Hemingway: How He Worked His Magic, How He Lived His Life

I have been a fan of Hemingway's stories since I read "The Killers" as a teenager. For the first time, I was interested in a story I couldn't relate to personally. Two people working in a small town café, two strangers who walk in, a young man at the counter, a man offstage we never meet.

What held me was the way Hemingway left so much unsaid.

Now, with more reading under my belt and with a copy of his Complete Stories by my bed, I'm beginning to see how Hemingway worked his magic.

Take a story like "Up in Michigan," probably one of Hemingway's least memorable stories, but even so, he draws us in from the beginning by including us as if we lived in Hortons Bay. What he knows is what we would know about a newcomer if we lived there. Since everyone likes gossip so we read on to see what will happen.

Or the way he bends the closing line of a story. He doesn't write a totally surprising ending, but he catches us by surprise by his change of focus. One example, the last line in "A Train Trip," where after father and son watch a set of violent incidents, the father gets back to talking about proverbs, and explains why he takes the one about blood being thicker than water literally without going into detail about how he knows.

Or despite Hemingway's macho reputation, the delicacy with which he describes the relation between sons and fathers. Or, more bluntly, the way he sets down detail after horrifying detail about war.

Hemingway's stories also hold us because he lived, knew war firsthand and by careful observation, boxing, fishing, teen age sex, big game hunting, boating, Indians who lived near his family's cabin, the expatriate life. .

It's common knowledge that Nobel prize winner Ernest Hemingway led an accomplishing and daring life, but many people are unaware of his severe depressions and more than ordinary miscalculation of high risk. Nowadays, reputable scholars are saying he had manic-depressive disorder (bipolar disorder), an illness for which in 1961--the year Hemingway committed suicide--the US government had not approved the medication that might have treating his illness effectively. If Hemingway had been British, Canadian or Australian, he might not have taken his life.

As a person with extreme periods of highs and lows can have normal periods in between, much of the time, Hemingway had the self-discipline and perseverance a writer needs. This, despite suffering accidents and, from his middle years on, chronic physical illness.

Even knowing what Ernest Hemingway accomplished, I keep imagining the thicker volume I would be reading if Hemingway had lived..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EfMDwPXeIk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EfMDwPXeIk