(2 of 6)
Dr. Hemingstein. There was a worldwide seismic shock at Hemingway's death, even though for some years younger writers had stopped imitating the master stylist, and despite the fact that in the last two decades, Hemingway had produced only a near parody of himself,
Across the River and Into the Trees, and a small but immutable achievement, The Old Man and the Sea. For the rest, the legend engulfed the man, and he seemed bent on playing the part of a Hemingway character.
From his earliest expatriate days, when he knew James Joyce and Gertrude Stein at Sylvia Beach's Paris bookshop, Hemingway plainly enjoyed being a celebrity among celebrities. He went fishing with Charles Ritz, the Paris hotel man, and considered fighting a duel over Ava Gardner, whose honor somebody had insulted. In Paris he invariably cultivated Georges Carpentier, the prizefighter turned saloon owner; in New York he befriended Restaurateur Toots Shor, and despite an often-expressed desire for privacy, went on the town with Gossip Columnist Leonard Lyons. He not only allowed but encouraged the world to turn him into a character. He had well-publicized talks about child care with Grandmother Marlene Dietrich ("The Kraut"), jovially referred to himself as Doctor Hemingstein or Old Ernie Hemorrhoid ("The Poor Man's Pyle"), and talked of his literary prowess in prizefighting terms: "I trained hard and I beat Mr. De Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, but nobody is going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or keep getting better."
But all this could not damage the work he had already done or lessen his world impact, which was, and is, incalculable.
Stream of Sensuousness. For years, critics skimmed the dazzling prose surface of Hemingway and harped on his tough-guy realism. In one of those flat-out statements that sometimes herald a major critical about-face, at least one U.S. critic, North Carolina State's E. M. Halliday, recently called Hemingway essentially a philosophical writer. His was, of course, never a formal but a sort of visceral philosophy. But though he was leary of metaphysical systems, Hemingway was really on a metaphysical quest. Without the customary marks of the intellectual, in fact often called anti-intellectual, he was nevertheless a tenacious observer of the crisis in belief and values which is the central crisis of Western civilization.
His philosophy—essentially a profound pessimism about the human situation and a stoic sense of tragedy—grew out of war. Like many a child of the times, he was born twice, once in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1899, and a second time during World War I at Fossalta on the Italian Piave on July 8, 1918. At Fossalta, Hemingway, who had switched from ambulance driving to join the Italian infantry, was so badly wounded in a burst of shellfire that he felt life slip from his body, "like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner," and then return. He emerged with 237 bits of shrapnel (by his own count), an aluminum kneecap, and two Italian decorations. It was at Fossalta that he picked up a fear of his own fear and the lifelong need to test his courage.