In spite of the universal and timeless themes of his books, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway was a man of his era, living it and breathing it as no one. He was a living legend and a true life-style icon of his time. Tragically, he also became a case example of the consequences of war in the human spirit.
In high school he was nicknamed “Hemingstein” for his insatiable thirst for beer, and hence he took to use nicknames for all his friends. He did not like the name Ernest and took to calling himself “Papa”, a name oddly used by his first wife in Paris during the early twentieth century. In ‘the City of Lights”, Hemingway intermingled with some of the most genial artists of the avant garde literary movement, such as Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. The self-exiled American writer Gertrude Stein referred to Hemingway and all the other young expatriates in Paris as “the lost generation” for their harsh experiences in the First World War and their reckless social lives afterwards. All said this generation of intellectuals and artists turned out to be one of the most creative and innovative in history.
A peculiar man of great bravado and a genuinely American spirit, Hemingway was the personification of the “good American”, especially around common people he met while fishing, hunting, and news-reporting around the world. He frequented bars in all the countries he visited and drank heavily. His books tell of his life passions and vices as well as bullfights, wars and romance. He reported on five wars; married four women; spoke four languages; and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize 1954 for his literary acumen.
He constantly tried to prove himself and his courage to others. He was certainly the type of man who would fight to the end no matter the odds. Although generally very friendly, he became irritated with anyone he thought was a phony or talked excessively about mannered subjects—this included most literary figures who helped him along during his early writing career; like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who helped him to publish his first book; Gertrude Stein, who advised him to drop news-writing altogether and concentrate in his literary writing); and Ezra Pound, who famously told him and his writer friends in Paris to “make it new”. On many occasions, he opted to drink heavily in the company of friends he considered vain and ended up treating them with disdain, sarcasm and disapproval.
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Hemingway’s Writing
As any good writer, Hemingway made mental pictures of how things fit in a room or particular scenery, and how everything works, including nature and man. He referred to fiction as the way to lie fantastically about real life, but he insisted on deep-knowledge of the subject at hand when writing. Overall, he was a fiercely competitive writer dedicated to his work, and he was much disciplined— in contrast to his social and marital life—, starting every day at five in the morning and ending around noon. He would start with a phrase that expressed a real-life event, and then in simple and direct language he would take the reader to faraway lands in an interesting, seductive and impressionable way. He allowed the characters to tell their own stories in their own voices, without profound psychoanalysis.
Hemingway became the greatest story-teller of modern times. He created a direct and expressive style based on his experiences as a young reporter, when he learned to emphasize short sentences and vigorous English. He described each conversation, background, or situation in an accelerated and convincing style.
Hemingway’s writing consists of short declarative sentences in a parataxis that engages the reader and does not get lost in syntax. His terse and fresh prose certainly changed the style of written English. In 1950, the New York Times referred to him as “The most important English writer since Shakespeare.” His influence on writers of his generation and beyond has been enormous.
Papa Hemingway called his style “The Iceberg Theory”, where he advised writers to “Impress the truth without saying it and making it more forceful this way. Don’t cheapen it by over-explaining something that can be left to the reader to interpret. Take the reader to fill in what is explicitly absent and makes the best of it. Don’t say the most important thing- like in music- leave the silence to fill more.”
“The Sun Also Rises”
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth, forever…The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down…” Eclessiastes.
After visiting Pamplona during the festival of San Fermín with a group of fellow Paris expatriates, Hemingway fell in love with Spain and its culture, but especially with its people, whom he found more genuinely rooted in their own traditions and idiosyncrasies than the acidic and urban Parisians. Hemingway embarked on his first novel, “The Sun Also Rises”, with an augmented spirit and a convincing optimism, relieving the experiences of the Fiesta de San Fermín.
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The abundance of dialogue and drinking in the novel opens the doors to the minds and behavior of the characters in a feast of alcohol, sex, and bullfighting. The narcissism of the bon-vivant tourists drowns in brandy, whiskey, gin, wine, sherry (jerez) and manzanilla wine, resulting in a constant stupor and brawls. In this book, the boredom of vanity meets the overall excitement of the festival and the particular uproar of bull-killing in the arena.
Pamplona is in the Province of Navarre in the wet-green Basque region of Northern Spain. Every year, starting at 12:00 p.m., on July 7, and continuing for seven days, Pamplona celebrates the Fiesta de San Fermín with clamor, music, dancing, singing and festivity. And then there are seven nights of revelry…
“Thirty-foot high Giant King and Moor figures, cigar-store Indians, a King and a Queen whirling and waltzing to the riau-riau”, is how Hemingway describes the event. Girls and boys dance to the tune of hollow drums and melodious reed pipes. The players wear red handkerchiefs around their necks, and the dancers show wreaths of garlic around their necks. People place their arms around each other’s shoulders and dance the jota.
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The cafés are places to sit and enjoy the view. Wine shops line up the streets selling leathered botas of wine, aguardiente or anís del mono (or del toro, as Hemingway joked). The sidewalks filled with merchants from all over. Daily fireworks are a show of exploding rockets with bright colors that leave a lingering smell of smoke in the air.
The 11:00 a.m. Mass at the Cathedral is the central religious event every day of the festival week. The smell of incense inside churches welcomes the procession of the statue of San Fermín, carried around town from church to church.
Hemingway’s fascination with bull fighting is seen in his narrative passion and has attracted people from all over the world to Spain, contributing greatly to internationalizing Pamplona. The bullring, the amphitheater, and the stands are the main scenario of life (and death). The aficionados, the torero, the banderilleros, the picaores and, not least, el toro, each becomes a character of this tragedy in a singular and typical way.
