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Introduction

Karl Jaspers states that in Kierkegaard there is something “different” that disturbs us once we have started to understand him (1980: 72). The same appreciation could be said with respect to Hemingway. The American Nobel’s popularity has motivated, to a great extent, the vulgarization, in every sense, of the impressive artistic legacy which he left behind, and has identified him as the drunken fun loving womanizer who put an end to his life by committing suicide. As Federico Eguíluz states, regarding the criticism arising after the writer received the Nobel Prize,

Uno sospecha, de todas formas, que estos ataques podían ir dirigidos más al hombre que a su obra, porque Hemingway no había tenido nunca demasiado tiempo para dedicarse a los círculos literarios, y nunca dudó en expresarlo así con un lenguaje claro y agresivo. (45)¹

The reading of his literary corpus awakens innumerable questions: why the obsession with death? Why the persistence of introducing a nihilistic existence? Why the moral principles so far from ethics? Why the continuous, repetitive heroprotagonist structured over and over following identical parameters, to the point of coining the term “code hero” when speaking of his characters? Why does he place them in extreme situations in a desperate attempt to obtain the “grace under pressure”—as it has also been coined? Why his apparent misogynous attitude? Why do his novels take place outside his native North America?

The questions become even more worrisome when we consider his famous iceberg theory in which a narration must only show one eighth of what can be found in the surface. One searches for answers when reading the abundant criticism about Hemingway and realizes that a good part of it barely gives light into some of the already mentioned questions making us “suspect,” using Eguíluz’s terminology, that most of it has been based on the visible part of the iceberg not showing what is hidden. The basis of this work is to “go into depth”—as Heidegger would say—with the objective of finding a coherent principle as universal as possible to obtain satisfactory answers to the questions posed. That principle, as I will try to prove, is found in existentialist philosophy. The reading of Kierkegaard and mainly Heidegger, but also Jaspers and Sartre, will give us another way of interpreting, another path to “understand” the human worries that distressed Hemingway. They offer us a dialectic, I even dare to affirm a “methodology” or exegesis, by which we can project in his novels and in most of his short stories an interpretative model that helps us understand while harmonizing the “apparent” incongruence that some have found in them. The theory here defended is that existentialist philosophy may help to understand the conception that Hemingway had of the individual as a human being as well as his relationship with the world. After all, as Heidegger states in Ontology: The Hermeneutic of Facticity, “All interpreting is an interpreting with respect to something, on the basis of it and with view to it. The fore having which is to be interpretively explicated must be put into the context of the object and seen there. One must step away from the subject matter initially given and back to that on which it is based” (60).

Searching for Literary Independence

Throughout his life, Hemingway antagonized many people, in many cases artistic figures with whom he had kept a close friendship. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos,² who had been part of his closest circle of friends, were some of the writers who suffered his humiliations and embarrassing writings. However, it is also true that Hemingway suffered his share of attacks. Brassaï, in his essay about Henry Miller, states that, among the modern writers, Hemingway was “his black beast,” and quotes a passage of Miller’s correspondence after Hemingway’s death, “Céline’s death touched me more than Hemingway’s. The latter’s work never attracted me neither as a writer nor as a man. It was all just a legend created around his name” (173).

Among all the disputes, one of the most peculiar and surprising is the one with Sherwood Anderson. The only feeling that Hemingway could have towards Anderson was that of gratitude. Anderson was the one who encouraged him to travel to Europe when Hemingway’s future as a reporter seemed somewhat unsubstantial; it was also the author of Winesburg, Ohio the one who wrote letters of recommendation to Gertrude Stein opening doors to the “crème de la crème” of the Parisian intellectuality; he also influenced in a determinant way—together with Francis Scott Fitzgerald—for Boni & Liveright publishing company to publish the American version of In Our Time, even though Hemingway was not a known author; and last but not less important, his influence in Hemingway’s artistic beginnings was decisive, to the point that Gertrude Stein would state that the main debt of Hemingway’s style was due to herself and Sherwood Anderson.

We can ask ourselves about the origin of the furious satire against Anderson represented in The Torrents of Spring. It could be argued that this is only the first attack on a writer, something present throughout Hemingway’s writings. He also parodied Harold Loeb in The Sun Also Rises; Scott Fitzgerald in the first version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”; Dos Passos in To Have and Have Not; Sinclair Lewis in Across the River and Into the Trees; and Stein and Ford in A Moveable Feast. Nevertheless, Anderson’s case is peculiar.³

To begin, we must say that the “fight” was not personal as it happened with the rest of the writers. The contact between Anderson, who was in the United States, and Hemingway, who was living in Europe while developing and writing the novel, was nonexistent. Even the constant correspondence of the early days had ceased. There are no existing references concerning any types of professional, sentimental or economical problems that could be pending between them. Therefore, it seems appropriate to focus the analysis purely on the artistic field. In Dark Laughter (1925), the cause of the dispute, Anderson advocated and praised the purity of the Black and Indian primitivism against modern society’s technology. That was the touchstone that irritated Hemingway. It is significant that Hemingway entitled his first publication in our time—the lower case corresponds to the fashion of those times, motivated by e.e.cummings and followed by Ford Madox Ford, editor of the “transatlantic review,” tending to eliminate the capital letters. This in itself seems to indicate a wish to break away, a formal distancing if so, from the past. Aside from the purely formal aspects, the title is interesting in itself, “in our time”; what does Hemingway mean when he makes a deliberate reference to “our time?” If, as is the case, it is not about the heading of any of the stories, what does he want to manifest with this title? Does he pretend to suggest that “his” time is different from the prior one? If so, in what sense?

