It started with nothing, with some nonsense about drinking, and then we got into a fight, and I slipped, and he knocked me down, and crushed me with his knee, and squeezed my throat with both hands, as if he wanted to strangle me, and I kept trying to get it out of my pocket. knife to stab him and free himself. Everyone was so drunk that there was no one to pull him away. He choked me and banged my head on the floor, but I still took out and opened the knife, slashed it across my hand, and he let me go. Now he couldn't hold me back. Then he rolled to the side, clutched his wounded hand and began to scream, and I said:

Why the hell did you decide to strangle me?

I think I would have killed him. I couldn't swallow for a whole week. He squeezed my throat hard.

Well, I left there, and his company remained with him, but some of them followed me, and I went down a roundabout route to the pier, and someone I met told me that a man had been killed here, nearby. I said: “Who killed?”, and he said: “I don’t know who killed, only he died”; it was dark, and there were puddles on the street, and the lanterns were not on, and the windows were broken, and the boats were all on the pier, and trees were torn out of the ground, and there were debris all around; and I got into the skiff, and sailed, and found my motorboat where I had left it, with inside Mango Key, and it was intact, just full of water. I pumped and scooped out the water, and the moon was shining, but the clouds were constantly moving towards it, and everything was still shaking quite a bit. I put out to sea, and when daylight came I was already past the Eastern Harbour.

Yes, I can tell you, the storm was serious. I was the first to go to sea, and you have probably never seen such water. She was white as lye, and from East Harbor to South West Key the shore was unrecognizable. And right in the middle, a wide strait washed out in the sand. Trees were torn out of the ground, and the water in the new strait was all white, like chalk, and all sorts of things were on it: branches and whole trees, and dead birds were floating. Beyond the islands, pelicans gathered visibly and invisibly, and all sorts of birds were flying. They probably took refuge here when they sensed that a storm was approaching.

I sat in a boat off South West Key all day and no one came for me. I was the first to go out to sea and saw a piece of a mast on the water and realized that a ship had sunk somewhere, and began to look for it. I found it. It was a three-masted schooner, and the remains of its masts were slightly sticking out of the water. She sank in a deep place, so I couldn’t profit from anything. Then I moved on, looking to see if there was anything else. I was ahead of everyone and knew that all the spoils should go to me. I swam over the shoals from the place where I left the three-masted schooner, and found nothing and swam very far. I reached the quicksand and found nothing and swam further. And so, when the Rebecca lighthouse was already visible, I noticed a lot of birds in one place and moved towards them to see what was there, and there was a whole cloud of birds there.

There was something like a mast sticking out of the water, and as I approached, the birds took off and began to circle in the air. The water in this place was clear, and some kind of mast was barely visible above the water, and when I came even closer, I saw that below, under the water, something was dark, some kind of long shadow, and I completely ran over it , and there, under the water, was a steamer; and lay there all under the water, huge, enormous. I drove over it. He lay on his side, and the stern sank very deep. The portholes were all closed, and I saw how the glass glittered in the water, and I saw its entire body; I had never seen such a large steamer before, and I rode over it to the end, and then pulled the boat out a little and dropped anchor, pulled the skiff onto the bow, pushed it into the water and rowed, and the birds hovered around me.

I had a water telescope, a tube like that, we went sponge fishing with it, and my hand was shaking so much that I almost dropped it. All the portholes that I saw when I sailed over the ship were closed, but somewhere below, near the bottom, there must have been a hole, because some pieces kept floating up from there. It was impossible to make out what it was. Just pieces. It was them that the birds flocked to. There were endless birds. They just hovered over me; the cry was desperate.

I saw everything completely clearly. I saw that the side of the steamer was convex, and under water it seemed a whole mile long. She lay on a clean white sandbank, and what I saw first was a foremast or some kind of yard sticking out of the water obliquely, because the steamer was lying on her side. Bow didn't go very deep. When I stood on the letters on its side, the water reached my chin. But the nearest porthole was twelve feet deep. I could barely reach it with the hook and tried to break it, but I couldn’t. The glass was too thick. Then I went back to the boat, took a wrench and tied it to the end of the gaff and still could not break the glass. So I sat, looking through the tube at the steamer full of all sorts of things - after all, I was the first to find it, but I couldn’t get into it. And there was probably five million worth of good in him.

I even broke a sweat when I thought how much goodness there was in it. Through the porthole, which was closest to me, something was visible, but I could not make out through the tube what it was. The hook was also of no use, so I undressed and, standing, took several deep breaths of air, and then dived from the stern, holding the key in my hand, and swam down. For a second I held on to the edge of the porthole and was able to look into the cabin, and in the cabin there was a woman, her hair was loose and lay on the water. I clearly saw her swimming there, and I hit the glass twice hard with the key and heard the sound of an impact, but the glass did not break, and I had to swim up.

I caught my breath, holding on to the side of the skiff, climbed into the skiff, took several deep breaths of air and dived again. I swam, grabbed the edge of the porthole tightly with my fingers and hit the glass with all my strength with the key. I saw through the glass a woman floating there in the cabin. Her hair was tied with a ribbon at the very head and lay freely on the water. I saw rings on one of her hands. It was right next to the porthole, and I hit the glass twice, but it didn’t even crack. Rising to the surface, I thought that I would not be able to stand it and would start breathing while still in the water.

I dived again and chipped the glass, just chipped it, and when I got up, my nose was bleeding, and I stood on the side of the steamer, touching the letters with my bare feet and sticking my head out of the water, and then swam to the skiff, pulled myself up, climbed into and sat there, waiting for the headache to stop hurting, and looking into the tube, but the blood flowed so heavily that the tube had to be rinsed out. Then I lay down on my back and covered my nose with my hand to stop the bleeding, and lay there for a long time, throwing my head back, looking at the sky, and the birds hovered around me in thousands.

When the bleeding stopped, I looked into the tube again and began to row to the boat to look for something heavier than a key, but I could not find anything, not even a sponge hook. I turned back, and the water became clearer and clearer, and I could see everything that floated there, above the white sandbank. I looked around to see if there were any sharks, but there were none. I would have seen the shark from afar. The water was completely clear and the sand was white. There was a hook on the skiff that served as an anchor, I cut it off and jumped into the water with it. He pulled me down, past the porthole, I grabbed at anything and could not hold on and sank deeper and deeper, sliding along the convex side. I had to unclench my fingers and release the hook. I heard it hit something, and it seemed like a whole year had passed before I surfaced. The skiff was pulled far away by the ebb tide, and I swam towards it, and blood flowed from my nose straight into the water, and I was glad that there were no sharks; but I'm very tired.

My head was pounding, I rested, lying in the skiff, and then began to row back. It was late afternoon. I dived again with the key and again to no avail. The key was too light. There was no point in diving without a large hammer or something else heavy. Then I again tied the key to the hook and, looking through the tube, knocked and beat on the glass until the key came off, and through the tube I saw quite clearly how it slid along the side, and then straight down and went into the quicksand. There was nothing more I could do. The key was gone, I also lost the hook, all that was left was to return to the boat. I was so tired that I could not pull the skiff on board, and the sun was already setting. The birds flew away, left the ship, and I moved towards South West Key, with the skiff in tow, the birds flying in front of me and behind me. I'm pretty tired.

The morning was very quiet. Dry Pine forest around the house he was sleeping, and the mountains were gloomily silent in the uncertain light. Everything was hidden in anticipation of a noisy spring day. He looked at the mountains. The world was a good place and worth fighting for, and he didn't want to leave it. But sometimes life is like a novel that you just can’t finish. The gun was leaning against the wall. Father said that a gun could be either best friend, or worst enemy. And now it is a friend and will help him. Father... “Dying is not difficult at all,” he said. Father was not afraid, and he was not afraid either. After all, it is life that requires courage, not death.

Fight and conquer!

The Halls and Hemingways were the most respected and wealthy families of the town. Their mansions stood opposite each other on the most respectable street. His father, Clarence Hemingway, lived in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. He was proud of his ancestors, among whom were fearless conquerors of the Wild West, who traveled across the prairies in wagons, as well as participants in the war between the North and South. In the mansion opposite, young Grace Hall grew prettier every day. When he graduated from medical school, an engagement took place. After some time, Grace became the wife of the provincial doctor Hemingway, giving up the singing career she had begun. However, the ambition seething in her required an outlet. She never tired of reminding her husband of her sacrifice. Clarence lived a quiet and contemplative life. A lover of hunting and fishing, he felt at home in the lap of nature. The Oakpark mansion, where the always dissatisfied Grace lived, seemed like a prison to him. God did not deprive the Hemingways of children. Ernest, born July 21, 1899, was the second child. The boy was named after his grandfather, and Ernest never liked his name, considering it too bourgeois. Not yet able to speak, little Ernest nevertheless clearly felt that his mother and father had fenced themselves off from each other with a blank wall of hostility, and the atmosphere in the house was always stormy and suffocating.

