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Narrator
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out well? With the name your price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill, too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help you find options within your budget. Try it today@progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law not available in all states. It's July 8, 1918 Skia on the Italian front, Rain slips steadily from the lip of the trench into the thick mud below. The night is eerily quiet but for the subdued chatter of soldiers huddled at their posts. A young Red Cross volunteer, an American, moves through the trench, his boots heavy with mud. Under one arm he carries a box of chocolate and cigarettes, small comforts for the exhausted men around him, hunched against the night, their breath mingling with a smell of cordite, sweat and damp.
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Paul Hendrickson
W
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Narrator
Far across the field, a single shell launches into the night with a rising whistle that sharpens until, in an instant, the sky bursts open in a white hot explosion. The sound is deafening, and the shockwave hits like a hammer blow. The young man is thrown backwards, slamming into the for a moment he hears nothing, but then noise and panic return. The screaming of injured men, shouted commands. Beyond the trenches, gunfire rattles in angry bursts and debris rains down over to the young man's right, a wounded soldier groans as he pushes himself upright. The volunteer's legs feel strangely weak beneath him. Another shell bursts nearby, showering him with clods of earth, and as the smoke clears, he sees a wounded man nearby, his uniform torn open, a hand pressed to his stomach. The American crawls towards him. He hooks his arms beneath the soldiers and heaves, hauling him onto his shoulders, his own legs nearly buckling under the weight, but adrenaline steadies him and he staggers forward. Machine gunfire snaps overhead. Bullets strike the ground in sharp, wet impacts. A sudden punch of agonizing force hits his knee, knocking him sideways, but he presses the pain and fear down and keeps moving. Somehow he carries the wounded man back through the shallow communication trenches, slipping and stumbling through the mud and smoke away from the front line and towards the flickering light of the camp beyond. Up ahead, a lantern wavers near a makeshift aid point with a Red Cross ambulance beside it. The young man calls out, and as he reaches the medics there, his strength finally abandons him. Hands grab at the wounded soldier first, pulling him from the volunteer's grasp. Then the medics turn to the young man himself, cutting away his trouser leg to treat the bullet wound. It's only then that he realizes that shrapnel from the blast has torn into his legs. The wetness he's been vaguely aware of is not just rain and mud, but his own blood. Lying back, he stares upwards as the rain falls into his open eyes. Shapes blur. Voices merge. The lantern above flickers as a stretcher slides beneath him. He has just walked the line between bravery and luck, between action and fear, between surviving and not. The war has marked him, and it's a mark this 19 year old volunteer, Ernest Hemingway will carry through his life. At the dawn of the 20th century, a writer emerged who learned his craft not in a classroom, but in battlefields, bullrings and bars. He believed that truth could only be found in courage and that words should be as hard and clean as a rifle shot. To some, Ernest Hemingway was the greatest writer of his generation, a noble laureate whose sparse, muscular prose changed literature forever. But to others, he was a swaggering egoist, a man addicted to danger and performance, obsessed with his own legend. His own life fueled his work, just as his work in turn fed his own myth. But behind the mask he forged through his writing lay a man haunted by fear, violence, and the tyranny of bravery. But why, more than 60 years after his death, does Hemingway remain a symbol of masculinity and and modernism? Who were the people whose lives were swept up in the hurricane of his own? And how did the same passions that made Hemingway great also destroy him in the end? I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Podcast Network. This is a short history of Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Miller Hemingway is his parents second child born in 1899 in the quiet middle class tree lined suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. It's a place his mother calls a good town for good people. His father, Clarence, is a respected doctor and an avid outdoorsman. Grace, his mother, was once a singer, but her ambitions of a career on the stage are never quite realized. Strong willed and eccentric, she had really wanted a second daughter. And though it's common in the early 1900s for infant boys and girls to be dressed similarly, Grace continues the convention far later than is usual, cutting his hair in the same bobbed hairstyle as his elder sisters. She models Ernest as her daughter's twin well into early boyhood, complete with pretty dresses and frilly bonnets. Paul Hendrickson is an author, journalist and professor and the writer of Hemingway's Everything He Loved in Life and Lost his
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Paul Hendrickson
mother, his strange mother cross dressed him as a child. I think it filled him with terrible anxieties. Twin dressed him, dressed him as a little girl with his older sister. She was not his twin, but his mother dressed them as twins.
