Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,532

This is the grave of Ernest Hemingway.

OK, there’s going to be a lot to unpack with this one!

Born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway grew up in a wealthy family. Frank Lloyd Wright was another resident of the town at the time. His father was a physician and his mother a musician. The family had a summer home in Michigan, which is where Hemingway developed his lifelong love of hunting and fishing. He was a good athlete in high school and edited the school paper. He graduated from high school and rather than choosing college, he went to work for the Kansas City Star.

This being 1917 though, the U.S. was about to enter World War I. Hemingway wanted to join the Army, but was rejected for bad vision. Not to be deterred, he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. Thus began his lifelong love/hate relationship with war, which proved men to be men but also disillusioned men with its reality. He saw some bad stuff in Europe, including collecting what was the left of the dead after an attack on a Milan factory, staffed primarily by women. It affected him deeply. He was injured pretty severely while in Italy and received the Italian Merit War Cross for his bravery in serving the soldiers on the front line. He was in the hospital for six months recovering from shrapnel wounds to his legs. Meanwhile, he fell in love with a nurse taking care of him and then she left him for another man, leading to him more or less hating or at least distrusting women for the rest of his life. Dude, at some point get over it.

Anyway, Hemingway came back and was stir crazy. He wanted to return to Europe. He got a job reporting in Toronto, got married for the first time to a rich woman a lot like the one who left him, and they moved to Paris on her income, though he did still earn some while working as the European reporter for the Toronto paper. There, Hemingway imbibed the postwar expat literary scene that revolved around Gertrude Stein. He somewhat randomly met Ezra Pound and the poet really liked the kid’s work. He went to Spain for the first time in 1923 and fell in love with bullfighting and the super masculine culture around it. He drank a ton, helped create a myth around absinthe that lasted precisely as long as it took for it to become available in the U.S. and people to realize that licorice-tasting liqueurs are not actually good, and slept around on his wife, who finally left his ass. He stayed in Paris until 1928, when he and his new wife moved to Key West on John Dos Passos’ recommendation.

When Hemingway decided to start writing seriously, it’s hardly surprising that he would tap into his own experiences. Early books such as In Our Time and The Torrents of Spring brought favorable attention, but it was The Sun Also Rises, based on he and friends drinking through Spain that really went through the stratosphere. Then A Farewell to Arms, lightly fictionalizing his wartime romance, did the same. Immediately, he was the new bright light of American literature.

As for Hemingway’s writing, I find it both inspiring and comically ridiculous at the same time. Let’s face it–he was tremendously influential on the whole generation of mid-century male writers, both in terms of his writing and the kind of terrible behavior almost expected of them. It went far beyond novels too, as anyone who reads the sportswriting of the period can attest. In a sense, Hemingway understood something fundamental–writing in simple language that everyone can understand has great value. As a historian, where no one is really trained to write at all and thus many are terrible writers (though the overall writing in the field is better today than ever), having someone like this in mind is actually quite valuable. Simple sentences using simple words actually get your point across! On the other hand, you know, you can use an adjective every now and then.

Hemingway spent the rest of his life drinking, cheating on women, writing, and traveling around doing manly man things. He went from Europe to the US and back, hunted a lot, He went to Africa on a big hunting trip and turned that into Green Hills of Africa. He went back to Spain to write a nonfiction book on bullfighting that became Death in the Afternoon. His time in Key West and Cuba became To Have and Have Not. By the late 30s, he was playing at being a leftist, went to Marxist conferences, and of course supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, which became For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s hard for me to take Hemingway very seriously as a person, given that he was just flouncing around trying to prove his manhood to himself in various ways and then writing novels about it, but I do think the novels mostly hold up. However, the idea of HEMINGWAY as THE AUTHOR OF THE 20TH CENTURY I do not think holds up at all and has declined significantly in the last thirty years. Who today thinks Hemingway is more important than Faulkner, for example? I can say this–there’s a heck of a lot more interest from English PhD students in Faulkner.

Hemingway played around in World War II as well, did some journalism, and tried to lead a group of resistance fighters in France, which got him brought up on international criminal charges since journalists are not supposed to play at war. He stopped writing fiction for a good long time, spent lots of time in Cuba after the war, cheated on his various women, continued drinking, and hunted and fished a lot. Of course, his most famous book from his late era is The Old Man and the Sea, which is fine for a 15 year old to read, but is awfully hard to take seriously today.

Hemingway’s house in Cuba remains a tourist attraction today. In fact, for the limited American tourists and much larger cadre of Canadian and European tourists who get there, Hemingway-based stuff is a big thing. Various bars he liked and such advertise it. When I took students to Cuba in 2020, I avoided all that stuff entirely. First, Hemingway was such an asshole, including in Cuba. Second, he was basically a representation of American imperialism himself. Third, I am not going to Cuba to celebrate a dated American writer. I’m sure the students went to some of these places, but I treated it with the disdain it deserved.

Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954. He believed it was because everyone thought he was going to die soon and that might be right. He had been in several major accidents over the years and it is almost amazing he survived as long as he did. By the mid 50s, he was also quite busy drinking himself to death. His heart was bad too. He got deeply depressed. Finally he killed himself while in Idaho in 1961. He was 61 years old.

There is much more to say, but this is long enough as is.

Ernest Hemingway is buried in Ketchum Cemetery, Ketchum, Idaho.

Can we talk about the liquor left on Hemingway’s grave? I mean, that’s some high end stuff! I know this is Sun Valley and all, so people are rich, but who is leaving a bottle of Woodford or Kaiyo on a grave? I was tempted to steal it for myself! I’ve seen people leave booze on graves of writers and musicians before, but this was another level.

If you would like this series to visit other American writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The Library of America has struggled to work out any arrangement with Hemingway’s estate, but now that his material is entering the public domain, very slowly you are going to start seeing volumes appear. The first was Volume 334, covering material up through The Sun Also Rises. Ursula Le Guin donated her body to science, so though she is Volume 335, no luck there. E.O. Wilson, whose nature writings make up Volume 340 is in Lexington, Massachusetts. Joan Didion, who is Volume 341, is in Manhattan. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.