For the summer, the Hemingways moved to a cottage on Walloon Lake. The boy liked the spartan atmosphere here more, and sometimes he forgot that there was a boring, hypocritical Oak Park in the world. One day Ernest was sent to a nearby farm to buy milk. He was skipping along the path, waving his stick, but suddenly he suddenly tripped, fell and a sharp stick stuck in his throat. Clarence quickly stopped the bleeding. The throat took a long time to heal and was very painful. “When it hurts and you want to cry, whistle,” my father advised. Subsequently, this advice was very useful to Ernest. From then on, if Ernest completely lost heart or suffered physically, he would whistle blithely, wanting to show everyone in the world that what was happening to him was nonsense.

At the age of three, he experienced a feeling of genuine happiness when he caught a small trout from a stream. He never forgot this feeling - a stretched fishing line, at the end of which a living elastic fish beats. To teach his son to aim carefully and shoot accurately, Clarence gave him three cartridges a day.

Grace had already come to terms with the fact that her eldest son would not make a decent resident of Oak Park, but when he also became interested in boxing, she simply could not see this savage with a broken nose and a black eye. “Boxing taught me never to stay down,” the writer Hemingway would later say. Ernest picked up strong words during boxing training and fights and often used them in conversation. Grace ordered in an unquestioning tone: “Go to the bathroom and wash your mouth with soap!” Meanwhile, in the school magazine, one story by Ernest had already appeared in the spirit of his idol - Jack London and another - about the machinations around the boxing betting. Starting quarrels everywhere, young Hemingway sought to prove to himself and everyone that he was invincible and invulnerable.

After graduating from school, Ernest had, like any respectable Oakpark resident, to go to university, find something he liked, get married and settle in a quiet suburb of Chicago. However, Ernest was simply sick of this prospect. He wanted to fight, get drunk, conquer! He was ready to run away anywhere, as long as it was away from here. The First World War had been going on overseas for three years. What kind of university is this when you can take part in such a big mess! However, the parents who supported him resolutely rebelled against military entertainment. Well, even if they don’t let him go to war, he still won’t stay at home. He got tired of Grace's lectures and moved to Kansas City, where his uncle helped him get a job as a reporter at a newspaper. “My luck was in a big fire,” Ernest recalled. To see all the details, the young journalist climbed into the thick of it, so that sparks burned holes in his new suit. After passing on the information over the phone, he added $15 per suit to the editor’s bill. However, no one was going to compensate him for the damage. “This was a lesson to me,” the writer will say, “not to risk anything if you are not ready to lose it.” Ernest's energy was overflowing. One journalist recalled that when Hemingway typed, he always missed letters because his fingers could not keep up with his thoughts. He rushed around the city all day, completing tasks, and spent his nights reading books.

Taste of War

However, the desire to go to war did not leave him. He wanted to take part in this performance. He wanted to fight for the sake of fighting, and not to defend some ideals. Most likely, he didn’t even care which side to fight on. However, the military commission rejected him due to poor eyesight. Then he enlisted in the transport corps of the American Red Cross and began to prepare to be sent to the Italian front. The next morning, Hemingway, suffering from a hangover, set off for Europe on the steamship Chicago. All passengers feared a German attack submarines. Hemingway stood on the deck, waiting to see if an enemy periscope would appear above the water. When the ship arrived safely, he, eager for adventure, said that he felt as if he had been cheated.

From Milan, Hemingway sent home a postcard with the laconic: “Had a great time.” Only this time this daredevil was showing off. In Milan, a bomb hit an ammunition factory, and volunteers cleared a huge area of ​​corpses. It was creepy, especially when they carried out the bodies of women. Then they collected pieces of bodies stuck in the barbed wire. All this sobered up the young journalist a little. Up to this point, he had viewed the war as a game of cowboys and Indians.

The volunteers were placed in a quiet place in Shio. Ernest felt like he was on vacation at a country club, and it infuriated him. He asked to go to the front line, and he was sent to the Piave River. Every day he delivered food and cigarettes to the trenches and one day miraculously remained unharmed after a direct hit from a shell into a trench. “I was covered in what was left of my friends.” Hemingway boasted that he was charmed against bullets and shells. But on July 8, 1918, when Hemingway, as usual, brought chocolate and cigarettes to the soldiers on a bicycle, the Austrians unexpectedly opened heavy fire from a mortar. Everyone who was close to Ernest was killed. He was greatly stunned. The last thing he saw was a wounded Italian sniper lying nearby. Having woken up, Ernest climbed out of the trench and crawled towards the sniper. He turned out to be alive, and, lifting him onto himself, Hemingway, bending down, tried to get to his people. However, the Austrians noticed him and began to fire at him. Again shell-shocked by the blast wave, Hemingway fell to the ground again. For a moment he felt what is called the soul fly out of him and after some time return back. “Then there was only pain and blackness,” Hemingway recalled. - The thought came that I should think about my whole past life, and it seemed funny to me. I had to come to Italy specifically to think about my past life! And in general, at such moments you think about anything, but not about the past. I wanted to run but couldn’t, as happens in nightmares.”

When Ernest got to his people, it turned out that the Italian he was dragging had long been killed by shrapnel. In the heat of the moment, Hemingway himself did not feel pain, although his knee was shattered and many fragments lodged in his leg. At the field hospital, some of the fragments (there were more than two hundred in total) were removed, and Ernest was sent to Milan. One of his acquaintances recalled how, lying in a hospital bed, Hemingway amused himself by taking out steel fragments from his leg, putting them in a jar and counting them. The danger of amputation looming over him passed after numerous operations. However, the pain tormented him day and night. He tried to drown it out with cognac. But his guardian angel did not forget about him and one day appeared to him in the form of a young nurse. The American Agnes von Kurowski was seven years older than Ernest, and he really liked it. The romanticism of relationships in the style of “a wounded warrior and a merciful woman” completely captured him. Agnes looked at him as if he were a funny child and called him “my baby.” During the day they exchanged numerous notes, and Agnes arranged her night shifts so that she could be with him. At night, he himself delivered thermometers to the wounded so that she would not have to get up. On the way back, he thought about her lying in his bed, and this thought warmed him as much as her body had an hour ago.

Puritanical Oak Park made itself felt - Ernest definitely wanted to marry his mistress. He loved her as one loves the first woman: without noticing her shortcomings and vices. The leg was healing, and Ernest was so used to the pain that he felt uncomfortable if nothing hurt. While he was experiencing his first novel, the war ended. He was awarded the Italian silver medal "For Courage". He was one of the first American soldiers to be wounded in World War I. His feat was described in many American newspapers.

Prodigal son

A completely different Ernest Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Leaning on a stick, a man in an Italian leather coat emerged from the carriage. He refused to lean on his father's arm and got into the car. The test of pain, love and “copper pipes” did its job. In order not to feel like a stranger at home, Ernest turns his room on the third floor into a military trench - military photographs and clothes, maps, awards, and weapons were hung on the walls. He covered himself with a blanket from a Milan hospital, the smell of which smoothed out the nightmares that tormented him. The only joy is Agnes. “She’s such a beauty,” he tells his family again and again, “she’ll come, then you’ll see.” While waiting for letters from Agnes, he eagerly greeted the postman every morning. Suddenly, Ernest came down with a fever, did not leave his room and did not allow his father to examine him. He revealed the cause of his illness only to his sister Merseline when he read her a letter from Agnes. She wrote that her love for him is more love mother that she is marrying an Italian officer.

Ernest drank cognac, locking himself in the room until the memories of the Milanese nights were erased from his memory. When everything burned out, only one desire remained - to write. Having gained some experience, he already knew what he was talking about, but did not know how. Having moved to a cottage on Walloon Lake, he began to write sheet after sheet, but a feeling of dissatisfaction did not leave him, the feeling that all this was not what he was looking for. For some time he was obsessed with the idea of ​​going to the East, but his mother refused to give him money for a passport and travel to Yokohama. She tormented her son with accusations of irresponsibility. In her opinion, for 18 months now he has been hanging around idle, not wanting to find a serious income-generating occupation. The profession of a journalist was for her synonymous with parasitism. And the thought that a young man from a decent family could become a writer infuriated her. In the end, Grace gave her son an ultimatum - either let him look for a job or get out of the house. Ernest chose the latter.