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Narrator
As soon as the boy is old enough, his father pushes Ernest firmly in the opposite direction. He takes him into the wilds, the cold lakes, the Michigan woods and marshes alive with birds. There he teaches him how to hunt, fish, gut and clean. He shows Ernest how to live off the land and how to respect it, seeding the rugged love of wilderness that will shape his son's life and work.
- [07:54]
Paul Hendrickson
I think it was true and authentic, that part of him, and he had learned it at his father's knee. That love for the outdoors, that rage to experience the world and experience nature and experience fishing and hunting.
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Narrator
But there is a tension between his parents. His father is strict, moral and religious, while his mother is artistic, theatrical and peculiar. They are contrasts that define their son's personality, pulling him between culture and wilderness, refinement and adventure.
- [08:29]
Paul Hendrickson
The mother and father were so mismatched and were so complicated and so much of it descended on his head.
- [08:38]
Narrator
But in the shadow of Oak Park's conservative respectability, Ernest grows restless. The narrow moral codes and rigid expectations begin to suffocate him, and he longs for danger, excitement, anything beyond the tidy lawns and church pews. After finishing school, he joins the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The crisp, unadorned writing style favored by the paper quickly becomes his own, with its short sentences, strong verbs and everything stripped back. Yet even reporting on accidents and crime scenes, it is not enough to satisfy his hunger for adventure. He jumps at the chance to sign up when America enters the Great War in 1917. But the army turns him down. He has long been near sighted in one eye, farsighted in the other, leaving his sight poor enough that it rules him out for service. The rejection, however, only makes him more determined. A local friend has just returned from the Italian front, where he was driving ambulances, and this friend has only one eye. He fills Hemingway's imagination with stories of horror and glory. If a one eyed man can do it, Hemingway decides, then surely he can too. In 1918, he arrives on the Italian front as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red cross. He's only 19 himself, little more than a boy in a borrowed uniform chasing glory in a man's war. At first, the camaraderie and sense of purpose feel exhilarating. But the romance doesn't last long. Within weeks, while running supplies to Soldiers in the trenches near the Piave River. A mortar round explodes beside him. But despite being shot in the leg and suffering shrapnel damage himself, he manages to drag a wounded soldier to safety. This moment becomes a cornerstone of the Hemingway legend. The young hero wounded in action. And though he was never a soldier himself, the emotional and physical trauma are undeniable.
- [10:51]
Paul Hendrickson
As Hemmingway said, it's never the duration of a sensation, it's the intensity of it. And even if it was that quick and that sudden and that new to his experience in the actual war fighting, it was enough to last him forever. But I think if you study it closely, I think he was scared up way before he ever put on that service uniform for the American Red Cross.
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Narrator
When he wakes in a hospital bed in Milan, his body is a map of scars and bandages. There he is tended by a nurse called Agnes von Karauski. She is patient, kind, and seven years older than Hemingway. In the long, drifting days of recovery, something intimate forms between them. And when he is sent home, the affair continues. By letter, he returns to Oak park hailed a hero, but the war won't let him go. At night, he dreams of bodies, maggots, bullets and blood. By day, he tries to make sense of it all, the only way he knows how, with words. He starts sending short fiction stories to magazines, but most get sent back with a gentle rejection. A worse rejection comes when Agnes ends their relationship by letter. The loss hits him hard. Listless and self absorbed. He earns a little through speaking engagements, regaling audiences with tales from the Italian front. The war stories are exaggerated, but he delivers them with charm and bravado. After one speech, he's introduced to a man who hires him for some summer work in Toronto, which in turn leads him to a brief stint at the Toronto Star as a freelancer. When that ends, he heads to Chicago. Now 20, he cultivates a new self image as a hard boiled journalist, a heartbreaker, a heavy drinker in dive bars. It's a performance he throws himself into fully. But that summer, back at the family cottage on Walloon Lake, his parents make it clear that they're not impressed. His mother, Grace, feels he is selfish and lazy, and when she hears rumors that Ernest has developed a reputation for promiscuity, she is appalled to have raised such a morally wayward son. Finally, on his 21st birthday, she reaches breaking point. In a stern, moralizing letter, she tells him that a mother's love is like a bank account with limited funds that must be topped up by the child. Through good Deeds and kind acts. Unless he grows up and starts behaving, he will face bankruptcy. In her account, you have overdrawn, she tells him. The words strike deep, but far from awakening remorse, the letter fuels Ernest's resentment of his mother and creates a wound that never heals.