The literary atmosphere he lived while in Paris during the twenties was singular and the French capital was the literary capital of the world. Two most outstanding artistic figures James Joyce, who published his Ulysses in 1922, and Ezra Pound, who had been writing his Cantos since 1915, were living there. The references mentioning the admiration that young Hemingway felt for those two writers are numerous, as in the earlier correspondence with Anderson, where the name of Joyce is mentioned repeatedly. Not in vain was Hemingway one of the first to reserve the extremely expensive first edition of the Ulysses, although he could barely afford such expense.⁴ He read it quickly and on March 9, 1922, a month and a week after the Ulysses was published, he would write to Anderson, “Joyce has a most goddam wonderful book” (in Ellman 543). Hemingway also signed a letter opposing the “tampered” North American edition of the Ulysses published by Samuel Roth and even promised to bring Joyce a live lion from his African safari (“Fortunately we escaped that,” stated Joyce, in Ellman, 708). His relationship with Pound, him being a fellow countryman, was much more intimate. Hemingway would teach him boxing and Pound would tutor him in the noble arts of writing. Jeffrey Meyers brilliantly harmonizes the relationship between the two writers,

Both Pound and Hemingway were passionately devoted to their art and soon established a dynamic creative sympathy. They liked each other personally, shared the same aesthetic aims and admired each other’s work. Pound was an unofficial minister of culture who acted as midwife for new literary talent. Hemingway, who at this time of his life was most responsive to constructive criticism, was intensely interested in technique: of poetry and prose as well as of boxing and bullfighting. He came to Pound as a pupil and allowed the poet to assume his favourite role as teacher. Pound, the first significant writer to recognize Hemingway’s talent, did everything possible to help him achieve success. (73)

“Make It New,” the “maestro” had foretold, and that was the outmost which Hemingway would assume as his dogma for faith. This was “his time,” the time of the literary revolution; a time where the old school was useless. The horrors of World War I had destroyed the optimism of harmonized humanity in which an individual could develop all of his potentials—”Everybody’s sick. I’m sick, too” (16), Georgette states at the beginning of The Sun Also Rises; Cohn had manifested such an opinion before, “‘I’m sick of Paris…’” (12). The traditional values seemed, pragmatically speaking, as obsolete as outdated. It was a new era, different from the one before and this was the reason why the models of expression also had to be different. This was Joyce’s and Pound’s aspiration; also Kafka’s or Tristan Tzara’s—with whom he published in the same edition of the “transatlantic review”—and of many others. As in every aspect of his life, also creatively, Hemingway followed the extreme. To create something new, you had to “kill the father,” and his artistic father at the time was Sherwood Anderson.

Frequently, especially among writers, the physical distance entails a spiritual, conceptual or philosophical distancing with respect to the prevailing values of the place of origin. The title in our time expressed the wish to break away, but the ties with Winesburg, Ohio, even though the first is a book of short stories and the second a novel, are unquestionable. Each and every one of the twenty one short stories in Winesburg, Ohio, has its own meaning in an isolated way, just like the Nick Adams stories in in our time can be understood as part of the set, for they all complement each other in such a way that Nick is progressively shaped as a novelistic character. Both cases deal with young protagonists who live in a rural environment and are moving towards maturity. Thus, we find two peculiar “bildungsroman” whose initiation towards adult life follows, in certain cases, similar guidelines.

This is the nexus, but in the stories of in our times it is possible to clearly see the spiritual distancing mentioned before. Nick Adams is an infinitely more individualistic character than George Willard, and his process of “self discovery” is structured around his rebellion against his parents, especially against his father. Stories such as “Now I Lay Me,” “Indian Camp” or “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” are clear and definite examples of what has been exposed. Although the rebelliousness against the father could be understood as a natural generation conflict, it clearly stresses the rejection of the traditional values that the parent embodies. Nick rebels against western civilization inherent values and points the way towards fundamental proposals in later protagonists, especially the individual’s individuality and singularity to whom the social code of values seems obsolete, outdated, and old fashioned. Hemingway’s heroes, as can be appreciated in the early Nick Adams, advocate or understand their existence from exclusively individual premises, always taking into account that it is their individual and non transferable experience which will finally make their perception about existence. The final result will be the acceptance of a personal moral system that is not necessarily similar to that which is socially accepted, ethics.

This wish to break away, which can be noticed more or less in a hidden way in in our time, can definitely be seen in The Torrents of Spring. Let us remember the subtitle of the novel, “A Romantic Novel in Honour of the Passing of a Great Race.” With respect to the meaning, from its content we can infer that the “great race” refers to the Indians mentioned in the novel. Nevertheless, the meaning of the novel, i.e. a criticism of Anderson, could very well have a new interpretation: could the allusion to the “great race” be understood as an allusion to those writers who preceded him or perhaps to Anderson’s Indians? These questions could be understood as a simple hypothesis, but taking into account the famous “iceberg theory” we can agree that it may contribute to substantial interpretations. From this point of view, D.H. Lawrence’s signed photographs, and even the oleo portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that can be found in the conference room, the Indians’ “wigman” in the novel, can be included in the list of authors aforementioned.

