Seminar paper Topic - Ernest Hemingway

Module leader: Mr. Fatbardha Doko

By Albert Nasufovski BF/25-2005

Contents:
Table of contents .. 2 Biography ......... 3 Early life 4,5 Writing style .. 6,7 Issues and Themes . 8,9 Conclusion . 10,11 Bibliography .. 12

Biography
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1931) born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance until in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he become a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as a Greek revolution. During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell. Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old man and the Sea, the story of and old fishermans journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat. Hemingway- himself a great sportsman- liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters- tough, at times primitive peoples whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his desperate dialogue, and his predilection for understatement and particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Man without Woman (1927), and the Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

Early life
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father Clarence Edmonds Hemingway was a physician, and his mother Grace HallHemingway was a musician. Both were well educated and well respected in the conservative community of Oak Park. Hemingways mother frequently performed in concerts around the village. As an adult Hemingway professed to hate his mother, although biographer Michael Reynolds points out that Hemingway mirrored her energy and enthusiasm. Her insistence that he learn to play the cello become a source of conflict but he later admitted the music lessons were useful on his writing, as in the contrapuntal structure of For Whom the Bells Tolls. The family owned a summer home called Windermere on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan where Hemingway learn to hunt, fish and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. His early experiences in nature instilled a passion of outdoor adventure, and living in remote or isolated areas. Hemingway attended to Out Park and River Forest High School from 1913 until 1917 where he took part in a number of sports-boxing, track and field, water polo, and football-had great grades in English classes, and he and his sister Marceline performed in the school orchestra for two years. In his junior year, he took a journalism class, taught by Fannie Biggs, which was structured as thought the classroom was a newspaper office. The better writers in class submitted pieces to the Trapeze, the school newspaper. Hemingways first piece, published in 1916, was about a local performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist; after leaving high school he went to work for the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Although he stayed there for only six months he relied on the Stars style guide as a foundation

for his writing: Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Hemingways writing Style

Ernest Hemingways writing is among the most recognizable and influential prose of the twentieth century. Many critics believe his style was influenced by his days as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, where he had to rely on short sentences and energetic English. Hemingways technique is uncomplicated, with plain grammar and easily accessible language. His hallmark is a clean style that eschews adjectives and uses short, rhythmic sentences that concentrate on action rather than reflection. Though his writing is often though of as simple, this generalization could not be further from the truth. He was an obsessive reviser. His work is the result of a careful process of selecting only those elements essential to the story and pruning everything else away. He kept his prose direct and unadorned; employing a technique he termed the iceberg principle. In Death in the afternoon he wrote, 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 a though the writer start them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eight of it being above water. Hemingway is also considered a master of dialogue. The conversations between his characters demonstrate not only communication but also its limits. The way Hemingways characters speak is sometimes more important than what they say, because what they choose to say (or leave unsaid) illuminates sources of inner conflict. Sometimes characters say only what they think another character will want to hear. In a short, Hemingway captures the complexity of human interaction through subtlety and implication as well as direct discourse. The writers of Hemingways generation are often termed modernist. Disillusioned by the large number of casualties in
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World War I, they turned away from the 19th century, Victorian notions of morality and propriety and toward a more existential worldview. Many of the eras most talented writers congregated in Paris, Ezra Pound, considered one of the most significant poets of the Modernist movement, also promoted Hemingways early work, as did F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, on Hemingways behalf. The powerful impact of Hemingways writing on the other authors continues to this day. Writers as diverse as Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Elmore Leonard, and Hunter S. Thompson have credited him with contributing to their styles. Direct, personal writing full of rich imagery was Hemingways goal. Nearly fifty years after his death, his distinctive prose is still recognizable by its economy and controlled understatement.