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Paul Hendrickson
Archibald McLeish, the poet who was his deep friend, said, Ernest Hemingway was the only man I ever knew who hated his mother.
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Narrator
Grace's letter is shortly followed by one from his father ejecting him from the house. Together, they give Hemingway the excuse he needs to cut ties and move away for good. Back in Chicago, he takes odd reporting jobs and drinks with newspapermen, falling in with a small circle of writers and musicians, living the kind of bohemian life he wants for himself. And it's in this world, that of overcrowded apartments and cheap cafes, that he's introduced to Hadley Richardson, a quiet, thoughtful young woman from St. Louis. Slightly older and with a modest independent income from her family, she offers him something he has rarely steadiness without judgment. They quickly fall in love, marry, and set off in search of a new beginning to a place where writers are reinventing the world and where Hemingway hopes to reinvent himself. That place is Paris.
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Paul Hendrickson
Hemingway, among his many geniuses, had a genius for landing at the right place at the right time. There was no more important place in the world for a young, deeply ambitious artist to place himself in, to land in than Paris in the 1920s, when everything is swirling around you. Music, art, Picasso's in there, all the impressionists, the sculptors, the painters, the poets. There were other world places that you could go to, but none was more important than Paris.
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Narrator
When Ernest and Hadley Hemingway arrive, they are newly married, full of hope, and, as Ernest loves to claim penniless, the
- [15:52]
Paul Hendrickson
fact is, she also had a small trust fund. They weren't that broke. I mean, he wanted us all to know that he was penniless and lived above the sawmill and was shooting pigeons with a slingshot in the Jardin de Luxembourg and carrying a dead pigeon home concealed beneath his jacket, so that they would have dinner that night. Yes and no.
- [16:13]
Narrator
Still life is hard. They rent a cold flat near the Place de la Contrascarp, where the pipes freeze in winter and the wallpaper peels from the damp. But for Hemingway, this is paradise. The city is alive with artists, poets and revolutionaries as it rebuilds itself after the war.
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Paul Hendrickson
It was absolutely formative. And this is another part of his genius. No one could soak up experience faster. He could seem an amateur in so many things, and then before long, he's lapping you on the track.
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Narrator
By day, he writes in cafes, filing freelance dispatches for the Toronto Star while quietly working on short stories of his own, learning to strip his sentences down to the bone. By night, he spends hours absorbed in conversation with the writers, many of them expat Americans who will shape a generation. The American writer Gertrude Stein becomes his mentor, urging him to cut adjectives, to trust the rhythm of speech. The poet Ezra Pound helps edit his work. James Joyce drinks with him before staggering off into the dark. They are all exiles of a kind, disillusioned by the Old World and trying to invent a new one with themselves at the heart of it. Stein calls them the lost generation, and the name sticks. These are the children of a war that destroyed faith in heroism and certainty, and they reflect this in their writing, which breaks everything that came before. Hemingway, in particular, develops a clear, direct, unsentimental style.
- [17:59]
Paul Hendrickson
Early Hemingway is this genius of this short, declarative sentence. You can parody a Hemingway sentence till kingdom come, but you can never quite write a Hemingway sentence yourself.
- [18:16]
Narrator
While honing his craft, Hemingway earns his living as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, sending dispatches from across Europe. He covers Mussolini's rise in Italy, even interviewing the dictator himself, describing him as an overgrown baby. The travel is relentless. In Constantinople, he contracts malaria and only narrowly survives. Still, he pushes on, restless and hungry for new experiences, for more adventure, convinced that a writer must see everything, terrified of missing out.
- [18:51]
Paul Hendrickson
I think he was so afraid in so many ways, and the only way that he could deal with it was by testing himself, testing himself and taking things to the limit. Well, what kind of a terrible anxiety is that to live with? At what cost?