Throughout the reading we find Henry James, of which Scripps thought of as “quite a writer” (53), although the narrator describes him as “that chap who had gone away from his own land” (52); Shakespeare, from whom he takes the name of Puck for his bird; Ford Madox Ford, a chatty person who tells good anecdotes, of which he is thankful for; Sinclair Lewis, with whom he talks to about literature; Both Tarkington, another “fellow” who “had the wrong dope” (69); John Dos Passos, “whom I consider a very forceful writer, and an exceedingly pleasant fellow besides” (69); Willa Cather (187), H.G. Wells (197), E.E. Cummings (in capital letters), Scott Fitzgerald, Anderson… as we can see, the literary references are constant, categorically more numerous, and there is more authenticity than in prior works.

In The Torrents of Spring, Hemingway shows an undeniable desire for innovation and experimentalism. The desperate search for artistic independence makes him reevaluate the narrative models known to him. Using Carlos Baker’s words, it is about “a declaration of aesthetic independence” (77). The novel itself is not understood as a work of art, but instead, it establishes an explicit dialogue with the reader who is always present as the final recipient of the work. Aside from comments and explanations pertinent to its contents, he introduces a series of reasoning which could be mortifying if not placed within an experimentalist and satirical scope. Thus, for example, he remarks through Dos Passos, “Hemingway, you have brought a masterpiece” (84). In others, it is Hemingway himself who evaluates his own work, “As I read that chapter over, reader, it doesn’t seem so bad” (93). The real artistic-ideological message is found in the quotes taken from Henry Fielding, who introduces each of the four chapters. “The only source of true ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation” (16) is the first quote that we read. Others, “And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse anyone” (40); or, “It maybe likewise noted that affectation does not imply an absolute negation of those qualities which are affected” (66); and the final one, “But perhaps it may be objected to me, that I have against my own rules introduced vices, and of a very black kind” (88). The irony is so evident that it cannot be missed; nevertheless, he will present identical narrative principles, this time formally, in Death in the Afternoon, “a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl” (192).

The Torrents of Spring is not Hemingway’s most appreciated work since it presents all forms of narrative irregularities; however, it represents a factual manifesto of literary independence. The true artistic achievement will come with his next novel, The Sun Also Rises. In this novel Hemingway’s artistic appreciation is synthesized in so far as his literary approach of future works are clearly and determinately exposed.

This novel was, as its title suggests, a torrent; but a “torrent” of uncontrolled feelings, of skin deep narrative eagerness, of raw anger, of creative energy in search of something that, whatever it was, had to be separated from everything known and be original, fresh, different… A torrent that needed to be funneled in such a way that its turbulent and uneasy waters would not cause destruction but once calm it would work as source for quality works in which the artistic component prevailed against personal resentment. The Sun Also Rises is the novel where will be found the fundamental “Hemingwayan” narrative from an artistic and philosophical approach, and, quoting Carlos Baker, “the means Hemingway chose to declare himself out of the alleged ‘lostness’ of a generation whose vagaries he chronicled” (77). The breaking away from the prior literary models is also reflected from the beginning of The Sun Also Rises. Robert Cohn, the character who appears at the beginning of the novel and who becomes Jake Barnes’ clearest antithesis, reads and rereads a book by W.H. Hudson entitled The Purple Land. For Cohn, the book “was all that was needed to set him off.” The story of The Purple Land “recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land.” However, Jake has read Turgenieff’s works,⁵ and his belief with respect to the benefits that Hudson’s works bestow upon the modern man is devastating, “For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books” (9).

It seems logical and coherent for Jake Barnes to read Turgenieff if we are admitting, as Lindell J. Kay remarked in the aforementioned section, that Hemingway “wrote portions of his own autobiography in each of his literary works”⁶; indeed, Hemingway himself said in numerous occasions that Turgenieff was one of his most fundamental influences and in A Moveable Feast he remembers how the two volumes of A Sportsman’s Sketches were precisely the first literary works that he borrowed from Sylvia Beach’s library to finish stating, “I had read all of Turgenev” (87). However, to understand the meaning and implications it will be valuable to briefly compare Turgenieff and Hudson. Doing so it will became clear that they are both clear unquestionable representatives of the points of view, of the vital attitude and code of value, of Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn respectively, and in the belief that these two fictional characters assume and reflect the passions and phobias of their creator.

William Henry Hudson, in the already mentioned The Purple Land (1885) as well as in Green Mansions (1904), A Shepherd’s Life (1910) or A Traveller in Little Things (1921), elaborates a narrative in accordance with the romantic patterns. He was a naturalist and an ornithologist who was particularly worried about nature, what conditioned his novels. Thus, for example, he does not specially show an interest in the creation of his characters, the most famous being Rima,⁷ the main character in Green Mansions, a half human half bird creature that lives in the forest. Hudson believes that mankind becomes conscious of his existence when he is in touch with nature. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenieff, on the other hand, presents literary principles drastically opposite to Hudson’s. In Fathers and Sons (1862), which is considered to be his most popular novel and from which he obtained international recognition, we meet Evgenij Bazarov for the fist time, a character that was classified by his own creator as a “nihilist,” as someone who did not accept authority or acknowledge a social, political, or religious value system. The construction of the action reflects the generational conflict between Bazarov and his parents.

