During that period of time, Hemingway stayed mostly in Spain, the country that stood for almost everything that mattered to him, including his life principles and his struggle between life and death. There he became war correspondent for NANA, the North American Newspaper Alliance. Thus, he saw much of the fighting and could collect experiences for a new novel. After a short stay in Paris due to liver troubles, he came back to Spain and then returned to America to organize the experiences he gathered in Spain into a novel. In 1940, his experiences from the war were worked into For Whom the Bell Tolls. The novel was widely proclaimed as his masterpiece. Hemingway thus became a real master with a worldwide reputation.
2.4 Honor and Death
On December 7, 1941, the United States entered World WarⅡ. For the first time in his life, Hemingway took an active part in a war. He was fiercely anti-Nazi, even offering his services to the FBI. Early in June 1937, in a speech, Hemingway stressed he was anti-fascist:
There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism. (Baker, 1962: 224)
However, he was more in love with the adventure of war than the issues involved. In the war, the Fascists led him to take drastic actions. He killed a man who stood face to face with him and was seriously shocked.
After the war, he started and abandoned a novel about the earth, the sea and the air. He went to Italy to gather materials for Across the River and into the Tree, but the novel was widely disproved, and the majority of reviewers accused him of bad taste. It showed that Hemingway had grown old. Fortunately, one section of another long sea novel, which was also started and abandoned, was published under the title The Old Man and the Sea. This short novel became Hemingway’s best-selling book, won him the Pulitzer Prize, and led him to win a Nobel Prize in 1954. The Nobel committee declared:
We express our admiration for the eagle eye with which he has observed, and for the accuracy with which he has interpreted the human existence of our turbulent times, and for the admirable restraint with which he has described their naked struggle. (Carter, 1999)
Then, his bad luck struck once again. On a safari he was the victim of two successive plane crashes. The injuries he got were grave and numerous. He sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, and temporarily lost his vision in the left eye. The physical pains caused him to crack up, and his strength was entirely gone. He was in so much pain that he could not sit down. Add to this high blood pressure, diabetes and liver damage brought on by years of drinking. He had shrunk from over 250 pounds to 165. His eyes stared blankly. Worst of all, he could not write. Finally, he could not bear these pains any more.
On July 2, 1961, at home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put his gun to his head and fired.
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大学英语---