Hemingway, Ernst Miller.

Hemingway, Ernst Miller, born 21-07-1899, in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, was an American author and journalist. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a gynecologist and his mother, Grace, born Hall, was a music teacher and former performing artist who went on to teach singing and music to neighborhood children. Both were highly educated and highly respected within Oak Park’s conservative community. After their marriage, Clarence and Grace Hemingway lived briefly with Grace’s father Ernest Hall, who would also become the namesake of their first son. Ernest Hemingway would later say that he disliked his first name, which he associated with “the naive, even foolish hero of Oscar Wilde’s play  “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Hemingway had five siblings. Marcelline (1898) was his older sister and after him Ursula (1902), Madelaine (1904), Carol (1911) and Leicester (1915) were born. From left: Marcelline, Madelaine, Clarence, Grace, Ursula en Ernest.

The family eventually moved into a seven-room residence in a respectable neighborhood that housed a music studio for Grace and a medical office for Clarence.

Grace dressed young Ernest (for a long time the only boy in the family) as a girl, something that was not unusual in her time and environment. She didn’t cut his hair until he was six years old. The mother of the young Ernest went very far in this and called her boy, for example, “Dutch dolly”. Biographers suspect that this strange relationship scarred Hemingway for life. The erotically charged motif of cutting a boy’s hair would appear several times later in Hemingway’s stories, such as in The Garden of Eden. Notably, a number of stories also feature men who for one reason or another have become impotent and desperately trying to regain their manhood, such as the dying writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. As an adult, Hemingway said to his friends, including John Dos Passos, , that he hated his mother and when he talked about her he spoke of “that bitch”. His cousin John Sanford, Marcelline’s son and now an academic, thinks otherwise. He said in an interview that Hemingway’s nasty words about his mother were just a “cover-up” for his deep love for her, and a result of his bitterness for disliking the topics he wrote about.

His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and public image. Early in 1918 Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and signed on to become an ambulance driver in Italy. He left New York in May, and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery. By June he was at the Italian front. It was probably around this time that he first met John Dos Passos , with whom he would maintain a rocky relationship for decades thereafter. Dos Passos,  an American novelist and artist, died age 74, on 28-09-1970.  On his first day in Milan he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion where rescuers retrieved the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his non-fiction book Dea in the Afternoon: “I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments”.A few days later he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave. On July 8 he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line. Despite his wounds, Hemingway carried an Italian soldier to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery .  He sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.  Hemingway’s fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that resonated with his audience. Many of his works are classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After leaving high school he worked for a few months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star,  before leaving for the Italian front to become an ambulance driver during World War I, which became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. He was seriously wounded  and returned home within the year. In 1922 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During his time there he met and was influenced by modernist writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the “Lost Generation”. His friends were the photographer Robert Capa   and his girlfriend Gerda Taro.   His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927,

    

Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced following Hemingway’s return from covering the Spanish Civil War after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940, but he left her for Mary Welsh Hemingway after World War II, during which he was present at D-Day

   and the liberation of Paris. Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life. His wife Mary Welsh Hemingway  moved to New York City, where she lived in an apartment on 65th Street. After a prolonged illness, she died in St. Luke’s Hospital at age 78, on 26-11-1986. In her will, she had stipulated that she be buried in Ketchum next to Hemingway, where they are now interred together.

Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and ’40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho,

   where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961, 02-07-1961, age 61   and is buried on the Ketchum cemetery in Idaho. My friend corporal of the 101 AB Division, 502 A C, Louis Merlano

   met Hemingway during a veteran reunion.

          

Here is Hemingway with my friend Louis Merlano (see Merlano)

               

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