As for the structure in his novels, Turgenieff was specifically interested in his characters, “He constructed his novels according to a simple formula that had the sole purpose of illuminating the character and predicament of a single figure, whether hero or heroine.” Britannica (vol. 12, p. 53). With respect to style, Turgenieff also shows the same approach as Hemingway. As previously stated, Hemingway ridiculed Anderson’s “affectation”; in Smoke, Turgenieff ridiculed this kind of expression when, according to the letter written by the main character, Litvinov, he says, “Litvinov did not much like this letter himself; it did not quite truly and exactly express what he wanted to say; it was full of awkward expressions, high flown or bookish, and doubtless it was not better than many of the other letters he had torn up”.⁸ Not only do we find similarities between Turgenieff and Hemingway in literature, but also in social criticism written about them. Víctor Gallego comments about the Russian, “De las numerosas acusaciones de que fue objeto Turguéniev por parte de sus detractores, destacan, por su reincidencia y encarnizamiento, dos: la indefinición y falta de compromiso del autor y su profundo desprecio por Rusia y todo lo ruso”⁹; the same criticism we frequently find questioning Hemingway.

We are referring to two authors, Hudson and Turgenieff, with substantially different literary interests from a structural and philosophical point of view. Each of them represents a different literary model and, even more important, the prototype in both characters that act and understand life according to different principles and values, if not antagonistic. Hudson represents “the past,” Turgenieff “the present”; exactly the same as Jake and Robert, in The Sun Also Rises.

The Hudson-Turgenieff opposition clearly seen in the Jake-Robert relationship in The Sun Also Rises can be considered as a relative parallelism to the disagreements between Hemingway and Anderson. For Hemingway, Anderson, like Hudson, represented the past; and himself, like Turgenieff, represented the present. In The Sun Also Rises we find a definite and conclusive passage,

I turn off the light again and read. I read Turgenieff. I knew that now, reading it in the over sensitized state of my mind after much too much brandy, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it. That was another good thing you paid for and then had. Some time along toward daylight I went to sleep. (149)¹⁰

The reference to the “past” and the “present” does not necessarily refer to a specific literary or stylistic aspect but to a certain way of understanding the world, to a particular idea of existence that one is able to grasp when one “reaches the light” (the reference to the light at the beginning and end of the quote is fundamental as will be studied later).

The trauma and scars left by World War I—which Hemingway had lived personally—obliged and motivated a radical reevaluation of the role human kind played on earth. The absolute truths that society had believed in up to then, seemed to be supported only by illusions and chimeras. Empiricism and the optimistic rationalism were old fashioned philosophies that could not coherently answer questions about the new situation that human kind was living after the war that bled the Western world. Christianity was more of a soothing effect than a remedy, and its compassionate rigid ethical rules arose more questions than answers; it was also understood by many as an attempt to escape from a state in which frailty or, philosophically speaking, the “non essence,” became unbearable. A new philosophy was emerging; a new thought process that would give answers to the new worries and questions, to the “desperation” that was strongly holding on to the “modern” man. Hemingway was aware of the dilemma that he was facing as he so notably writes through Jake’s meaningful contemplation in The Sun Also Rises,

The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.

Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about. (148)

Hemingway, personified in Jake, shows a palpable disappointment with “all the other fine philosophies I’ve had,” emphasizing his need to find out “how to live in it,” to learn “what it is all about.” In brief, it is all about the same restlessness that the “thinkers” of the time were trying to solve when urged by the same anguish that afflicted Hemingway.

The philosophers that lived between the wars found what they were looking for in the philosophy of the Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, who based and structured his reasoning around the uniqueness of the individual. To exist as an individual, Kierkegaard would say, it is necessary to isolate from the world. Only then would the individual be conscious of his own being, that is, “he will exist,” which on its own would bring about the greatest misfortune, for our existence is finite and this is a cause for desperation for the human kind. “Is desperation an advantage or a defect?” Kierkegaard would ask himself in The Sickness unto Death (Sygdommen til döden) “regarded in a purely dialectical way it is both” (147), he responds.

In this same work, the philosopher would reflect upon, “what a delusion most needs is the very thing it least thinks of—naturally, for otherwise it would be a delusion (223). The Europe of the first half of the 20th century would find in Kierkegaard, in his existentialism, a new model through which man would confront, while at the same time find, his place in the world and in society.

In Henry Miller: The Paris Years, Brassaï, Miller’s contemporary photographer and friend, reflects how Parisian life was during the time between the wars, emphasizing the conceptual differences between the United States and Paris. According to Brassaï, “His long dry spells he blamed on the sterility of America…” (18). On the other hand Miller writes in Tropic of Capricorn, “I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris” (17). Hemingway went through the same exact process some years earlier. His life in Paris in the 1920’s and 30’s would have certainly been similar to Miller’s if his first wife, Hadley Richardson, would not have accompanied him. The atmosphere, the “zeitgeist” that Brassaï reflected upon, is truly similar to what is found in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Brassaï remembers,

To get there from Montparnasse, you descended Boulevard Raspail, crossed the Seine at Pont-Royal, traversed the Tuileries to the Avenue de l’Opèra then up to Rue Scribe. By taxi, car, subway, bus, carriage and, most often on foot, every American who has ever lived in Paris, from Gertrude Stein to Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan to Hemingway and Steinbeck, has trod this path of hope and dreams. (27)

