HEMINGWAY BRILLIANTS (writers of the “lost generation”).

Celebrity came to Hemingway after publishing his first novel, “Farewell, Arms”. He spent ten years working on this world war novel, which he completed in 1929. The country was in crisis, millions of Americans were losing their jobs and America was plunged into the darkness that historians call the Great Depression. In those hard times, Americans watched every dollar, but Hemingway’s novel sold millions of copies.
And it was a popular recognition of his talent. Despite the hard times, the sale and filming of the novel ensured the author’s financial well-being for the next adventurous decades of his life.

When I read his stories and novels, I had this amazing feeling of being beside his characters, empathizing with their dramas. Only someone who has been one of them can touch the reader’s soul in this way. Over the years, as I reread Hemingway’s novels that once captured my imagination, my thoughts returned to the phenomenon of the writer. As an aspiring writer, I wanted to find out how and thanks to what a journalist who wrote about the criminal chronicles of the city’s gangland districts, who reported from the front line, woke up one morning to find that he had become America’s most famous writer.

Ernest Hemingway was a regular at beer halls and bars, he loved loud company. And by putting himself in a certain frame of mind, he could easily cross the forbidden line. He loved to take risks, and Lady Luck favored him. That is why he always returned from a dangerous journey with an idea or a plot for a new story.
What is written must always be re-read and re-edited. What is written emotionally must be edited many times. Hemingway was very demanding of his writing. After writing down what inspiration dictated, he edited what he wrote, returning to it many times, even years later. This long and painful process is called creativity. While working on his novel “A Farewell to Arms”, Hemingway rewrote the last part of it at least seventeen times. And chapters of the novel were edited over two hundred times.

Millions of years ago, deep in the Earth’s crust, a piece of opaque carbon glass was subjected to enormous pressure and once pushed to the surface by volcanic magma, where it was found and fell into the hands of a jeweler. In the same way that a jeweler patiently grinds the facets of a diamond to produce a sparkling diamond of marvelous clarity, Hemingway endlessly polished his masterpieces. He wanted them to be diamonds in the library of world literature!

The heroes of Hemingway’s works do seemingly crazy things, but, according to the writer, it is madness that leads them to the goal and encourages them not to give up in the face of difficulties. At the same time, his stories are always deeply human, very lyrical, and touch the soul – whether it is a story about the horrors of war or about a deadly fight between a bull and a matador.

At the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1954, Hemingway said: “True writing is a solitary business… The writer works alone… We have had so many great creators in the past that the modern writer must go far beyond those limits beyond which no one can help him”.

Every writer collects stories. “The Old Man and the Sea”, and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” were born from stories that Ernest Hemingway heard. And he could tell them as if he had been there. Observations on life and original thoughts expressed in short form are called aphorisms. They are found in every writer, reflect his philosophy, and help us to understand the intention of his works.
Here are a few by Hemingway:

Unlike most writers of his time, Hemingway preferred to work standing up. He spent hours at his desk writing. On one good day, he writes off seven pencils, moving only to shift his weight from one foot to another. He believed that standing was good for productivity. His typewriter stood on a bookcase, which he called his “desk”.
Although this was the golden age of Hollywood, Hemingway, unlike most writers, steadfastly refused to write for the screen. He did not, however, object to his work being filmed. And if he had, we would never have seen ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, ‘The Killers’, ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and many more.
After seeing the 1958 film ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, Hemingway was disappointed. He was critical of actor Spencer Tracy’s performance, saying he looked more like a rich old actor than a poor Cuban fisherman. Tracy had the last laugh, however, as he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance.

Ernest Hemingway, even in his younger years as a journalist, developed the principles that he followed throughout his life. Here are a few:

• Get up early in the morning and get to work.
• Stop when you’re still inspired, when the work is going well and you know what’s coming next. If you do that when you’re working on a novel, you’ll never get stuck, you’ll never lose inspiration. That’s one of the most valuable things I can pass on…
• Giving yourself completely (…after finishing a story I always felt devastated, I felt sad and happy, like saying goodbye to a woman after intimacy…).
• For the rest of the day, don’t think about the text, just read.
• Choose simple, honest sentences, the truest sentence you know. I thought for a long time about one such true sentence and everything that came after it. This true sentence came from what I had seen, heard, and experienced. If I tried to write exquisitely and floridly, as some writers do, I would have to cross it all out, throw it away, and start the narrative with a true, simple sentence I had already written…

He once jokingly advised an aspiring writer: “Write drunk, edit sober”. When I studied the writer’s techniques and his writing style, I knew that this advice was not a joke. Hemingway knew the magical power of this commandment of his and it was a rule in his work. He wrote when inspiration came and let it go, editing what he wrote when his emotions cooled.