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Narrator
Through all the travel, he keeps writing fiction. By now he has drafts of several short stories, all early attempts at the voice he's learning to master. But in late 1922, disaster strikes. When Hadley travels to Lausanne to join him. On his request, she brings his manuscripts in a single suitcase. Somewhere on the journey, the luggage vanishes. He tells her not to worry. He always makes carbon copies of his stories. But, crying, she tells him she'd packed those copies in the suitcase, too. Every draft, every copy, every notebook is gone. It's a devastating blow. He will later say it forced him to start again and to write better. This is a paid advertisement from Indeed. If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Hoping the right people see your job Posting isn't the best growth strategy. When the pressure's on and you need the right hire, this is A Job for Sponsored Jobs Indeed Sponsored Jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Sponsored Jobs boosts your job. Post in search results so you can reach the people that help your business thrive. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs you only pay for results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results when you need the right person to cut through the chaos. This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs and listeners of this show will get a 75 doll sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com podcast just go to Indeed.com podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Hiring this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. You didn't start a business just to
- [21:14]
Paul Hendrickson
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- [21:15]
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Paul Hendrickson
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Paul Hendrickson
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Narrator
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- [22:49]
Paul Hendrickson
So he is confronted for the first time in his life with the incredible spectacle of bullfighting. And it just overwhelmed him because he's Ernest Hemingway. He has to try to get to the bottom of it. He has to try to drain it, so to speak, of all its oxygen. He has to consume it. He has to metabolize it. These bullfighters who became such instant heroes to him with their grace, their elegance, tuned out in their gorgeous uniforms. They're such little men, the way they can ballet out there with this terrible animal that wants to run them through, run them through their intestines with their horns. Oh, my goodness. He's got to possess this.
- [23:33]
Narrator
For Hemingway, bullfighting is a revelation. It's danger countered with control, beauty carved out of brutality, a dance with death that speaks to something elemental in him. He immerses himself entirely, studying its rituals and training alongside professional matadors. After the festival, the couple return briefly to Paris, then sail back to the United States. Hadley is by now heavily pregnant and determined to give birth in America. In October 1923, their first child, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, is born. Known as Bumby, even his middle name is Hemingway's tribute to the matador, Nicanor Vialta. Such is his obsession. Early the next year, the young family returns to Paris, and Hemingway's work begins to crystallize. He writes the story Big Two Hearted river, which many consider the purest expression of his writing style. On the surface, it is simply a story about a young man, Nick Adams, camping and fishing alone in the Michigan woods. But beneath the stillness is a submerged trauma.
- [24:49]
Paul Hendrickson
What that story really is about is a boy who has been blown up, is home from the war, and he's trying to get his mind back because he's been shell shocked. And one of the ways he feels he can get his mind back is by recreating every ritual, the memory, muscle memory of recreating these rituals.
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Narrator
The story represents the essence of Hemingway's iceberg theory, which asserts that if a writer knows a truth deeply enough, they don't need to state it explicitly. The reader will feel what remains unsaid while the bulk of meaning lies hidden below the surface. As his writing progresses, Hemingway continues to draw inspiration from the creative people around him. What eventually emerges is the book that propels him into the Limelight.
- [25:42]
Paul Hendrickson
So he's 27 when he publishes the Sun Also Rises. That is such a slim little book. It's 60,000 words, and you talk about imagistic short sentence writing. It's just magnificent.
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Narrator
Published in 1926, the sun also Rises is the story of a group of expatriates drifting from Paris to Pamplona in search of meaning, love, and distraction. It captures the voice of a generation adrift after the Great War, and it makes Hemingway a celebrity almost overnight. But success brings attention and expectation. He begins to cultivate a public image as the boxer, the hunter, the fisherman, the man of action. Reporters can't get enough of him. Critics soon coined the term the Hemingway hero who epitomizes the man who knows the world is cruel and meaningless, yet faces it with courage, discipline and grace. It becomes both the core of Hemingway's art and the code he tries to live by. But even in the early years of his fame, friends whisper that he is becoming boorish or that the performance of Hemingway is starting to overshadow the work.
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Paul Hendrickson
The people who begin to hate him do so, I think, because he becomes insufferable.
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Narrator
Instead of bringing joy, the triumph of the publication seems only to create pressure to succeed again. Ernest carries a deep fear that he will fail the next test, and even the bravado he projects can't protect him from the pitfalls of achieving so much fame so quickly.
- [27:28]
Paul Hendrickson
Boy, the critics want to start turning against him, even there, right there, because they're sick already. This man has become a world figure so quickly. It's all become a little bit too much.