Every morning at dawn, with the exploding of rockets, the Running of the Bulls takes place as the bulls are let out of their corral and driven through the town’s narrow streets into the big bull ring for the encierro. Men shoved and gored (cogido) by the bulls’ horns as they run down towards the plaza de toros. In Hemingway words, “Bulls galloping tossing their heads up and down.”
Following the encierro, the arena fills with people. In the stands, there is a feeling of elation, with drums pounding, shrill pipe music playing, and the crowd dancing a form of jota. A big hum precedes every bullfight.
There is an afternoon of farce bull-fighting where a horn-padded bull is fought by anyone who dears. And then comes the real bullfight. The torero is a figure that dominates Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”, and introduces us to the writer’s obsession with violent death. In a way one may think of Goya and Hemingway as twin minds in the artistic dialog of life and death— the savage aspect of life that clamors death. Both creators shared morbid and stylistic concerns about the final breath. In Spain, Hemingway found a greater purpose and meaning to life through the Spanish cultural fascination with death.
Pedro Romero (after the real Antonio Ordoñez), is the matador in Hemingway’s book, who loves bullfighting and loves the bulls, even when they gore him, or when he kills them. “The bull was named Boca Negra…” is Hemingway’s introduction to the bull that gored Romero to an eventual death. “The Sun Also Rises” is an unreal and inconsequential spectacle, but it carries a profound message of the true meaning of death as it follows life.
“For Whom the Bell Tolls”
The three-year Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was a precursor to the violence that was to come in the Second World War only understated in levels of horror and technology. The Spanish Republic, the so-called niña bonita, began five years before the Spanish Civil War and run by an elected socialist-leaning government. The People’s Army (consisting of government military regiments and foreign brigades organized in battalions) was entrusted with the defense of the Republic. It was ill-prepared and equipped, and never achieved the level of training required for the defense of Madrid, let alone the rest of Spain. The more than forty-thousand-strong International Brigade was made of disappointed social idealist and communist fighters from different nations.
The opposing Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco (later Generalísimo or Commander in Chief) were supported by the Italy of Mussolini and the Germany of Hitler, showcasing the latest war technology.
In 1936, Hemingway made a propaganda movie with Orson Wells called “Spanish Soil” featuring the cause of the loyalists as defenders of the elected Republican government. Hemingway was a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, but his involvement was more than journalistic. He acquired a deep understanding of the war and its people. Based in this close experience with the conflict Hemingway wrote “For Whom the Bell Toll” to detail the guerilla fight of the loyalist militias behind enemy (nationalist) lines.
The title of the novel comes from a poem by the English poet John Donne (1572-1631) that partly reads:
Each man’s dead diminishes me,
For I am involved in Mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
In the novel, the unrestrained killing as well as the atrocities perpetrated by both sides in the Spanish Civil War, gushes through the ironic and sarcastic conversations of the characters. The book introduces a mature and experienced Robert Jordan (el inglés), a member of the American Lincoln Battalion, who is an explosives engineer expert.
Jordan, an absinthe addict, clearly resents the Soviet involvement in the war, recalling images of apathetic Russians smoking Russian cigarettes and drinking Russian vodka parading in the lobby of the Gaylord Hotel in Madrid. But Jordan hates the nationalists even more and calls them fascists. A man of courage and conviction, Jordan blows trains and bridges to help the Republic, and in the process comes in close contact with men and women who suffer physical and mental anguish after the constant embattlement of the Spanish Civil War.
One important aspect of the novel is the role of women in this tragic war. Women showed enormous discipline, strength, and courage at all levels of the defense of the Spanish Republic. Women who participated in the guerilla and the resistance fight such as the Pasionaria, a charismatic speaker-leader who predicated the New Spain as, “A new nation forged in the discipline of its soldiers and the enduring bravery of its women.” In “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, Hemingway introduces us to Maria, whom Jordan meets and falls in love after she is freed from prison scared and shaven-headed. Maria had been raped by her nationalist captors, after her parents were murdered. We also meet Pilar, a strong and smart peasant woman, who cooks, tends to all needs, and inserts common sense in the guerilla band at all levels and finally takes over the command of the fighters from her faithless and drunkard husband, who quits altogether.
The narration of the war is vivid and real, but is limited to the loyalists’ guerrilla fight to stall the advancing forces of Franco and his Moorish troops from the south towards Madrid. It does not relay the larger war taking place in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and the Basque country, with scenes such as the approach of bomber planes eliciting the cry of “Aviación!, Aviación!” after the ringing-out of the alarm sirens; the planes flying-out in pursuit of enemy airplanes and sometimes bringing them down; the strong sound of explosions, rifles and heavy machine guns firing repeatedly; tanks rolling forward; the repositioning and calibration of the mortars followed by the call “Fuego!”; the Falangista infantry assault in columns of six; the wounded transported in all sorts of made up stretchers and vehicles under constant bombardment; the empty buildings in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona without windows or doors and marked by mortar blasts and German artillery; the Italians losing in one battle more than in the entire Ethiopian War; neighborhoods organizing under juntas de defensa that had to do more with medical attention and food distribution lines than fighting; the smell of death, high-explosives smoke, and blasted granite; the clenched fist of the republicans and the high-hand fascist salute of the nationalists. And then there is Guernica…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpck_AmvbuU&t=29s
Jaime Otero-Zuazo
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