Ernest Hemingway: The eclectic hunting world can boast among its countless followers illustrious names who have distinguished themselves in many fields of culture, art, politics and science. Among these we must certainly include the timeless Ernest Hemingway, world famous writer and Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in the state of Illinois, near Chicago, in the famous Oak Park. Descendant of a wealthy family of Protestant religion and of English origin, he was the second of six children. His father, a surgeon specializing in gynecology, carried out his work with great professional and human commitment on an Indian reservation.
A vibrant passion for all activities related to the outdoors was thus transmitted to Hemingway, such as: love for nature, the wildest and most uncontaminated one, for fishing and hunting. Over the years, he was able to practice these last two passions in many continents, making long trips and stays in various states of North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. Very young, even before school age, he began to follow his beloved father on frequent hunting and fly fishing trips in the endless plains and hills of North America, going up the many and meandering rivers or along the shores of crystalline lakes. For him it was certainly a childhood rich in healthy examples and teachings that allowed him to grow and develop his innumerable interests and sensibilities. His was a youth not stingy with exciting and reckless adventures, but also with more or less serious accidents, all episodes that he will remember in his first collection of writings "In Our Time". He was still a teenager when he was hired as a reporter for a local newspaper. At the beginning of the First World War he enlisted as a volunteer and was assigned to the Italian front. He asked and obtained permission to be sent to the front line where he was seriously injured and therefore was subsequently decorated with the war cross and a silver medal. Person of indisputable charisma and charm, during the three months of hospitalization in the hospital in Milan, he fell in love and made the nurse Agnes von Kurowski fall in love, with whom he had a very exciting relationship. For needs of long hospitalization he returned in 1919 to his beloved Oak Park, where he could continue to collaborate with various Canadian newspapers and newsrooms. In 1921, completely recovered, he moved to Europe with his wife Hadley Richardson, a well-known musician and pianist.
Ernest Hemingway: Already at the beginning of his career as a journalist and writer, all his genius and ability to communicate showed in him.
Ernest Hemingway had the ability to convey strong, true sensations to readers, almost always the result of experiences he had lived through or was thoroughly familiar with. It is no coincidence that all the emotions that he was able to acquire during his intense adventures of fishing, hunting, life in contact with nature and the countryside, then transferred to the printed media, proved to be and still today prove to be a winning and captivating cocktail for its large audience of devoted readers. Four generations have now passed since he published his first books, but despite nearly a century having passed, his writings still arouse the same renewed interest from readers. This is amply proven by the countless reprints translated into many languages and edited by the most prestigious publishing houses in the world. Hemingway certainly distinguished himself for the frankness, sincerity and spontaneity of his writings and thoughts full of teachings, where respect for the weakest and the elderly prevailed, the desire to always try to improve in life and increase their knowledge. He never denied his passions for hunting and for the carefree life, certainly not monastic, on the contrary he tried to exalt them on those aspects that he believed gave greater meaning to life and human existence. Hemingway spoke extensively in his texts of the numerous more or less hidden wives and loves, of the desire to love and desire several women at the same time, while maintaining those delicate and complex balances that can understandably cause. He sought and fully loved the pleasures of earthly life, he was a competent taster of spirits, in particular of rum, cognac and whiskey; he loved to savor the most aromatic and precious tobaccos, including his inseparable Cuban cigars, during the hours of long work, even at night, sitting at the typewriter. Moreover, he did not disdain to participate in gala evenings in the most aristocratic circles, where he always emerged for his dialectic and joviality. Characteristically, he preferred to alternate periods, even long ones, of solitude, living in close contact with nature (these moments he defined as a "source of new energy and literary ideas"), with others at his homes or at others, where he used to be a guest , where it was the hub of parties and refreshments, involving people of high social depth, members of clubs or elite circles. He was, therefore, frequently at the center of important social moments, certainly not for the pure pleasure of appearing, but because he felt them as a source of new emotions, he was fatally attracted to everything that could give him intense competitive sensations, such as bullfights, fights between roosters and boxing, where man was the cause and contributing cause of victories or defeats. At the beginning of the XNUMXs he was sent to the places of the Greek-Turkish war. This together with the strong experiences lived during the First World War inspired him to write "A Farewell to Arms", which was nothing more than a real indictment against the violence of the war and was generally regarded as the best of the novels of ' love and war that was ever written by an American. He also participated in the peace conference in Lausanne where he managed to interview Benito Mussolini. The first book that revealed his real and disruptive ability as a writer was "Even the sun rises", published in 1926 and translated in Italy with the title "Fiesta".
