Why Christians should read Ernest Hemingway

Published in Christian Renewal magazine.

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous authors in American history. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, his writing career began in 1917 as a reporter for the Kansas City Star in and continued as a European correspondent for the Toronto Star. Within a decade, he had earned an international reputation.

It is for literature, however, not journalism, that Hemingway is most widely known. His first successful collection of short stories was In Our Time (1925), and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), was considered a masterpiece immediately after publication. His other major works include the novels A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952); the nonfiction works Death in the Afternoon (1932) and A Moveable Feast (1964); and numerous short stories, which have been collected in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition.

In terms of style, Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of all time. One biography describes him as having done “more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century . . . [He] wrote in short, declarative sentences and was known for his tough, terse prose.” Hemingway compared his own writing to an iceberg, in that the words on the page are only part of the story. The rest, “the underwater part of the iceberg,” is always just beneath the surface, giving depth and character to what is written. Such famous authors as Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, and Hunter S. Thompson have credited Hemingway as an influence.

To Christians, perhaps the most interesting thing about Hemingway’s writings is the way they so clearly convey his worldview, which can be summed up in two words: truth and tragedy. Everything he wrote reflects in some way those two ideas.

Hemingway described writing – fiction or non-fiction, it makes no difference – as a struggle to describe people, places, experiences, and ideas as truly as they could possibly be expressed.

"Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be" (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, p. 215).

"Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written" (A Moveable Feast, p. 12).

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was" (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, p. 184).

"The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn" (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, p. 183).

Hemingway demanded this kind of truthfulness about all of life. His combination of an unusual perceptiveness and exceptional writing skill enables his readers to see the world as he saw it. Many of his written works – which range in subject matter from war in Europe to bullfighting in Spain, skiing in Switzerland, the people of Paris and Key West, hunting in Africa, and fishing in Michigan and the Gulfstream – consequently resonate as genuine and honest. They seem real above all else.

Hemingway’s characters are often memorable and reveal how he perceived the people he met. Some are deep and dynamic, like Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms or Nick Adams, the hero of numerous short stories. Others are shallow caricatures meant to mock the people they represent, like the Bimini brawler in Islands in the Stream or the laughing lady in To Have and Have Not. His descriptions of children can be particularly moving, as in the short story, “A Day’s Wait.”

One of Hemingway’s editors, Maxwell Perkins, said of him, “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality, no one ever so completely performed it.” Unfortunately, Hemingway’s insistence on telling the truth does not provide his reader with many happy endings. As Hemingway saw it, life is tragedy.

In his well-known short story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway refers to swamp fishing as a “tragic adventure.” Sadly, the phrase also aptly describes the majority of his life. He certainly understood his profession to be tragic:

"Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged" (Green Hills of Africa, p. 71).

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you" (Death in the Afternoon, p. 122).

Hemingway’s tragic adventure was not confined to his writing; his favorite pastimes also inevitably ended in tragedy. In hunting and fishing, either the animal dies or the hunter or fisherman experiences the tragedy of failure and loss. In bullfighting, either the bull is killed or the torero is gored.

Hemingway seemed bent on extending his tragic adventures into his personal life as well. He was married four times, with numerous paramours on the side. According to one story, his last wife, Mary, threatened to kill one of Ernest’s lady friends if she caught them together. His relationship with his three sons was often strained as well.

Thus death and loss was a way of life for Hemingway, and he lived out his tragic adventure to the end. After several years of mental deterioration and depression caused by lifestyle and genetics, on the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head with his favorite shotgun in his Ketchum, Idaho home.


What should Christians read Ernest Hemingway?

The ideas of truth and tragedy encapsulate Hemingway’s life, writings, and worldview – or perhaps truth as tragedy is a better way of putting it, for Hemingway saw tragedy as the message that he was truthfully telling. And concerning the tragedy of life, Hemingway was right. This world is utterly and completely fallen; that fallenness spares no one and extends itself to every area of our lives.

The saddest thing about Hemingway – the shortfall of his worldview – is that he understood tragedy so deeply but rejected the hope that comes in Jesus. Without that hope, it is no surprise that he sought relief in such things as drink, dalliance, sport, and suicide, but found no lasting satisfaction in them. The real surprise is that he was so driven to communicate the truth of tragedy to others, diligently beginning his work at dawn each day. By his writing he became an apostle of a grim gospel of loss.

Sadder still is the fact that Hemingway’s worldview is shared by so many around us. Even those who talk themselves into optimism or distract themselves by one means or another are only temporarily avoiding the reality that a world without Jesus is just as Hemingway describes it:

"What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. . . . [H]e knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. . . .

"Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it." (From “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” written by Hemingway in 1926 at the age of 27, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition, p. 288.)

The first reason Christians should read Ernest Hemingway is because they regularly meet people who share his worldview, whose hearts and lives reflect the hopelessness he writes about. Reading Hemingway will give us a better understanding of exactly how such people see the world.

We will find many of his writings to be offensive, but it should not surprise us when the lost act lost. We must temper our offense and respond in compassion and love, for they can learn only from us that “everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame” and that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Every time we are confronted with a worldview like Hemingway’s is a golden opportunity to respond with the world-transforming gospel of Jesus Christ.

A second (and equally important, I believe) reason why Christians should read Ernest Hemingway is to better their writing. Above all other people, Christians know the power of words. Every Christian has experienced the power of God’s Word to change lives, and that same Word commands every Christian to be ready to articulate his faith. Learning to speak and write as well as possible is part of taking that command seriously, and doing so does not undermine the Holy Spirit’s work in conjunction with the Word, even though some so-called evangelists have relied more on their own skill than God’s power.

Few authors in history have been such a keen observer of people, such a vivid and moving reporter of life, and such a master of words as Hemingway was, and he had much to say about developing the skill and style of writing. Who better to learn from than such a man? No one would say that we should ignore such unbelievers as Monet when learning about art or Jefferson when learning about politics. Why then would we not learn how to write from Hemingway? I have certainly learned more about writing from him than I did in my university English classes.

Hemingway is not the only writer who can teach us to write better while revealing something of how our neighbor understands life. He is particularly skilled at doing those two things, but perhaps you prefer a different author. By whatever means, however, Christians must be sure to remain aware of the worldview surrounding them and to improve continually their ability to speak the truth in such a setting.