Welcome to The Deep Dive. Today, we're plunging
into the life of, well, one of the most celebrated
and maybe complex figures in modern literature,
Ernest Hemingway. Absolutely. When you think
Hemingway, you probably get that picture, right?
Yeah. Yeah. The adventurer, the rugged sportsman,
always on the move. He was an American novelist,
journalist, short story writer, 1899 to 1961.
And his style, that economical, understated prose.
It just completely redefined how stories were
told in the 20th century. It really did. But
what's fascinating and what we really want to
get into today is that huge gap, isn't it, between
the, you know, the spareness of the writing and
the absolute utter chaos of his biography. Total
chaos. I mean, a life of staggering drama, war
correspondent, safari hunter, deep sea fisherman.
And the accolades, too. Pulitzer in 53, the Nobel
Prize in literature in 54. Right. So our mission
for you today really is to try and bridge that
chasm. Because the sources we've looked at, they
really show the man and the writer are just inseparable.
We're going to unpack his biography, look at
how he engineered that radical literary style,
and also cover his, well, his tragic decline,
both mentally and physically. All to understand
that key question. How did all these overwhelming
experiences, this profound trauma, How did that
get distilled into work famous for being so objective,
almost clinical? Exactly. It's quite a puzzle.
It's an extraordinary journey we're taking together.
We'll start in conservative Illinois, then jump
pretty quickly to the shrapnel filled fields
of Italy. Then on to Paris, the lost generation.
Those smoky salons. Yeah. Then adventures in
Africa, the Spanish Civil War. Yeah. Right up
to those dramatic, sometimes frankly bizarre
final years in Idaho. It's quite a ride. It really
is. So get ready because we're starting right
at the beginning. The making of the man who'd
become Papa Hemingway. Okay. So Ernest Miller
Hemingway, born July 21st, 1899, Oak Park, Illinois.
Oak Park. And you described it as affluent, very
conservative. Very. You know, if you know the
area, it's all about piety restraint. Which is
just peak irony considering the life he ended
up leading. Completely. His parents, Clarence,
who was a doctor, a respected physician, and
Grace, his mother, a musician, they gave him
this cultured upbringing. But like you said,
it was riddled with contradictions from day one.
And that duality seems crucial. Oh, absolutely.
The sources really highlight that tension straight
away. His mother, Grace, she was apparently quite
determined to keep him and his slightly older
sister, Marceline, looking like a matched pair.
Like twins. Sort of, yeah. For his first three
years, she kept his hair long, dressed him in
these frilly... feminine clothes. Wow. OK. And
this enforced femininity, which you get the sense
he really chafed against. It stood in such stark
contrast to the other side of his education.
You know, the rougher, hyper masculine stuff
from his father. Right. The outdoorsman. Exactly.
And that contrast really did define him, didn't
it? On one hand, you've got these reluctant cello
lessons pushed by his musician mother. But here's
where it gets fascinating. Hemingway himself
apparently said later. Those lessons contributed
to what he called the contrapuntal structure
of for whom the bell tolls. Isn't that incredible,
that connection? It really is. Can you unpack
that a bit? Contrapuntal. Sure. So in music counterpoint
or contrapuntal texture, it's about weaving together
multiple independent melodic lines simultaneously.
Okay. Hemingway sort of translates this idea
into narrative. It seems the cello training gave
him an ear, maybe subconsciously, for how you
could run these simultaneous independent threads.
voices narratives themes within one big structure
like in belt holes exactly like belt holes you've
got robert jordan's internal thoughts you've
got the dialogue happening around him you've
got the constant looming reality of the war yeah
all playing out at the same time like different
melodies working together that makes sense and
meanwhile his father's doing the complete opposite
right Instilling this lifelong passion for the
outdoors, teaching young Ernest Woodcraft, hunting,
fishing, camping up in northern Michigan. And
that passion, that connection to wild places,
self -sufficiency, it becomes the backdrop for
so much of his best work, doesn't it? Almost
all of it, yeah. And this fusion, the sensitive
artist, the disciplined athlete, it really starts
to come together in high school. He did everything,
boxing, track, football. But also editing the
school paper. The trapeze. And not just editing.