There is no proof or reference, direct or indirect, that Hemingway read neither Kierkegaard nor any other existentialist philosopher—it is known that Nietzsche was Miller’s “bed night reading”. Using Killinger’s words, Hemingway “imbibed the spirit of existentialism in the bars and bistros of that city [Paris] in the nineteentwenties” (vii). Jacqueline Brogan expresses herself in similar terms in her “‘It’s Only Interesting the First Time’: or, Hemingway as Kierkegaard,” for whom,

This conjunction of Kierkegaard’s insights with Hemingway’s novel is not meant to suggest that Hemingway was directly influenced by Kierkegaard. Rather, it exposes something akin to a compulsion in both authors, both of whom relentlessly double, retract, and contradict their perspectives on numerous ethical questions when ethical position of writing itself. (2)

Accepting Killinger’s appreciation, from a more general point of view, and Brogan’s, from a more specific point of view,¹¹ I would add that reading Russian writers such as Turgenieff, and also Dostoievski, Tolstoi, and Gogol—all of them mentioned repeatedly by the writer as his more direct references, and novelists of a clear and demonstrated existentialist philosophy—turned out to be a fundamental and definitive influence for Hemingway in his existentialist approximation to the complex literary universe. Kenneth Lynn assures that while writing The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway was reading Tolstoi (297); and it is even more significant that his character Jake, as mentioned, reads Turgenieff. Be that as it may, Killinger in his “Foreword” of Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (1965), masterly summarizes the beginning, the “initial hypothesis” of this theory,

Hemingway’s philosophy of life, which appears already to have taken form in his earliest stories and sketches, and which therefore antedates every publication of both the German and the French existentialists, has not been affected by contact with this group of sophisticated thinkers, but has been the hard, wrung-from-the-heart product of life in an age which has been, in many ways, more difficult than any other. In a time when death is so mechanical and impersonal as to produce the nada-concept, when one of man’s most profound fears is of nihilation by absorption into the machine, the mass, or whatever, it is not unlikely that many thinking men arrive independently at approximately the same conclusions about what it means to exist. (vii)

It is precisely that direct and intellectual “ignorance” of the existentialist theories, the reason why it is not possible to tie Hemingway to any concrete “existentialist school.” Nevertheless, it can be clearly found in his works the philosophical beginnings of the important theoreticians of the movement: Kierkegaard, “father” of modern existentialism; Heidegger, who recuperated it at the beginning of the 20^th century and gave it the category of philosophical school; Jaspers, who would establish a nexus between this “new” philosophy and the prior ones; and finally, Sartre, who took it to its highest level of popularity.¹²

Theoretical Frame

It has already been mentioned how the new times which humanity lived demanded new models of expression. However literary works express or reflect the philosophy of their time either to accept it or question it. The analysis of the philosophical altercations of the time when Hemingway writes his works would turn out to be fundamental to understand the determining factors and ideas reflected in his novels.

The philosophical panorama in the first half of the 20^th century was dominated by two clearly differentiated determinants: on the one hand, Russian dialectical materialism and its satellite countries and, on the other hand, western existentialism, mainly in France and Germany. Although Sartre¹³ would still take some years to publish his more important existentialist works, the Paris of the 1920’s and 30’s lived the fervor deriving from a new concept of the human kind which, to a certain point, envisaged the “Belle Epoque.” Sören Kierkegaard was the father of modern existentialism and his theories were already known and studied in Europe, although not in a generalized manner (Heidegger published Sein und Zeit in 1927).

It has just been mentioned that there is no proof that Hemingway had any direct or indirect relationship with the existentialist philosophy; however, Hemingway’s relationship with existentialism seems unquestionable. Just a simple search as “combining” the words “Hemingway” and “existentialism” in Google showed 354.000 results on August 2013. This does not mean that they are all about the subject, far from it. Only the first three pages of references are of some interest.

Hemingway’s relationship with existentialism even manages to go beyond the exclusively literary field by interesting all sorts of people. Thus, for example, it is possible to mention how some Ministers use said relationship in their Sunday sermon. This is the case of Raymond T. Exum, Minister of the Crystal Lake Church of Christ—Crystal Lake, Illinois—who delivered the sermon entitled “Teaching Morals” on April 27, 1997. That day the parishioners listened to the following words,

Has the United States reached that situation today? Earlier in the twentieth century there was a philosophy known as existentialism. It came from a Danish philosopher named Sören Kierkegaard. I want to read Mr. Kierkegaard’s definition of this new philosophy from his journals. He said, “The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do. The thing is to find a truth which is true for me.” Notice the emphasis there on his feelings about what is right and wrong, not necessarily what God thought about that matter. That statement was the basis for Ernest Hemingway’s statement “Good is what you feel good after doing and bad is what you feel bad after doing.”¹⁴

This one is a clear representation of its generality, since searching for information on Hemingway and existentialism or asserting that Hemingway is an existentialist writer seems excessively superficial if the “type” of existentialism is not distinctly clarified. Existentialist trends are as varied as the number of philosophers that followed the movement. After all, existentialism is not a monolithic system of thought. We can even find antagonistic points of view between the different existentialist philosophers, resulting from the analytical independence of each of them.

One suspects that the use of the terms “existentialism” or “existentialist” nowadays is directly related with the Sartrean vision or approach to the philosophical school—it was Sartre who popularized the term after World War II; however, the evolution from Kierkegaard to the French philosopher is interesting in the substantial aspects of this philosophical thought. Kierkegaard, for example, believed in the existence of God; Sartre, on the other hand, denied it. Not in vain the three most known existentialist philosophers have been categorized as “Christian existentialists” (Kierkegaard¹⁵); “agnostic existentialists” (Heidegger) and “atheist existentialists” (Sartre).