Girlfriend Hash

He moved in with a friend in Chicago and got a job as an assistant editor at an economics magazine. If earlier he worked for pleasure, now, having lost the support of his family, he did it only for money. Ernest met a girl named Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Soon he invited her to a football match. But Hadley sprained her ankle that day. The foot was swollen and there was no way to put a shoe on it. Then Hadley put a red slipper on her foot and calmly walked down the street in it next to Ernest. This contempt for convention captivated Hemingway. He liked her brown hair and smile. Hadley's life before meeting Ernest could not be called paradise. Her father committed suicide, she for a long time suffered from a spinal injury and thought that she would be a burden for the man who would connect his life with her. Rejected by Agnes, Hemingway at this time also considered himself a flawed person. They both needed each other. Hash (as Hemingway called her) lived in St. Louis, and they exchanged letters for a long time. She was the first to appreciate his literary experiments, saying that his prose had rhythm and precision of words. She gave him his first typewriter, saying: “I gave you such a good gift that now you are obliged to marry me.” On September 3, 1921, they were married in a small Methodist church in Horton Bay. Grace, who was present at the ceremony, hoped that, having started a family, Ernest would come to his senses and stop writing stories that no one wants to buy. After her mother's death, Hash received a small inheritance and was ready to invest the money in her budding literary husband. And Ernest dreamed of Paris. And then the editor of the Toronto Daily Star invited him to go to Europe as a traveling correspondent for the newspaper. Ernest had to bear all expenses; the editors would only pay for his publications.

On December 8, 1921, the Hemingway couple sailed from New York to Europe on the steamship Leopoldina. Hash was amazed by the low prices in Paris - for seven francs (60 cents) you could have a good lunch. Young unrecognized talents flocked to Paris from everywhere, attracted by the cheap life and atmosphere of creative and moral freedom. The couple rented a two-room apartment on Cardinal Lemoine Street without running water or other amenities. They slept on a mattress thrown on the floor. Hash was ideal wife for an unrecognized genius - she stoically endured all the difficulties of this camp life. Ernest wrote essays about Parisian life and customs for the newspaper, went to an international conference in Genoa, and later interviewed Mussolini. In the French capital, he met Parisian Americans: Gertrude Stein, a plump, ugly woman who spoke in metaphors, the eccentric Fitzgerald couple, and bookstore owner Sylvia Beach. Hash got a very difficult husband to communicate with. He could not speak for days, absorbed in creative ideas. Literature was perhaps the only thing he took seriously, saying that it did not tolerate half measures. When Ernest began a work, he sharply reduced any communication with his wife, directing all his energy to writing. One day, when Hash was traveling to visit him in Lausanne to go skiing, her suitcase with all his manuscripts, which she was carrying for him, was stolen on the train. Having learned about this, Ernest created a scandal, accusing Hadley of almost malicious intent.

Europeans certainly considered all Americans to be millionaires. However, Ernest and Hash soon had difficulty scraping together even seven francs for lunch. Ernest preferred to save only on clothes for Hash, but not on food or drink. When Hash became pregnant, he received the news with horror. He complained to Gertrude Stein that he was not ready to be a father and suspected that a child would complicate his already difficult life. His first book, “Three Stories and 10 Poems,” published in a circulation of 300 copies, stroked Ernest’s pride, but went unnoticed and did not bring in a cent of money. Soon, however, he came to terms with the fact that he would have to be a father. He took the pregnant Hash to boxing, took her to Switzerland to ski, and later they saw a bullfight together in Spain. Ernest believed that after all this, Hash would certainly give birth to a boy who would become a real man. When he first saw bullfighting in Pamplona, ​​Hemingway was captivated by the spectacle and said that bullfighting was an act akin to an ancient tragedy. Dancing people in the streets, with leather skins full of wine, running bulls along the main street - all this created the atmosphere of a medieval carnival. It seemed that the celebration had no boundaries either in time or space.

The money from Hash’s inheritance had come to an end by that time, and the couple decided to go to America for a couple of years, earn extra money there, and then return to Europe. John Hadley Nicanor was born in Toronto in October 1923. The boy was named Nicanor in honor of the matador who amazed Hemingway with his virtuosity. Meanwhile, the father of the family was not doing well.

The deputy editor-in-chief disliked Hemingway for his excessive freethinking and made every effort to force him out of the newspaper. After liberal Europe, Toronto seemed to Ernest an enlarged copy of Oak Park.

Ernest develops his creative principles. A writer is, first of all, an attentive observer of life. “Even if you are heartbroken, standing at the bedside of your dying father, you must notice everything, to the last detail, even if it causes you suffering.” From observing the details, Hemingway's famous iceberg principle was born. The characters - a man and a woman - can sit in a bar and talk about unimportant things like brands of wine, and only a random word, a gesture, a trembling voice indicate that both are experiencing a tragedy.

Principles of “our time”

After leaving the newspaper, Ernest and his family sailed back to Europe. In Paris, they rented an apartment above a sawmill on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In January 1924, Ernest’s second book, “In Our Time,” was published in a small edition. Clarence ordered six copies of the collection and sent them back immediately. The naturalistic details of some of the stories greatly shocked his parents. Ernest believed that one must write truthfully, without hushing up anything. His father wrote to him: “Decent people do not discuss their venereal diseases anywhere except in the doctor’s office.” Merselina recalls that the parents reacted to their son’s book “like nuns who ended up from a monastery in a brothel.” Clarence and Grace tried not to remember the collection “In Our Time,” and if they did, they referred to it only as “this book.” This rejection of his work hurt Ernest, and he stopped writing to his parents. Meanwhile, Ernest decided not to return to the profession of journalist, believing that it would spoil his pen. Hash and Ernest ate onions and cahors, diluted with water. Ernest later recalled how he lied to Hash that he was invited to dinner, and went for a walk around Paris so that his wife and son could get more food. Avoiding looking at the windows of pastry shops, he wandered around the Luxembourg Gardens, sometimes looking into museums, noting that the pictures become clearer and more beautiful if he sucks in the pit of his stomach. He developed the habit of working in a cafe, where the noise of the sawmill and the crying of his son did not disturb him. “I ordered coffee with brioche for one franc and worked all day,” the writer recalled. The half-starved existence did not discourage Ernest. “I’ll be damned if I write a novel just to have lunch every day,” he said. He earned 10 francs per round as a partner for professional boxers in training. In October 1925, a reputable American publishing house released the second edition of his collection “In Our Time.”

One day he met an American woman, Duff Twisden, in a cafe. Duff was one of the most scandalous personalities in Paris. The daughter of an aristocrat and a shopkeeper, she managed to be a British spy, marry an English aristocrat and run away from him to Paris with her bisexual cousin. She liked Ernest because he was undisturbed and handsome - a rare combination for Paris. In the summer of 1925, the famous trip to Pamplona took place. Duff was accompanied by her cousin, her new lover Harold Loeb, and Hemingway and his wife. Immediately upon arrival in Spain, a love pentagon was formed. The rivalry between the three men electrified their company. Jealous cousin Duff gave her a black eye, and Ernest, who always strived to be the winner, challenged Lab to a duel. Hash watched all this silently. Their relationship suffered when she became pregnant a second time, and Hemingway forced her to have an abortion. In the end, Duff left all three, becoming infatuated with the handsome matador. Even though Ernest and Duff were never lovers, she, with her short hair, dressed simply and elegantly, became his muse, inspiring him to write his first novel called “Fiesta.” Duff, of course, would not refuse his bed, but when it came to cheating on his wife, Ernest became a puritan.

Although the characters in the novel were not copies of the real participants in the trip to Pamplona, ​​all of Duff's lovers recognized themselves. The main character, Brett Ashley, based on Duff, careless and suffering, was liked by readers the most.

Ernest so masterfully described the suffering of the narrator, the impotent Jake, that rumors spread about the writer's male inferiority. The Lost Generation theme was in vogue, but Ernest's novel became an encyclopedia of the lives of people returning from the First World War.

