Despite his fears that marriage would destroy his way of living, Hemingway married Hadley, and they set up housekeeping, living on income from her trust fund. Soon, near-poverty depleted Hemingway’s usual good nature, and friends urged him to move to Paris, where living expenses would be cheaper.
In Paris, Hemingway and Hadley lived in the Latin Quarter, a bohemian enclave of artists, poets, and writers. The Toronto Sun bought the articles that Hemingway submitted, as well as his political sketches, and Hemingway was pleased about the short stories he was writing. He was twenty-three years old and felt that he’d finally hit his stride as an author with a style that was authentically his own.
After covering the war between Greece and Turkey for the New York Sun, Hemingway returned to Paris and continued writing Nick Adams tales, including “A Way You’ll Never Be.” He was interrupted, though, when the Toronto Star insisted that he cover the Lausanne Peace Conference. While there, he urged Hadley to join him, and she did so, bringing all of his short stories, sketches, and poems in a valise that would be stolen in the Lyon train station.
Hemingway was so stunned with disbelief at the terrible loss that he immediately returned to Paris, convinced that Hadley surely hadn’t packed even the carbon copies of his stories, but she had. Hemingway had lost everything that he’d written.
Ironically, American expatriate and writer Gertrude Stein had just spoken to Hemingway about loss, mentioning a garage keeper’s off-hand comment: “You are all a lost generation,” a casual remark, yet one that eventually would become world famous after Hemingway used it as an epigraph to his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). This term “lost generation” would be instantly meaningful to Hemingway’s readers. It would give a name to the attitudes of the post-World War I generation of Americans, especially to the young writers of that era who believed that their loves and hopes had been shattered by the war. They had been led down a glory trail to death—not for noble patriotic ideals, but for the greedy, materialistic gains of international power groups. The high-minded sentiments of their elders were not to be trusted; only reality was truth—and reality was harsh: Life was futile, often meaningless.
After the loss of his manuscripts, Hemingway followed Stein’s advice to go to Spain; she promised him that he’d find new stories there. After his sojourn in Spain, Hemingway returned to Paris and from there to Canada, where Hadley gave birth to their first child. Afterward, Hemingway returned to Paris, where he began writing “Big Two-Hearted River.” From there, he went to Austria, where he wrote more Nick Adams stories, as well as “Hills Like White Elephants.”
Hemingway and Hadley were divorced in 1927, and he married Pauline Pfeiffer, an Arkansas heiress, who accompanied him to Africa, traveling 300 miles by train to reach Nairobi, and onward to the Kapti Plains, the foothills of the Ngong Hills, and the Serengeti Plain. Africa would be the setting for two of Hemingway’s most famous short stories—“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
In 1940, Hemingway and Pauline were divorced, and he married writer Martha Gellhorn. They toured China, then established a residence in Cuba. When World War II began, Hemingway volunteered his services and his fishing boat, the Pilar, and cooperated with United States naval intelligence as a German submarine spotter in the Caribbean.
Wanting a still-more-active role in the war, Hemingway soon was a 45-year-old war correspondent barnstorming through Europe with the Allied invasion troops—and sometimes ahead of them. It is said that Hemingway liberated the Ritz Hotel in Paris and that when the Allied troops arrived, they were greeted by a notice on the entrance: “Papa Hemingway took good hotel. Plenty stuff in the cellar.”
Following yet another divorce, this one in 1944, Hemingway married Mary Welsh, a Time magazine correspondent. The couple lived in Venice for a while, then returned to Havana, Cuba. In 1950, Across the River and into the Trees appeared, but it was neither a critical nor a popular success. His short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), however, restored Hemingway’s literary stature, and he was awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in literature.
In January 1954, Hemingway was off for another of his many African safaris and was reported dead after two airplane crashes in two days. He survived, though, despite severe internal and spinal injuries and a concussion. When he read newspaper obituary notices about his death, he noted with great pleasure that they were favorable. That same year, Hemingway received the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Prize in literature, “for his powerful style forming mastery of the art of modern narration, as most recently evidenced in The Old Man and the Sea.”
During the next few years, Hemingway was not happy, and during 1961, he was periodically plagued by high blood pressure and clinical depression. He received shock therapy during two long confinements at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, but most of the prescribed treatment for his depression was of little value. Hemingway died July 2, 1961, at his home, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It seems as if there were always two Hemingways. One was the adventurer—the grinning, bearded “Papa” of the news photographs; the other was the skillful, sensitive author Hemingway, who patiently wrote, rewrote, and edited his work.
Certainly each of the short stories discussed in this volume represents a finished, polished “gem”—Hemingway’s own word for his short stories. No word is superfluous, and no more words are needed. Along with such well-known short-story writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and John Steinbeck, Hemingway is considered by literary critics to be one of the world’s finest.