Existentialism is usually associated with atheist attitudes. However, there are numerous philosophers who are considered existentialists that develop their theories from religious premises. Kierkegaard has already been mentioned, and closer to the present time it could also be mentioned the German Protestant theologists Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann or Carlos Barth, who links Kierkegaard’s postulates with respect to eternity with Luther’s and Calvin’s theories, starting a reformist movement of theological dialectics; the French Catholic theologist, Gabriel Marcel, who repudiated the expression “existentialist,” precisely for his opposition to Sartre’s atheist approach; the Russian orthodox, Nikolay Berdyayev, who, like Leon Chestoff, worried about the spiritual manifestations of the soul from the inherent beginnings to orthodox Christianism; the Italians, Armando Carlini and Augusto Guzzo, and the most popular Italian existentialist, Nicolas Abbagnano, supporters of Christian existentialism; or the German Jew, Martin Buber.

Therefore, it is necessary to clearly put forward the basis of existentialism and its later derivations, with the purpose of establishing the theoretical frame in which it will be developed and base the line of argument here exposed when relating Hemingway to existentialism.

Theoreticians of the movement have seen existentialist signs in the “Old Testament”¹⁶ and also in certain Socratic¹⁷ postulates. However, it was the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, the one who in the 17^th century anticipated the conceptual beginnings of modern existentialism. Pascal opposed the rigorous rationalism of his contemporary René Descartes, and in his Pensées he had already dealt in depth with the “paradox” of human existence, for, to simplify, man is a combination of body and mind, which on its own is paradoxical and contradictory.

These are the precedents, although true existentialism—or “modern existentialism” as numerous critics like to call it—arises with the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard.

In the same manner that Pascal questioned Descartes’ principles, Kierkegaard opposed Hegel’s philosophy. The Dane emphasized human liberty, without showing special interest for the universally accepted truths that interested the German. Kierkegaard theorized about the relative truths exclusive to the individual which were the cause for personal decisions; that is, he was interested in “existential truths.” The turning point of existentialism with respect to the philosophical theories of the 19^th century, still inherited from the transformation that arose in the Modern Era, has to do with the substitution of the universalist conception that deals with the afterlife, which would represent a spiritual attitude, for a more partial vision that is fundamentally oriented to life on earth, an existential attitude. He proposed a substantial alteration of the gnoseological (of knowledge) and axiological (of values) order.

Like Pascal, Kierkegaard also understands man’s life as a continuous paradox and infers, as Eduardo Nicol states, (208), that “la existencia es para el hombre posibilidad, y que las decisiones que se toman son las que forman y transforman efectivamente nuestro ser. Hacerse a sí mismo es la tarea propia del hombre en su existencia” (142; footnote 28).¹⁸

This represents the essence that unifies the theories of existentialist philosophers. Each and every one of the books and treaties about existentialism emphasize the numerous, and in some cases fundamental, discrepancies between the different philosophers of the movement; and, at the same time, recognize that all of them converge in their conception of the individual as a free person who is continuously facing the difficult and distressing need to choose. Jaspers and Sartre present diverging existential models, although their opinions are identical with respect to human liberty.

The Enlightenment, which at its time opposed the theoretical conception of the world and society, centered its attention in obtaining “rational ideas” to understand the universal and the essential in a rational and empirical way so that a nexus could be established between reason and nature. It was basically a broader vision that was not interested in specific or individual subjects, precisely those which were truly important for existentialists. Moreover, the understood belief that man was a harmoniously integrated being in the universe that lived with security in this world and who would become a kind of “heaven on earth” thanks to technique and science, had been crushed due to the recent historical events brought by the war. According to the existentialists, it was a fallacy to believe in universal kindness because this way they would loose sight of the enigmatic and disturbing of our existence. Lastly, it was a mistake to consider that man did not have spiritual autonomy and self responsibility in favor of the masses, of the general benefit. The optimistic proclamations of the Enlightenment and Hegel’s absolutistic pantheism were at all costs inefficient for the 20^th century man.

Martin Heidegger understood it as such. He returned to Kierkegaard’s philosophical theories—until then practically unknown—and took them one step further when asserting that “being” and “existing” were the same, and that “being in the world” is the same as “coexisting with others.” Besides, existence comes from nothing, and that is where it heads to. Man would finally be a “being for death” (Sein-zum-Tode). As his predecessors Pascal and Kierkegaard, Heidegger also structures his philosophical thought as an answer to another philosopher’s rationalism, in this case his old professor Edmund Husserl. The founder of the phenomenological philosophy wanted, in a certain way as Descartes and Hegel, to establish a “method”—as he called it—as scientific as possible to describe and analyze human consciousness in order to resolve, if possible, the contradiction between empiricism and rationalism. Phenomenological idealism, or if preferred “phenomenological method”—followed by thinkers of great stature like Pfänder, Geiger, or Farber, among others—establishes a distinction between what is called “science of fact,” empiricism, and “science of essence,” eidetics, assuming that philosophy can reach the same level as science. Heidegger, on the other hand, presupposes that man moves on earth as incomprehensible as indifferent and that any intent or hope to understand the reason of our earthly existence seems useless and is inevitably doomed to failure. Lastly, man sees the need to “set a goal” and tries to reach his objective with dedication, despite knowing the inevitability of death, the intranscendency of life, and the inexistence of a spiritual life after the earthly life. Nietzsche has been unjustly accused of “killing God” because existentialist philosophers with similar thoughts¹⁹ have demonstrated that he only wrote his elegy, and Heidegger was its executer.