He was actively imitating the popular sports
writers of the day, guys like Ring Lardner. So
he's already honing that voice. Practicing. And
that practice, that imitation, it prepared him
for what you could argue were the most important
six months of his early career. Which was that
stint at the Kansas City Star right after high
school. Yeah, just six months as a cub reporter.
Yeah. But that experience, as you said earlier,
it became the absolute bedrock of the entire
Hemingway style. It's revolutionary, really,
when you think about how different American prose
sounded before him. It wasn't just a job. It
was like a stylistic boot camp. The star's style
guide gave him these non -negotiable rules. What
were they again? Simple. Declarative. Almost
brutal in their clarity. Use short sentences.
Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.
Be positive, not negative. Wow. No messing around.
None. It forced constraint. It stripped away
all that flowery, adjective -heavy prose you
got in the 19th century. It was creating a whole
new way to build a story. Anti -purple prose
training, basically. And that style gets tested
almost immediately in the crucible of World War
I. Yeah. He couldn't join the U .S. without any
poor eyesight. Right. So he volunteers, ambulance
driver for the American Red Cross Motor Corps
in Italy. This is 1917. And the shift from that
clean, conservative Kansas City newsroom to the
chaos of war, it's immediate, isn't it? Brutally
immediate. On his very first day in Milan, he
witnesses the aftermath of a munitions factory
explosion. Sheer carnage. Oh, God. He was sent
to retrieve the dead. He later described it as
collecting the shrouded remains of female workers.
A truly visceral introduction to modern industrial
death. And then, just days later, the big one.
The instant that changes everything. July 8,
1918. Fosalta di Piave. He's delivering comfort
cigarettes, chocolate to the frontline troops.
And he gets hit. Badly. Mortar shrapnel. He was
only 18. Just 18. The shrapnel wounds were severe.
Both legs. But the psychological impact. Maybe
even more profound. That's when he talked about
losing the illusion of immortality. Exactly.
He said something like, other people get killed,
not you. Then when you are badly wounded the
first time, you lose that illusion and you know
it can happen to you. That moment of realization,
that death is right there, random. It's the foundation
of his whole tragic worldview, really. But even
badly wounded, the sources say he was incredibly
brave. Oh yeah. He helped Italian soldiers get
to safety before dealing with his own injuries,
which earned him decorations the Italian War
Merit Cross, the silver medal of military valor.
So physical courage. But the wounds weren't just
physical, were they? There was an emotional one
during his recovery, too. Right. Six months recuperating
in Milan, he falls hard for Agnes von Karosky.
The Red Cross nurse. Yeah. Seven years older
than him, he was convinced they were getting
married, poured all that youthful hope into it.
But she rejected him. Months later, yeah. Via
letter. Said she'd gotten engaged to an Italian
officer. Ouch. Biographers really focus on that
moment, don't they? Calling it devastating, scarring.
Why is it so critical? Well, because it seems
to have immediately set up this toxic pattern
in his future relationships, his marriages. Oh,
so. The shock of being abandoned like that. Yeah.
So unexpectedly by Agnes. It looks like it created
a kind of defense mechanism. In his later marriages.
Hemingway consistently leaves the wife before
she has a chance to leave him. Ah, preemptive
abandonment. Exactly. A cycle of emotional preemption.
Yeah. And it seems rooted in that double shock
of WWI, the physical loss of control over life
and the emotional loss of control over love.
So where did he find solace? Well, as we see
in that famous Nick Adams story, Big Two -Hearted
River, the only reliable comfort seemed to be
nature. Going back to northern Michigan, seeking
solitude, trying to find some kind of peace,
some psychological recalibration after the war.
OK, so he goes back to the States. He marries
Hadley Richardson in 1921. She's eight years
older, right? Seemed to provide a bit of stability.
Yeah, a nurturing presence, perhaps. And then
they make the big move, Paris. On Sherwood Anderson's
advice? Right. Anderson gave them letters of
introduction, told them to join the expatriate
scene over there. And Paris. I mean, that's where
the Hemingway persona really gets forged, doesn't
it? Absolutely. That's the forge. Initially,
he's working as a foreign correspondent for the
Toronto Star. Still keeping that journalistic
muscle flexed. Covering everything from, you
know, post -war political crises to fishing reports.
