Review: Ernest Hemingway’s simple, devotional and private Catholicism
Ernest Hemingway in 1950 (Wikimedia Commons)The American fiction writer and journalist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was raised in the Congregational faith in an affluent suburb of Chicago. In high school, his flair for writing found him editing the school’s newspaper and yearbook. Though he was expected to attend the University of Illinois for college, he abandoned his studies to join The Kansas City Star as a freelance reporter.
But the Great War was raging in Europe, and he felt he was missing out on the excitement, so at 18 years of age he volunteered to be a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. It was there one night on the front lines that an Austrian trench mortar shell exploded just three feet away from Hemingway, cruelly injuring him as 227 pieces of shrapnel tore into his legs. Soaked in blood and unsure if he would live or die, the Protestant in a Catholic country found himself praying for the intercessions of “Our Lady and various saints.”
Crucially, an Italian priest happened upon the shelled soldiers hanging onto life and anointed them in the rite of extreme unction. In Hemingway’s Faith, Mary Claire Kendall notes that “Hemingway considered July 8, 1918, a day of spiritual rebirth. It was the day he had stared down death and was ‘anointed’ and absolved of his sins.” From then on, he called himself Catholic.
Yet it was a simple, devotional and very private Catholicism that was not uncommon then. A friend in the 1920s, Kendall notes, felt Hemingway “was a very strong Catholic. His religion came mainly from the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. He told me several times that if there were no Bible, no man-made Church laws, the apparitions proved beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church was the true church.”
Some 40 years later, Hemingway would tell a New York Post interviewer: “Politics and religion are two things I never discuss. If my books don’t make it clear how I feel about both, then I’ve failed in my life’s work.”
His leftist politics are fairly easy to discern in his writing—he was at one point considered “a person of interest” by the F.B.I.—but it’s the objective of Hemingway’s Faith to find the religious themes that are subterranean in his novels.
Kendall writes that The Sun Also Rises is “drenched in Catholicism,” noting a scene in which the war-injured Jake Barnes enters a cathedral in Pamplona and says, “I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying. I was a little ashamed, and regretted I was such a rotten Catholic” and that “it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time.”
In A Farewell to Arms, there is an important conversation with a Catholic priest about love. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, a major character named Pilar—a nod to Our Lady of the Pillar—says, “There probably still is a God after all, although we have banished him.” In The Old Man and the Sea, the fisherman Santiago—named for the Spanish pilgrimage destination of Santiago de Compostela that Hemingway loved—is chasing a marlin that is being hunted by sharks; Santiago claims he is not religious but “proceeds to pray one Hail Mary after another, adding, ‘Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is.’”
Unfortunately, there are only instances of religious considerations in Hemingway’s fiction, nothing that is head-on, probably because he thought of himself as “fallen away” and in over his head religion-wise. “His checkered marital history, he incorrectly believed, precluded him from full communion with the Church,” Kendall writes.
Kendall is particularly savvy in her perspectives on Hemingway’s irregular marriages. His first wife, Hadley Richardson, was wealthy, unbaptized and eight years older than he. After their civil wedding, she permitted the even wealthier Pauline Pfeiffer, a fashion journalist four years older than Hemingway, to live with the couple, seemingly oblivious to the inklings of a love affair. Because Hemingway’s marriage to Richardson had been outside the church, the archbishop of Paris granted Hemingway an annulment to marry Pfeiffer, a Catholic, and he was finally officially certified as a co-religionist.
But his embrace of the faith did not last. Although he often castigated himself for his transgressions, he found it too hard to change. He engaged in multiple love affairs that ended in another divorce and his wedding to the World War II journalist Martha Gellhorn. She then divorced him as well after five years because of his bullying, heavy drinking and jealousy. She was followed by Mary Welsh, like him an alcoholic and war correspondent, who became Hemingway’s caretaker for the final 15 years of his life as he descended into paranoia and mental illness.
Like his father, sister and brother, who all died by suicide, Hemingway seemed to have inherited hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder caused by an excess of iron in the blood, accruing the symptoms of diabetes, memory impairment and depression. But he was misdiagnosed and distressingly subjected to 25 electroshock treatments, about which he wrote to the editor and novelist A. E. Hotchner: “What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It’s a bum turn, Hotch, terrible.”
Evidence of his psychic losses includes that in 1961 it took him “a week to compose a simple note of congratulations to newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy. He was writing between tears, frustrated that the words were so slow in coming.”
On Saturday night, July 1, 1961, Hemingway seemed to be in good spirits as he and his wife ate at a Chinese restaurant. His final words to Mary were “Good night, my kitten.” Early Sunday morning, he took out his favorite shotgun. “Mary found him at the bottom of the stairs, slumped over, a bloody mess.” He was not yet 62.
I found Mary Claire Kendall’s book riveting and full of fresh information. She has done a wonderful job of sifting through the mountain of material on Ernest Hemingway and is wisely indebted to the research of the late H. R. Stoneback, “the foremost scholar on Hemingway’s Catholicism and himself a convert.”
The late Duke University poet and essayist Reynolds Price suggested that although he did not consciously know it, Hemingway’s lifelong subject was saintliness. Hemingway’s Faith provides ample evidence of that.
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