Hemingway’s Faith

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was a “complex man with a simple faith,” according to this flawed portrait from biographer Kendall (Oasis). Raised in a strict Protestant household by a father obsessed with “God’s wrath,” Hemingway said he was spiritually reborn during WWI when a Catholic priest anointed him while he was recovering from war wounds in an Italian hospital. After converting to Catholicism, Hemingway sought spiritual wisdom through his writing, Kendall argues. She notes that, after getting divorced from his second wife and before marrying again, Hemingway experienced a moodiness and “spiritual thirst” that found its way into For Whom the Bell Tolls, where Pilar—a strong-willed woman who becomes the leader of a guerrilla unit fighting fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War and whose name is a nod to Our Lady of the Pillar—muses that “there probably still is God after all, although we have banished him.” Unfortunately, the parallels Kendall draws between Hemingway’s faith and his fiction can feel forced, and odd religious biases further undermine her thesis, as when she suggests that Hemingway “should have reached out to God, through the intercession of Our Lady, to cure his spiritual impotency” amid the rocky end to his second marriage. This fails to convince. (Dec.)