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Narrator
Now, compelled to embrace his own legend, he goes off on hunting safaris and great expeditions, and the press follow him everywhere. Every adventure, every hunt, every glass raised becomes part of the story until the man and the myth are almost indistinguishable. By the late 20s, Hemingway's success has transformed him and strained his marriage. Fame, money, and ego unsettle what was once a quiet partnership with Hadley. Their small Paris apartment has become a gathering place for writers, editors and hangers on, all drawn to the rising star of American modernism. Among them is Pauline Pfeiffer, a stylish young fashion journalist from Vogue. She is wealthy, confident and ambitious. Everything Hadley is not. Pauline befriends them both. But her interest in the writer is unmistakable. Soon she's traveling with them, even joining the group on their annual trip to Pamplona.
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Paul Hendrickson
He was a full adult. He was a father. And he let himself be taken in, seduced, taken over by Pauline. It's not as if he didn't have agency.
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Narrator
Back in Paris, the affair can no longer be hidden. When Hadley discovers it, she refuses to share him. Instead, she proposes a deal. He will spend 100 days away from his new lover. If after that time he still wants her, Hadley will leave him to it. Hemingway agrees. But when the hundred days pass, he chooses Pauline. In January 1927, Hadley files for divorce. Hemingway gives her all the royalties from the Sun Also Rises, amounting to about $120,000 in today's money. And she returns to the United States with their son. Within a few months, Hemingway and Pauline are married in Paris. The newlyweds move to Key West, Florida, where Hemingway fishes by day and writes each morning with a fierce intensity. Out of this period comes A Farewell to Arms, a love story. It is steeped in blood and loss, drawn from his own wounds, not least the pain inflicted when his first love, Agnes, rejected him. It becomes his greatest success yet, but coincides with the tragedy.
- [30:16]
Paul Hendrickson
There was such mental instability in the family. His father, a successful Oak park doctor, suffering depression for many years, came home one workday at noon for lunch and went upstairs and sat on the bed and took a revolver out and he shot himself in the temple.
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Narrator
Ernest is devastated by his father's suicide. He writes that a man should never do that to his sons. Yet he will spend the rest of his life fearing he might do the same. Haunted as he is by self doubt and bouts of deep depression, he and Pauline go on to have two children. But neither wealth, fame nor family can quiet the restlessness that has dogged the now famous writer throughout his adult life. In the years that follow, Paul he hunts in Africa, fishes in the Caribbean and writes with relentless discipline. It all adds to the Hemingway myth, but none of it silences the anxiety and dread. While Pauline keeps the household running in Key West, Hemingway's output grows. He publishes the short story collection Men Without Women, the Bullfighting study, Death in the Afternoon, another collection, Winner Take Nothing and Green Hills of Africa, his non fiction account of a big game safari. His reputation as a great writer continues to grow, but satisfaction remains elusive in Key West. He spends long afternoons in Sloppy Joe's bar, filling the gaps between writing with noise and alcohol. It's at this favourite haunt that in 1936 he meets a war correspondent called Martha Gellhorn. Nearly ten years younger than him, she is sharp, independent and utterly fearless, and Hemingway is drawn to her instantly. When war breaks out in Spain, Gellhorn heads off on assignment for Colliers magazine to cover the fight against fascism. Hemingway follows partly for the story, partly for her, and partly because he needs to test himself again. Drawn by the danger and thrill of the front. It's early 1937 in Madrid, Spain under siege, the city shakes as a shell lands somewhere beyond the Grand Via, rattling windows in their frames. In the early morning light, the buildings of central Madrid appear carved from smoke. Ernest Hemingway moves through the city at a heavy trot, shoulders hunched, coat pulled tight against the cold. Ahead of him, the massive bulk of the Telefonica building looms. It's one of the last places left where correspondents can still push a story out of Spain. Beside him, Martha Gellhorn keeps pace, weaving through rubble and sandbags, her notebook tucked safely in her coat pocket. The avenue is eerily empty. Everyone who can stay indoors is already taking cover. Another shell whistles overhead, ending in a concussive boom behind the rooftop. The blast rolls through the street, lifting dust like a tide, but Hemingway doesn't stop. He understands the rhythm of bombardment now and knows when to keep moving. They reach the entrance of the Telefonica building and push inside. Dust shakes loose as another impact quakes through the floor. Upstairs, the press room is a chaotic whir of clacking typewriters, telegraph cables beeping and journalists chatting. A generator struggles to keep power flowing through lines constantly damaged by shellfire. Here, global correspondents work shoulder to shoulder, filing reports around the world. While Gellhorn greets a fellow writer, Hemingway crosses to an empty desk. He pulls his notes from his pocket and scans the jottings made earlier between bombardments as he feeds a sheet into the typewriter. Artillery thunders again and the building shudders in response. A shower of plaster dust falls from the ceiling, but no one even looks up. Every second counts when the lines of communication might die at any moment. On the next explosion, the lights blink once, then die completely. There is a collective moan of frustration, and for a heartbeat, nothing moves. The bombardment outside seems louder without the clatter of keys. Hemingway pats his pockets for his lighter, and a moment later a small flame blooms at his fingertips in the flickering orange glow. He carries on typing, pounding the keys with the same steady force as the artillery outside. Whatever else stops in Madrid today, the story will not. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus.
