critics believe that the new structure made Hemingway’s style

By the 1960s, Hemingway went back to the United States, he tried to live his life and do his work, everything was good for him for a while until his anxiety and depression took over. He is hospitalized twice in Minnesota because of it and receives electroshock treatments because of it. Electroconvulsive therapy became highly popular in the US in the 1940s, it is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are provoked to the patient to provide relief from mental disorders like major depressive disorder, mania and schizophrenia. Its use is highly controversial. Two days after returning to his home in Idaho, Hemingway takes his life with a shotgun on the 2nd of July 1961. Hemingway left behind him several manuscripts some of which has been published like A Moveable Feast, published in 1964, a memoir of his years in Paris before he was a famous author.

Hemingway still lives in his writings with characters who embody his values and view of life. In The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the main character is a young man who is strong, will-powered and self-confident who is still affected and sensitive towards the events he has lived during wartime. For Hemingway, war is a key theme and issue. For him, it was a strong symbol of the world: complex, morally ambiguous, that inevitably caused pain, hurt and destruction. His characters are created around the idea that to survive such a world and have a chance of survival, the characters had to act with honour, bravery and dignity. This set of principles is known as the “Hemingway code”: it is a particular set of qualities, way of acting that his given to characters to be considered as heroic figures, it is what Hemingway calls “grace under pressure”, it is a kind of victory against the instinct of preservation and theme widely studied in The Old Man and the Sea.

Finally, Hemingway is a key-author of the 20th century with his style being the most imitated. He made his prose truly authentic, trying to erase any language inessentials, erasing all traces of verbosity or embellishment and sentimentality. His goal was to be objective and as honest as possible. Hemingway’s style was fresh, simple and natural. His narratives are composed by descriptions of series of actions. He uses short and simple sentences with no comments or emotional rhetoric involved. It makes a concentrated, concrete and unemotional prose but is often resonant with the repetition and rhythm given with a few adverbs and adjectives used. This detached quality can also bring irony through understatement when talking of subjects like the war, death and pain. His innovative style influenced novels worldwide, especially those written from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Nevertheless, Hemingway was an interesting persona by itself through his contradictory character. He knew fame quite rapidly, a fame that was surpassed by few American authors of the 20th century. His cold fashion, masculine, virile way of writing, echoing with what he experienced during the war is a coating for a much more delicate and sensible aesthetic with particular attention given to details. He was what we can call a celebrity at a young age and his popularity and fame are still validated today by critics and scholars, which makes him probably one of the most famous cat lovers for the past two centuries.

Composed by,

Cécile Fardoux, Undergraduate of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen