Ernest Hemingway/Influences in literature and other Authors

Ernest Hemingway /Influences in Literature and Other Authors

Ernest Hemingway is known as the author of a number of miscellaneous novels and short stories , as well as two books on blood sports . His best-known works , however , are two 'novels of love and war , A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls , and his significant development such as it is (for only in a very special sense can he be said to develop at all , may best be seen by a comparison of those two works Hemingway , in practice and in art

, strips living of all superficial complication . The war made clear to him the primordial in mankind , and he sees this primordial as always dominant . He is interested in people who come to grips with physical life . So , vigorous struggle , sex , and death are his principal themes . In The Sun Also Rises (1926 , his first novel , he shows a group who have been mentally and physically injured by the war . They cannot readjust themselves to the changed tempo of peacetime . Their disabilities cannot check their passion for physical excitement - a passion as constant and as emphatic as it was when they were going through war experiences . Lesser emotions pall when there has been close and unremitting contact with death in its violent forms Death in the Afternoon explains Hemingway 's obsession for bull-fighting which to him is not a sport but an art where death can be seen given avoided , refused and accepted for a nominal price of admission . To Hemingway , death is the ultimate and triumphant reality (Meyers 1977 He is therefore interested in danger , in activities which test man to the limit , in situations in which death is present in palpable form Such is Hemingway 's art inheritance from the war

This primary concern with death does not , however , cast a shadow of pessimism . Hemingway has evidently often thought , How good the mere living ' He is a Kipling in his emphasis on vigorous and strenuous action . The joys of being young and healthy , the joys of fishing and hunting , the joys of making love - these are the concerns of the primordial man as much as are fighting and killing . Many of Hemingway 's stories are therefore wholly cheerful , and of them are wholly tragic . Ernest Hemingway , like Mark Twain and Stephen Crane , was a journalist and war correspondent before he became a writer , and this valuable experience enabled him to describe-with unusual authority-the bloody conflicts and exotic settings that appear in his work . In boyhood he had hunted and fished with Indians in the wilds of northern Michigan

All his powers are assembled in A Farewell to Arms . If the love plot were removed , the book would practically be autobiography . For it follows closely Hemingway 's own experiences as officer in charge of an ambulance unit on the Italian front . But with the imagined love plot woven into his actual chain of observations and impressions , the book attains a purpose and a body which add greatly to its strength Hemingway is not a sentimentalist like Dreiser . The persons in A Farewell to Arms are not pitied indignation at the horror of war did not stir Hemingway to write the book . It is a record of life and love and war , of man placed where all that civilization has achieved topples and crashes down . A Farewell to Arms is just a record of this , and the reader is left to supply whatever terror and pity he might wish

But , if any criticism is to be significant , as far as Hemingway is concerned , it must concern itself with the central fact that Hemingway is first and above all an artist . William McFee once said of Joseph Conrad that , though he was perhaps not the greatest novelist , he was incomparably the greatest artist who ever wrote a novel (Ross 1961 The distinction which McFee rightly makes here is equally illuminating for Ernest Hemingway , because such a distinction points out the outstanding quality of an artist - that he is , by the fact of his artistry , unique

The unique quality of the artist stems from the primary artistic function which is to see and it is the individuality , the originality perhaps even the personality of his perceptions which give to Hemingway as to every artist , his quality . But to see an object , a place , a time or a person , requires a formed image , a whole whose parts are integrated with a central concept . To see is to impart form to inchoate material But to see thus , in a unique , formed whole , requires an extraordinary discipline on the part of the craftsman for he must rigidly exclude the didactic , the accidental and the irrelevant

All of Hemingway 's major works became successful films : A Farewell to Arms (1932 , For Whom the Bell Tolls '-sold to Paramount for 100 ,000 plus royalties (1943 , To Have and Have Not (1944 , The Killers (1946 The Macomber Affair (1947 , The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952 , The Sun Also Rises (1957 , The Old Man and the Sea (1958 , the second A Farewell to Arms (1958 ) and Islands in the Stream (1977 (Laurence 1981 . These movies helped to make him a millionaire and his well-publicized friendships with Marlene Dietrich , and with Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper (who starred in these films and personified his heroic characters , enhanced his glamorous legend . The Hemingway image has continued with his granddaughters , who have recently achieved fame as models and movie stars

Hemingway 's ambition was to write what I 've seen and known in the best and simplest way (Gunnk 1972 . His classic style , stripped of adjectives , is bare , sharp and direct . He emphasizes dialogue rather than , sensations rather than thought , and achieves an astonishing Immediacy : an exaltation of the instant ' As Wallace Stevens remarked "Most people don 't think of Hemingway as a poet , but obviously he is a poet and I should say , offhand , the most significant of living poets , so far as the subject of extraordinary actuality is concerned ' Hemingway 's influences , his gift of evoking a sense of place , are matched only by D .H . Lawrence

Despite the reservations of reviewers , the technique and style of Hemingway 's books , which were translated into more than thirty-five languages , had a profound effect on modern European . For he offered a way of seeing and recording experience which matched his contemporaries ' belief that art is a means of telling the truth . Sartre and Camus , as well as Elio Vittorini and Giuseppe Berto , Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Btzll , were strongly influenced by his work . Camus liked to emphasize his own place in the French tradition and said he would give a hundred Hemingways for a Stendhal or a Benjamin Constant but Sartre defined his friend 's debt to the American master : The comparison with Hemingway seems more fruitful [than with Kafka] , The relationship between the two styles is obvious . Both men write in the same short sentences . Each sentence refuses to exploit the momentum accumulated by preceding ones . Each is a new beginning . Each is like a snapshot of a gesture or object . For each new gesture and word there is a new and corresponding sentence . Even in Death in the Afternoon which is not a novel , Hemingway retains that abrupt style of narration that shoots each separate sentence out of the void with a sort of respiratory spasm . His style is himself . What our author [Camus] borrows from Hemingway is thus the discontinuity between the clipped phrases that imitate the discontinuity of time (Fleming 1985

Hemingway , who was first published in Russia in 1934 and praised as an active anti-Fascist , soon became the favourite foreign author of both the intellectuals and the masses . More than a million copies of his works have appeared in the Soviet Union . He has received a poetic tribute from Yevgeny Yevtushenko and critical appreciation in several essays by Ivan Kashkeen , who presents the most appealing social and political aspects of Hemingway to Russian readers : The struggle of the common people for a decent existence , their simple and straightforward attitude towards life and death serve as a model for Hemingway 's more complex and contradictory characters (Asselineau 1965 . He also states the reasons why Hemingway is attractive to younger : The fact that he can look at life without blinking that his manner is all his own that he is ruthlessly exacting on himself , making no allowances and straightforward in self-appraisal that his hero keeps himself in check , and is ever ready to fight nature , danger , fear , even death , and is prepared to join other people at the most perilous moments in their struggle for a common cause

Hemingway 's life and work , which taught a generation of men to speak in stoical accents , have also had a profound influence on a school of hard-boiled American -Dashiell Hammett , James Farrell , John O 'Hara , Nelson Algren , James Jones and Norman Mailer-who were affected not only by his style and technique , but also by his horrific content and his heroic code that seemed to represent the essence of American values . Ralph Ellison has described the psychological and aesthetic effect of Hemingway 's life and language , and explained why he was an even more important model for him than the black novelist Richard Wright : Because he appreciated the things of this earth which I love . Because he wrote with such precision . Because all that he wrote was involved with a spirit beyond the tragic . Because Hemingway was a greater artist than Wright . Because Hemingway loved the American language and the joy of writing . Because he was in many ways the true father-as-artist of so many of us who came to writing during the late thirties (Lawrence 1973

In much written about him during the 1950s Hemingway the hero merged imperceptibly with Hemingway the sage , thus restoring to him one of the artist 's most venerable functions , one radically diminished for serious since at least the time of Flaubert . Modern might still aspire to transform the consciousness of their race , but because of their art 's increasingly private and difficult ' nature , and especially because powerful competing modes of communication had usurped some of their functions and much of their audience , they no longer enjoyed the cultural pre-eminence they once did (Donaldson 1977 . As a novelist Hemingway subscribed to Flaubert 's specification of a restrained , indirect , and subtle art , but this chafed that part of him which wanted more in the way of public influence . His solution - arrogating to himself the role of mentor in his public personality - used the competing media for his own purposes . Paradoxically , however because he was an artist whose literary genius was universally recognized , his stature as a sage was considerably augmented . Performing one of the artist 's traditional roles , but in the untraditional way of speaking outside his art , he prescribed modes of consciousness and implied by example how his admirers could live their lives as successfully as he had his . And his culture , granting the validity of his special insight because he was an artist , eagerly welcomed these prescriptions

The retrospective essay by James Farrell , whose 'Studs Lonigan (1932-35 ) had been strongly influenced by Hemingway , was published during World War Two . Farrell places the novel in the perspective of the 1920s and writes from the social-realist perspective of the 1930s . He says that Hemingway 's influence had a liberating and salutary effect The nihilistic character of Hemingway 's writing helped to free younger people from the false hopes ' of the thirties . But Farrell , like Kazin writing in 1942 , believes that 'Hemingway is a writer of limited vision one who has no broad and fertile perspective on life that his characters 'live for the present , constantly searching for new and fresh sensations and that his attitude is simply 'an action is good if it makes one feel good (Reynolds 1976

Though Farrell calls The Sun Also Rises Hemingway 's best book and one of the best novels of the twenties , he thinks that Hemingway 's attitudes were firmly fixed at that time . He said pretty much what he had to say with his first stories and his first two novels ' Contemporary critics were divided on the merits of the novel . But it has had a far greater effect on later generations who identified with rather than rejected the sordid and nihilistic lives of the protagonists , and recognized it as Hemingway 's greatest work

The most important author living today , the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare , is Ernest Hemingway (Meyers 1977 ) So we have been assured by John O 'Hara in The New York Times Book Review . We should have to know what Mr . O 'Hara thinks of the various intervening authors of Shakespeare himself , and indeed of literature , in to get the full benefit of this evaluation . It might be inferred , from his review of Across the River and into the Trees , that he holds them well on this side of idolatry . Inasmuch , Hemingway 's novel tends regrettably to run certain attitudes and mannerisms to the ground , merely to describe it - if I may use an unsportsmanlike simile-is like shooting a sitting bird Mr . O 'Hara 's gallant way of protecting this vulnerable target is to charge the air with invidious comparisons . His final encomium should be quoted in full , inasmuch as it takes no more than two short words , which manage to catch the uncertainty of the situation as well as the strident unsteadiness of Mr . O 'Hara 's tone : Real class ' That interesting phrase , which could be more appropriately applied to a car or a girl carries overtones of petty snobbery it seems to look up toward an object which , it admits in wistful awe , transcends such sordid articles of the same commodity as ordinarily fall within its ken . To whistle after Hemingway in this fashion is doubtless a sincerer form of flattery than tributes which continue to be inhibited by the conventions of literary discourse

If he was an okay joy ' to his comrades in arms , he is something more complex to his fellow . Their collected opinions range from grudging admiration to fascinated suspicion . Though most of them make their separate peace with him , they leave a fairly consistent and surprisingly hostile . The exception that proves the rule , in this case Elliot Paul , is the warm admirer who demonstrates his loyalty by belabouring Hemingway 's critics . Few of them are able to maintain the distinction , premised by Mr . McCaffery 's subtitle , between the man ' and his work ' Curiously enough , the single essay that undertakes to deal with craftsmanship is the one that emanates from Marxist Russia . The rest , though they incidentally contain some illuminating comments on technique , seem more interested in recapitulating the phases of Hemingway 's career , in treating him as the spokesman of his generation , or in coming to grips with a natural phenomenon . All this is an impressive testimonial to the force of his personality . Yet what is personality , when it manifests itself in art if not style ? It is not because of the figure he cuts in the rotogravure sections , or for his views on philosophy and politics , that we listen to a leading Heldentenor . No contemporary voice has excited more admiration and envy , stimulated more imitation and parody , and had more effect on the rhythms of our speech than Hemingway 's has done . Ought we not then first and last , to be discussing the characteristics of his prose , when we talk about a man who - as Archibald MacLeish has written - whittled a style for his time (Young 1952

Hemingway 's face was a familiar sight on magazine covers in the years after The Old Man and the Sea . What this signified , beyond the obvious fact that he was the best-known writer of his time , was that he had transcended his literary calling and become a figure of importance to his entire culture

Hemingway is , within very narrow limits , a stylist who has brought to something like perfection a curt , unemotional , factual style which is an attempt at the objective presentation of experience . A great deal of the immense influence of Hemingway 's fiction still seems to project derives from his protagonists ' misery issuing as naturally and inevitably from experience as agony from a wound . In his attempts to get all the facts down ' Hemingway contributed to debunking fever ' the prevalent postwar literary attitude of disgusted with attempts to mollify American life who instead attempt to realistically depict contemporary material

As an artist Hemingway occupied an honorific position in the culture but one with limited status outside the intellectual elite . In much written about him during the 1950s Hemingway the hero merged imperceptibly with Hemingway the sage , thus restoring to him one of the artist 's most venerable functions , one radically diminished for serious since at least the time of Flaubert . Modern might still aspire to transform the consciousness of their race , but because of their art 's increasingly private and difficult ' nature , and especially because powerful competing modes of communication had usurped some of their functions and much of their audience , they no longer enjoyed the cultural preeminence they once did . As a novelist Hemingway subscribed to Flaubert 's specification of a restrained , indirect , and subtle art , but this chafed that part of him which wanted more in the way of public influence

By 1969 Hemingway was no longer so important to his culture as he had been . That he remained an important object of public attention for over half a decade after his death represents the momentum of his fame among people who had followed his life for years . A generation that did not remember him , that could only learn about him , had its own celebrities and his name and face appeared less in magazines and newss . His literary reputation seemed stable - although at what level was conjectural - but with the 1970s Hemingway the public writer was becoming matter for history

Today Hemingway still has a large following , especially among adolescents and college students , though they have newer idols . While the young cannot deny him his literary position as the leader of a revolution in prose style , there are many indications that he is no longer a heroic model for a rising generation of culture makers . Those militantly committed to a national policy of peace find it hard to emulate a man who wrote that he did not believe in anything except that one should fight for one 's country whenever necessary . Young activists are disenchanted with the author who eschewed political and social involvement , for he was basically an apolitical man , drawn to battle less from ideological commitment than from the lure of danger and excitement . Unlike the socially minded of the 1930s who unsuccessfully attempted to activate him , he early lost any idealistic desire to change the world . Hemingway was unquestionably an artist of the first rank , with an admirable soul the size of Kilimanjaro . His choice of subject matter , though , bullfighting and nearly forgotten wars and shooting big animals for sport , often makes him a little hard to read nowadays . Conservation and humane treatment of animals and contempt for the so-called arts of war rank high on most of our agendas nowadays One of a sage 's traditional duties is to instruct the young in proper ways of thinking and feeling . In "Hemingway Talks to American Youth This Week described him before a group of high school students in Ketchum , Idaho , where he outlined his ideas on work , fear , failure and success ' His responses to the young people 's questions were suitably homiletic

If a splendid new English prose is in the process of the making Hemingway is its chief promoter . His influence over the most promising young of the thirties has been enormous . Read Hemingway and learn to write ' one hears . His idiom is the idiom of actual speech and of actual thought . His aim is to bring the life he is projecting directly into the emotions of the reader . He is a master of the art of spontaneity , the unpremeditated art . How relieving it is to turn from Dreiser 's ponderous periods to Hemingway 's limpid phrasing ! No one of his imitators has as yet learned his adroitness . But his influence is to say the least , most salutary

John Aldridge (1951 ) wrote that for members of his generation , the young men born between 1918 , roughly , and 1924 , there was a special charm about Hemingway . By the time most of Aldridge ' contemporaries were old enough to read him he had become a legendary figure , a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron and like Byron , he had learned to play himself , his own best hero , with superb conviction . He was Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing beside a marlin he had just landed or a lion he had just shot he was Tarzan Hemingway crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready , Bwana Hemingway commanding his native bearers in terse Swahili he was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty fascist shells crashed through the roof later on he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post single-handed against fierce German attacks (Delaney 1972

But even without the legend he created around himself , the chest-beating , wisecracking pose that was later to seem so incredibly absurd , his impact upon us was tremendous . The feeling he gave us was one of immense expansiveness and freedom and , at the same time , of absolute stability and control . We could put our whole faith in him and he would not fail us . We could follow him , ape his manner , his cold detachment , through all the doubts and fears of adolescence and come out pure and untouched . The words he put down seem to us to be carved from the living stone of life . They are absolutely , nakedly true because the man behind them had reduced himself to the bare tissue of his soul to write them and because he was a dedicated man . The words of Hemingway conveyed so exactly the taste , smell , and feel of experience as it was as it might possibly be , that we begin unconsciously to translate our own sensations into their terms and to impose on everything we do and feel the particular emotions they arouse in us

For many Americans the announcement of Hemingway 's death in Ketchum Idaho , on July 2 , 1961 , had the same impact as the news of President Roosevelt 's fatal stroke sixteen years earlier (Baker 1969 . Like FDR Hemingway seemed such a familiar and immutable presence , such a fixed part of the emotional landscape that his mourners could remember what they were doing and where they were when they learned he was dead . As the public tributes in subsequent days and weeks would illustrate , his death signified more to his culture than the passing of a distinguished writer . It was the demise of a national institution