This novel is actually the detailed diary of an exciting safari in East Africa, which allowed him to explore different states, an adventure that the author lived together with his last wife Mary Welsh and the well-known Philip Percival, who had his son Richard in tow. . This safari was all an alternation of successes and disappointments given by long stalking and waiting in which the protagonists (antelopes, elephants, buffaloes, leopards and lions) were a useful tool for him to understand the balance between life, death and the fatal destiny, as well as the integration between man and nature. He took part in various aerial excursions just to be able to admire from above those fantastic spaces and scenarios that only Africa can offer. That was the truest Black Africa, certainly not stingy with strong emotions, triggers of the well-known "African sickness" which could not fail to strike Hemingway, like many of his predecessors and successors. From this safari he kept for his whole life the trophies of the prey he captured, which they displayed in all the residences that he had to come. Later he settled in Cuba, in a large and green farm, not far from the capital Havana. Here he was able to devote himself to deep-sea fishing, but also to hunting ducks, snipe and cunning colini. He was a friend and several times hunting guest of Fidel Castro within the personal reserves that he created and had reserved for institutional guests. In 1941 he was again on his way to the Far East this time as a war correspondent in the Sino-Japanese conflict and when the United States entered the World War II conflict, he was also a member of the special anti-submarine patrols in Florida waters. The day came when he decided to follow the US army to Europe and, again as a war correspondent, he lived those tragic moments that characterized the landings on the Normandy coast, a historical moment in which he participated in the front lines. He was then among the first to enter Paris with the partisan avant-gardes, his countless acts of courage made him deserve the decoration of the Bronze Star.
Ernest Hemingway: In 1948 he came to spend several months in Italy staying in Cortina d'Ampezzo and Venice.
It was from this experience that he drew inspiration for the novel "Across the River and Among the Trees", which came out in its first edition in 1950. In this novel Hemingway described at length when, at the very beginning of 1948, he lived many experiences of hunting in the Venice lagoon and precisely in Torcello. He tied himself to the members of the Franchetti family and in particular to Baron Franchetti, who shared with Ernest the love for hunting by inviting him several times to his personal reserve in Latisana. He was fascinated and made sincere friendship with various men of the valley, hunters and fishermen by trade, from whose life descriptions he drew many inspirations. It seems that in the barrel he did not prove to be a capable shooter and that he loved to sip, during the wait, excellent liqueurs with consequent and understandable mediocre results. The fact remains that he was deeply impressed by this unique and particular form of hunting, which finds its greatest exaltation in the valleys and lagoons of the upper Adriatic. And it was in 1952 that he gave birth to another great success, "Il Vecchio e il mare". Book that sold five and a half million copies in two days and was also translated into Arabic. This masterpiece earned him the Pulitzer Prize of $ 500 and the choice of the Book of the Month Club, not to mention that several film editions translated into multiple languages were made of "The Old Man and the Sea". Other travels and hunting expeditions followed in Africa, where he found himself involved in two rather serious plane crashes that at first passed off as dead.
This fact unleashed all the information media, some of which fueled unexpected speculations to his detriment that revealed unfair actions towards him, which he certainly never imagined. All this caused him so annoying inconvenience that it prevented him from going to Sweden to receive the coveted Nobel Prize for literature, which was awarded to him on 28 October 1954 by the Swedish Academy, motivating him "for his powerful stylistic mastery in the art of modern storytelling. as was recently seen in Il Vecchio e il Mare… ». Hemingway had four wives and to their critical reading he routinely entrusted the minutes of his writings, which among other things, having all a high literary culture and sensitivity, were certainly of great help and support. Some of them were also established journalists and always knew how to advise him, as well as encourage him in his work. In early 1961 he left Cuba and his farm to move to Idaho, in Ketchum. From that moment his sad decline began, his health faded and the more and more frequent hospitalizations began, followed by his suicide attempts, until on July 2, 1961 he shot himself with the weapon most dear to him. The accident had long been feared, but the repeated attempts to recreate around him a more serene and optimal life context for his needs were useless. It is certain that from such an active, eventful and comfortable existence, having to surrender to advancing age, health complications, increasingly frequent misunderstandings with the last wife, in a man like him, who never gave up to any of his interests or passions, all of this may have become a trigger cocktail of his depression and suffering. Reading his countless works, for anyone who feels in the soul and in the spirit the desire for a life of freedom and contact with nature, Hemingway has been and will always remain a myth to follow, which certainly cannot be cracked by parenthesis of its sad end.
Text and photos by Roberto Basso
Images Archive Civic Museum of Natural History of Jesolo