Hash interested him less and less. In old dresses, plump, always sitting at home with her son and so... ordinary. He already regretted that he had missed the opportunity to have adultery with Duff. Maybe that's why he turned his attention to Hash's friend, Pauline Pfeiffer. Pauline could be called, rather, a charming plain woman than a beauty. The daughter of wealthy parents, she worked for the Parisian magazine Vogue and dressed like the models from its pages. A bright bird compared to Hash, an ordinary gray sparrow. Pauline knew how to flatter men and, in order to marry a fashionable writer, pretended to be a fan of his work. She quoted phrases from his stories, sprinkled him with her favorite expressions, and even adopted his manner of speaking. Pauline followed the couple to a Swiss ski resort, where she most likely became Ernest's mistress. Hemingway immediately began to regret his action and was burdened by a feeling of guilt. The knowledge that he was living with Pauline “in sin” forced him to ask Hesh for a divorce. He later blamed Pauline for the collapse of his marriage and called Hash the most generous woman in the world. Oddly enough, after the divorce, the initiator himself suffered more. Ernest became depressed, called himself a scoundrel and son of a bitch. He gave the entire fee for “Fiesta” to Hash.

One of the characters in the story “In a Strange Country” voices the writer’s pessimistic thoughts at that time: “A person cannot marry. He must find something that cannot be lost." Hemingway first looked at this world as a universal trap. Each of his subsequent wives was richer than the previous one. The time of hunger and economy passed, and Ernest settled with Pauline in spacious apartments. The shock caused by the divorce was so great that Ernest was struck by temporary impotence.

In America, he settled in its most exotic part - on the island of Key West off the southern tip of Florida. While he was writing a new novel, two events happened in his life. Pauline bore him a son. The birth was difficult, and the child was born by caesarean section. Ernest spent many hours in the hospital corridor, sure that Pauline would die, and if she died, it would be his fault. Almost immediately following this event, Clarence Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself with his Smith & Wesson. The father suffered from diabetes and, in addition, went broke after investing a large sum of money in real estate in Florida. As a doctor, Clarence clearly saw how his illness was progressing, and, not wanting to live out his life as a helpless invalid, he shot himself in the head in his bedroom in Oak Park. According to Ernest, only cowards die this way. He blamed his mother for everything; he believed that she suppressed Clarence with her dictatorial character. In the future, he called Grace nothing more than “that bitch” and, when she died, he did not come to her funeral. His father remained in his memory as a kind but strict man who taught him to shoot and catch trout. He loved him very much. Until Clarence became henpecked by his wife. Ernest himself was so afraid of becoming like his father that he not only dominated his family, but was even a domestic tyrant. When he wrote well, he was complacent and cheerful, but when he was dissatisfied with what he wrote, he became unbearable. For a long time Ernest did not allow himself to grieve for his father. This could have prevented him from finishing the novel.

Love cycle

In 1933, he went on his first African safari with Pauline. The writer always believed that his woman should be able to do everything that he can do. Therefore, all his wives, without exception, were sharp shooters, brilliant skiers and skilled fishermen. The Hemingway couple settled on a farm in Nairobi. They spent two weeks preparing for the safari there.

In a passenger car they moved to the Serengeti nature reserve. They were accompanied by two trucks with hunting equipment, mechanic, porters and cook. Having killed his first lion, the writer experienced great disappointment. He expected a brutal fight with roars and blood, and the lion simply fell dead. There, in Africa, he conceived a story about a hunter who overcomes his cowardice. Striving to be a winner in everything, Ernest tried to get more trophies than the rest. He managed to shoot a rhinoceros and many kudu antelopes. The green hills of Africa and its emerald valleys became the theme of his work for a long time.

Returning to America, he purchased his famous boat "Pilar" from a shipyard in Brooklyn. On the island of Bimini he bought light machine gun, which was installed on a boat to drive sharks away from caught fish. Then he met Jane Mason, a beautifully built blue-eyed blonde. She was married to a wealthy respectable man. It was an unhappy marriage. Jane was barren and often looked for entertainment on the side. From her fashionable house with nine servants, she fled to Ernest. They went to sea together on the Pilar. By that time, Pauline had already given birth to her second son by Caesarean section. Doctors warned her that the new pregnancy could end fatal both for her and for the child. Afraid of getting pregnant, Pauline kicked her husband out of their marital bed. And barren Jane in this sense did not know any restrictions. They often met in Havana in a room at the Ambos Mundos hotel, where the romantic mistress climbed up the fire escape. Jane was extremely unstable, drank heavily, suffered from depression and once tried to commit suicide. Gradually their passion faded away. Jane was too much like him. Sometimes it seemed to Hemingway that he was an unlucky talisman, touching which was fraught with tragedy. Even though he always carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in his pocket, he couldn't help but feel an unhappy aura around him. His father killed himself, his sister Ursula, having fallen ill with an incurable disease, committed suicide, younger brother shot himself in 1982. His mistress Jane Mason and his Parisian friend, the writer Fitzgerald, tried to commit suicide. One of the writer's first biographers jumped out of a window.

At a Key West bar he met Martha Gellhorn, another blonde in a black suit. He told everyone that he first fell in love with her slender legs, and only then - into it itself. Martha was a strong-willed, ambitious, independent person. She was a fairly well-known journalist and became famous as an exposer of social ills such as unemployment. They talked for hours about the civil war that had broken out in Spain. And if Ernest went to his first war solely out of a desire to fight, now he was eager to kick the Francoists out of his beloved country with a kick in the ass. Pauline tried her best to dissuade him from this idea. Ernest and Martha, as correspondents, left America separately and met in Madrid, staying in different rooms at the Florida Hotel. Martha was a real “trench wife” - she patiently endured the difficulties of the field and did not bow to bullets.

Pauline bombarded him with letters, begging him to come home. “I want you to be here, sleep in my bed, wash in my bathroom, drink my whiskey. Dear Dad, come home soon!” - she wrote. And he returned briefly to quiet Key West, only to soon rush off to Spain again. In besieged Madrid, he felt like a man “who has no wife, children, house, boat, nothing.” I drove with Marta along the Aragonese front, spending the night in barns or in the back of a truck, filming documentary about the Spanish War, carrying heavy equipment under fire and looking for the best camera angle. Soon both left for Paris, where Pauline was waiting for Ernest. After the victory of the Francoists, Ernest, tired of quarrels with his wife, settles in Havana, in his favorite hotel, Ambos Mundos. Every day from eight o'clock until lunch he wrote his new novel about the Spanish War, called "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Subsequently, when he was asked what he wanted to say with this work, he replied that he wanted to write “about the land that will endure forever.” Martha lived with him. "The Bell" was a huge success. The novel was immediately stolen for quotes. Even the words from the epigraph: “Never ask for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for you,” became a catchphrase. Paramount Studios acquired the film rights to the novel. Meanwhile, having divorced Pauline, he immediately married Martha. With almost all of my former women he maintained good relations. “If you truly love someone, you will never completely get rid of this love,” he said. Martha, unlike Ernest’s other wives, was not very suitable for the role of homemaker. “She is the most ambitious woman who has ever lived,” the writer recalled.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the Second world war. Martha instantly evaporated from the Cuban Finca, where they had settled by this time, and rushed off to the front. Hemingway, suffering from loneliness, decided to organize a counterintelligence network to identify enemy agents who had sneaked into Cuba. He himself recruited waiters, fishermen, loaders and drank in the company of his many cats. By writing “The Bell,” he understood that he had set a bar for himself, and if the next work was weaker, there would be talk that Hemingway had written himself out. In the end, physically and mentally exhausted, he came to Martha in London, where he met Mary Welsh, a short blonde and also an American journalist. He shocked her by immediately declaring that he wanted to marry her... Having drunk heavily at a party, he, returning to the hotel by car, crashed into a water tank and hit his head hard. I had to spend some time in the hospital. Martha came to visit him and, seeing his bandaged head, laughed loudly. Ernest was offended, and she attacked him with reproaches, saying that “they don’t behave like that in war,” and left for the combat zone.

Ernest, meanwhile, decided to fly to English bomber. The likelihood that the plane would be shot down was high, and on the eve of departure the writer did not feel very comfortable. In addition, the maid accidentally threw away his talisman - a pebble given to him by his son Bambi. The superstitious writer finally lost his peace of mind, and then the maid gave him a cork from a champagne bottle for luck. The plane, having dropped its portion of bombs, returned safely to the airfield, and Ernest carried the cork in his pocket for a long time, considering it “lucky.”