His passing did not end his hold as public writer upon the imagination of his countrymen . If anything , his public personality was more in the public eye in the eight years after his death than before . During this period , which concluded with the publication of Carlos Baker 's authorized biography , he was the subject of six other biographies scores of reminiscences , many poems and short stories , dozens of appreciations , even a syndicated comic strip which purported to tell the story of his life . And in his posthumous memoir , A Moveable Feast , he continued to influence the public 's perception of his character , adding lustre to his already fulgent Paris years

We can account for some of this excellence by the fact that Hemingway has been and is contemporary . His novels have so crystallized the circumstances of our times that the critic is given material which enormously simplifies his own task of interpretation and analysis . It is , for instance , very helpful to comment on the Twenties if we use The Sun Also Rises as our point of reference and the same thing can be said for most of Hemingway 's other works

But when we say that Hemingway has stimulated the best in the critics perhaps we have not said enough . For it should be pointed out that the nature and brilliance of most of the critical writing partake of the same qualities of excitement and interest which we derive from Hemingway 's work . It seems to me that no one who could possibly come away from Hemingway ' writing unenriched . One comes away from these writings with a better knowledge of Hemingway and a powerful stimulus to read him and to reread him in the light of these critical attitudes Current critical thought tends to play down the image of the artist as heroic individual it sees the literary work not as the product of one person working in isolation but rather as a communal artefact . The bridge between Hemingway and his audience is not permanently created once for all time but is constantly under construction

But if it did not matter then , it matters bowknot because what is supremely good in Hemingway is in any way perishable , but because his work is stationary , because there is no real continuity in him , nothing of the essential maturity of spirit which his own poetic insight has always called for . It matters now that Hemingway 's influence has in itself become a matter of history . It will always matter , particularly to those who appreciate what he brought to American writing , and who with that distinction in mind , can realize that Hemingway 's is a tactile contemporary American success who can realize , with respect and sympathy , that it is a triumph in and of a narrow , local , and violent world - and never superior to it

Technically and even morally Hemingway was to have a profound influence on the writing of the Thirties . As a stylist and craftsman his example was magnetic on younger men who came after him as the progenitor of the new and distinctively American cult of violence , he stands out as the greatest single influence on the hard-boiled novel of the Thirties , and certainly affected the social and left-wing fiction of the period more than some of the could easily admit . No one except Dreiser in an earlier period had anything like Hemingway 's dominance over modern American fiction , yet even Dreiser meant largely an example of courage and frankness during the struggle for realism , not a standard of style and a persuasive formula , like Hemingway 's , that would colour the manners of a whole generation and make its real effect , where it had begun , in the smaller truth and larger slickness of American journalism Hemingway is the bronze god of the whole contemporary literary experience in America

Works Cited

Asselineau , Roger , ed , The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe New York , 1965

Baker , Carlos , Ernest Hemingway : A Life Story , New York , 1969

Capellbn Angel , Hemingway and the Hispanic World . Ann Arbor : UMI Research

, 1985

Cheney Patrick . Hemingway and Christian Epic : The Bible in For Whom the Bell Tolls " s on Language and Literature 21 .2 , Spring 1985

Delaney , Paul . Robert Jordan 's 'Real Absinthe ' Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual 1972

Donaldson , Scott , By Force of Will : The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway , New York , 1977

Fleming , Bruce , Writing in Pidgin : Language in For Whom the Bell Tolls ' Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 15 .4 , 1985

Gunnk , Giles B . Hemingway 's Treatment of Human Solidarity : A Literary Critique of For Whom the Bell Tolls ' Christian Scholar 's Review 2 1972

Laurence , Frank M , Hemingway and the Movies . Jackson : UP of Mississippi , 1981

Lawrence , Broer , Hemingway 's Spanish Tragedy . Tuscaloosa : U of Alabama br

, 1973

Meyers , Jeffrey , Married to Genius , London , 1977

Meyers , Jeffrey , Hemingway 's First War ' Criticism , 19 , 1977

Ross , Lillian , Portrait of Hemingway , New York , 1961

Reynolds , Michael , Hemingway 's First War : The Making of A Farewell to Arms , Princeton , 1976

Young , Philip , Ernest Hemingway , New York , 1952

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