Although Hemingway began writing at the age of 12, it was not until he was 26 that he wrote a truly serious and large book. Before that, he wrote short stories and reports.
His principle as a writer was to write about what he knew well. That is why all of Hemingway’s novels are plausible and based on real events. The writer remembered the events of his life, gave them an artistic form, and added a little fiction.
For him, the most important thing was to be in the thick of things and describe everything he saw and experienced in the greatest detail. So he rushed to Europe, where the Great War was raging. Then to Spain, where a civil war was raging. Later another world war and Hemingway was there again, in the trenches. And then Spain again and bullfighting, safaris in Africa, and lion hunting.

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He was very fond of champagne. He drank it ice-cold, freezing the glass beforehand. He even invented a cocktail by mixing absinthe with champagne, which he named after one of his novels, Death in the Afternoon. The cocktail is also known as ‘Hemingway’s Champagne’.

Hemingway was once angered by the disdain for champagne shown by his guests, who left an unfinished bottle on the table. He made them return to the table and finish the bottle. It was said of Hemingway by friends with a smile that he “…could think of no better way to spend money than on champagne”.

Of all the eclectic items displayed at the Ernest Hemingway House Museum in Key West, Florida’s southernmost island, the most unusual is a bar urinal that the writer turned into a garden fountain. Hemingway snatched the urinal from his favorite bar, Sloppy Joe’s, after deciding he had “pissed” enough money into it to take it home!

Hemingway loved femininity in a woman. He dedicated a book to each of his four wives. He dedicated the novel “The Sun Also Rises” to his wife Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. “Death in the Afternoon” to Pauline Pfeiffer. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was dedicated to Martha Gellhorn. “Across the River, and into the Trees” – Mary Welsh, with love.

In each of his women, he found a piece of that “One” that every man dreams of.

For Hemingway’s 60th birthday, his wife Mary threw a lavish party that lasted twenty-four hours. Chinese food was flown in from London, codfish from Madrid, and champagne from Paris. In addition to the exotic food, there were flamenco dancers, fireworks, and a shooting gallery. Even members of the Italian royal family and the Maharaja of Cooch Behar from India were among the star guests.

Hemingway suffered from severe depression. He referred to his attacks as “black dog days.” In the 1960s, the most common treatment for seemingly all types of mental illness was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – the application of electric shocks to the brain. In an attempt to cure his depression, Hemingway underwent 15 sessions of such treatment. Far from helping, the therapy worsened his condition, impairing his memory and destroying his imagination. Alcohol could still take him over the edge. But it was already a darkness in which inspiration no longer appeared.

After electroshock sessions, the writer lost his memory and the ability to create. That was the verdict. This is what Hemingway himself wrote: “…These doctors who electrocuted me, they do not understand writers….. Let all psychiatrists learn to write fiction to understand what it means to be a writer …. what was the point of destroying my brain, erasing my memory, which is my capital, and throwing me to the margins of life…?”.

According to his wife Mary Welsh, Hemingway became the complete opposite of what he used to be – from an outgoing, cheerful man with a burst of energy, he became withdrawn and silent. At the age of sixty Hemingway experienced a fatal writing crisis. He was asked to write a few words for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech in 1961, but he could not find a single word. No matter how hard he tried, the words just wouldn’t come. The inability to write shook him to the core. Hemingway cried and told a friend, “It won’t happen again, it won’t come back.”

Ernest Hemingway suffered over 200 shrapnel wounds, a shattered kneecap, and an aluminum prosthesis during the First World War. During his life, he survived anthrax, pneumonia, malaria, skin cancer, hepatitis, a ruptured kidney, a ruptured spleen, a fractured skull, a fractured spine, two world wars, and two plane crashes. Death came so often that he had grown accustomed to it.

He had seen and experienced it all in his life. What an optimist one must be, what tremendous willpower and vitality to survive. And what depths of despair must a man be in to stop this love? He lived only when he was creating. He withdrew into the world of his heroes, traveled with them, fought, and won. Losing his world, he lost interest in life.

Back home in Idaho, he ordered his favorite dinner: a New York steak, jacket potatoes, Caesar salad, and a glass of Bordeaux. In the early morning hours of 2 July 1961, Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself with his favorite shotgun.

His tombstone reads:
“…More than anything else in his life he loved autumn. The warm yellow autumn leaves floating down the river on the backs of trout, and the blue windless sky above them. Now he would be a part of it all, forever…”.