Issues and themes

In his early years, Hemingway was very close to Sherwood Anderson, a writer he highly admired. Anderson found a willing, enthusiastic pupil in Hemingway. Gurko has pointed out that like Anderson, Hemingway thought the mind was treacherous and abstract, and the senses were always to be trusted. Hemingway used his senses at the center if his writing. In Modern Critical Views: Earnest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren comments that this intense awareness of the world of the senses is, of course, one of the things that made the early work of Hemingway seem, upon its first impact, so fresh and pure. He adds, Physical nature is nowhere rendered with greater vividness than in his work, and probably his only competitors in department of literature are William Faulkner, among the modern, and Henry David Thoreau, among the old American writers. Not long after the relationship that started with Anderson, people began labeling Hemingway as Anderson disciple. Hemingway didnt like this because he wanted to be his own man. What resulted was The Torrents of Spring in which Hemingway ridiculed and parodied Andersons style of writing, his characters, and his most cherished ideas about life. Obviously, their friendship ended. Hemingway was greatly disturbed b his fathers suicide. He questioned his fathers courage, or lack of courage. His father had taught him to admire courage. Once, Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. Yet his father could not handle this extreme pressure. He felt his father had somehow failed him. Soon, Hemingway assumed the nickname Papa, which he held to the end of his life. He was talking on the burden of being the person, or ideal papa, that his own father had failed to be. By 1952, Hemingway had become the most publicized writer in America. Gurko notes that everything he said and did was avidly recorded by the columnists and his emphatic personality supplied newspapers and magazine editors with endlessly colorful copy.
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Hemingways stories are concerned with death. In our time is a good example of how his stories relate do death. There are fourteen brief italicized scenes between the short tales. These are numbered as chapters. The keynote of these interchapters is violence which contains the threat of death in its most aggressive form. Gurko comments that loss and approaching death may be the unavoidable fact of human existence and that the central lesson of existence, however, is that death must be accepted, faced without demoralization and thereby mastered. He adds Hemingways stories are as much a demonstration of the lesson as they are of the fact; their drama arises from the tension between them. Hemingway has had an enormous influence on American writers, mainly because of his unique writing style. He used simple nouns and verbs and was still able to capture the scene precisely. He provided detached descriptions of action in that he avoided describing the thoughts and emotions of his characters in a direct way. In an interview from Modern Critical Views: Ernest Hemingway was asked how detached from and experience must he before writing about it in fictional terms; i.e. the African air crashes. Hemingway responded: It depends on the experience. One part of you sees it with complete detachments from the start it. Another part is very involved. I think there is no rule about how soon one should write about it. It would depend on how well adjusted the individual was and on his or her recuperative powers. Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. Hemingway made the reading of the story as close to the actual experience as possible. Authenticity in writing was important to him and he felt that ones treatment of a subject in writing was more honest if the person had actually experienced it or observed the subject closely.

Conclusion
Nowhere does Hemingway appear truer to his nature than in the photographs that show him hunting or fishing or on the battlefield.

Whether he holds the Tycoon rod he used to catch spearfish or his Austrian Mannlicher Schoenaur. 256 which he used on elephants hunts, these images seem to encapsulate the truth. They show the Hemingway we remember, a bearded giant of a man in Bermuda shorts and worn out loafers, and instantly recognizable larger than life hero of our times. We remembered him as an action man. A man field with confidence and authority. But in reality he was shy and bitterly frustrated. He was a man with exceptional intelligence and an educated upbringing, so diverse it must have been confusing to a young man. His mother on one side was teaching him culture and took him to operas, concerts and art galleries and his father, on the other, was rugged and taught him outdoor life, how to use and axe, a gun, and to be afraid of nothing. Both parents were strong and each had a total conviction and enthusiasm to teach Ernest their own ideals. And of course he and his five brothers and sisters were brought up in an intensely religious atmosphere. Hemingways childhood and adolescence gave him an insight into all aspects of life and being such an inquisitive, person with a determination for detail he wanted to try everything and be exceptional at everything he did. He found it very frustrating when his health or poor eye sight kept him from fulfilling his goals.
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Right from adolescence when he wanted to join the forces he was unable to. His poor eye sight meant he could only join the ambulance corps. Enough for some peoples, but not Hemingway. He wanted to excel, to be though of as the best. He had of course been a newspaper reporter after leaving high school, but his first choice was to follow his fathers examples, to become a rugged, outdoor, independent man. Ironically it was his father who refused to let him join up for the First World War. He quickly got married with eight years old woman Hadley and he have son with her, John Hadley. Hemingway did not know what he wanted. He wanted everything and nothing. His writing was his way of coping with life to exorcise his ghosts, to achieve fame and glory and yet he also had a natural talent. What came first, his writing or his adventures? What was most important to him? To fulfill his mothers wishes or his fathers? Maybe he felt unfulfilled at his attempts of being adventurous, outdoor man? He certainly had more than his fair share of illness. Anthrax, digestive problems, pneumonia. Each illness seemed to occur after a long period of activity. Fishing, hunting, shooting. Maybe he was frustrated at his poor health, his proneness to sickness every time he made some exertion on his body. He eventually fell into a period of mental illness, overwhelmed by the demands put on him by others and himself. His father had committed suicide, did he feel then it was perfectly ok for him to do the same? But his medical treatment to overcome his mental problems did not work and he found his memory had gone and he could not even write to appease himself. His physical state was also too poor for him to carry on with his pursuits of fishing, shooting and hunting. There no was other choice than to end his life.

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Bibliography
Internet resources: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway - http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/conclusion.htm - http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1 954/hemingway-bio.html - http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hemingwa.htm - http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#Writing_sty le

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