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Welcome to our
Frequently-Asked-Questions section!
Just click on a question below and you'll be taken directly to the answer.
Much has been made of the "Lost
Generation" phrase that appears at the front of Hemingway's 1926 novel, The Sun
Also Rises. Hemingway attributed the phrase to Gertrude Stein who supposedly heard
her French garage owner speak of his young auto mechanics, and their poor repair skills,
as "une generation perdue." Stein would expand the remark to describe all the
disillusioned young men who had survived World War I and who seemed to end up in France
with no real purpose, but because of its relatively low cost of living.
For the most part the "Lost Generation" defines a sense of
moral loss or aimlessness. The World War seemed to destroy for many the idea that if you
acted properly, good things would happen. But so many good young men went to war and died,
or returned damaged, both physically and mentally, that their faith in the moral
guideposts that had given them hope before, were no longer valid...they were
"Lost."
Some other novels of the post war period echoed this sentiment,
including Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise which showed the same young
generation masking their general depression behind the forced exuberance of the Jazz Age.
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby does the same, to a degree, where the illusion of
happiness hides a sad loneliness.
Hemingway was a little distressed that so much emphasis was placed on
the phrase, and that he became the leader of the whole "Lost Generation"
concept, when he really didn't agree with the idea at all. In letters to his editor, Max
Perkins, he tried to clarify the theme of his novel. The point of the book for him was
"that the earth abideth forever," hence his use of the verse from Ecclesiastes
from which the book's title originates. He felt "there was no such thing as a lost
generation" and that Gertrude Stein's comment was a piece of "splendid
bombast." The vast majority of readers however, didn't see it that way, or couldn't
see it that way.
As for the reasons
Hemingway killed himself...there were many. At the age of 61 he had a bad combination of
physical and mental ailments caused by a lifetime of neglect and fast living. Mentally he
had lost his memory during electroshock treatment at the Mayo clinic. Physically he
suffered from rapid weight loss, skin disease, alcoholism, failing eyesight, diabetes,
hepatitis, high blood pressure and impotence. Basically his body had broken down, he could
no longer write and he was severely depressed, and rather than endure a lingering and ugly
death he decided, ironically, that the courageous thing to do was to shoot himself.
Hemingway pioneered a new
style of writing that is almost commonplace today. He did away with all the florid prose
of the 19th century Victorian era and replaced it with a lean, clear prose based on action
rather than reflection. He also employed a technique by which he would leave out essential
information of the story under the belief that omission can sometimes add strength to a
narrative. It was a style of subtlety which contrasted greatly (and in a way enhanced) the
themes he wrote about...war, blood sports like bullfighting or boxing, crime, etc. It is
hard to find anyone writing today who doesn't owe a debt of influence to Hemingway.
What is Hemingway's theory of
omission or "iceberg principle?"
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway outlined his "theory of
omission" or "iceberg principle." He states:
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may
omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough,
will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated
them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of
it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does
not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."
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When Fitzgerald met Hemingway in Paris
in 1924, Fitzgerald was already a very successful novelist (This Side of Paradise
was a bestseller that made Fitzgerald wealthy and famous) while Hemingway was an obscure
writer whose small book Three Stories and Ten Poems had for all intents and
purposes been privately published. Despite this disparity in their careers, Fitzgerald
hero-worshipped Hemingway. He found in Ernest all the qualities that he desired in
himself, talent, athleticism, good looks, unfailing confidence, and more talent.
Fitzgerald did some really important things for Hemingway's career...he introduced
Hemingway to his publisher, Scribners, and helped in the editing of his first major novel The
Sun Also Rises, which was published to great critical acclaim. In fact Fitzgerald
seemed more interested in furthering Hemingway's career than his own. Ultimately
Fitzgerald's alcoholism ruined their friendship. By all accounts Fitzgerald was
intolerable when drunk...he would create so many embarrassing scenes that his friends
began to avoid him, and this is what Hemingway did. Hemingway welcomed Scott's company
when sober, but this seemed a rare condition for Fitzgerald. They would last meet (though
this is debated by many of the biographers) in 1937 in Hollywood, where Hemingway was
discussing a documentary he had worked on, and where Fitzgerald was working as a
screenwriter.
