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Ernest Hemingway: Alive and Well Online
Copyright © 2001 by Timeless Hemingway
Reflecting on the death of Albert Einstein, Isidor Isaac Rabi once wrote: "a great light has gone out in the world of physics."1
On July 2, 1961, the day Ernest Hemingway took his own life at the age of sixty-one, a great light went out in the world of literature.
News of Hemingway's death darkened the front pages of most major newspapers including The New York Times and brought tributes from
people all across the world. Robert Frost wrote: "The country is in mourning" and William Faulkner, who had managed (on more than one occasion)
to ignite the competitive fuse of Hemingway, now said of his literary colleague: "He is not dead. Generations not yet born of young men and women
who want to write will refute that word as applied to him."2
Forty years later and Faulkner's assertion still holds true. Hemingway is not dead. In fact, he is perhaps more alive today than he was in his mortal years.
He has his own line of clothing, furniture, pens, and would you believe, teddy bears, distributed by Boyds Bears, neatly attired in hunting vests and hats and
christened with the name, "Hemingway K. Grizzman." He has societies in Michigan, Oak Park, Illinois, and Japan dedicated to preserving his literary and cultural memory.
A scholarly journal (The Hemingway Review) bears his name, as does a literary award (PEN/Hemingway Award), not to mention an entire marina in Havana, Cuba.
His former home in Key West, Florida is a registered national historic landmark and his Finca home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba is a museum operated by the
Cuban government. Almost every place Hemingway ever lived or visited is encased in red velvet ropes, except for one restaurant in Madrid (which shall remain nameless)
that displays a good-humored notice out front for its patrons: "HEMINGWAY DID NOT EAT HERE."
The Computer Industry Almanac has projected that in the year 2002, 490 million people around the globe will have access to the Internet3,
thus opening a new arena for Hemingway preservation. As of the writing of this article, there exist over twenty web sites (not web pages) devoted in
some part to Ernest Hemingway. Several of these sites come equipped with biographies of Hemingway, photos, bibliographies of his work, and interactive messageboards
to encourage further discussion and commentary. The web sites range in name from badhemingway.com, a more parodistic look at Hemingway's style of writing, to
ernest.hemingway.com, an outline of Hemingway's life in stages, to lostgeneration.com, a resource center and bookstore aimed at the Hemingway student,
to timelesshemingway.com, my own personal tribute to the American literary master.
I founded Timeless Hemingway in 1998. Originally conceived as a "fan site," Timeless Hemingway has grown to become one of the premiere web sites pertaining
to the life and works of Ernest Hemingway and has been quick to receive the attention of the media. In July 2000, the web site was featured on CNN Headline News in their
"What's Online" television segment. In the December 7, 2000 print edition of USA Today, the site appeared in Sam Vincent Meddis's weekly web site review column,
and on February 20, 2001, Timeless Hemingway was the chosen site of the day on The New York Times Learning Network (www.nytimes.com/learning). Not entirely naive,
I recognize that Timeless Hemingway's accessible design and informative content only half explains why it has been deemed newsworthy by the press; the larger explanatory
half for its honorable mentions is of course Ernest Hemingway.
Even in cyberspace, Ernest Hemingway's hold on our collective imaginations is incredibly strong. Point your web browser to eBay (www.ebay.com), the leading online auction site,
and perform a keyword search for "ernest hemingway." On any given day, you will be fed back over 150 separate merchandise links of ongoing auctions.4 If you
were to limit your keyword search to "hemingway" alone, over 400 ongoing auctions would be outputted. Try a keyword search for "ernest hemingway" at Altavista (www.altavista.com),
a popular online search engine, and you will be presented with over 70, 000 "pages found."5 Granted, many of these pages may be duplicates, or belong to
the same site, or no longer function, but still this number of results is staggering. Finish off your cybersurfing tour at amazon.com, a leading online bookseller, and you will
find over 600 book results6 attributed to a search for "ernest hemingway." What is it about this man that not only intrigues so many, but keeps so many
intrigued? Is it Hemingway the celebrity we are latching on to or Hemingway the writer? Can we enjoy one personality without reviving the memory of the other?
Hemingway's status as celebrity is well documented, perhaps most articulately in "Hemingway as American Icon," an essay by Hemingway biographer, Michael Reynolds.7
One must remember though that Ernest Hemingway was a writer who became a celebrity and not a celebrity who became a writer. Prior fame did not propel him to the top of his field.
It was rather a basic mix of hard work and unrelenting resolve. Hemingway may have represented the ideal writer in the literary sense through his intense and obsessive dedication
to his craft, but he did not lead the stereotypical reclusive writer's life. Hemingway's life was exciting and glamorous. He hunted, he fished, he drank, he brawled, he traveled, he married.
He was a man who truly enjoyed life. He made those around him enjoy life. When he could no longer enjoy his life, when his body failed him, when his gift for writing deserted him,
he ended his life. This final act would add to the Hemingway mystique and it continues to be a major source of interest not only for seasoned scholars, but also for those being introduced
to Hemingway for the first time. From this latter group, I have received the following questions via the Timeless Hemingway web site:
"What happened to the gun Hemingway killed himself with?"
"Did the ECT treatments administered at the Mayo Clinic cause Hemingway's suicide?"
"Did Hemingway die instantly of his wounds?"
"Have any other members of the Hemingway family committed suicide?"
Legitimate as many of these questions may be, they represent our innate curiosity in the morbid and macabre details often associated with human tragedy. When our great, seemingly
invincible heroes fall, we compellingly crave for the precise and uncensored details surrounding that fall. For it is in the fall that our heroes become humanized. They become susceptible
to tragedy, to loss, to the finalities of life and death. They become, in essence, more like us.
