Ernest Hemingway

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a writer emerged who learned his craft not in a classroom, but in battlefields, bullrings, and bars. To some, Ernest Hemingway was the greatest writer of his generation. A Nobel laureate whose sparse, muscular prose changed literature forever. But to others, he was a swaggering egotist, a man addicted to danger and performance, obsessed with his own legend. His own life fuelled 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 sixty years after his death, does Hemingway remain a symbol of masculinity 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? This is a Short History Of Ernest Hemingway. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Paul Hendrickson, author, journalist, professor, and the writer of Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. Written by Sean Coleman | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw Get every episode of Short History Of… a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions ⁠A Short History of Ancient Rome⁠ - the debut book from the Noiser Network is out now! Discover the epic rise and fall of Rome like never before. Pick up your copy now at your local bookstore or visit ⁠⁠noiser.com/books⁠⁠ to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:02Speaker 02

  It's July the 8th, 1918. Skier on the Italian front.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Rain slips steadily from the lip of the trench into the thick mud below.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  The night is eerily quiet but for the subdued chatter of soldiers huddled at their posts.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  A young Red Cross volunteer, an American, moves through the trench, his boots heavy with mud.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  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 the smell of cordite, sweat, and damp wool.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  The sound is deafening, and the shockwave hits like a hammer blow.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  The young man is thrown backwards, slamming into the ground.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  For a moment, he hears nothing. But then noise and panic return.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  As he pushes himself upright, the volunteer's legs feel strangely weak beneath him.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  The American crawls towards him. He hooks his arms beneath the soldier's 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.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  A sudden punch of agonizing force hits his knee, knocking him sideways. But he presses the pain and fear down and keeps moving.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Up ahead, a lantern wavers near a makeshift aid point, with a Red Cross ambulance beside it.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  The young man calls out, and as he reaches the medics there, his strength finally abandons him.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Hands grab at the wounded soldier first, pulling him from the volunteer's grasp.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  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 the shrapnel from the blast has torn into his legs. The wetness he has been vaguely aware of is not just rain and mud, but his own blood.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  He has just walked the line between bravery and luck, between action and fear, between surviving and not.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  The war has marked him, and it's a mark this 19-year-old volunteer, Ernest Hemingway, will carry through his life.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  But why, more than 60 years after his death, does Hemingway remain a symbol of masculinity 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?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Podcast Network. This is A Short History of Ernest Hemingway.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  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."

• 6:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Cutting his hair in the same bobbed hairstyle as his elder sister's, 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 Boat: Everything He Loved in Life and Lost."

• 7:37Speaker 03

  His 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 him as twins.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  As soon as the boy is old enough, his father pushes Ernest firmly in the opposite direction.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  The mother and father were so mismatched and were so complicated, and so much of it descended on his head.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  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 is not enough to satisfy his hunger for adventure.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  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 nearsighted in one eye, farsighted in the other, leaving his sight poor enough that it rules him out for service.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  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."

• 10:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  As Hemingway 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 warfighting, 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.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  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 Karowski. She's 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.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  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 twenty, 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.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  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 rumours that Ernest has developed a reputation for promiscuity, she is appalled to have raised such a morally wayward son.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Finally, on his 21st birthday, she reaches breaking point.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  In a stern, moralising 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.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Archibald MacLeish, the poet, who was his deep friend, said: "Ernest Hemingway was the only man I ever knew who hated his mother."

• 14:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  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 of overcrowded apartments and cheap cafes that he's introduced to Hadley Richardson.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  A quiet, thoughtful young woman from Saint Louis, slightly older and with a modest, independent income from her family. She offers him something he has rarely known: 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.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  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 it, 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.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  When Ernest and Hadley Hemingway arrive, they are newly married, full of hope, and, as Ernest loves to claim, penniless.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  The 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.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Still, life is hard. They rent a cold flat near the Place de la Contrascap, 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.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  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."

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Hemingway in particular develops a clear, direct, unsentimental style.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  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".

• 19:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  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?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Every draft, every copy, every notebook is gone.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  It's a devastating blow. He will later say it forced him to start again and to write better.

