Angelus News | May 7, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 9

Ernest Hemingway writing
while at his campsite
in Kenya, circa 1953.
| LOOK MAGAZINE/
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Hemingway’s haunted Catholicism
A new PBS documentary on the writer’s life largely
skips over its most overlooked component
BY ROBERT INCHAUSTI
“I have never wanted to be known as
a Catholic writer because I know the
importance of setting an example —
and I have never set a good example.”
— Ernest Hemingway to Father
Vincent Donavan, in an unpublished
letter dated December 1927.
Among the many surprises in
Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s
six-hour documentary on
Ernest Hemingway are the accounts of
Hemingway’s two adult conversions to
Catholicism.
Most literary scholars do not take
either of these conversions very seriously
and see them as pressed upon
Hemingway by family, friends, and
circumstances. The conventional view
is that Hemingway’s true “religion”
— insofar as he can be said to have
one at all — is his famous “Code”: the
idea made explicit in his interviews
that in order to give meaning to life,
one had to live by some set of ethical
principles.
It could be “the code of the hunter,”
or “the code of the bullfighter,” or
even “the code of the sea.” It didn’t
matter what code one chose — just as
long as it provided rules for living a life
of rectitude and dignity in an otherwise
meaningless universe.
But if Hemingway’s conversions were
sincere — and there is little reason to
think they were not — then his “code”
is not based on the agnosticism of a
disillusioned existentialist, but rather
on the comprehensive, universal affirmation
of Christianity.
Burns and Novick do not look very
deeply into this possibility, even
though they quote Hemingway himself
as saying as much. Instead, they take
Hemingway for the stoic adventurer
and icon of American machismo that
everybody else does.
Still, the fact that they bring up
Hemingway’s Catholicism at all confirmed
my own suspicions of a deeper,
clear-eyed spiritual sensibility lurking
behind all of Hemingway’s naturalistic
plots — forcing me to reconsider
everything I had previously thought
about the man. That led me to two
books: H.R. Stoneback’s groundbreaking
work “In the Nominal Country of
the Bogus: Hemingway’s Catholicism
and the Biographers” (1991), and
Matthew Nickel’s more recent “Hem-
28 • ANGELUS • May 7, 2021