Hemingway's literature has always been susceptible to tragedy. When one begins to read a significant amount of his work, one notices an element almost always lacking: the happy ending.
Not only can Hemingway describe life "as it is," he is also adept at describing life "as it is not." Life is not a clichéd bed of roses, a care-free world in which lovers walk hand and hand
into a setting sunset. No, the sun also rises, and if its rays are too hot or too bright, or if it stays visible for too long, the roses will wilt and die. Hemingway never shies away from
exploring the tragedies of life, of death, of love, of living, of dying, of loving.
There is little doubt that the events in Hemingway's fiction mirror the events in his life. Hemingway's true and often overlooked genius, however, lies in his ability to construct a fiction
which is more realistic and truer than any life event could ever be. Every writer of fiction wishes to produce a similar construction. Many try. Many fail. Some succeed. Hemingway succeeded and
he is still succeeding, which returns us to the original question: what is it about this man that not only intrigues so many, but keeps so many intrigued? Quite simply, Hemingway keeps succeeding.
One prime example of Hemingway's success is in the fact that he is one of the most quoted authors in the English Language. I would place him in the top three of this category, behind only Shakespeare
("the undisputed champion" in Hemingway's opinion) and Twain. With millions continuing to "get online," we now have a unique quantitative tool for measuring the popularity of a writer's words. In January of 1999,
I introduced the Hemingway Quote Finder, a service allowing users to input a Hemingway quote in a form, submit that form, and later be e-mailed back a source for the quotation. Within hours
(yes, hours) of putting the quote finder online, submissions began pouring in. Users were ecstatic that there was actually a service that would e-mail them the sources of
Hemingway quotations. "I've been searching eleven years for that quotation," one woman wrote triumphantly. An older gentleman, who wanted to know the origin of the phrase, "for whom the bell tolls"
expressed his gratitude this way: "Thank you for confirming my original belief. I knew this phrase came from John Donne and was second-handedly used by Hemingway. I feel ten years younger."
Since 1999, the Hemingway Quote Finder has fielded thousands of quote source requests and has become a phenomenon in its own right. People from all walks of life have e-mailed in quotations:
professors, film production companies, government officials, and authors. If I had a dollar for each time the following quotation was submitted, I would soon corral enough money to pay my web hosting fees
until the next millennium: "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."8 I've received this inquiry so many times that
it prompted me to e-mail back a standard reply:
This is one in a long list of quotations mysteriously attributed to Ernest Hemingway. While the general public seem to agree that this is in fact a Hemingway quotation, scholars have some reservations
and for good reason. The early Hemingway did not believe that bullfighting was a sport. For him it was a tragedy. See his October 20, 1923 article titled "Bullfighting A Tragedy" reprinted in
By-Line: Ernest Hemingway Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades edited by William White. Hemingway reiterates his beliefs regarding the tragedy of bullfighting in his 1932 book, Death in the Afternoon.
Some of the quote finder inquiries I receive deserve more than just a standard reply. People who have recently lost loved ones e-mail their requests for a Hemingway quotation to be used in a tribute,
remembrance, or eulogy. Considering the large scope of Hemingway's remarks on the subject of death, I have many sources from which to choose. When I e-mail back a source, I am hopeful that the recipient
will find some sense of solace in my response. I am more hopeful of the fact that the recipient will find solace in the words of Ernest Hemingway.
Il faut d'abord durer were words in which Ernest Hemingway found solace. The French saying, translating to "first, one must last" was used by the author in several private letters9
and he occasionally inscribed the words in books he signed for close friends. The Internet has brought new meaning to this expression, and judging from the Computer Industry Almanac statistic cited earlier,
this innovative medium intends to be around for some time to come. The Internet has presented to authors like Hemingway and to web site creators like myself the exciting prospect of being able to instantaneously
reach literally millions of people on a global scale. They come for different reasons of course: students needing assistance with Hemingway related assignments, authors trying to promote their latest Hemingway
inspired endeavors, and the generally curious wanting to know why a certain birth date is periodically printed with an 1898 attached at the end rather than an 1899.10 They come for different
reasons, but they are united by the same lure, the same intrigue, the same driving desire to explore and perhaps even understand the life and literature of a "little man" from Oak Park, Illinois, who would steadfastly
rise to become a mammoth icon, a giant industry, one of the greatest and most enduring writers of his time, our time, all time.
NOTES
1. From a June 1955 issue of Scientific American.
2. Frost's and Faulkner's comments can be read in full in "Authors and Critics Appraise Works," part of
The New York Times obituary of Hemingway (July 3, 1961).
3. Full study can be found online here.
4. Keyword searches for "ernest hemingway" and "hemingway" were run on eBay every day for one week, starting March 28, 2001 and ending April 4, 2001.
5. The number of pages found is valid as of April 4, 2001.
6. The number of book results is valid as of April 4, 2001.
7. Reynolds's essay appears in Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time (1999) by Frederick Voss.
8. After years of searching, I have been unsuccessful in attributing this quotation to Ernest Hemingway or to anyone else for that matter.
9. See, for example, his March 14, 1931 letter to Archibald MacLeish (Selected Letters, 338) and his June 1, 1950 letter to Arthur Mizener (Selected Letters, 696).
10. Hemingway lied about his age when taking a job as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star in October 1917. This helps to explain why
his birth year is sometimes given as 1898, rather than the correct year of 1899.
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