Maintaining that vigorous discipline. But at
the same time... He gets adopted by the giants
of modernism. This is where the famous names
come in. Gertrude Stein. Right. The Doyenne of
Montparnasse. She becomes his mentor, godmother
to his son Jack Bumby. And she introduces him
to that whole circle. The artists, the writers.
The painters, sculptors, and crucially the other
American writers who are all trying to figure
out this post -war world. And Stein gives them
that name, right? She does. The Lost Generation.
That term she coined referred to that whole post
-WWI cohort, feeling spiritually adrift, displaced,
disillusioned by the collapse of old values after
the, frankly, pointless slaughter of the war.
Beyond Stein, who else was key? Ezra Pound. Big
time. Pound had just finished basically shaping
T .S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Wow. They met, sort
of by chance, in 1922. Pound immediately saw
the raw talent in Hemingway and helped him hone
his prose, cut the fat. And James Joyce. Didn't
he hang out with Joyce? Apparently went on alcoholic
sprees with him frequently. I mean, can you imagine
a more intense, more challenging intellectual
environment for a young writer? No kidding. Demanding,
anti -establishment, obsessed with style. Totally
focused on stylistic innovation. But this period,
this intense creative growth, it gets hit by
a catastrophe. The lost manuscripts. Ugh. Yeah,
this story still makes writers physically uncomfortable.
December 1922. Hadley's traveling to meet him
in Geneva, takes a suitcase full of his work
onto the train to the Gare de Lyon in Paris.
And loses it. Loses it. Almost everything he'd
written up to that point. Early fiction, short
stories, drafts. Gone. He must have been. Devastated
and furious. Yeah. According to the sources.
Understandably. Yeah. But, you know, you could
almost argue it was a weird kind of creative
purification. What do you mean? Well, he was
forced to focus only on the few scraps, the handful
of stories that survives or that he rewrote from
memory. It reinforced that journalistic need
for precision, for constraint. He couldn't get
lost in old drafts. He had to strip down, build
again. And that forced focus paid off pretty
quickly. It did. His first book, Three Stories
and Ten Poems, comes out in 1923, then the collection
In Our Time in 24, and the expanded In Our Time
in 25, which had Indian camp. And critics noticed
immediately. Oh, yeah. Especially back in the
U .S., they were struck by that crisp, declarative
style, recognized it as something new, something
powerful, especially in the short story form.
And that success coincides with meeting F. Scott
Fitzgerald, 1925. Right. Their friendship. famously
volatile. Yeah. A real mix of admiration and
hostility. Yeah, I've read about that. Fitzgerald
was already a big name, right? And he encouraged
Hemingway, pushed him towards a novel. Apparently,
reading The Great Gatsby was the thing that really
convinced Hemingway his next big project had
to be a novel. And that novel comes out of Spain,
doesn't it? The bullfighting. Exactly. He becomes
fascinated by bullfighting after visiting the
Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. After his
third trip there, he sits down and starts drafting.
The sun also rises. On his birthday, July 21st,
1925. And finishes it how quickly? A breakneck
eight weeks later. Incredible. The Sun Also Rises
comes out in 1926. Becomes the book for that
post -war expatriate crowd. Cements Stein's lost
generation label. But Hemingway himself complicated
that label later, didn't he? He did. He told
his editor, Max Perkins, that the real point
of the book wasn't that they were lost, but that
the earth abideth forever. implying the characters
were maybe battered, wounded by the war, sure,
but that being lost was a temporary human thing,
not some permanent spiritual damnation. The earth
endures. They endure, in a way. That's a really
interesting nuance. But okay, while his literary
star is definitely rising, his personal life,
not so smooth. No. The first marriage starts
to fall apart. He begins an affair with Pauline
Pfeiffer in early 1926. Hadley finds out. Eventually,
yes. He divorces Hadley in January 1927, marries
Pauline just a few months later in May. He even
converted to Catholicism before marrying her.