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Paul Hendrickson
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Paul Hendrickson
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Narrator
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Paul Hendrickson
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Visit onnit.com and show Alpha Brain to unlock your next level. That's O N N I-t.com as the Spanish Civil War grinds on, Franco's nationalist forces tighten their assault on the capital, Madrid, determined to break the Republican government. Day after day, the bombardment shatters windows, scatters debris and leaves the city trembling. It's in this crucible that Hemingway and Gellhorn's relationship is truly forged. Together, they race through the devastated streets to file from the Telefonica building or drink with foreign correspondents in dim hotel bars. And their comradeship morphs into something competitive, electric, romantic. But as the Republic falters, the foreign press corps eventually disperses, with each correspondent carrying home their own version of the siege. For Hemingway, the war in Spain is another turning point. It gives him both a new great love and the raw material that will later once more redefine his career with his masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls. It also marks the beginning of the end of his marriage to Pauline. When they leave Spain, Hemingway and Gellhorn return to America as war heroes of a kind, or at least as renowned correspondents and literary celebrities. By 1940, he has divorced Pauline and married Martha. Together they buy a hillside house outside Havana, naming it Finca Vijaya, or Lookout Farm. At first, Cuba is everything Hemingway loves. He has the sea, the solitude, the light. He writes in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, and in between times, he drinks with the sailors in the local port. His new wife, though, has no plans to relinquish any of her independence. When she leaves to cover World War II, he feels abandoned and overlooked. He joins her in Europe, reporting from Normandy and from the liberation of Paris. But the relationship doesn't survive the strain. By 1945, his third marriage is over.
- [38:57]
Paul Hendrickson
His kid brother, Leister, he said, everything was good with my brother until it wasn't. When we talk about Hemmingway, it's always about contradiction, always about this thing undoing that thing.
- [39:12]
Narrator
Modern critics are often concerned by the presence of racist and anti Semitic language and tropes which appear in his work, though some argue they simply demonstrate his commitment to truthfully representing the world in which his characters lived. They also speak to the casual, unexamined prejudice endemic at the time. Another of the vexing contradictions in Hemingway's character is his relationship with women, both in life and on the page. Though he experiences love repeatedly and intensely, he can be cruel, a man who depends on women, yet pushes them away. Serially unfaithful, emotionally volatile and often controlling, he expects his partners to orbit his work and moods, and when challenged, can be cutting or dismissive. And while he writes unforgettable heroines, he is often accused of chauvinism in his work, too. The criticism centers on how women are framed in relation to male suffering. His female characters are often defined through desire, devotion or loss, and their inner lives can seem secondary to the wounded men they love. To some readers, they appear idealized, simplified or shaped to serve male endurance rather than fully realized on their own terms. And yet that is only part of the picture. Many central female characters are far from passive. Defined by their agency and strength, they often possess more emotional clarity and resilience than the men around them.
- [40:49]
Paul Hendrickson
This great heroine of A Farewell to Arms, Catherine, she's not a doormat. The wrong reading of her is that she would be a doormat.
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Narrator
The debate over Hemingway and women endures precisely because his work resists easy answers. He is capable of tenderness and empathy, yet is shaped by the limits of his own experience. For all the swagger and bluster of his public Persona, Hemingway also reveals, in his private letters and his work, a far more vulnerable man. He can be tender, even self effacing, especially in moments of illness or uncertainty. He wrote once to Hadley that he needed her like rain and told Gellhorn she was the bravest woman in the world. Both sentiments at odds with the supposedly impenetrable masculinity he has cultivated for himself. And in life, as in fiction, love is no small matter to him.
- [41:48]
Paul Hendrickson
He was absolutely capable of falling authentically and deeply in love.
