Hemingway and Me: Or How I Learned to Love Hemingway and Stop Worrying About His Hopelessness

I did not always like Ernest Hemingway. In some ways I still don’t. Among the post-Great War American writers, I consider F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck as better writers who dealt with the same poignant themes of love lost and the crushing burden of debt suffocating dreams; they are, in my estimation, better representatives of the tradition of the crestfallen “American Adam” as the Yale scholar R.W.B. Lewis once wrote. Nevertheless, the older I get and more I return to rereading Hemingway (as any reader should do even if they’re not particularly fond of what they’re rereading) I do think Hemingway speaks to us just as much as he did to generations a century ago. In rereading Hemingway, I find myself liking him more and more.

It’s hard to say what is Hemingway’s best work. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, nominally, for The Old Man and the Sea. Personally, I dislike that small book the most of any of Hemingway’s “great works.” The terse narrative prose is off putting and lacks the vivid poignancy and dialogue of, say, A Farewell To Arms or For Whom The Bells Toll. If I had to choose which work of Hemingway’s is best, I would probably say For Whom The Bells Toll (and the 1941 Pulitzer Board agreed but didn’t confer the award due to the intervention of Nicholas Murray Butler who considered the work too vulgar for a prestigious award). There are scenes that still stick with me, especially the ending as a mortally wounded Robert Jordan prepares his ambush of Francoist cavalrymen knowing he is going to die while his comrades, and lover, escape.

What made me dislike Hemingway as a youngster was the tragic element to his writings. Naturally, most teenagers think the world is boundlessly open to them and that they have unending opportunities. Romantic flings and aspirations carry with them the optimism and tickling sensations of first love; romantic tragedy isn’t exactly on the mind of a lusty teenager filled with the pulsating heart of life. While Hemingway’s characters also have their romantic moments and dreams, the inability of those aspirations to manifest themselves struck a younger me as the ramblings of a failed life that held no sway over what was possible for my life—I would be different.

Now that I’m a little older, and hopefully a little wiser, there is a hard impasse to distinguish between what we might call romantic realism and romantic tragedy. Should we even consider such a distinction? Hemingway’s contemporaries—Fitzgerald and Steinbeck—also wrote in the same genre. I didn’t like Steinbeck either when I had to read him in high school. Today, Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors. In fact, the entire genre of American romantic tragedy, and romantic tragedy more generally, is my favorite genre. From Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind to John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, these stories of romantic aspiration to romantic failure have a far greater affecting quality than other teenage romantic literary fads I shall not name as it would be a disservice to include them in the same sentence as works by Pasternak, Mitchell, and Steinbeck. Are the works of romantic tragedy really tragic, or do they speak to the reality of our world?

Romantic literature is among the oldest in human civilization. Poetry, especially, is imbued with its spirit. We can think of great names like Sappho, Catullus, even Dante, as writers who cried with the piercing laments of love unconsummated and unrequited. Sappho plunged herself off a cliff to her death. Catullus died heartbroken; the enduring image is him alone on a beach even though he died in Rome. Dante might have been joined with Beatrice in paradise, but the love he had for her when he was a young man went unconsummated in his life on earth and his life in heaven.

Hemingway is a romantic writer. But he is not a romantic writer like his Victorian predecessors who defined the early emergence of the genre we now know very well. If Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters stand as the pillars of the genre’s formation and public understanding of how romance novels are supposed to progress and conclude, what are to make of Hemmingway’s decidedly tragic endings? Austen and the Brontë sisters may have plenty of tragedy, pain, and suffering running throughout their novels, but they end how we would want romance novels to end and expect romance novels to end because they shaped the course of how romance novels are to conclude. After all, they formalized our modern romantic sensibilities. Austen’s heroines eventually marry and are happy. Cathy Linton overcomes the tyranny of Heathcliff and marries Hareton; the sun finally shines over Wuthering Heights. Jane forgives Rochester and marries him; the two have a new life together and start a family. The sun doesn’t shine over Hemingway’s characters as they do not marry and do not start new lives with their beloved. Robert Jordan is left wounded, and we know—as he himself knows—he will die. Frederic Henry walks out into the rain and muck and mud after Catherine dies in his arms at a hospital. Santiago’s marlin is ripped away from him by a shark. He returns exhausted to his bed, and we are left with an ambiguous ending over his fate. Those of us who have read plenty of Hemingway just assume Santiago dies. That’s Hemingway. Yup, that’s Hemingway. Dead.

