Stranger on Earth

An allegory? A Moby Dick imitation? A morality tale? A (semi-)autobiographical account? How should Ernest Hemingway’s signature work The Old Man and the Sea (1952) be read? One fact is carved in stone. The work has a gargantuan reputation, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and reminding the Nobel Prize committee that acknowledgement of Hemingway’s genius had been long overdue. Readers come to the novella with certain expectations, and usually leave slightly puzzled, unsure of its “message” and yet utterly convinced of the power of its composition. The novella showcases Hemingway’s laconic prose style at its most sophisticated. It contains only bare bones, devoid of longwinded character and setting descriptions. The reader is given little, and must therefore work twice as hard to steer through Hemingway’s “cruel sea.” Ostensibly, the novella is about an aged, down-and-out fisherman who has to fish alone and finds himself entangled in a body and mind battle with a giant marli...

From The New York Times July 4, 2012 To Use and Use Not By  JULIE BOSMAN In an interview in The Paris Review in 1958 Ernest Hemingway made an admission that has inspired frustrated novelists ever since: The final words of “A Farewell to Arms,” his wartime masterpiece, were rewritten “39 times before I was satisfied.” Those endings have become part of literary lore, but they have never been published together in their entirety, according to his longtime publisher, Scribner. A new edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” which was originally published in 1929, will be released next week, including all the alternate endings, along with early drafts of other passages in the book. The new edition is the result of an agreement between Hemingway’s estate and Scribner, now an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It is also an attempt to redirect some of the attention paid in recent years to Hemingway’s swashbuckling, hard-drinking image — through fictional depictions in the best-se...

On May 10th of 1934, a month after the publication of his new novel, Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend, Ernest Hemingway, and asked for his honest opinion on the book — a tale about Dick and Nicole Diver, a couple based largely on mutual acquaintances of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Gerald and Sara Murphy. Hemingway certainly responded with honesty. His engrossing reply — a letter that contains plenty of advice for any writer — can be read below. (Note: Hemingway's spelling is shown accurately. For example, he twice wrote "write" where, presumably, he meant "right.") ( Source: Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961; Image: Ernest Hemingway, via. ) Key West 28 May 1934 Dear Scott: I liked it and I didn't. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can't refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them,...

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is now remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring work, not least because of its detailed and personal account of the Spanish Civil War. Its laconic treatment of the universal subjects of friendship, sex, and love – essentials that give additional meaning to life in times of war – is the reason for its lasting appeal. The plot is crudely simple, like the characters’ motives. American Robert Jordan decides to do his part for the country he claims to love by working as a dynamiter for a republican guerrilla unit, and one day, owing to an assignment to blow up a bridge, he finds himself among a group of disparate rebels hiding high up in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra. The novel records only three and a half days of Robert’s experience (and yet this is the longest Hemingway novel); at the end of the “adventure,” things go horribly wrong, as foreshadowed, and the reader is forced to leave the hero behind and move on – just like the re...

Bumby (Jack/John Hemingway) One of the most endearing chapters in the memoir will have to be “The Education of Mr. Bumby,” in which Hemingway the father describes a conversation with his first-born in the Place St. Michel café. Bumby was a precocious and sensitive child. Having been told by his French tutor that the writing profession was a difficult metiér , he asked his father if it was really so. “… Tell me papa is it difficult to write?” “Sometimes.” “Touton says it is very difficult and I must always respect it.” “You respect it.” (204) Then Bumby asked if they could go by Silver Beach’s bookstore (Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company , the mispronunciation affectionately retained by Hemingway) because “she is always very nice to me” (205). Bumby Hemingway then refers to a quarrel he had with Hadley about something in which “she had been right and [he] had been wrong seriously” (205). This had been witnessed by young Bumby, who said: “Mother...

Hadley Hemingway Hadley and Ernest Hemingway in 1922 The intimate passages concerning Hemingway’s first wife Hadley reveal to us Hemingway the husband and lover. Some of these passages (especially those in the intriguing chapter “The Pilot Fish and the Rich”) were expurgated by Mary Hemingway, causing the man to come across as an unrepentant cheat who blamed his adulterous behaviour on Hadley. The Restored Edition tells us that this is quite far from the truth. Hadley and Hemingway had a close bond. They did many things together, even tried to grow out their hair together (humorously described in “Secret Pleasures”). When he describes their love-making, which facilitated his writing process, it is always with a touch of tenderness and hope. Hadley and Hemingway used to go skiing in Schruns in Austria (he had found it an agreeable place to write). Despite the awful avalanches that would occur now and then, Hemingway’s memories of the place were mostly romantic...

Hemingway photographed in Milan in 1918 Before I post the other two parts of the 3-part essay on Ernest Hemingway and A Moveable Feast , I thought I would share this intriguing article taken from bbc.co.uk. The newly released letters by Hemingway further prove that my reading of him as a “sensitive macho” is accurate. 30 March 2012 Ernest Hemingway letters reveal upset over cat Newly released letters by writer Ernest Hemingway have shed light on his distress over the death of his cat. The celebrated author was forced to put down Uncle Willie after he suffered two broken legs in a road accident. "Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years," Hemingway wrote to a friend in the 1950s. The set of 15 letters will be displayed to the public at the JF Kennedy Library in the US. Hemingway's correspondence over several years was with Gianfranco Ivancich, a younger Italian man with whom he struck up a friendship in Veni...

HEMINGWAY The ring of that surname alone is enough to conjure up in most people’s minds a host of unflattering descriptions: “male chauvinist pig” (a favourite amongst his feminist readers), “vacuous cad with a drinking problem,” “bullfight enthusiast stricken with machismo,” “Indiana Jones fancying himself a writer.” The man himself might have been all of these things, but what he was not was an unthinking, unfeeling man. This becomes apparent if one approaches his classic works A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises without the above-mentioned preconceptions; but if one really wants to know the man behind the brilliance of For Whom the Bell Tolls , one must get to him through his posthumously published memoir. A Moveable Feast – the 2009 Restored Edition allows the reader to do just that. Though it should be regarded as “fiction,” as dictated by Hemingway himself, it does invite the willing reader into the rambunctious world of the man, and along the way, he is treated...