review of for whom the bell tolls
To judge from the frequency with which biographies of him continue to appear nearly four decades after his death, Ernest Hemingway remains as fascinating a figure now as he was to his contemporaries. The reasons for this fascination have, of course, changed to some extent. The public perception of any writer undergoes an alteration after his or her death, when the facts of the private life--some of them perhaps deliberately concealed--begin to come to light. In his lifetime, Hemingway created and sold to a vast public, including millions who never read a word he had written, a myth of himself as an undisputed master in a wide variety of activities--soldier, fighter, hunter, literary genius, a man whose confidence and authority made him envied by men and adored by women. All of these things were to a greater or lesser degree true of Hemingway, although in most cases not nearly to the extent that they once appeared to be. And it has become clear that for him, as for the protagon!ists of his novels and stories, the true nature of heroism lay not in the effortless realization of superior gifts, but in the constant, consuming struggle to overcome crippling psychological defects and terror at the emptiness both in the larger world a
His legacy, precisely because it is so pervasive, is difficult to perceive. Those who have grown up reading American short fiction written after Hemingway cannot appreciate the startling originality of his work. If, to them, he sounds a lot like everyone else, it is because everyone else has learned almost everything from him. Like Elvis Presley, another American original, he used his unique vision and enormous gifts to utterly transform his chosen art and remake it in his own image. Sadly, also like Presley, he did his best and purest work at the beginning of his career, descending thereafter into a drawn-out process of self-destruction and becoming a grotesque self-parody. a mordant irony that seems quite characteristic of Hemingway's view of life, "Indian Camp" ends with a discussion between a little boy and his father on the rarity of suicide; the models for both these characters, Hemingway and his own father, would subsequently kill themselves. The finest story in In Our Time was "Big, Two-Hearted River," in which a shell-shocked Nick Adams, returned from the war, goes camping and fishing by himself in the Michigan woods of his youth, seeking to heal himself through the performance of increasingly complex, familiar rituals. The great stress upon ritual--upon doing things in a prescribed "right" way, and thus the reliance on pattern to provide shape and coherence against the surrounding emptiness and terror--also helps to explain Hemingway's lifelong preoccupation with such one-on-one sports as boxing, big-game hunting, and especially bullfighting. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ernest Miller Hemingway, the second child and first son of Clarence Hemingway, a medical doctor, and Grace (Hall) Hemingway, was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. His family and upbringing were conventional in their middleclass expectations and unimaginative moralism, although Hemingway would in later years characterize them, especially his mother, far more harshly than the realities justified. Much has been made of the fact that in his earliest months his mother dressed him like a girl and treated him as a sort of twin to his sister Marcelline, who was eighteen months his senior. After graduating in 1917 from Oak Park High School, where he was active in both sports and writing, he went to work as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. In July of 1918, in what would prove to be the closing months of the First World War, he went to Italy as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, and there had two experiences that would profoundly af! riumph, described how Frederick Henry makes his own "separate peace" with the First World War, only to lose everything. This novel became Hemingway's classic treatment of th
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Approximate Word count = 1885
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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