Why was he so negative? Why does no one ever live happily ever after in his books? Some people really do live happy lives of noodle salad. Why were there never any winners? There are winners in life, yet one of his own collection of short stories he titled...Winner Take Nothing. God damn the pusher, Hem, lighten the fuck up whydontja.
Why did he seek out danger and pain and death, tragedy and unhappiness? Was his life in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of a physician, so maddeningly, stultifyingly boring that he had to volunteer in wars and revel in bull fights where--guaranteed!--an animal is going to get tortured and be killed or his torturer is going to be gored?
By all accounts, he had friends who liked him, children who adored him, wives who loved him, people who were not just celebrity "pilot fish", real friends, real women who loved him and whom he loved. Agnes von Kurowsky. In Farewell to Arms she is Catherine Barkley. Agnes did not die in childbirth along with her and Hemingway's son. She wrote Hemingway a Dear John letter--ooh, that is tough. She was his first love and he was much the younger. Yes, crushing. But both Agnes and Ernest moved on. People do that too you know. Agnes married twice, Ernest fo' times. People never move on from loss and tragedy in Hemingway's semi-non-fiction fiction.
Why do you have to "bleed" to write really well?
He was a total success in writing--won the fucking Nobel Prize!
What is there in Ernest Hemingway's life to be unhappy about? Okay, his father blew his brains out, BIG DEAL. Seriously, Hemingway moved on from that...until he didn't. Let me put it differently: Hemingway had fun, he was funny, he was movie star handsome, he was loved, he was an artistic and financial Winner by writing of soo much pain. I don't understand why he deliberately chose that path.
Winners and Losers, I love Ernest Hemingway's books. Can't get enough of them. Hemingway is the best writer I have ever read. His sentences are as pure and precise--and as cold as a snowflake. His books, I can't choose one there are so many brilliant ones, are second only to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as the greatest I have ever read. I also think I would have liked Hemingway personally, if I had known him. But why did he write so brutally? I don't know.
