Hemingway and His Literary Works
欧内斯特·米勒·海明威(1899-1961)出生于伊利诺伊州,上学期间经常到密歇根州北部进行狩猎和捕鱼探险,这有助于奠定他后来的原始主义态度。在担任堪萨斯城报社记者后,他加入了法国的一个志愿救护队,然后被调到意大利步兵队,直到第一次世界大战结束,之后他为《多伦多之星》报道近东的战况,并作为旅外团队的一员定居巴黎。1921-26年,他对巴黎的回忆在死后发表在《流动的盛宴》(1964)一书中。受埃兹拉·庞德(Ezra Pound),尤其是受格特鲁德·斯坦因(Gertrude Stein)的风格的影响,他出版了《三个故事和十首诗》(巴黎,1923)和《在我们的时代里》(美国,1925)。这些早期故事已经展现出了使其后来成名的思想态度和技巧。作为“迷惘的一代”的主要代言人,他表达了人们饱受战争创伤的感受。他们因失去信仰和希望而幻灭,并因前价值观的崩溃而彻底失败。故事主要讲述的是“坚强”的人,要么是陷入极度愤世嫉俗的聪明男女,要么是拓荒者、印第安人和职业运动员等原始人,他们的基本勇气和诚实与文明社会的野蛮形成了鲜明对比。海明威回到纽约后,写了一部讽刺性较小的小说《春潮》(1926年),他将短篇小说的风格和态度融入小说《太阳照常升起》(1926),该小说讲述了一群被战争击垮的美国和英国侨民的道德崩溃,他们通过一切可能的暴力手段逃离战场。小说《永别了,武器》(1929)再次成功地塑造了一个时代的思想,这是一个关于一名英国护士和一名美国救护车中尉在战争期间的辛酸爱情故事。除了更杰出的短篇小说集《没有女人的男人》(1927年)和《胜者一无所获》(1933年),他在接下来的几年里只写了两本较小的书,尽管他的作品继续对这一时期的文学产生巨大影响。《午后之死》(1932年)是一本关于斗牛的书,《非洲青山》(1935年)是关于大型狩猎的记述,尽管文学性不高,但与欺骗了他那一代人的空洞文化相比,这两本书进一步彰显了对原始和野蛮的刻画。在《有钱人与没钱人》(1937)中,海明威第一次表现出对通过集体行动解决社会问题的兴趣。这种态度在西班牙关于内战的报纸文章中继续存在,他的现实剧《第五纵队》(the Fifth Column)以间谍活动为主题,由本杰明·格雷泽(Benjamin Glazer)改编为舞台剧(1940年),并在《第五纵队与49个故事》(1938年)中发表,其中出现了他最优秀的两篇小说《弗朗西斯·麦康伯的短暂幸福生活》(the Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber)和《乞力马扎罗的雪》(The Snows
of Kilimanjaro)。
《丧钟为谁而鸣》(1940)是他最长的小说,讲述了西班牙内战中的一个事件,其主题具有普遍性,即在一个地方失去自由意味着处处都失去自由。他编辑了一本选集《战争中的男人》(1912年),但直到《过河入林》的出版(1950年)才有新小说问世。普遍认为,此时的海明威已经极像故事中的主人公,一位年迈的上校一样变得痛苦和失败。在辛辣的中篇小说《老人与海》(The old Man and Sea,1952)中,他再次赢得了评论界的喝彩,获得诺贝尔奖(1954年)。在他最后的几年里,他什么也没发表,在病重相当长一段时间后,死于自残枪伤。
Hemingway and His Literary Works
Ernest Miller Hemingway(1899-1961), born in Illinois, while attending school made frequent hunting and fishing expeditions in northern Michigan, which helped condition his later primitivistic attitude. After working as a Kansas City reporter, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in France,then transferred to the Italian infantry until the close of the First World War,after which he reported battles in the Near East for the Toronto Star, and settled in Paris as a member of the expatriate group. His memories of Paris,1921-26, were posthumously published in A Moveable Feast (1964). Influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude Stein, whose style strongly affected him, he published Three Stories
and Ten Poems (Paris, 1923)and In Our Time( U.S, 1925). These early stories already exhibited the attitude of mind and technique for which he later became famous. As the leading spokesman for the ‘lost generation,’ he expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people,disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values . The stories are mainly concerned with ‘tough’ people, either intelligent men and women who have dropped into an exhausted cynicism, or such primitives as frontiersmen, Indians,and professional athletes, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly contrasted with the brutality of civilized society. After Hemingway returned to New York and wrote the lesser satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring (1926), he carried the style and attitude of his short stories into the novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which tells of the moral collapse of a group of expatriated Americans and Englishmen, broken by the war,who turn toward escape through all possible violent diversions. Success in fictional craftsmanship and in portraying the mind of an era was again achieved in A Farewell to Arms (1929), the poignant love story of an English nurse and an American ambulance lieutenant during the war. Besides further distinguished collections of short stories, Men Without Women ( 1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933),he wrote only two lesser books during the next few years, although his work continued to exercise a great influence on the literature of the period. Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book on bull-fighting,and Green Hills of Africa(1935),an account of big-game hunting with digressions on literary matters,show a further cultivation of the primitive and brutal levels,contrasted with the hollow culture that had cheated his generation. In To Have and Have Not (1937),Hemingway for the first time showed an interest in a possible solution of social problems through collective action. This attitude continued in newspaper articles from Spain about its civil war, whose espionage was the subject of his realistic play, The Fifth Column, adapted for the stage(1940) by Benjamin Glazer, and printed in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938), in which appeared two of his finest stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows
of Kilimanjaro’ . For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel,on an incident in the Spanish Civil War, has universality in its thesis that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere. He edited an anthology,Men at War (1912), but issued no new novel until Across the River and into the Trees (1950) which was considered to show that Hemingway had become bitter and defeatist like his tale’s protagonist, an aging colonel. With The old Man and the Sea(1952), a parable of man against nature in а poignant novelette, he recaptured his critical acclaim,
recognized in a Nobel Prize (1954). In his last years he published nothing, and he had been seriously ill for some time before his death from a self-inflicted gun wound.