Always Keep Fighting
Last week, my husband and I watched the PBS three-part, six-hour documentary "Hemingway," which follows the life and literary career of one of the world’s great writers, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). The documentary was made by renowned filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. As usual with Ken Burns’ work, he and his partner have rendered a fascinating three-dimensional story of this complicated, flawed, and gifted man who lived in tumultuous times. He survived near-death explosions and other dangers in the First and Second World Wars and the Spanish Civil War as a soldier and journalist in Spain, France, and Italy, where he sometimes fought on the front lines and sustained head wounds and shrapnel. He carried this trauma for life, as survivors of war often do.
Hemingway also embarked on daring personal adventures, some that almost claimed his life. He hunted big game in Africa and survived two plane crashes (in two days!) there in January 1954. Hemingway and his wife Mary were in a single-engine plane flying over Uganda’s Lake Albert when the pilot nosedived to avoid a flock of large birds. They crashed into a hillside and spent the night in the jungle surrounded by elephants. The next day, the group was picked up by a tourist boat and brought to the town of Butiaba. There, the Hemingways boarded another small plane, with a new pilot. The plane crashed on takeoff and caught fire, and the novelist had to ram his head against the door repeatedly to escape the flames. Meanwhile, the whole world thought he was dead from the first crash--it had been spotted from the air by a search plane, which reported no signs of life. So Hemingway got to read his own premature obituaries. This, of course, would not happen in this era of cell phones—and could only happen to Hemingway, who was larger than life in every way.
Burns and Novick crafted the story from the writer’s letters and from interviews with his son Patrick and critics such as the Peruvian 2010 Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, who considers Hemingway’s short novel "The Old Man and the Sea" his masterpiece. For many critics, "A Farewell to Arms," set in Italy during World War I, is his greatest work, although for my husband (who took a course on Hemingway at the University of Kansas), "The Sun Also Rises," set in Paris and Spain after the war, is superior to the rest and shows the novelist at his sharpest. Others think "For Whom the Bell Tolls," set during the Spanish Civil War, is his best. For me, the story that Hemingway recounts in "The Old Man and the Sea," about a Cuban fisherman’s epic struggle to bring in a blue marlin, is a metaphor for life: We might fail to obtain the prize, but we can never be defeated, because ultimately it is not the achieving of the goal that counts but rather the process. The understanding we gain by going through a challenging experience is where triumph resides—displaying courage and determination for what we want, never giving up, defines who we are.
As rich as Burns and Novick’s documentary is, it also uncovers Hemingway’s demons, including depression and mental illness. He sought to cope through alcoholism and self-medication. The untreated illness had painful ramifications that damaged or destroyed many of Hemingway's closest relationships--with his mother, his four wives, and his three sons. The repeated blows to the head he took—as a young pugilist, in car and plane wrecks, and from a skylight falling on him—were worsened by the alcohol, and he spiraled downward, eventually committing suicide at age 61—the same fate his father had succumbed to.
During Hemingway’s time, the topic of mental illness was taboo, and those who struggled with it had to deal with the misconceptions and stereotypes of this affliction. Like Hemingway, they hid their problem.
Fortunately, since Hemingway’s time, society has changed its views on mental illness, and although there is still work to do in this area, education, social services, science, and laws now enable us to accept and support those who struggle in this area. If you are one of those individuals who experience some type of mental illness, don’t hesitate to reach out for help. WMU has resources in place to guide and assist you in treating the problem. Don’t let fear of being misunderstood, stigmatized, or alienated keep you from addressing your situation. Reach out for help!