HEMINGWAY (PART 1)

foreign ER should be of his great property as a priest of God he is either honest or not as a woman is chaste or not and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again [Music] [Applause] [Music] this hand wrote the words describing the world as seen by these eyes the eyes of Ernest Hemingway this is Chet Huntley for the next hour I shall conduct you in an exploration of the life of Ernest Hemingway as prepared by NBC News this program is based upon the results of their exhaustive inquiry Hemingway emerges as one of the most talented powerful and important personalities of this century he is the most widely read serious author in the world today and his work came directly out of the colorful and dangerous life he lived he pursued experience with Vigor and Imagination he gathered the raw material and processed it in his mind and heart then he applied to it the Precision Machinery of his style the product was perhaps the best crafted export we've ever sent abroad to the world the pros of Ernest Hemingway his life and his work fed each other they existed in Harmony from his Boyhood until his death and because of this there is a consistency which invests his work with the quality of Genius he was the figure in whose image nearly all his Heroes were made Nick Adams the boy in his earliest stories grew to become Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms he was Jake Barnes and The Sun Also Rises Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Grew Older to become Colonel Cantwell in across the river and into the trees in The Old Man and the Sea the Cuban fisherman was of a different nationality but he was still a generic Hemingway hero he lived by the same code courage is the major virtue the most important part of Hemingway's life was spent trying to write prose as he said without tricks and without cheating with nothing that will go bad afterwards no writer in our times has left a more Vivid Mark of his talent and personality on the world [Music] [Applause] Ernest was a half year older than the century born in Oak Park Illinois the second of six children of Dr Clarence Edmonds Hemingway an obstetrician who loved and was skilled at hunting and fishing and his wife the former Grace Hall Who Loved music I used to play cello my mother kept me out of school for a whole year to study music but I was absolutely without Talent of course that year I was out doing other things too [Applause] the best part of the year for him was summer the family went to Northern Michigan where at the age of three Ernest was given his own fishing rod and at the age of 10 his first shotgun [Music] first Covey of partridge's I ever shot was with my father we came on them dusting and feeding in the sun beside the Grist Mill on Horton's Creek in Michigan I was so excited with the were of the wings that I missed both shots while my father shooting an old lever action Winchester pond killed five out of the cubby he was a beautiful shot one of the fastest I've ever seen but he was too nervous to be a great money shot these photographs are Advanced one generation they are of Hemingway and his own son [Music] when Hemingway was 14 he asked for boxing lessons in the first lesson the next Pro broke the boy's nose and inflicted what turned out to be a permanent injury to his left eye but Ernie finished the course and became a first-rate amateur boxer he thought and wrote often in terms of this Sport and his talent for it was exercised frequently in his life in the fall of 1913 Ernie went to high school he was an all-around boy in a classical Midwestern Tradition at Oak Park he said if you could play football you had to play it he did for three years also managed the track team competed in swimming and was captain of the water basketball team he was a member of the school orchestra for three years played a lead in the senior class play was editor and reporter for the school paper he wrote the class prophecy in 24 short stories in his 17th year he graduated that year at the height of World War One in Europe it was 1917. foreign had coined the phrase the world must be made safe for democracy and the United States declared war on Germany [Music] Ernest tied 12 times to enlist in the Army his father objected strongly but he needn't have the eye injury inflicted in the boxing lessons three years earlier caused Ernie's rejection in September he got a job as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star short sentences he learned short paragraphs vigorous English he went out chasing ambulances and squad cars and sent back his copy in the Genesis of the Hemingway Style on the star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence newspaper work will not harm a young writer if he gets out of it in time Hemingway did get out in time he was watching the ticker as it clicked out that the American field service needed ambulance drivers he volunteered and was assigned to the Red Cross [Music] less than a month later he was in Paris on route to Italy foreign he arrived during the shelling of Paris by Big Bertha the most powerful cannon in the world and went by taxi from the train to the area under bombardment danger was a magnet to him two days later he was off to Milan near where the Italians our allies were fighting the austrians and took his place with the ambulance Corps from there he went to the front having a wonderful time had my baptism of fire my first day here when an entire Munitions plant exploded I go to the front tomorrow oh boy glad I'm in it this exuberance reminds us that he was 18 years old at the time [Music] he drove his ambulance alongside the sheer Cliffs of the Italian Alps Along The Hairpin curves after 10 days he was bored and itching for action he persuaded a local Commander to allow him to ride down to the trenches on a bicycle loaded with cigarettes cigars and candy he did this for Six Days on the seventh day he was hit a friend of Hemingway's wrote to Hemingway's father I've just been to see Ernest at the hospital here you may be proud of your son's Valor with those in our section he volunteered to go down to the piavi it was when the Italians were pushing the austrians back over the river about midnight on