And this whole intense Paris chapter, it ends
with another weird injury. It does. It perfectly
illustrates that blend of drama and sheer absurdity
in his life. He publishes Men Without Women in
27, which includes the great boxing story 50
Grand. Yeah. But just before he and Pauline leave
Paris for Key West in 1928, he's in a bathroom,
reaches up to pull what he thinks is the toilet
chain. But it's not the toilet chain. It's the
rope for the skylight. Pulls the whole thing
down right on his head. Oh my God, serious. Seriously.
Gives himself this massive gash, leaves a prominent
forehead scar for the rest of his life. That's
almost slapstick for this icon of masculinity.
It's bizarre. But it kind of underscores that
point the sources make. After leaving Paris in
March 1928, Hemingway never again lived in a
big city. He was seeking those wilder, more isolated
places from then on. Hashtag, hashtag, hashtag
three. Adventure, war, and for whom the bell
tolls. 1928, 1940. Okay, so they leave Paris,
head back to the States, settling in Key West
eventually. But 1928 is a good year. Professionally
good, personally devastating. Yeah, another one
of those intense juxtapositions. His son Patrick
is born that year. They're establishing this
new life in Key West. But then, just six months
later. December 1928. News comes about his father.
Clarence. Yeah. Clarence had died by suicide,
used his own father's Civil War pistol. Oh, wow.
That must have hit Hemingway incredibly hard.
Profoundly. The sources say he felt deeply responsible,
worried about his father's mental state. And
he made that chilling remark, didn't he? I'll
probably go the same way. Prophetic, tragically.
That knowledge, that shadow of hereditary mental
instability, you feel it adds another layer of
darkness to his work after that, don't you? You
absolutely do. That specific kind of tragedy.
But despite that immense personal blow, his career
just hits a new high. He finishes A Farewell
to Arms. Published in 1929. And this book really
cements his reputation, right? Major American
writer status. Undeniably. But think about the
craft involved. He famously rewrote the ending.
What was it? 17 times. 17 times. Why? What was
he trying to get right? It speaks volumes about
his obsession with realism, with emotional truth.
He wasn't just fiddling with plot points. He
was wrestling with fate, with tragedy itself.
Okay. He needed that ending where Catherine Barkley
and the baby die to feel absolutely inevitable,
not just tacked on or melodramatic. Each rewrite
was this attempt to find the perfect, cold, objective
correlative for that specific kind of loss. The
journalistic mind applying surgical precision
to tragedy. That's a great way to put it, yeah.
And that obsession with life and death, it carries
right into his Key West research phase in the
early 30s. Death in the Afternoon, 1932. This
incredibly detailed, almost anthropological study
of bullfighting. Which he saw as more than just
a sport. Oh, much more. He called it of great
tragic interest being literally of life and death.
For him, it was this ritualized confrontation
with mortality. Grace under pressure, all that.
And then he gets the boat, the pillar. 1934.
Right. Buys the pillar, dives deep into deep
sea fishing in the Caribbean. More solitude,
more physical rigor. That constant need for authentic
action seems like a necessary counterweight to
the intense mental work of writing. And then
comes Africa. The big safari. 1933. He and Pauline
go on this 10 -week trip. Kenya. Tanganyika territory.
And that one trip fuels a huge amount of writing.
Tremendous output. The nonfiction Green Hills
of Africa in 35. And two of his absolute classic
short stories, The Woes of Kilimanjaro and The
Short Happy Life of Francis McComber. A prolific
time, but also dangerous, wasn't it? Always dangerous
with Hemingway, it seems. During that safari,
he gets amoebic dysentery. Really bad case. Leads
to a prolapsed intestine. Had to be dramatically
evacuated by plane. It's just another example
of how his life was lived right on the edge.
constantly gathering material through these brushes
with serious illness or death. That restless
energy doesn't keep him stateside for long, though.
Soon he's back in a war zone. The Spanish Civil
War. Starts covering it in 1937 for the North
American Newspaper Alliance. And he sees its
significance immediately, calls it an international
testing ground for what's coming in Europe. And
he's not alone there, is he? No. He's accompanied
by Martha Gellhorn, the journalist. Who he'd
met in Key West. Right. And Gellhorn was... Different.
Sources suggest she never catered to him the
way other women did, a real peer professionally.