The absence of the universal truth and values was also developed by Karl Jaspers. Man, as Jaspers understands, is continuously exposed to difficult situations and is oriented towards transcendence. A yearning for transcendence, its “search” (Suche), is something inherent to existence itself. Therefore, we are only interested in our own existence, and in values and existentialist truths (not universal) through which we guide our lives towards transcendence. Paradox, as in Kierkegaard, also makes up the nucleus of Jaspers’ thought. Jaspers understands that our existence is a continuous search for transcendence, but it becomes an impossible goal since any event or discovery would stop being considered transcendent in the exact moment in which it happens or is reached; in other words, man finds the yearning for transcendence in the process of the “search” inherent to existence. For him, knowledge is simply a subjective point of view of the human being in the world, but it becomes limited, never universal, because there are as many subjective points of view as individuals. Thought, which he identifies with “reason,” would be a way of illuminating existence. In fact, always according to Jaspers, through “reason” man gets to know the limitations of his own existence. Moreover, through “reason” we have knowledge of other means of existence, especially the transcendent, towards which we should guide or relate our own existence. Although Jaspers explicitly rejects any type of religious doctrine, his interest and worry for the transcendence and limits of the human experience strongly influenced “religious” existentialist philosophers like those already mentioned.

Jean Paul Sartre provided the last component. He took these theories to their extreme and advocated a radical nihilism which he denominated “humanism,” a theory which he developed in Existencialisme est un humanisme (1948). The concept of nihilism, closely related to Sartre, currently has an undeniable pejorative meaning since it is directly related to pessimism and to the desperation that facing nothingness brings, especially from Catholic postulates. Nevertheless, the existentialist does not see nihilism as something negative but as Prini explains, quite the contrary,

De esta clarificación depende la cuestión más importante de nuestro tiempo; si el nihilismo es una conclusión o más bien un método amargamente lúcido de hallar de nuevo un sentido auténtico del ser. En esta segunda alternativa, emergen de la radicalidad de sus negaciones los equívocos que nacen de no reconocer el enigma de la ambigüedad del ser como necesidad, finalidad, o libertad. (18)²⁰

The alteration of the concepts and their assessment seems radical: nihilism does not represent anguish and desperation but becomes the path to “find a new meaning of the real being.” From a popular point of view, it does not seem “optimistic” to describe someone as “existentialist.” However, solely from a philosophical perspective of existentialism, he questions the vision of mankind as an “unindividualized” and “impersonalized” being, as Hans Pfeil affirms,

el existencialismo nació de una apasionada protesta contra la ruina del hombre, contra su desindividualización y despersonalización, contra el necio desconocimiento de su peculiaridad individual, de su libertad y responsabilidad personal, y contra el menosprecio—más necio todavía—de la perplejidad y caducidad, de la fragilidad y finitud del hombre. (66)²¹

Summarizing what has been stated, for the existentialists (specifically referring to Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre), the human being is an individual and not an idea, someone who must live his own life without being part of the universal. They are interested in the salvation of the individual man, outside of the fallacy and vulgarity that means being part of the mass, of the group. The problem with mankind would be how to exist (Dasein) so that his personal existence materializes (Existenz). Two characteristic features of existentialism will be those relative to the “futility of existence” and the “unsubstantiality of existence.”

According to the “futility of existence,” birth does not presuppose a transcendental event—from the spiritual point of view—in our lives, since we have been placed in a chaotic and contradictory world without our consent; for this reason, mankind must create its own space of understanding and sense. Existence itself implies progression, future, with death being the only certainty of the future, which can be looked upon as a sense of anguish when facing this inevitable end. In other words, existence is finite, as finite as our own life. For the existentialist philosophy mankind is immersed in a hostile world, or in the best scenario, in an indifferent world.

As for the “unsubstantiality of existence,” they understand that existence does not have a universal essence but that it is personal and individual. Each individual is radically different from one another and the social system does not resolve their problems. Society is absurd, as is everything outside of mankind, and this drives man towards decadence. Any external universal thought or value is only a deceit for there are no values or rules that show a path to follow or a goal to reach. Although it seems eternal, it is only temporary; if it seems objective it is subjective. Therefore, existence is something isolated and confined to itself and in itself without any type of possible transcendence or projection. This leads them to think that existence is an experience of complete freedom and disengagement, of “causa sui.” They conclude that it is precisely at the time of complete consciousness of freedom and disengagement that man reaches personal existence (Existenz) in such a way that he can act and find self-fulfillment. As Kierkegaard had stated, mankind “is constantly in the process of becoming” (In Killinger, 25. Citing Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 79). It is a premise radically opposed to deterministic pessimism; thus, it cannot be considered from the optimism of the Enlightenment itself, since existentialism demands an incessant search but it denies the security of finding something. In a certain way, we are dealing with a race towards emptiness, towards nothing. This second certainty also generates anguish, like the certainty of death does, since mankind is aware of the impossibility of reaching objectives and valid universal truths. In either case, it is not about the theological anguish coming from the fear of God and eternal condemnation, but about the anguish when facing nothing.