Romance can be heartbreaking. This is something that Hemingway shares with his predecessors. But where the heartbreak of romance is eventually rewarded with romantic fulfillment in much of nineteenth century romance literature, post-WWI romantic literature in the twentieth century rejects this resolution. From the writers of America to Europe and the world over, the romance literature that emerged out of the blood-stained mud of the First World War (and the Second World War) often takes the permanence of heartbreak as the central pillar of romance – the absolute rule to the story being told. We love, but that love can never be sanctified and sanctifying. The horrors of the twentieth century tell us so. The blood and mud of the Somme confirm it.

The permanence of heartbreak is what Hemingway achieves in his great novels. Love permeates the environments that Hemingway writes about and in which his characters move and die. He is, in some ways, an inverted Augustinian—for it was Saint Augustine who articulated the view love governs and moves all things, even our free choices, “My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” But where Augustine found the highest expression of loving desire in hope (hope is the synthesis of faith and love for bishop of Hippo), Hemingway ultimately finds futility in love. Love is hopeful in Augustine. Love is hopeless in Hemingway. But love governs all things in both men. Hemingway accepts the reality of love governing our cosmos and our lives but rejects that it means anything.

We might, therefore, go as far as to say that Hemingway is a captive fugitive of a hopeless love, a love where no ultimate fulfillment can be found but this doesn’t detract from the reality of love that moves him and his characters. Robert Jordan’s love for María is powerful even if impermanent. Their love brings them solace amid war. But war and the death that results in war comes knocking on Robert Jordan’s door at the end. Likewise, Frederic Henry cannot find the healing love he so desperately seeks with Catherine. Santiago’s love for fishing, nature, and life eventually wears him down. Santiago is beaten by the end of The Old Man and the Sea. Even in The Sun Also Rises, Jake and Lady Brett are on two different paths: Jake has been ruined by war (physically and spiritually) while Lady Brett has been newly liberated in the interwar “Roaring Twenties” age. Their (potential) love, which is erotic in nature and to which Jake cannot consummate because of his war wounds, is unable to flourish. They slowly drift away even if they end up in a taxi together at the novel’s conclusion—reminiscing on what could have been—the cruelest of symbolic images: together, but not really together. Hemingway is taunting us.

So romance is at the heart of Hemingway’s great stories. But the romance which Hemingway expresses is a romance of the purely erotic, the ephemeral, the temporal. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this; after all, all things are good. The problem is Hemingway’s hopelessness, a hopelessness which makes the love of his characters simultaneously poignant and pointless. We who have hope for a greater love can see the futility in Hemingway’s lovers. We grieve with them. We may even cry with them. Their love, however, cannot be sanctified because of the hopelessness they find themselves in. If, however, there is a greater hope than the fleeting and fugitive love expressed by Hemingway, then Hemingway’s stories can be sanctified and redeemed by recognizing their shortcomings in relationship to the higher reality of the permanent love that Augustine longed for.

This leads me to conclude with why I now enjoy Hemingway in ways I did not previously when younger. I can hope for Hemingway and his characters in ways that the author himself could not. This ensures a more enchanted relationship with Hemingway’s stories, an enchanted relationship built on love and hope—love of a good story and good characters with an outside hope that their loves and sacrifices were not in vain. The reader develops a personal relationship that also expresses their own sentiments. Mine are now obvious: Hemingway may not have had hope for his characters, but I do.

In that hope I have, I can love his characters and their stories more intimately than I can with other characters whose stories end with beatitude. That hope that I now have draws me closer to Hemingway and his characters. In my hope I can revive the hope of Hemingway’s hopeless characters and give them a second life, a resurrected life that Hemingway prevented because of his hopelessness but that I have the imaginative power to bestow—thus ensuring the eternality of María and Robert Jordan, Catherine and Frederic, Lady Brett and Jake, Santiago, and the rest of the souls who dot Hemingway’s artistic landscape.

My hope lifts up tragic romance and turns it into a sanctifying romance. I, as the reader with a sanctified and sanctifying imagination, have the power to do this. Hemingway’s own imagination may not have been able to reach that blessed land for his characters, but my imagination has that unique and special power for his characters. I have the power to bestow life where life ends. Hemingway gives me that opportunity that other writers do not with their happy endings. I have come to appreciate him more for this very reason. Hemingway permits me to be hopeful for his characters, that I may one day meet Robert Jordan and María in the land of eternal love where peace and happiness without strife and struggle abound forever and forever.

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