And that partnership turns romantic. Quickly.
Leads to the end of his marriage with Pauline.
Divorce is finalized, and he marries Martha in
Wyoming in November 1940, his third wife. But
Spain also caused a major rift with another writer
friend, didn't it? John Dos Passos. Yeah, a really
painful break. Hemingway was brought in to work
on the screenplay for the propaganda film The
Spanish Earth, essentially replacing Dos Passos.
Why did Dos Passos leave? His friend and translator,
Jose Robles, had been arrested and executed by
Republican forces. Dos Passos felt Hemingway
didn't do enough, didn't use his influence to
help Robles. It created this huge ideological
and personal split, permanent. While all this
is happening, Madrid is under siege. Relentless
bombardment. And in the midst of that, Hemingway
writes his only play, The Fifth Column. But the
real literary culmination of this period comes
shortly after. He's dividing his time between
his new home in Cuba, Finca Vigia, and Sun Valley,
Idaho. And he writes For Whom the Bell Tolls.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940. And it's a massive
success. Huge. Immediate bestseller. Half a million
copies sold in months. Biographers are clear.
It triumphantly reestablished Hemingway's literary
reputation. Showed that his lean style could
absolutely handle epic themes, large -scale political
drama. romance, profound questions about life
and death. It pulls together all those threads,
doesn't it? The WWI trauma, the power of nature,
that idea of facing death with dignity. Exactly.
A real synthesis of everything he'd experienced
and learned up to that point. Hashtag, hashtag
five, trauma, triumphs, and the final decades.
1941, 1961. So Pearl Harbor happens December
41. The U .S. is in World War II. Hemingway's
living in Cuba at Fincavigia. And he can't just
sit it out, obviously. No way. He jumps right
in. But in his own, well, eccentric Hemingway
fashion, he refits his beloved fishing boat,
the Pilar. Into a what? A cue boat? What's that?
A cue boat historically was like a decoy ship.
a heavily armed vessel disguised as an ordinary
merchant ship designed to lure enemy submarines,
U -boats in this case, into close range and then
attack them. So he turned his fishing boat into
a submarine hunter. Pretty much. Patrolling the
Caribbean looking for German U -boats. And on
top of that, he sets up his own amateur counterintelligence
unit, ran it out of his guest house, trying to
surveil Nazi sympathizers in Havana. Okay, Hemingway
the Q -boat captain and spymaster. It sounds
like something straight out of his own fiction.
Doesn't it? Yeah. And all this cloak and dagger
stuff, interestingly, led to the FBI compiling
this massive file on him. 124 pages. They monitored
him pretty closely for years after that. Wow.
Meanwhile, what's happened with Martha Gellhorn?
The marriage. It's failing. Under the strain
of their competing careers, there are different
approaches to the war. She wanted him back in
Europe as a correspondent. He was more into his
war games in Cuba. Tensions rising. Big time.
Sources say they fought frequently and bitterly.
She finally had enough, left for Europe on her
own in 43, demanded a divorce. So Hemingway eventually
follows her to Europe. As a correspondent. Yeah,
for Collier's Magazine in 1944. And it's in London,
covering the war buildup, that he meets Mary
Welsh. Time correspondent. Right. Starts an affair
almost immediately. And sticking to that pattern
we talked about. The preemptive strike. Asks
her to marry him on their third meeting. Third
meeting. Yep. His divorce from Martha becomes
final, quite acrimoniously, in 1945. He marries
Mary, his fourth and final wife, in 1946. But
the war itself keeps taking a toll physically,
doesn't it? Another head injury. A bad one. Just
before D -Day, he's in a car accident in Blackout,
London. Severe concussion needed 57 stitches
in his head. And he still goes to cover the landings.
Try Sue. He went with the troops heading for
Normandy, bandage on his head, clearly suffering
concussion symptoms. But the military brass,
probably quite rightly, prevented him from actually
going ashore. Too much of a liability. But he
finds other ways to get close to the action.
Oh, yes. Later in the campaign in France, he
kind of bends the rules, attaches himself to
Colonel Charles Buck, Lanham's 22nd Infantry
Regiment. And near Rambouillet, outside Paris,
he becomes the sort of de facto leader of a small
band of French resistance fighters, a village
militia. Which is completely against the rules
for a correspondent, right? Geneva Convention.