- [41:54]
Narrator
But partnership for Hemingway is rarely simple. Admiration turns to resentment and passion sours into competition. His marriages all begin as rescue and end as escape, and the wreckage from each relationship helps shape the next version of himself.
- [42:13]
Paul Hendrickson
Was that part of his need for the next thing? Was that part of his need for the next adventure, the next conquering? My answer to that is yes and no.
- [42:26]
Narrator
When his marriage to Martha Gellhorn ends, Hemingway finds his fourth wife, Mary Welsh. She is a sharp, worldly journalist he meets in wartime London, and she becomes his companion through the final great successes of his career. They settle at Finca Vijay in Cuba, where Hemingway returns to a familiar rhythm. He spends mornings at his desk, afternoons at sea, nights filled with friends, rum and stories. In 1952, he publishes the Old man and the Sea, a spare, poetic novel about endurance and dignity following an aging fisherman battling a giant marlin and, in many ways, himself. It wins him the Pulitzer Prize and, two years later, the Nobel Prize for Literature. For the first time, Hemingway seems to have found a kind of stability. Surrounded by friends, his wife, his Trophies and the warm air of the tropics. But his children are adults now and live far away, and contact with them is irregular. Likewise, his relationships with his former wives have cooled or collapsed. Added to that, his health is failing and the old darkness is gathering again. By the mid-1950s, Hemingway is world famous. He's a noble laureate and the living symbol of of American courage and style. But the fame that once thrilled him now feels like a burden. Years of drinking, injury and sun have taken their toll. He suffers from high blood pressure, depression, and the lingering effects of two near fatal plane crashes in Africa in 1954, which leave him in constant pain. He tries to keep writing, but it becomes harder to focus.
- [44:17]
Paul Hendrickson
What became of Hemingway fame became of Hemingway. Yes, it's the diseases of fame. It's the ravages of alcohol, and this leads to your increasing inability to write to your own satisfaction.
- [44:33]
Narrator
He grows paranoid, convinced the FBI is watching him. And as later records show, he isn't entirely wrong. His years in Cuba, his wartime activities, and his political sympathies have placed him on their radar, though not as centrally as he imagines. Friends notice his memory failing and his temper shortening. He retreats into silence and drink, haunted by the sense that he has outlived his own legend. In 1960, political upheaval in Cuba forces him to leave the island he loves. He returns to the United States, settling in Ketchum, Idaho, with Mary. But he is a shadow of the man he once was. By this time, Hemingway's mental state has deteriorated even further. He is suffering from severe depression, insomnia, paranoia, and an overwhelming sense that he can no longer write. His doctors diagnosed him with hypertension and what today would be recognized as a major depressive disorder. In early 1961, he is admitted to the Mayo Clinic. Electroshock therapy is prescribed, intended to lift his depression. But in his case, it only further erodes his memory and confidence.
- [45:50]
Paul Hendrickson
One way to read Hemingway's life is through the idea of loss. He lost the beauty and the pristine wilderness of northern Michigan to the loggers, the clear cutters who came in. He lost Key west, and he moved to Cuba. He lost Key west because his marriage broke up, and then he lost Cuba. The revolution came in, Castro came in. He had to leave. He lost the Gulf Stream, where he spent those last decades of his life. For some reason, the marlin fields in the ocean dried up. He lost all these relationships, and finally he lost his mind. Finally, he lost his ability to write.
- [46:33]
Narrator
In July 1961, his struggle ends. It's early morning on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, the sun is only just beginning to rise over the Wood River Valley outside a house on East Canyon Drive. The early quiet is broken by the sound of a car pulling up on the gravel. A Blaine county deputy steps out, hat in hand, moving with a kind of reluctant purpose towards the front porch. The screen door hangs slightly ajar, as if someone fled through it moments earlier and didn't look back. The woman who called him Mary stands outside, still in her robe, gripping the railing with both hands. Her face is drained, her breath uneven. The deputy nods to her gently as he passes, then pauses at the open door. Inside, the foyer is still and silent. Light spills across the floorboards, illuminating a pair of glasses on a side table, a rug pushed slightly askew, and just ahead, the body of Ernest Hemingway, dressed in blue pajamas and a bright red robe. Beside him on the floor lies the shotgun he has just used to end his life. The deputy stops, removes his hat, steps back and looks toward the driveway, where another car is arriving. A doctor climbs out, followed by a second deputy. Their movements are subdued, almost ceremonial. They enter the house together, speaking in low murmurs, picking their way across the floor with delicate care. The doctor leans over the body of the bearded, barrel chested writer whose pajamas are now stained with his own blood. He reaches for a pulse, but it's a formality, as surely none can exist. And then he pronounces the death. At just after 7:40am the larger than life man of words is gone. The deputy watches from the deck, standing beside Mary, who leans against the balustrade, her eyes fixed on nothing. She cannot see inside from where she stands, and she doesn't try. As the doctor leaves, he talks briefly with Mary. Of course there will be an inquiry, but for now, for the sake of the family, they will tell the world that he shot himself accidentally while cleaning his gun. And with that he leaves Mary alone on the porch. There are no more words. Now at the Home Depot. Receive 12 months special financing and free
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Paul Hendrickson
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Paul Hendrickson
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Narrator
The fight has ended, but even to the very last, Hemingway's mind was a well of contradictions at his lowest ebb. Just days before he died, he sat down to compose the last piece of writing he would ever complete. It was a letter to the nine year old son of his doctor and close friend who was seriously ill to wish him a speedy recovery.