the seventh day a trench mortar shell fell within a few feet of earnest an Italian Soldier was killed instantly while another Soldier lost both legs the third Italian was wounded badly after Ernest had regained Consciousness he put the latter on his back and carried him to the first aid dugout he says he doesn't remember how he got there Ernest was sent to Milan to the Red Cross Hospital here he's being showered with the tensions by American nurses several years later Hemingway told a friend of his that he had been in love with a nurse who had left him hurting him deeply the physical wounds he had sustained plus the loss of this woman left bad scars it was ten years before he was able to write about the war when he did he wrote very specifically from his own experiences many critics regard the book as the finest modern novel America has produced A Farewell to Arms during the time I was writing the first draft my second son Patrick was delivered in Kansas City by cesarean section and while I was rewriting my father killed himself in Oak Park Illinois I remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in the fine times and the bad times we had in that year but much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it each day making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been before each day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next the fact that the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believe that life was a tragedy I knew it could only have one end finding you were able to make something up to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it and to do this every day you work with something that gave me greater pleasure than any I'd ever known [Music] beside it nothing else mattered [Music] he had learned and he wrote In A Farewell to Arms the world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places thus from his experience through a period of gestation during which his brain distilled his experience to putting his experience down on paper our inquiry traces the course of his work and reveals that the raw material of life is wrought by this man into art when Hemingway was released from the hospital he did the sort of thing which had become a bold figure in the pattern of his life he put the most powerful stress he could devise upon the part of him he feared might not be able to take the strain where the scars of his wounds still angry and the pain of his experience still alive in his memory Free to Go Home free to go anywhere he chose to enlist in the Italian Infantry he served with it until the Armistice and returned to Oak Park with the medal of valor a friend who knew him then later said he came back figuratively as well as literally shot to pieces he seemed to have a tremendous need to express the things he had felt and seen Hemingway did indeed give evidence of being troubled in deep and subtle ways he needed to get away to Nature and he did to the Michigan Woods he had loved as a boy to keep track of him chronologically he was still in his 19th year and for the first time his life and his work coincide and he becomes one of his own Heroes the boy the world knows as Nick Adams the story is Big two-hearted River it tells how Nick deeply ill in spirit takes Solace from the Peace of his solitary camp and the clean pleasure of fishing the story is put together with the fragility strength and Perfection of an egg Nick's sensibilities are so delicately balanced that he dare not make an unpremeditated move lest he jar his mind into a breakdown gradually the peace and Harmony of the woods and the therapy of preparing his camp soothenic inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas it smelled pleasantly of canvas already there was something mysterious and home-like Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent he had not been unhappy all day there had been this to do now it was done he had made his camp he was settled nothing could touch him it was a good place to camp he was there in the good place he was in his home where he had made it in 1920 Hemingway met Hadley Richardson and became a reporter on the Toronto Star within two years he had convinced the editors of the star that they needed a roving reporter to cover Europe he had almost complete freedom of movement and choice of material there was no better job in the world for him just then he married Hadley and they were off to Paris hiring Hemingway turned out to be a good move on the part of the star the 22-year-old foreign correspondent cabled back sharp funny informative always vigorous pieces Paris in the winter is rainy cold beautiful and cheap it is also noisy jostly crowded and cheap in some parts it is lonely austere dripping and cheap two of us are living at a comfortable hotel in the Rouge a cope was just back at the Academy of the bozarts and a few minutes walk from the twileries our room cost 12 francs a day for two it is clean light well heated has hot and cold running water in a bathroom on the same floor that makes a cost for rent of 30 a month at the present rate of exchange on an income of one thousand dollars a year one can live comfortably and enjoyably in Paris our landlord described it as a third floor apartment I was taking a very romantic view of it our landlord would probably refer to a villa on the extreme top of Mount Vesuvius as an ideal location well heated and reached by a pleasant climb only 28 minutes from the heart of Naples the scam of Greenwich Village New York has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles fall on that section of Paris adjacent to the cafe rotund and made the Rotan the leading Latin quarter Showplace for tourists in search of atmosphere it is a strange acting and strange looking breed that crowd the tables of the cafe ratoned they have all striven so hard for a careless individuality of clothing that they have achieved a sort of uniformity of eccentricity [Music] he learned to love Paris it became a city that was home to him as much as any in the world he learned about painting and met Monet Brock Picasso [Music] he met James Joyce they did a certain amount of drinking together the author of Ulysses was a small thin unathletic man with