Absolutely. Non -combatants aren't supposed to
lead troops or engage in combat. He later beat
the rap, as they say, by claiming he only offered
advice. A pretty fine line. But his proximity
to combat was real. He was definitely under fire.
He was there for the liberation of Paris, even
had a reconciliation with Gertrude Stein shortly
before she died. And eventually, he was awarded
a Bronze Star for bravery in 1947 for his service
under fire in combat areas. So the war ends.
What happens in the post -war period, creatively?
It's a slump. A big one. He himself described
it as being out of business as a writer from
about 42 to 45. Right. He wrestled with these
huge, ambitious projects that just stalled. The
Garden of Eden, the Seabook. And this creative
drought lines up with a physical decline. Exactly.
His body was starting to really feel the effects
of, well, everything. The sources list it all.
The chronic heavy drinking making the impact
of his previous head injuries worse. How many
head injuries did he have by then? At least nine
documented serious concussions or head traumas
by this point led to severe headaches, high blood
pressure, weight gain, eventually diabetes. He
was paying the cumulative price for that hard
-lived life. So getting back into writing was
tough? Very tough. His next published novel,
Across the River and Into the Trees, 1950. It
was inspired by this placonic affair he had with
a much younger woman, Adriana Ivancic, in Venice.
And the critics hated it. Mostly, yeah. Pretty
negative reviews, which absolutely infuriated
him. And it seems, almost in direct response
to that backlash, he channeled that energy and
wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea. In
just eight weeks. Just eight weeks. Published
in 1952, he called it... The best I can write
ever for all of my life. And this time, the reception
was different. Totally different. The story of
Santiago, the old Cuban fisherman, is an international
sensation, a huge comeback, proved his mastery
was still there, won him the Pulitzer Prize for
fiction in 1953. But just when things seem back
on track, Africa happens again, and it's almost
unbelievable. It really is stranger than fiction.
January 1954, he's on a sightseeing trip in Africa
with Mary. What happened? Oh. Oh my God. Staggering.
Hemingway, trapped inside this burning wreckage,
has to physically smash his way out by battering
the flimsy door open with his head. With his
head? After already having multiple concussions?
With his head. The injuries from this second
crash were catastrophic. Fractured skull, two
cracked spinal discs, ruptured kidney and liver,
dislocated shoulder, and then later, adding insult
to injury, he gets second -degree burns fighting
a nearby bushfire. It's amazing he survived.
Press thought he hadn't, right? Yeah. Obituaries
were published worldwide. Everyone assumed he
was dead after two plane crashes in two days.
And while he's recovering from that. While he's
still recuperating, October 1954, the news comes.
He's won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Wow.
Talk about timing. Receiving the highest literary
honor just months after reading your own obituaries.
It's incredibly poignant, isn't it? He was too
ill, too injured to travel to Stockholm to accept
it. But his acceptance speech, the one read for
him, it's quite famous. It is. He reflects on
the cost of being a writer, that isolation. He
says, writing at its best is a lonely life. He
grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness
and often his work deteriorates for he does his
work alone. perfectly captures that paradox doesn't
it the world famous celebrity who believed fame
was detrimental to the work itself the celebrated
recluse exactly hashtag tv style themes and the
tragic end okay so when we talk about hemingway's
legacy The thing that lasts. We have to come
back to his style, right? And that central idea.
The iceberg theory, or as he sometimes called
it, the theory of omission. It's absolutely foundational.
You can't really understand his work without
grasping this. Explain it again. It's like what
you see is only a small part. Exactly. It's the
perfect metaphor, isn't it? The visible stuff,
the facts, the dialogue, the action, the objective
descriptions. That's like the one eighth of the
iceberg floating above the water. Right. But
the other seven eighths. The real bulk, the meaning,
the symbolism, the deep emotion, the backstory,
all of that operates submerged, out of sight.
And that's deliberate. The writer leaves things
out. Deliberately. But crucially, the writer
must omit things they know intimately. You can't
omit something you don't understand yourself.
