Augustine Himmel offers a
piece on why he prays for Hemingway’s soul in a piece for americanmagazine.org.
In graduate school, a friend
and I, both Hemingway aficionados, would try to stump each other by quoting
lines from the famous writer’s fiction. I had a bit of an advantage because I
was a few years older than my rival and had already taught Hemingway to high
school students. And so, familiar with even obscure works like “A Man of the
World,” which adolescents enjoyed, I never lost one of our good-natured
contests. Yet despite my devotion to the Nobel Laureate, I never thought two
decades later I'd be praying for his soul.
…Far from being a nihilist,
he had an interest in Catholicism even before his 1927 marriage to Pauline, and
though he practiced the faith imperfectly, to say the least—four wives, several
affairs—it always remained important to him and permeates much of his fiction.
Santiago, after all, means St. James, and in 1954 Hemingway formally presented
his Nobel Prize Medal to Our Lady of Charity, the Patroness of Cuba.
Yet I do not pray for Hemingway
because he was Catholic, but rather because through his writing he has been a
friend of mine, and in 1961, two years before I was born, he put the twin
barrels of a shotgun against his forehead and committed suicide.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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