In 1944, Hemingway, together with American motor reconnaissance units, entered a small French city, where he organized a perimeter defense with local partisans. The sight of Paris abandoned by the Germans brought tears to his eyes: “My throat was sore, because ahead of me lay a pearl-gray and, as always, beautiful city, which I love more than all the cities in the world.” After the defense, settling in a room at the Ritz with his overgrown and heavily armed friends, who were ready to shoot anyone who offended their Pope, he celebrated the victory for a long time and wildly. Soon Mary appeared at the Ritz, and they spent their first night in a room littered with guns, grenades and empty bottles, listening to the singing of the Marseillaise in the street. At the end of 1945, when he divorced Martha, a tabloid newspaper published an article entitled "The Bell Tolls for Hemingway's Three Women."

a swan song

Returning to Finka, the writer completely fell apart. He was tormented by headaches and nightmares. In general, the head was his Achilles heel. Not a year went by without him getting a concussion. All because of risky activities like fishing, boxing and hunting, combined with the habit of alcohol. As a result, his hearing began to deteriorate and his speech became slower. The presence of Mary, his guardian angel, always had a calming effect on him. “She’s just a wife, not a quarrelsome, career-obsessed woman,” he said. When Mary became pregnant, he took her from Havana to the northern United States to see a doctor. The pregnancy turned out to be ectopic, bleeding began along the way, and Mary fell into a coma. The doctor suggested that he say goodbye to his wife... Everything that happened was terribly reminiscent of the ending in “A Farewell to Arms!” And he decided, in his own words, to “rape fate.” He ordered that plasma be infused into Mary on his own responsibility. After the operation, which he attended, the writer sat next to his wife’s bedside for a week. Mary has recovered.

After arriving in Italy with his wife, he met a young girl, Adriana Ivancic, while hunting, whom he saw in the evening at the hunting lodge. She sat by the fire and dried her black shiny hair after the rain, combing it with her long fingers. This primitive picture fascinated the writer. Hemingway broke his comb and gave her half. The girl came from an old Dalmatian family. last love the writer was sinless, they were connected only platonic relationship. The black-haired muse put an end to the creative crisis. Her "long eyelashes, very dark skin", her classical beauty inspired Ernest to write last novel"Across the river, in the shade of the trees." The girl was flattered by the love of the venerable writer, but she herself did not experience deep feelings for him. The novel “Beyond the River...” is largely autobiographical. From the creative upsurge caused by the last affection, the story-parable “The Old Man and the Sea” was also born. a swan song Hemingway.

Mary built a three-story tower at Fink where he could work in privacy. However, the work did not go well. The writer often got irritated, scolded everyone and everything, and went to bars with a famous Havana prostitute named Xenophobia. When Adriana came to stay with him, he took her to the coast. They looked at the sea in silence for a long time, after which Hemingway quietly said: “Thank you.” On May 4, 1953, he was fishing on the Pilar when the radio announced that he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The player Hemingway always strived for victory, but when he won it, it ceased to mean anything to him. The road can be more interesting than the goal you are walking towards. After the triumph, he took a vacation for himself. He and Mary went to Spain, then to Africa. Ernest decided to show Mary his favorite green hills from a bird's eye view, and they hired a plane. The plane hit the telegraph wires and began to fall. Beneath them were swamps with crocodiles. The pilot pulled the car to solid ground and landed. Mary had several broken ribs, and Ernest had a dislocated arm. In addition, when they returned to camp, a forest fire broke out nearby. While helping to put it out, the writer tripped and fell into the fire. A moment later he could no longer hear his own voice, and double vision appeared in his eyes.

On the ship sailing to Venice, he became very ill. My head was spinning all the time, the wound on it - a consequence of burns - was festering, and everything inside hurt like hell. However, he traveled by car from Venice to his beloved Spain. On the way, he realized that he had clearly overestimated his strength.

Returning to Finka, the writer, on the advice of doctors, went on a diet and began to drink significantly less. He hoped that, having recovered his health, he would be able to write again. His typewriter, the sound of which he compared to the crack of a machine gun, was silent and collecting dust. On October 28, 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his story “The Old Man and the Sea.” Ernest was afraid of becoming arrogant and said: “A prize is a prostitute who can infect you with a bad disease. Glory is the sister of death."

A real stir began around his person. In letters to friends, he complains that reporters are literally breaking into his home. “I feel as if someone has recovered in my personal life,” Hemingway wrote, after which he moved for a while to the Pilar, where he sadly discovered that he could no longer land big marlin. He began to quarrel with Mary often, but his wife believed that everything was allowed to a genius, and treated his often unfair accusations as cute baby talk. The writer feels deep affection for his last wife. “When she is gone, our Finka is empty, like a bottle from which every drop has been strained,” he wrote. In the mid-fifties, a revolution began in Cuba. As always, the writer did not pay attention to the danger and continued to live in Finka. One day, the dictator Batista's soldiers, breaking into his house in search of weapons, killed Black Dog, the writer's old dog, who made a heroic attempt to protect Finca. This deprived him for a long time peace of mind. He couldn't write without the old dog lying next to him on the kudu skin. Hemingway no longer felt at home here. He loved Finka - he loved to have his cats sitting on the table and on his shoulders when he wrote, he loved to sunbathe on the roof of the tower and sit on the step that he never allowed to be repaired because flowers grew through it. But he knew that he had to leave here. And he left.

He met the fall of 1958 in the town of Ketchum in the western United States. At this time, in Paris, at the Ritz Hotel, two of his suitcases, which had been there since the 20s, were found in the storage room. They contained books, clippings, notebooks, things that were once important to the writer. As Hemingway sorted through all this, he had the idea of ​​writing memoirs about his Parisian life. He tried to start a new book, but it didn't work out. Ernest celebrated his sixtieth birthday at a villa near Malaga, having fun with all his might. He shot the ash off the cigarette his friend was holding in his teeth, and enjoyed tasting the gourmet food and wines Mary had ordered. Then, when a rocket fell on a palm tree during a fireworks display and the firefighters arrived, Ernest and his friends got them drunk and began driving around the villa in a fire truck with a siren. In the fall of 1960, his vision deteriorated greatly. He was afraid to sleep because of nightmares. Upon returning to Ketchum, other alarming symptoms of the disease appeared. He assured everyone that FBI agents were watching him, that the police wanted to arrest him. One day he became very worried because he decided that he was ruined. Mary, wanting to reassure him, called the bank in New York to reassure him that his account was full. However, the obsessive thought of financial collapse did not leave him. Hemingway did not want to admit that he was mentally ill and turn to a psychiatrist. He considered this a sign of weakness. He thought that only he could help himself. Finally, Mary persuaded him to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, under the pretext of treating hypertension, from which he had long suffered. The entire city consisted of a world-famous hospital and numerous hotels around, where relatives and friends of patients lived. Mary rented a hotel room and visited her husband every day. The writer ironically said that he lives in a clinic under someone else's surname Lord. However, the newspapers soon learned that Papa Hemingway was seriously ill. Meanwhile, his condition did not improve, and the doctors decided that home furnishings will do him good. In Ketchum, he tried to continue working on a book of Parisian memoirs, but could not get anything out of himself. “This is an amazing book, I know how everything should be, but I can’t do it.” He accused the doctors and Mary of ruining his talent, saying that he would prefer to be a psycho and be able to write than to be like everyone else. When he was required to write a preface of several lines for the publication of one old book, he tried in vain to connect words into sentences, cried... and, in the end, two weeks later, with the help of Mary, he composed the necessary text.

There have always been two people in Hemingway: one an attentive and disciplined creator, who does not get up from behind the typewriter until he writes the required number of words, and the other, a hunter and fisherman without fear or reproach, who admired the caught swordfish more than the first - the published a novel or an award received. But one could not live without the other. The second could not calmly shoot partridges if the first was not full of ideas about future books. When the writer Hemingway died, the life of Hemingway the Superman lost all meaning. One day Mary found her husband loading a gun. She tried to distract him by asking him to read her the suicide note he had written. He explained that he was leaving his entire fortune to her. A doctor and Ernest's friend came and took the gun from him. That same day he was taken back to Mayo. When everyone got into the car, he stated that he had forgotten some things and went into the house, where he tried to shoot himself again. The desire to die was as strong in him as before - the desire to live. As before, at Mayo he was treated with electric shock sessions. After these painful procedures he felt better again. When the treatment ended, he and Mary returned to Ketchum. The first evening at home passed quietly, Ernest seemed calm and content. On the morning of July 2, 1961, while everyone was still asleep, Hemingway unlocked the closet where Mary had hidden the guns and took his favorite double-barreled shotgun.

What is death?..