The existentialist principles of interest to understand Hemingway’s existentialism are referred to different authors: from Kierkegaard, the denial of universal values benefitting an individual and singular philosophy of the individual; from Heidegger, the conception of mankind as a “being for death” (Sein-zum-Tode), deriving from the identification of “being” with “existing”; from Jaspers, the study of “limit situations” and his transcendent worries; from Sartre, his nihilistic vision—not necessarily negative, as it has already been mentioned—of the human being.

¹ Anyway, it could be suspected that these attacks were more focused on the man than on his work, for Hemingway had never had enough time to be involved in the literary environment, and never doubted to express it in a clear and aggressive language (my translation).

² The list would continue with Archibald MacLeish, William Bird, Donald Orden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, etc.

³ We also find this type of revenge among the Russian writers. The best known is that of Dostoievski with Turgenieff—personalized in Karmazinov—in The Devils (1871).

⁴ One hundred copies in Dutch paper, signed by Joyce, each 350 francs; the prices of the 150 copies in “vergé d’arches” were 250 francs, and 750 copies in simple binding were 150 francs.

⁵ Since we can find different ways of spelling Turgenieff (Turgueniev, Turgenief, Turgueniev, Turgeniev, Turguenev, Turgenev), I will adopt the one used by Hemingway.

⁶ www.authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=9114.

⁷ There is a statue of Rima in Hyde Park, London, by Jacob Epstein.

⁸ http://www.eldritchpress.org/ist/smoke.htm

⁹ In “Apéndice: Unas palabras sobre Humo” (285-300), the Spanish edition of Smoke. “Among all those accusations against Turguéniev made by his detractors, two of them are prominent due to their reoccurrence and ferocity: the vagueness and lack of commitment of the author and his deep contempt for Russia and all Russian things.”

¹⁰ I would like to explicitly call attention to how the light is mentioned at the beginning and end of the quote -it is a complete paragraph-, since, as I will later explain, the light in Hemingway acquires an important symbolic meaning as it is directly related with knowledge, with “to know what it is all about.” Nevertheless, I am advancing an explanatory quote: “There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn’t” (Sun, 148).

¹¹ In his article, Brogan analyzes the parallelism between Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Hemingway’s posthumous The Garden of Eden.

¹² Miguel de Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14636), deserves a study on its own since his theories concerning transcendence (“Do not let us talk of merit or of right or of the wherefore of our longing, which is an end in itself, or we shall lose our reason in a vortex of absurdities”), change (“A man can change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place within his continuity”), and knowledge (“All knowledge has an ultimate object”) follow different lines of thought to those exposed here, although coherent within its philosophical vision. However, his idea of the relationship between the individual and the universal is useful for our line of argument. Other lines of argument which are not studied in the present research are also accurate, like “The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends,” but others become questionable—in Hemingway—that “The will and the intelligence have need of one another.” Ortega y Gasset’s theories are also not included in this research since we think, as Eduardo Nicol does, that “La confusión grave en que Ortega incurre consiste en identificar el ser con el concepto del mismo que empezó a elaborar la metafísica griega: el concepto de esa “figura estable y fija,” es decir, el concepto de forma y substancia.” (“The serious confusion Ortega commits consists on identifying the being with its own concept, which came about in Greek metaphysics: that of “stable and fixed figure,” in other words, the concept of form and substance.”) On the other hand, the present research assumes Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s approach of man as “projection.”

¹³ Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the regulars that visited Hemingway at his room at the Ritz Hotel after the liberation of Paris during World War II.

¹⁴ http://clcoc.org/inetserm/morals.htm. Paraphrasing, Death in the Afternoon, 4.

¹⁵ One of his works, included in Mi punto de vista, has the title of “My position as a religious writer.”

¹⁶ Even Kierkegaard himself seems to suggest such theory in his Diario when he cites the “Genesis” (35, 29) as Pietro Prini states (40). Furthermore, The Sickness Unto Death takes Christianism as a reference.

¹⁷ Kierkegaard writes in The Sickness Unto Death “Socrates, Socrates, Socrates! Yes, one may well call thy name thrice, it would not be too much to call it ten times, if that would do any good” (223).

¹⁸ “The Christian heroism … is to venture wholly to be oneself, as an individual man, this definite individual man, alone before the face of God, alone in the tremendous exertion and this tremendous responsibility.” In footnote 29 continues: “the self despairingly wills to dispose of itself or to create itself, to make itself the self it wills to be, distinguishing in the concrete self what it will and what it will not accept” (201). The quotes in footnotes 28 and 29 are from The Sickness Unto Death III, ii, b.

¹⁹ See E. L. Allen, Existentialism from Within (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1953) and James D. Collins, The Existentialists: A Critical Study (Chicago: Regnery, 1952) (cited in Killinger, 55).

²⁰ “The most important issue of our time depends on this clarification; if nihilism is a conclusion or a method bitterly clear to find again in the authentic sense of the being. In this second alternative, misunderstandings arise from not recognizing the enigma of the ambiguity of the being as a necessity, objective or freedom.”

²¹ Existentialism was born by the passionate protest against man’s ruin, against its deindividualization and depersonalization, against the foolish ignorance of its individual peculiarity, of its freedom and its personal responsibility, and against the contempt—even more foolish—of perplexity and caducity, of fragility and man’s finitude.