very bad eyes when in the course of their drinking he ran into any sort of belligerence he would jump behind his powerful friend and Shout deal with him Hemingway deal with him Joyce was writing Ulysses the influence of his work was what changed everything and made it possible for us to break away from the restrictions he was introduced by a letter from Sherwood Anderson to the group which gathered around the formidable and Brilliant Gertrude Stein later Hemingway wrote to Anderson Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers and we see a lot of her I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon he was an extraordinarily good-looking young man 23 years old with passionately interested rather than interesting eyes we spent the evening and he and Gertrude Stein went over all the writing he had done up to that time Richard Stein rather liked the poems but the novel she found wanting there is a great deal of description that she said I'm not particularly good description begin again and concentrate what a book would be the real story of Ernest Hemingway not these he writes but the confessions of the real Ernest Hemingway some years after this church would Stein and Hemingway did not meet and then he was back in Paris telling a number of people how much he wanted to see her they sat and talked a long time finally she said Hemingway after all you are 90 rotarian can't you he said make it eighty percent no she said regretfully I can't however Gertrude Stein always says yes I know but I have a weakness for Hemingway years later Hemingway replied Miss Stein wrote at Sun length and with considerable inaccuracy about her influence on my work it was necessary for her to do this after she learned to write dialogue from a book called The Sun Also Rises I was very fond of her and thought it was Splendid she had learned the right conversation it was no new thing to me to learn from everyone I could living or dead and I had no idea it would affect Gertrude Stein so violently here it is simpler and better to thank Gertrude for everything I learned from her and to say how fond I was of her F Scott Fitzgerald the Galahad of American novelists was in Paris at the time he was handsome witty talented and successful he drew the celebrated and the Beautiful toward him without effort he spent his time his money in his substance particularly Hemingway his friend watched without Indulgence the responsibility of talent was work in a letter to Fitzgerald Hemingway was harsh you put so much damn value on youth it seems to me you confused growing up with growing old forget your personal tragedy when you get the Damned hurt use it don't cheat with it you see Bo you're not a tragic character neither am I all we are is writers and what we should do is right you need discipline in your work you're a rummy but you're no more of a rummy than Joyce is and most good writers are you're twice as good now as you were at the time you think you were so marvelous all you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is using Paris as his base Hemingway robed Europe for the Toronto Star I alert and wit at the ready at 23 he was a journalist of sharpened discernment with a faculty foreseeing through sham and a gift for expressing it so that it crackled Mussolini is the biggest Bluff in Europe get hold of a good photograph of Senor Mussolini sometime and study it you will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl that famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19 year old fashisto in Italy study his genius for clothing small ideas and big words [Music] and then look at his black shirt and his white spats there is something wrong even histrionically with a man who wears white spots with a black shirt [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] with the same sardonic perception the young reporter continued to dispatch his impressions of Europe's political verities Queen Marie of Romania who was a first-rate bridge player a second-rate poetess and a very high grade puller of European political strings and who uses more makeup than all the rest of the European royal families combined is making every effort to form such European alliances if the coming disintegration of Romania will be stopped his growing sophistication included a knowledge of the Cities as well as the people he was in Berlin at 24 when he wrote Berlin is a vulgar ugly suddenly dissipated city after the war it plunged into an orgy that the Germans call the death dance there is nothing attractive or gay about The Nightlife of Berlin and it is altogether revolting cocaine pedders get short stripped from the Paris Police but in Berlin they sell their Wares openly all over the city in some cafes cocaine is served at the tables by the waiters there is no nightclub in Berlin that is not disgusting dull and hopeless if anyone has any doubt that the Germans lost the war and realized that they lost it all they need would be a session of after midnight Berlin [Music] Lincoln Stephens who met Hemingway at a political conference in Geneva in 1922 wrote about him at the time in his autobiography Hemingway was the surest future over there walking along the street with him he would go boxing in the air fishing bull baiting all the Motions in Paris where the approve all eccentricities nobody noticed except a smile with this big handsome boy squaring off to Phantom fight you he was gay he was sentimental but he was always at work like Sinclair Lewis like my little boy Pete he was forever playing what he was writing and he was straight hard-boiled honest too by August 1923 Hemingway had his first book ready for publication three stories and ten poems later these stories with revisions became the nucleus of the Nick Adams stories his serious writing made him no money and Hadley was about to have a baby they decided they owed their child stability so they returned to Toronto into a regular weekly salary this was in August in October John Hemingway was born and by December his 24 year old father had reported enough concerts and one alarm fires to last the rest of his life the Hemingway family was off for Europe again and this time to be supported not by our correspondent but by a writer