Friday, March 4, 2011

In what short stories does Ernest Hemingway relate his life to events in the stories?

Ernest Hemingway often drew on events from his own life
when composing his short fiction. An especially significant example is his tale titled
“A Very Short Story.” In this extremely brief work, Hemingway’s personal experiences are
alluded to in a number of different ways, including the
following:


  • Like the unnamed protagonist of the
    story, Hemingway was indeed an American in Europe during World War
    I.

  • Like the protagonist, Hemingway was injured during the
    war, required hospital treatment, and fell in love with a nurse who treated him. In real
    life, the nurse was a fellow American named Agnes von Kurowsky.

  • Like the protagonist, Hemingway was treated in Italy
    (where he had been injured).

  • Hemingway implies a sexual
    relationship between the protagonist and the nurse.  Agnes von Kurowski denied that she
    had had any such relationship with Hemingway (see Jeffrey Meyers’ biography of
    Hemingway). According to Martin Smith, in his study of Hemingway’s book In Our
    Time
    ,

readability="8">

Despite what some biographers have claimed, and
despite the wishful thinking of some Hemingway "fans," it is highly
unlikely that Hemingway and Agnes von Kurowsky
had sex in his hospital
bed.



  • In the story,
    Hemingway implies that the couple have serious, imminent plans to marry. Von Kurowski
    later claimed that she was never as serious about Hemingway as Hemingway suggested and
    that their relationship had been quite innocent. Nevertheless, in the story, the
    protagonist describes receiving letters from the nurse, who was smitten with him. Her
    letters, he says,

readability="7">

were all about the hospital, and how much she
loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was
missing him at
night.



  • In the
    story, the protagonist returns to America, planning to find a job so that he and the
    nurse can marry – a detail that fits the basic facts of Hemingway’s
    life.

  • In the story, the nurse falls in love with an
    Italian and breaks off her relationship with the protagonist – another detail taken from
    “real life.”

  • In the story, the nurse’s letter is sent to
    Chicago, which was indeed Hemingway’s
    hometown.

In short, the events described in “A
Very Short Story” bear many resemblances to real events in Hemingway’s life, but
Hemingway seems to have taken a good deal of fictional liberty in creating the
story.

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