Zelda was skeptical of Hemingway on several fronts. She didn't buy the
macho image that he portrayed and thought he might even be a homosexual, which made her
wonder about her own husband, who seemed to worship Hemingway. She wasn't that impressed
with his writing either. But it seems mainly she was jealous of her husbands genuine
affection toward Hemingway, and she didn't quite know how to handle it. Hemingway saw
early on that Zelda was mentally ill (she spent years in sanitariums, and eventually died
in one in 1948 when it caught on fire) and he berated Scott for letting her control so
much of his life. Hemingway always thought that Scott had great talent and genius, but
that he drank it away and let Zelda wear him down so much that he couldn't write as well
as he should have. Hemingway had watched his own mother dominate his father, whom he loved
dearly, and believed her dominance led to his father's suicide; he didn't want to see the same happen to Fitzgerald.
Hemingway's first wife was Hadley
Richardson. They married in 1921 and had a son, John, in 1923. They were
divorced in 1928. Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1928 and had two sons with
her, Patrick in 1928 and Gregory in 1931. He divorced Pauline in 1940 and married Martha
Gellhorn that same year. He divorced Martha in 1945 and married his fourth and final
wife, Mary Welsh, in 1946.
What is
the couple talking about in Hemingway's story "Hills Like White
Elephants"?
The couple is discussing the possibility of Jig (the
female character) getting an abortion. The man tries to reassure her about
the operation's simplicity, but he fails to understand the emotional impact of
an abortion on the woman, and this misunderstanding creates the underlying
tension of the story.
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I'm looking for a quote by
Hemingway that says "there is no hunting like the hunting of
men." Where does it come from?
The quote appeared in the April 1936 issue of Esquire. It was the first line of an article titled "On The Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter." The exact quote follows:
"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
This article has been reprinted in a book called Byline, Ernest Hemingway
which has recently been reissued. You can find it at our Lost Generation
Bookstore by clicking the link below.
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Could you explain what the
story "Old Man at the Bridge" is about?
 The story itself
was written from notes Hemingway had kept during his visit to the Ebro River in
April of 1938 as part of his coverage of the Spanish Civil War for the North
American Newspaper Association (NANA). Along with military trucks and troops
crossing a bridge over the Ebro, and civilians pulling carts with their
belongings, he saw and talked to an old man who was sitting at the foot of the
bridge. He was too tired to continue. Hemingway, perhaps realizing that his
situation would make a better short story than a dispatch, filed the story with
Ken Magazine instead of with NANA. The story, on its surface, is about an old
man who has left his village because of potential enemy artillery fire, has
walked some 12 kilometers, but can go no farther.
A certain degree irony that runs through the
story and is based on the juxtaposition of the old man having left his animals
and worrying about them dying, and the correspondent's having to leave the old
man, knowing that if he does so, the old man will die. The irony is that a cat,
a few doves, and two goats will have a better chance of survival than the old
man. But the old man doesn't complain
that he is likely to die, he worries about the animals. He doesn't complain that
he has no family, he worries about the animals. And he doesn't complain that he
has no place to go, even if he managed to get onto a truck ("I know no one
in that direction'). He simply continues to worry about the only
"friends" he seems to have left.
The irony at the end is that the correspondent
could help him but callously says, "There was nothing to do about him. It
was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray
overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact
that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that the old
man would ever have." This meaning that there was no luck - the
weather would sooner or later clear and the planes would fly and the old man
would be killed. Cats may be able to take care of themselves, but old men,
tired, alone in a war, cannot.
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Can you tell me more about
Hemingway's relationship with Gertrude Stein?
In 1920 - 1921,
Hemingway was working as a reporter in Chicago, and met and married Elizabeth
Hadley Richardson. He did not get along with one of the editors on the paper and
decided to go to Europe to concentrate on his writing. His first thoughts were
to go to Italy, but at the urging of the author Sherwood Anderson, he changed
his mind and decided to go to Paris. Anderson wrote him a letter of introduction
to (at least) two people, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Both Pound and Stein
would prove to be important on the one hand as writers and critics would would
help Hemingway in his own writing. But also because their lives and apartments
were the centers for the other expatriate artists of that time - John Dos Passos,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Miro, Picasso, etc. And as a collector of artwork, and
since she and Alice B. Toklas lived next to the Jardin de Luxembourg, Hemingway,
just by visiting her, was exposed to Cubist and Modernist paintings. (He would
visit he apartment for afternoon tea and then spend time in the Jardin viewing
the French Expressionist paintings).