He felt very tired and decided that he would definitely rest there, across the river, in the shade of the trees. He died almost immediately and then saw bright daylight and smelled the sea. The floor beneath his feet swayed in time with the waves, and he realized that he was standing on the deck. He was on the Pilar. The yacht was ready to sail. He walked up to the helm and suddenly saw them all on the pier. He saw short-haired, boyish Brett, and then Kat Barkley. And next to her is the dark-golden, white-toothed Maria. And Agnes was there, wearing a white nurse's apron and holding a book. And old Santiago with a mast on his shoulder. And Hash is wearing a red slipper on his left foot. “How good...” he thought, “they all came to see me off.” He started the engine. The sea lay before him - gentle, warm, like a beloved woman. The pier disappeared from view. “How easy it is when you are defeated. I didn’t know it was so easy...” thought the writer. He walked further and further, listening to the eternal breathing of the sea.

Natalya Klevalina

or what is the moral of E. Hemingway’s prose.

It is impossible to imagine a proper Russian writer, born in the twentieth century, who would not have suffered from it at one time and conquered it in himself, like a high disease. It is impossible to imagine a person who, after reading any of his stories, would remain indifferent. Ernest Hemingway is not just a cult writer, he is a writer whose name will thunder for many centuries to come, a writer whose works will touch the soul today, tomorrow and always.

The extraordinary personality of Ernest Hemingway, his passion for adventure and travel and unconditional talent made him one of the most prominent personalities of the 20th century and practically a living legend.

Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Illinois (USA) into a family of avid hunters. Both grandfather and father of young Hemingway loved to take a break from the bustle of the world in the company of their favorite gun. Ultimately, it played a role in both the life and death of the writer himself.

IN school years He made his debut as a writer in the small school magazine “Tablet”. First, “The Court of Manitou” was published - an essay with northern exoticism, blood and Indianfolklore, and in the next issue - a new story “It's All About the Color of the Skin” - about the behind-the-scenes and dirty commercial side of boxing. Further, mainly reports were published about sports competitions and concerts. Particularly popular were snide remarks about the “high life” of Oak Park. At this time, Hemingway had already firmly decided for himself that he would be a writer.

After graduating from school, full of energy, Ernest gets a job at a Kansas City newspaper. Through his work, Hemingway becomes acquainted with the darkest sides of city life: prostitution, criminals and prisons, brothels and scammers. Later, his experience would prove to be invaluable material for literary activity.

But his work was mainly influenced by the war. Ernest was unable to serve due to vision problems. But the desire to make a contribution was stronger, and so he signed up as a volunteer driver for the Red Cross.On the first day of your stay inMilanHemingway and other recruits were thrown straight from the train to clear the territory of an exploded munitions plant. A few years later he would describe his impressions of his first encounter with war in his book “A Farewell to Arms!”

“A Farewell to Arms!” is one of Hemingway’s most famous and controversial works, evoking a huge range of feelings in the reader, ranging from terrible melancholy to hopelessness and detachment.

“A Farewell to Arms” is a work that shows war as it is.All this talk about debt military honor, courage is nonsense, and it’s worth nothing compared to having a loved one next to you.

The main character of the novel does not believe in love, does not believe that he is capable of such a feeling, believes that his lot is to “go with the flow” of life, but everything changes when he small world a woman bursts in. Life takes on meaning, and now he is ready to move mountains and literally swim across any rivers just to be next to her. But what does the winner get? Right. Nothing. That is why at one moment he is deprived of everything that gave him the strength to live, and not just exist: his beloved woman and his unborn child.

“This is how it ends. Death. You don't even know what all this is about. You don't have time to find out. They just throw you aroundin lifeand they tell you the rules, and the first time they catch you by surprise, they kill you. Or they will kill you for nothing. Or they will infect you with syphilis. But sooner or later you will be killed. You can be sure of this. Sit and wait and they will kill you.»

The peak of Hemingway's fame can be considered the 30s, when the writer returned to the USA. His stories are an unprecedented success; numerous fans come to the writer from all over the country.

In 1830, Ernest gets into a serious accident, and the writer spends six months of his life recovering. This is a period of Hemingway’s creative crisis, a breakdown of his usual life principles.

Being a conscientious citizen, the writer closely follows the Spanish Civil War and goes to Madrid to fight on the side of the Republicans. As a result, the writer’s new novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is published.

“Never ask for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for you.”

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” is one of the most emotional and heartbreaking works of the twentieth century.

This is a story about love and hate, about peace and war. A book about remembering unity little man with the whole world, with all humanity. In the novel we're talking about about the Spanish Civil War, about a difficult time for the whole country. And along with this national tragedy, the tragedy of personality, the tragedy of human destiny is revealed. Probably only the great American prose writer, Ernest Hemingway, can so subtly describe fragile souls in strong and even somewhat rough shells. For whom the Bell Tolls? This question is relevant not only on the pages of a book, but also in real life. And no one can know in advance where its ringing will respond.

It is common for every person to think about the meaning of life. Some believe that they have already found it, some are looking for it, and some even believe that it does not exist. But in the most difficult moments of life, people try to grasp the essence of their life and come to its logical comprehension and completion. The main character of one of Ernest Hemingway’s most famous stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” also resorted to this method.

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is not just a story, it is a confession of a man who feels the approach of his imminent death, who tried to find answers to the eternal questions of the meaning of life, his role in the fate of every person with whom this fate confronted him, about what he wanted to achieve in life and what he really managed to do, about how many people he made happy and how many he brought disappointment to.

In the finale, Hemingway leaves his hero no chance of salvation. The hero’s consciousness is becoming more and more confused, delirium takes over his brain, no one can reach him anymore, the hero does not hear anyone and does not perceive anyone’s presence, and the rescue helicopter does not fly to them at the foot of Kilimanjaro to take them to civilization. And along with disappointment comes death to the hero.

In his story, Ernest Hemingway wanted to show that human life is unique. Unique not only in the sense of a person’s capabilities, the originality of his talents, the people and circumstances that surround him. But it is also unique in the sense of its uniqueness and uniqueness. And a person must always be guided by his ideals, genuine interests, values, correlating his life with the factor of time and the understanding that life is now. Also in the story, the author introduces the theme of responsibility for one’s actions and decisions. That is why, having assessed his life path, the hero comes to death, which is a logical consequence of his conclusions.

Like any “cult writer,” Hemingway is surrounded by legends. For example, what did he invent? alcoholic drink"mojito". It is not true. He just really loved mojitos when he lived in Cuba. But it would be better if he invented it. It would taste better that way

A much more serious legend is that Hemingway is impossiblea drunkard, a man one hundred and fifty percent, a fisherman and hunter, a military journalist, a partisan, a favorite of women, a boxer - in a word, a strong, brutal personality who, if she sheds a tear, it burns like alcohol. And, starting with his father’s suicide, all his life he was haunted by some kind of misfortune: injuries, illnesses, car and plane accidents, hypertension, diabetes, depression... He was always sick with something, broke something in himself, crumbled to pieces. But only such a person could write “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Hemingway's strength lies not in courage, but in fragility. In his tenderness. In sentimentality.

According to legend, Hemingway once bet in a bar that he would write a story of only 6 words, and it would be the most touching story in the world. The writer won the argument. Here is his story: "For sale: Baby shoes, never used." In Russian it’s even shorter: “Children’s shoes for sale. Unworn.”

In 1952Life magazine published probably the saddest story in world literature. "The Old Man and the Sea" is a lyrical story about an old fisherman who caught and then lost the most big fish In my life.In this work, the author found a hero whom he had been painfully searching for for many years.

Hemingway himself was aware of the significance of this discovery and in one of his interviews said: “I was lucky that I had a good old man and a good boy, and for Lately writers forgot that such people exist. Moreover, the ocean deserves to be written about in the same way as a person. So we were lucky in that too.”

These words are important primarily because the writer himself stated that he had finally found a good person, in other words, a positive person, as a hero. It cannot be said that all of Hemingway's previous heroes were bad people. Not at all. These were good people, but suffering from circumstances scary world, in which they are doomed to live, seeking refuge from this tragic world. They suffered from a lack of agreement with themselves, from the unattainability of harmony in life and in themselves, from the loneliness to which a person is doomed in this torn world.

The story was a huge success both among critics and among the general reader, and caused a worldwide resonance. For this work, Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.The swaying rhythm of the story “The Old Man and the Sea” was inspired by the rhythm of the Cuban surf. It is impossible to doubt this once you have visited Cuba. But from this swinging rhythm normal person going crazy.

One of the most beloved by the readership and at the same time my favorite story is “Where it is clean, it is light.” This work touches the soul and reveals the meaning of human existence. But what is the point anyway? But he doesn’t exist, and human life is worthless. The writer does not want to make the reader depressed; he wants to convey to everyone the realities of the world exactly as they really are, without embellishment and false phrases.

All books - Ernest Hemingway's stories and novellas - were a reflection of all his feelings and experiences, which is why they are of such a delicate and depressive nature.