- [50:50]
Paul Hendrickson
He's at the Mayo Clinic and he's had shock treatments and everything is gone. And he sat down and wrote those, I forget, 259 words to that ill child who was the child of his small town, Idaho doctor. I mean, every time that I want to revile Hemingway for all of this boorish dross, I want to go back and read that letter and see the dignity and the beauty and the poetry of a man who's lost everything but still able to put down those luminous words.
- [51:26]
Narrator
News of Hemingway's death shocks the world to millions. He was more than a writer. He was an icon, a living symbol of courage and adventure. Newspapers carry the story across the globe, while in Ketchum, mourners gather quietly as the body is laid to rest beneath the mountains he loved. His house, his boat, his manuscripts all become relics of the life he built around action and art. Within months, A Movable Feast, his portrait of 1920s Paris, is published posthumously. The book's gentle nostalgia offers a final glimpse of the young man he once was before fame and fear closed in. Over time, the legend only grows. The name Hemingway becomes shorthand for a certain kind of masculinity that's stoic, wounded, defiant, but also dangerous. Critics question his treatment of women, his politics, his myth, making others see beneath the bravado, a man who wrote with unmatched honesty about pain, loss and endurance.
- [52:41]
Paul Hendrickson
I'm accused of sometimes standing up too much for Hemingway. I'm proud to say I'm guilty of that. I think he was on a strange quest for his sainthood and he destroyed it at every turn. But you can't deeply read Hemingway without seeing the decency and the goodness in him. But it's covered up so much by his boorishness, his macho demand that he is the alpha male in every situation, in every moment. You scrape all that away. It's a bookish man in glasses trying to get his work done.
- [53:18]
Narrator
Today, more than 60 years after his death, Hemingway's work still feels alive. His words echo from the trenches and the bullrings, from fishing boats and battlefields, from every place where people test themselves against fear. He once wrote that a man can be destroyed but not defeated in the end. Perhaps that line was less a declaration than a plea, the hope that courage, if found, might last forever.
- [53:50]
Paul Hendrickson
He will fascinate us and revile us and make us intensely admire him for all these things we're talking about. But he invented a new way of language on the American page, and the words are the words are the words, and when they were beautiful, there was nothing like them.
- [54:19]
Narrator
Next time on Short History of We'll bring you a short history of C.S. lewis. Lewis has become one of our most successful writers because he read everything and remembered everything. His toolbox as a stylist had every available tool from a sledgehammer to a scalpel and everything in between. He could write books that appealed to seven year old kids, but also write books that satisfied the most learned professors at Oxford and the most devout archbishops in the Church of England. There are very few people who can hit so many different marks in so many different ways with many such degrees of success. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of Right now without waiting and without adverts by subscribing to NoiserPlus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiza.comsubscriptions to unlock more episodes.
- [55:21]
Paul Hendrickson
I'm Ian Glenn and this is Real Vikings.
- [55:28]
Narrator
A monastery on a remote Scottish island overrun with pagan warriors. The dragon shaped prow of a longboat cutting through Canada's icy waters. A Norse trader in North Africa exchanging furs for silver under a desert sun. The Vikings terrified the medieval world, yet they beguile us today. Who were they really? Real Vikings from the Noiser Podcast Network. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Today. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just 15amonth. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgment, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
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Paul Hendrickson
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