• 20:34Speaker 00

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• 21:04Speaker 01

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• 21:34Speaker 02

  When Hadley becomes pregnant in early 1923, Hemingway worries how they will support a child. Around the same time, he meets editor Edward J. O'Brien, who includes his story "My Old Man" in an anthology.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  It's a tale of fathers and sons, of admiration curdling into disillusionment, and of the painful moment a child discovers a parent's fallibility. For the first time, Hemingway's fiction reaches readers in the US. In the summer of 1923, Hemingway and Hadley traveled to Pamplona in northern Spain for the festival of San Fermin. A week-long celebration, it is an eruption of music, fireworks, all-night revelry. Most famous is the Ensierra, in which fighting bulls thunder through the narrow streets

• 22:29Speaker 02

  at dawn on their way to the ring, while the brave or foolhardy try to outrun them. It's during this visit that he's introduced to the spectacle that will become his new obsession.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  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 Nicconor Hemingway, is born.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Known as Bambi, even his middle name is Hemingway's tribute to the matador Nicconor Vialta. Such is his obsession.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  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 for stillness is a submerged trauma.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  It captures the voice of a generation, adrift after the Great War. And it makes Hemingway a celebrity almost overnight.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  It becomes both the core of Hemingway's art and the code he tries to live by.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  The people who begin to hate him do so, I think, because he becomes insufferable.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Boy, the critics want to start turning against him, even there, right there, because they're sick already. This man who's become a world figure so quickly, it's all become a little bit too much.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  By the late twenties, 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.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Among them is Pauline Fifa, 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.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Back in Paris, the affair can no longer be hidden.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  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 100 days pass, he chooses Pauline.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  The newlyweds move to Key West, Florida, where Hemingway fishes by day and writes each morning with a fierce intensity.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  It becomes his greatest success yet, but coincides with a tragedy.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  There was such mental instability in the family. His father, a successful Oak Park doctor, suffering depression for many years, came home one work day, at noon, for lunch, and went upstairs and sat on the bed and took a revolver out and he shot himself in the temple.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  It's at this favorite haunt that, in 1936, he meets a war correspondent called Martha Gelhorn. 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, Gelhorn heads off on assignment for Collier's 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.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  It's early 1937, in Madrid, Spain.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Under siege, the city shakes as a shell lands somewhere beyond the Gran Via, rattling windows in their frames.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  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 Gelhorn keeps pace, weaving through rubble and sandbags, her notebook tucked safely in her coat pocket.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  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 rooftops.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  The blast rolls through the street, lifting dust like a tide.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  But Hemingway doesn't stop. He understands the rhythm of bombardment now and knows when to keep moving.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  They reach the entrance of the Telefonica building and push inside.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Dust shakes loose as another impact quakes through the floor.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Upstairs, the press room is a chaotic whir of clacking typewriters, telegraph cables, beeping, and journalists chatting.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  A generator struggles to keep power flowing through lines, constantly damaged by shellfire.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Here, global correspondents work shoulder to shoulder, filing reports around the world.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  On the next explosion, the lights blink once, then die completely.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  There is a collective moan of frustration, and for a heartbeat, nothing moves.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  The bombardment outside seems louder without the clatter of keys.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Hemingway pats his pockets for his lighter, and a moment later, a small flame blooms at his fingertips.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:43Speaker 00

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• 36:13Speaker 01

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• 36:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  It's in this crucible that Hemingway and Gelhorn'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.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  When they leave Spain, Hemingway and Gelhorn 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 de Hía, or "Lookout Farm."

• 38:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  His kid brother Leister, he said, "Everything was good with my brother until it wasn't." When we talk about Hemingway, it's always about contradiction. Always about this thing undoing that thing.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Modern critics are often concerned by the presence of racist and antisemitic 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. Seriously unfaithful, emotionally volatile, and often controlling, he expects his partners

• 39:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  His 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.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  And in life, as in fiction, love is no small matter to him.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  He was absolutely capable of falling authentically and deeply in love.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  But partnership for Hemingway is really 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.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  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, think of here, 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.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  By the mid-1950s, Hemingway is world-famous. He's a noble laureate and the living symbol 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.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  By this time, Hemingway's mental state has deteriorated even further.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  He is suffering from severe depression, insomnia, paranoia, and an overwhelming sense that he can no longer write. His doctors diagnose him with hypertension, and what today would be recognized as a major depressive disorder.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  In July 1961, his struggle ends.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  It's early morning on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  A Blaine County deputy steps out, hat in hand, moving with a kind of reluctant purpose towards the front porch.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  The screen door hangs slightly ajar, as if someone fled through it moments earlier and didn't look back.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  The deputy nods to her gently as he passes, then pauses at the open door.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Beside him on the floor lies the shotgun he has just used to end his life.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  The deputy stops, removes his hat, steps back and looks toward the driveway where another car is arriving.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  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, just after 7:40 a.m. The larger-than-life man of words is gone.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  As the doctor leaves, she 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.

• 49:26Speaker 00

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• 49:57Speaker 01

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• 50:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  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 borscht-drose, 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.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  News of Hemingway's death shocks the world.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  To millions, he was more than a writer, he was an icon, a living symbol of courage and adventure.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Today, more than 60 years after his death, Hemingway's work still feels alive. His words echo from the trenches and the bull rings 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."

• 53:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of C.S. Lewis.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  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 such degrees of success.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  That's next time.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to unlock more episodes today.

• 55:26Speaker 00

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• 55:51Speaker 01

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