In 1960, Hemingway was diagnosed with depression and severe mental illness at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. After leaving the hospital and finding that he was no longer able to write, he returned to his home in Ketchum.
On June 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide with a gunshot.He shot himself with a Vincenzo Bernardelli gun. Now this model of double-barreled shotgun is called Hemingway.

The winner gets nothing - this is probably the whole moral of Hemingway's prose. If a bell rings, it rings for you. After noon death comes.

What he did not leave before committing suicide suicide note, speaks volumes about his writing taste. All his prose was this note. Well, what else could he write to us?

Ernest Hemingway

WINNER GET NOTHING (story collection)

1. After the storm

It started with nothing, with some nonsense about drinking, and then we got into a fight, and I slipped, and he knocked me down, and crushed me with his knee, and squeezed my throat with both hands, as if he wanted to strangle me, and I kept trying to get it out of my pocket. knife to stab him and free himself. Everyone was so drunk that there was no one to pull him away. He choked me and banged my head on the floor, but I still took out and opened the knife, slashed it across my hand, and he let me go. Now he couldn't hold me back. Then he rolled to the side, clutched his wounded hand and began to scream, and I said:

Why the hell did you decide to strangle me?

I think I would have killed him. I couldn't swallow for a whole week. He squeezed my throat hard.

Well, I left there, and his company remained with him, but some of them followed me, and I went down a roundabout route to the pier, and someone I met told me that a man had been killed here, nearby. I said: “Who killed?”, and he said: “I don’t know who killed, only he died”; it was dark, and there were puddles on the street, and the lanterns were not on, and the windows were broken, and the boats were all on the pier, and trees were torn out of the ground, and there were debris all around; and I got into the skiff, and sailed, and found my motorboat where I had left it, on the inside of Mango Key, and it was all safe, only full of water. I pumped and scooped out the water, and the moon was shining, but the clouds were constantly moving towards it, and everything was still shaking quite a bit. I put out to sea, and when daylight came I was already past the Eastern Harbour.

Yes, I can tell you, the storm was serious. I was the first to go to sea, and you have probably never seen such water. She was white as lye, and from East Harbor to South West Key the shore was unrecognizable. And right in the middle, a wide strait washed out in the sand. Trees were torn out of the ground, and the water in the new strait was all white, like chalk, and all sorts of things were on it: branches and whole trees, and dead birds were floating. Beyond the islands, pelicans gathered visibly and invisibly, and all sorts of birds were flying. They probably took refuge here when they sensed that a storm was approaching.

I sat in a boat off South West Key all day and no one came for me. I was the first to go out to sea and saw a piece of a mast on the water and realized that a ship had sunk somewhere, and began to look for it. I found it. It was a three-masted schooner, and the remains of its masts were slightly sticking out of the water. She sank in a deep place, so I couldn’t profit from anything. Then I moved on, looking to see if there was anything else. I was ahead of everyone and knew that all the spoils should go to me. I swam over the shoals from the place where I left the three-masted schooner, and found nothing and swam very far. I reached the quicksand and found nothing and swam further. And so, when the Rebecca lighthouse was already visible, I noticed a lot of birds in one place and moved towards them to see what was there, and there was a whole cloud of birds there.

There was something like a mast sticking out of the water, and as I approached, the birds took off and began to circle in the air. The water in this place was clear, and some kind of mast was barely visible above the water, and when I came even closer, I saw that below, under the water, something was dark, some kind of long shadow, and I completely ran over it , and there, under the water, was a steamer; and lay there all under the water, huge, enormous. I drove over it. He lay on his side, and the stern sank very deep. The portholes were all closed, and I saw how the glass glittered in the water, and I saw its entire body; I had never seen such a large steamer before, and I rode over it to the end, and then pulled the boat out a little and dropped anchor, pulled the skiff onto the bow, pushed it into the water and rowed, and the birds hovered around me.

I had a water telescope, a tube like that, we went sponge fishing with it, and my hand was shaking so much that I almost dropped it. All the portholes that I saw when I sailed over the ship were closed, but somewhere below, near the bottom, there must have been a hole, because some pieces kept floating up from there. It was impossible to make out what it was. Just pieces. It was them that the birds flocked to. There were endless birds. They just hovered over me; the cry was desperate.

I saw everything completely clearly. I saw that the side of the steamer was convex, and under water it seemed a whole mile long. She lay on a clean white sandbank, and what I saw first was a foremast or some kind of yard sticking out of the water obliquely, because the steamer was lying on its side. The bow part did not go very deep. When I stood on the letters on its side, the water reached my chin. But the nearest porthole was twelve feet deep. I could barely reach it with the hook and tried to break it, but I couldn’t. The glass was too thick. Then I went back to the boat, took a wrench and tied it to the end of the gaff and still could not break the glass. So I sat, looking through the tube at the ship full of all sorts of things - I was the first to find it, but I couldn’t get into it. And there was probably five million worth of good in him.

I even broke a sweat when I thought how much goodness there was in it. Through the porthole, which was closest to me, something was visible, but I could not make out through the tube what it was. The hook was also of no use, so I undressed and, standing, took several deep breaths of air, and then dived from the stern, holding the key in my hand, and swam down. For a second I held on to the edge of the porthole and was able to look into the cabin, and in the cabin there was a woman, her hair was loose and lay on the water. I clearly saw her swimming there, and I hit the glass twice hard with the key and heard the sound of an impact, but the glass did not break, and I had to swim up.

I caught my breath, holding on to the side of the skiff, climbed into the skiff, took several deep breaths of air and dived again. I swam, grabbed the edge of the porthole tightly with my fingers and hit the glass with all my strength with the key. I saw through the glass a woman floating there in the cabin. Her hair was tied with a ribbon at the very head and lay freely on the water. I saw rings on one of her hands. It was right next to the porthole, and I hit the glass twice, but it didn’t even crack. Rising to the surface, I thought that I would not be able to stand it and would start breathing while still in the water.

I dived again and chipped the glass, just chipped it, and when I got up, my nose was bleeding, and I stood on the side of the steamer, touching the letters with my bare feet and sticking my head out of the water, and then swam to the skiff, pulled myself up, climbed into and sat there, waiting for the headache to stop hurting, and looking into the tube, but the blood flowed so heavily that the tube had to be rinsed out. Then I lay down on my back and covered my nose with my hand to stop the bleeding, and lay there for a long time, throwing my head back, looking at the sky, and the birds hovered around me in thousands.

When the bleeding stopped, I looked into the tube again and began to row to the boat to look for something heavier than a key, but I couldn’t find anything, not even a sponge hook. I turned back, and the water became clearer and clearer, and I could see everything that floated there, above the white sandbank. I looked around to see if there were any sharks, but there were none. I would have seen the shark from afar. The water was completely clear and the sand was white. There was a hook on the skiff that served as an anchor, I cut it off and jumped into the water with it. He pulled me down, past the porthole, I grabbed at anything and could not hold on and sank deeper and deeper, sliding along the convex side. I had to unclench my fingers and release the hook. I heard it hit something, and it seemed like a whole year had passed before I surfaced. The skiff was pulled far away by the ebb tide, and I swam towards it, and blood flowed from my nose straight into the water, and I was glad that there were no sharks; but I'm very tired.

My head was pounding, I rested, lying in the skiff, and then began to row back. It was late afternoon. I dived again with the key and again to no avail. The key was too light. There was no point in diving without a large hammer or something else heavy. Then I again tied the key to the hook and, looking through the tube, knocked and beat on the glass until the key came off, and through the tube I saw quite clearly how it slid along the side, and then straight down and went into the quicksand. There was nothing more I could do. The key was gone, I also lost the hook, all that was left was to return to the boat. I was so tired that I could not pull the skiff on board, and the sun was already setting. The birds flew away, left the ship, and I moved towards South West Key, with the skiff in tow, the birds flying in front of me and behind me. I'm pretty tired.

At night the storm came again and raged for a whole week. It was impossible to get to the ship. They came from the city and told me that the man whom I had to slash with a knife was alive, only his arm hurt, and I returned to the city, and they released me on bail for five hundred dollars. Everything ended well

Scandalous divorces Nesterova Daria Vladimirovna

Ernest Hemingway. "The winner gets nothing..."

Ernest Hemingway

The idol of an entire generation that was called lost, Ernest Hemingway became a myth during his lifetime. It was he who first formulated the credo of this generation: “The winner gets nothing...”, but he himself found the strength and courage to achieve everything in life, literature... But not in love.

