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

ingway’s Dark Night” (New Street
Communications, LLC, $22.95).
Both see Catholicism as playing a
central role in Hemingway’s literary
vision and moral landscape. And yet
despite Burns’ penchant for pitting
rival experts against one another to
round out his analysis of complex subjects
and people, neither Stoneback
nor Nickel are cited or mentioned in
his latest documentary.
This is an unfortunate omission, for
part one of “Hemingway” promised a
deep dive into Hemingway’s “invention”
of the modern novel, which it
never delivered. The episode instead
turned away from the religious clues
in his work to focus on his public
image, war exploits, and psychological
instability — all while missing that singularly
under-reported and significant
aspect of Hemingway’s life as a writer:
his Catholicism.
Hemingway was raised in a Congregationalist
Protestant home, and
his first conversion to Catholicism
occurred when he was a 19-year-old
and volunteer ambulance driver in
Italy during World War I. Two weeks
into the job, he was delivering candy
to soldiers on the frontlines when he
was hit by machine-gun fire and more
than 200 metal fragments from an exploding
mortar round. An Italian priest
recovered his body, baptized him right
on the battlefield and gave him the last
rites.
Hemingway later described what happened
this way: “A big Austrian trench
mortar bomb of the type that used to
be called ash cans, exploded in the
darkness. I died then. I felt my soul or
something come right out of my body,
like you’d pull a silk handkerchief
out of a pocket by one corner. It flew
around and then came back and went
in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.”
After having been anointed, Hemingway
described himself as having
become a “Super-Catholic.” It was a
near-death experience that changed
the course of his life. After the war,
he went to work as a foreign correspondent
in Paris. And eight years later
— after his first marriage failed — he
undertook a second, more formal
conversion process in preparation for
marriage to his second wife, devout
Catholic Pauline Pfieffer.
It was at this time that Hemingway
changed the title of his unpublished
first novel, tentatively titled “Lost Generation,”
to “The Sun Also Rises.” And
writing to another friend, he declared,
“If I am anything I am a Catholic ...
I cannot imagine taking any other
religion seriously.”
He attended Mass (albeit irregularly)
for the rest of his life and went on
pilgrimages, received confession, had
Masses said for friends and relatives,
and raised his three sons as Catholics.
Most of his novels are set in Catholic
countries, and his last great hero (Santiago
of “The Old Man and the Sea”)
was a devout suffering servant, much
in the cruciform mold of most of his
heroes. When he won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1954, he gave away
the medal as a votive offering to “Our
Lady of Cobre” in Havana.
Unfortunately, his subsequent divorces
and additional marriages, drunken
brawling, domestic abuse, poison pen
letters, paranoia, megalomania, and
habitual womanizing tarnished his
youthful sense of himself as a “super-Catholic.”
Hemingway never wanted
to be known as a “Catholic writer”
because he simply felt he couldn’t live
up to the responsibility.
In a letter to his friend Father Vincent
Donavan in 1927 just before he
married his second wife, Hemingway
wrote, “I have always had more faith
than intelligence or knowledge and 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.”
Unlike James Joyce, Hemingway
didn’t renounce his faith; and unlike
Flannery O’Connor, he never promoted
it. He thought of himself, like
many of his protagonists (Nick Adams,
Jake Barns, Robert Jordan, Francis
McComber and Santiago), as a man
struggling to live with grace and die a
good death in a violent, unforgiving
world where all of us must suffer.
The first time I read Hemingway’s
books, I found an irrepressible piety
and sense of the sacred permeating
all his naturalistic plots. Had I known
then about his Catholicism, it would
have clarified things — and made the
books better.
Think of the ending to “For Whom
the Bell Tolls” — described so movingly
by the late John McCain in the
documentary — or even the parody of
the Lord’s Prayer in the story “A Clear,
Well-Lighted Place” — only this time
knowing that the author of these works
knew the Bible, prayed every day, and
had studied St. John of the Cross in
an original Spanish edition. It changes
everything.
And although Hemingway never
related to the surface aspects of American
Catholic life, he wrote at least one
work explicitly about Christ, “Today is
Friday,” a dialogue between three Roman
soldiers present at the crucifixion
discussing how well Jesus had died and
the grace he showed under pressure.
Unlike James Joyce, Hemingway didn’t
renounce his faith; and unlike Flannery
O’Connor, he never promoted it.
Knowing these things does not explain
away all the troubling aspects of
Hemingway’s egocentric personal life
— his public inebriations, domestic
abuse, womanizing, and suicide, but
it helps me to understand the kinds
of people Hemingway admired, their
motivations and ideals, and the brave,
virtuous person he was attempting to
become.
The Trappist monk Thomas Merton
wrote a poem the day after Hemingway
killed himself titled “An Elegy for
Ernest Hemingway.” It contains the
lines: “You pass briefly through our
midst. Your books and writings have
not been consulted.” In other words,
as I read it, the gifts he gave us are, for
the most part, still unreceived.
Robert Inchausti is professor emeritus
of English at Cal Poly, San Luis
Obispo, and the author of several books,
including “Thomas Merton’s American
Prophecy,” and “Subversive Orthodoxy.”
May 7, 2021 • ANGELUS • 29