Hemingway biographer Jeffery Meyers makes the
point that Hemingway saw in Stein much of his mother - they were both the same
age, both physically large women, both frustrated artists, and both competed,
and lost, to some extent to Hemingway. "Most significantly, Hemingway tried
to work out with Gertrude some of the strong Oedipal feelings he had for Grace.
'I always wanted to sleep with her and she knew it and it was a healthy feeling
and made more sense than some of the talk.' Such forbidden desires could be
safely expressed because he knew he could not actually sleep with a lesbian any
more than he could sleep with his mother."
It was Stein who first introduced Hemingway to
bullfighting and suggested that he visit Spain. She urged him to give up
journalism completely and concentrate on his writing, explaining to him about
the rhythm of prose and the power of the repetition of words. When she was
dissatisfied with some of his early work, she made him start over and to
concentrate more intensely. Hemingway felt so indebted to her that he made her
the godmother of his first son and had some of her work published in one of the
little magazines he was helping to edit.
Sadly, they suffered a falling-out in 1926.
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I need information on
the story "Soldier's Home." Can you help?
As with many of
Hemingway's short stories, understanding the title is helpful to understanding
the intent of the story. "Soldier's Home" can have two meanings; the
first is that [a] soldier is home, meaning that the soldier was home before,
went off to experience war, and then came home. All of this is told to the
reader within the first three paragraphs. But a second meaning of
"Soldier's Home" is similar to an "Old Person's Home."
In other words, a home in which someone lives who is unable to fully take care
of himself. They have been physically or mentally affected by something. Both
nuances of the title apply to Krebs. He certainly has gone away to war and come
back to his home. And he doesn't seem to be able to take care of himself - he
stays in bed much of the day, hasn't gotten a job yet, and has only vague plans
of going to Kansas City. But more than just this kind of laziness, there are
hints that he had, and now has lost, his belief in any form of authority. He is
disrespectful to his mother, does not abide by any religion seriously, and is
incapable of feeling any of what we might consider normal interests; love,
marriage, a job. ("Still, none of it had touched him.") But you
can make the point that it is religion that he has lost touch with the most.
Before the war he had gone to a Methodist college in Kansas and there is a
picture of him and his fraternity brothers wearing the same type of collar -
Hemingway's intimation that he had accepted religion before the war. But
afterwards, because of what he experienced at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the
Champagne, and Saint-Mihiel and in the Argonne Forest, he cannot even pray
with his mother. The soldier may be home, but he is not the boy who went away,
not at least in the former beliefs that helped to support him.
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Where did the title "For
Whom The Bell Tolls" come from, and what does it mean?
Hemingway took "For Whom The Bell Tolls" from "Meditation 17" of John Donne's (1572-1631)
work Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the
Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea,
Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy
friends, or of thine owne were; Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in
Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
The tolling of the bell refers to the act of ringing a bell (the death knell) at a funeral to indicate that someone has died. Hemingway is drawing a parallel between the death of one person and the consequent affect on everyone, and the loss of Spain to the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The loss of one man or woman diminishes all of humanity just as the loss of Spain will diminish the extent of a free continent of Europe.
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Where did the
title "Across The River and Into the Trees" come from and what does it
mean?
Hemingway draws this title from the last words of Civil War General "Stonewall" Jackson.
At 9:00 PM Saturday, May 2nd, 1863 Jackson was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was shot through the left upper arm just beneath the shoulder. The humerus was fractured--the rachial artery was injured. He bled profusely. A second bullet entered the lateral left upper forearm and exited diagonally from the medial lower third of the forearm. A third bullet struck his right hand fracturing the second and third metacarpal bones and lodged beneath the skin on the back of his hand. These wounds would lead to his left arm being amputated, and his living for eight days.
On the following Sunday, at 1:30 PM, Dr. McGuire noted momentary consciousness and told him he had but two hours to live. Jackson whispered, "Very good. it's all right." He declined brandy and water and said, "It will only delay my departure and do no good. I want to preserve my mind to the last." Dr. McGuire states his mind began to fail and wander. He talked as if giving commands on the battlefield--then he was at the mess table talking to his staff--now with his wife and
child--now at prayers with his military family. A few moments before he died he ordered A.P. Hill to prepare for action. "Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks"--then stopped. Presently he smiled and said with apparent relief,
"Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees" and then seemingly in peace he died."
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