That deep knowledge is what gives the sparse
prose its weight, its resonance. So the reader
has to do some work. The reader has to lean in.
Participate. You have to feel those unstated
things based on the clues provided by the visible
part. And this whole theory, this structure,
it forced it into that famous style. The short
sentences. Clear, short, declarative sentences.
Simple grammar. Almost childlike sometimes. Something
like 70 % of his sentences are simple sentences
lacking complex clauses. And that gave his writing
that visual feel, didn't it? Almost cinematic.
Very cinematic, and intentionally so. He talked
about using techniques like cutting quickly between
scenes or splicing images together, creating
what he called a multifocal photographic reality.
You can see the journalist's eye there. Absolutely.
Translating directly into literary technique.
Well, let's talk about emotion. Because the iceberg
theory... Did it mean no emotion? That's the
common misreading, isn't it? Early critics and
even some followers thought he was trying to
eliminate emotion, just focus on action on the
surface. But no, that wasn't the intent at all.
So what was the intent? The intent was to portray
emotion realistically by relying on what the
modernists like Pound and Elliott called objective
correlatives. Objective correlatives. OK, meaning?
Instead of saying he felt devastated. You show
the character performing an action or observing
an object that evokes that feeling in the reader.
Like watching a cup shatter or just standing
silently by a river like you said earlier. Exactly.
The emotion is conveyed indirectly through this
carefully chosen collage of objective images,
facts, and actions. Hemingway felt that trying
to describe emotion directly was maybe dishonest
or just beyond him as a trained newspaper guy.
He said the important thing was to know the sequence
of motion and fact which made the emotion. So
the iceberg theory was almost like literary armor,
allowing him to deal with tough subjects indirectly.
That's a really interesting way to think about
it. Describing unspeakable trauma through action
and implication rather than explicit emotional
declaration. Okay, so using that technique, what
were the big themes he kept returning to? Well,
the recurring ones are pretty clear. Love. War,
expatriation, wilderness loss. Nature, for instance,
is huge. As a place for redemption. Often, yeah.
A place for rebirth, for rest. Where characters,
especially men, wounded physically or psychologically,
can find solitude and maybe start to heal. Think
of Nick Adams again in Big Two -Hearted River.
And the focus is often on the act itself, right?
The fishing, the hunting. The rigor, the discipline,
the dignity found in the skilled act itself.
Rather than just, say, winning or losing, it's
about how you do it. And underpinning all of
it. Death. Always. Death permeates his work.
Characters often achieve authenticity or maybe
redemption by how they face death with courage,
with dignity. Right. Whether it's Francis McComber
or a bullfighter in the ring or Santiago fighting
the sharks. It's that idea that if the world
is ultimately meaningless, as many modernists
felt. Then the only real response is an authentic,
courageous action in the face of that meaninglessness.
Grace under pressure. OK, but we also touch on
the gender stuff. Because that's been a big point
of critique, hasn't it? Hugely contentious. Yeah.
Early critics often praised his. male -centric
world, saw the women sometimes falling into these
archetypes, the castrator or the love slave.
But later critics pushed back hard. Oh, absolutely.
Later feminist critics especially characterized
a lot of his work as deeply misogynistic. They
point to the way characters like Brett Ashley
in The Sun or Sars Rises are framed sometimes
seen as this destructive dark woman goddess figure
versus someone like Margot McComber in The Short
Happy Life who's arguably presented as a kind
of light woman that also... Potential murderous.
It's complex and often uncomfortable. And the
theme of emasculation comes up a lot, too. Constantly.
Literal emasculation from war wounds, like Jake
Barnes in The Sun, also rises. But also figurative
emasculation in relationships. Critics often
tie this directly to the broader cultural and
psychological wounds of that post -WWI generation.
Okay. Which brings us, sadly, to his final years.
The decline. Yeah, the final struggle. They moved
from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho in 1959. Castro was
nationalizing property, but it also coincided
with a really severe mental downturn for Hemingway.
He was working on the Paris memoir then, wasn't
he? A movable feast. Yes, shaping it from notebooks
he'd rediscovered famously in trunks left at
the Ritz Hotel in Paris back in 1956. A return
to that formative time. But his mental state
was deteriorating rapidly. Paranoia became overwhelming.