There were many women in the life of the great writer. His first wife was Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. When Hemingway first saw Elizabeth, as he himself recalls, he received a shock akin to an electric shock. “I realized that this is the girl I should marry.” It is known that the writer hated boredom and routine more than anything in the world, and with Hadley Richardson (he called her Red Hash) it was impossible to get bored.

Like Hemingway, Hash was attracted to travel, entertainment and creative personalities. She hated boredom, respectability and monotony.

Soon after the wedding, Hemingway was offered a position as a correspondent for a French newspaper, and the young couple went to Paris. The days spent in Paris were the happiest in the life of Hemingway and Hash: a small apartment, new friends, a string of cafes and the pink air of the “city of lights.” The wife earned money by playing the piano, and the husband wrote articles for newspapers. Early in the morning, before work, Hemingway loved to sit in a cafe, where, after ordering a cup of black coffee, he plunged into the world of invented images.

Every evening, Hemingway and Hadley left their small apartment and wandered the narrow streets of Paris for several hours, and when they returned home, they made love. Subsequently, Hemingway wrote about this happy time for him: “After work, I needed to read. Because if you think about work all the time, you can lose interest in it even before you sit down at your desk the next day. It is necessary to get physical exercise, to get tired of the body, and especially to indulge in love with the woman you love. This is the best..."

The husband and wife traveled a lot. They visited Italy, Germany, Spain, the Middle East, and America. Their friends never ceased to be amazed at how Hemingway and Hadley managed to visit everywhere, see all the sights and discover something new in every city. But the secret was that the spouses were running away from boredom: they did not understand why waste time on trifles if there was so little available.

Hemingway and Hadley loved and understood each other, and after the birth of their son, whom they affectionately called Bambi, husband and wife became even closer. Their life, despite material difficulties, was an idyll. Could this idyll last forever? Of course she could, if... If Hadley hadn't changed.

Several years of family life and the birth of a child greatly influenced Hadley: from an extravagant woman she turned into a sensible and sedate lady. In addition, she was 8 years older than her husband, and, apparently, age began to tell. Hadley has cooled down to entertainment and travel and most She devoted her time to housekeeping and raising the baby. She no longer rushed headlong with her husband when he was sent on business trips to the ends of the world. Hemingway was disappointed. He still loved that Red Hash and could not get used to the new Elizabeth Hadley.

With the birth of the child, the family's financial situation worsened. If earlier the couple were content with the little that life gave them, now they had to think about their son’s health: they often went hungry, giving the baby their last piece of bread. But despite the fact that the work of a journalist brought in little income, and the writer’s first books were gathering dust in a warehouse, Hemingway did not give up. He believed in his future, that one day the world would recognize him. She believed in the genius of her husband and Hadley. Although she had changed, her love for Hemingway remained as passionate as before.

Probably, they would have waited together for the recognition and glory of a brilliant writer if a certain Polina Pfeiffer had not quickly burst into their lives. She was a young, unmarried woman whom the Hemingway family was introduced to by their friends. Ernest fell in love with her at first sight. How to explain this? Perhaps a sudden feeling for a wayward and eccentric rich woman is the passion that often pushes people to do crazy things. But most likely, Hemingway’s love for Polina can be explained by his constant thirst for new sensations.

Hemingway himself recalled his relationship with Polina this way: “A young unmarried woman temporarily becomes the best friend of a young married woman, comes to stay with her husband and wife, and then quietly, innocently and inexorably does everything to marry her husband to herself... When the husband finishes work, two attractive women are next to him. One is unusual and mysterious, and if he is lucky, he will love them both.”

But, as you know, Hemingway was unlucky. Perhaps he truly loved both women, but if Hadley was his wife and true friend, then Polina literally drove him crazy. The desire to possess this woman and completely subjugate her to himself deprived him of peace and sleep. Hadley understood everything perfectly, but in her memories of Hemingway, apparently trying to shield ex-husband, wrote that the breakup was her fault: “I didn’t have time to keep up with him. I felt tired all the time, and I think that's what it was main reason…»

Hadley valued her family, and her husband languished within four walls, dreaming of plunging headlong into new feelings and sensations. He could not leave on his own, leave his wife and son, and waited for Hadley to take the first step towards a divorce. In the end, she made up her mind, believing that living with a person who no longer loved was humiliating. After explaining things to her husband, Hadley filed for divorce. Soon the couple separated.

Strange as it may seem, they did not become enemies. On the contrary, Hadley and Hemingway remained good friends until the end of their lives.

It must be said that Hemingway took the break with Red Hash very hard. His friends later recalled this: “He is a romantic by nature, and he falls in love just as a huge pine tree collapses, crushing the surrounding small forest. He also has a puritanical streak that keeps him from flirting over cocktails. When he falls in love, he wants to get married and live in marriage, and he perceives the end of the marriage as a personal defeat.” I can’t help but remember the words of Hemingway himself: “The winner gets nothing...”

The writer married Polina. Even before the wedding, he became a Catholic. The fact is that Polina was a zealous Catholic and agreed to the marriage only after Hemingway promised to become a Catholic, like her. He loved Polina and took this step for her sake. In Polina, the writer saw the ideal woman that he often pictured in his dreams, but after the wedding, Ernest was faced with reality: his wife turned out to be completely different from what he imagined her to be.

Polina, unlike Hadley, was demanding and tyrannical. She was not used to financial difficulties and made absolutely unrealistic demands on her husband. The couple's relationship became strained after the birth of their sons: Hemingway, trying to provide for his family, worked extremely hard, and Polina, instead of supporting and inspiring her husband, constantly complained to him about her difficult life.

His wife never became Ernest’s friend; in temperament and worldview they were different people. When the tension between the spouses became unbearable, Hemingway left home for several weeks, but his magical attraction to Polina always prevailed over resentment and misunderstanding, and he returned.

As often happens, the loneliness and alienation that arose between husband and wife allowed Hemingway to create the best works of his life. He plunged headlong into creativity, and after the film adaptation of the novel “A Farewell to Arms!” became famous. He realized that his star had finally risen, and began to work with even greater zeal. But Polina was missing something again. Money? Husband's attention? Worldwide fame? Love?

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hemingway realized that the Europe he loved no longer existed. The writer went to East Africa. And when he returned to Europe, he did not recognize her: people lived in fear, lied, rushed about. Suddenly Hemingway felt like part of a lost generation. The writer was choking from powerlessness and general doom...

It seemed to Hemingway that the war in Spain, and then World War II, became a kind of purification for him after years of inaction. He felt needed again. “Yes, in my opinion, it was a broken generation, broken in many ways,” he wrote. - But - damn it! – we didn’t die at all, of course, except for the dead, the maimed, the ones who went crazy. Lost generation! - no... We were a very resilient generation..."

By this time, the marriage of Hemingway and Polina had broken up, having completely exhausted itself. From a brilliant woman, Polina turned into a grumpy and boring housewife. She became a stranger to Hemingway. The breakup was inevitable, and the main reason for it was the same story as in the case of Hadley. Only now Polina is in Hadley’s place...

So, again, my wife’s friend... A certain beautiful blonde Marta Gelhorn is a young journalist. She burst into Hemingway's life like a whirlwind, but it was hardly love. Most likely, the writer simply found an excuse to break away from his boring family life. Energetic and eccentric Martha, like Hemingway, adored everything new. The writer clung to her like a drowning man clutching at a straw, believing that this was the woman who would understand him. But what Martha loved about Hemingway was his popularity. The 42-year-old master of the pen, being blinded by a new passion, did not notice anything and, having separated from Polina, married Martha.

Yes, Hemingway and Martha had a lot in common: like the husband, the wife could not sit still and was constantly on the road. And when she came, she... made scandals. Martha was obsessed with cleanliness. In her opinion, everything around had to be sterile. Ernest, however, like any creative person, could not do without the picturesque disorder. When he plunged headlong into work, his house resembled ruins. Needless to say, how infuriating this was for Martha. She made scandals, threw tantrums, and Hemingway did not seem to notice his wife’s angry attacks, continuing to behave as before.

When the first gusts of passion subsided, the writer’s eyes were opened: Martha again turned out to be not the woman he wanted to see next to him. Having divorced his wife, Hemingway promised himself not to marry again, but fate seemed to laugh at him, not allowing him to fully enjoy the delights of a bachelor's life. Soon after his divorce from Martha, Hemingway met the most beautiful woman in the world. She really was sent to him by fate. Hemingway's marriage to Mary Welsh was happy. She accepted him as he was and loved him, no matter what... Mary was devoted to her husband until last day his life.

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