He was absolutely convinced the FBI was actively
monitoring him in Ketchum, tapping phones, intercepting
mail. And the chilling thing is, they were, weren't
they, to some extent? They were. As we mentioned,
they had compiled a huge file on him over the
years due to his Cuba activities and other things,
and apparently surveillance did continue right
up until his death. So some of his paranoia had
a basis in reality, which must have made it even
worse. And physically. Failing eyesight made
writing incredibly difficult. He couldn't organize
complex manuscripts like The Dangerous Summer,
his account of the 1959 bullfighting season,
just physically and mentally couldn't manage
it. And then came the diagnosis. 1961. Hmm. Diagnosed
with hereditary hemochromatosis. Which is? It's
a genetic condition where your body absorbs too
much iron from your diet. The iron builds up
in your tissues, organs, liver, heart, pancreas,
and crucially the brain. It leads to serious
physical and mental deterioration over time.
So you've got this genetic condition, plus the
lifetime of heavy drinking, plus the head injuries.
All those head injuries, nine or more serious
concussions, battering his head against that
plane door in Africa. Neuropsychiatrists looking
back now widely believe he was suffering from
chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE. Like athletes
get. Exactly. A form of dementia caused by repeated
brain trauma. It would have profoundly worsened
his depression, paranoia, cognitive decline.
A perfect storm, really. And the treatment they
tried was controversial. Electroconsulsive therapy,
ECT. He was admitted to the Mayo Clinic for severe
depression and underwent multiple sessions, maybe
as many as 15, in late 60 and early 61. And for
a writer whose entire capital was his mind, his
memory. It was devastating. He lamented it bitterly,
said something like, what is the sense of ruining
my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital,
and putting me out of business? He felt it destroyed
his ability to write. And just days after being
released from the Mayo Clinic the last time.
July 10, 1961, just two days after getting home
to catch him, he quite deliberately, as Mary
later put it, took his favorite shotgun. and
ended his life. Mirroring his father's suicide
decades before. Tragically, yes. And that pattern
continued in the family. His sister Ursula, his
brother Lester. They also later died by suicide.
A very dark thread running through the Hemingways.
It's such a tragic end. But despite that, his
influence, it's immense. Undeniable. That style.
The lean, hard, athletic prose. You could argue
it's the single biggest change, the most fundamental
shift in American writing in the 20th century.
You either copied it or reacted against it. Exactly.
You couldn't ignore it. His stories, his way
of seeing and writing, as the sources say, they're
just unequivocally part of our cultural heritage
now. Hashtag, tag, tag, outro. So we've really
seen a life of just extreme contradictions, haven't
we? Here's this man who craved grand adventure,
danger, almost self -aggrandizing exploits, but
wrote with the precision, the stripped down clinical
focus of a journalist. Yeah. And the writer who
chased fame, celebrity, became this huge public
figure, yet constantly said he believed his work
got worse as he lost that essential loneliness
of the artist. It's fascinating. And the power
of that work, I think. lies in how he managed
to take the almost incomprehensible trauma of
his time, the chaos of war, the betrayals of
the body, the losses, and somehow give it form.
Structured, powerful simplicity, using techniques
like the iceberg theory. Giving objective shape
to all that inner turmoil. That's it, exactly.
So we really encourage you, if you revisit his
work, maybe the sun also rises. Maybe the old
man in the sea. Do it with this context in mind.
Look for those wounds, the physical influences,
the journalistic rigor behind every single carefully
chosen simple sentence. See what's under the
water. Yeah. And maybe here's a final provocative
thought for you to mull over. We've talked about
the iceberg theory, how its function was to convey
powerful emotion through objective description,
through facts and action. Right. Knowing what
we now suspect about Hemingway struggles, the
untreated physical trauma from head injuries,
the CTE. the deep mental anguish? Does that legendary
toughness of his style represent a kind of courageously
faced truth? Or is it perhaps a masterful literary
armor, something crafted specifically to conceal
an overwhelming inner breakdown that he simply
couldn't face or perhaps couldn't even articulate
directly? Courage or concealment. Or maybe both.
Maybe both. Something to think about.