Catholicism in a time of crisis

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was probably the best known of a generation of writers and artists who explored the possibility of living with nobility and courage in a universe without God. What Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Albert Camus’ The Plague did in French literature, and what Humphrey Bogart did for Hollywood film, Hemingway accomplished in a singular manner for modern American literature.

In his stories and novels, he depicted those who have been through the horrors of war or the disappointments of life and somehow arrived at a code of stoic dignity, self-restraint, and honor despite the inevitable brutality of experience and the tragic emptiness of the world. Hemingway showed a whole generation how to act like a man despite all. He became a father figure of sorts: It was not only his children who called him “Papa.” And yet, even a cursory examination of his greatest novels (The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms) and his spare, plainly spoken, dialogue-heavy short stories will find them rife with references direct and indirect to Roman Catholicism.

It is not subtle, and it is, if not ubiquitous, pervasive. Even so, most Hemingway biographers and scholars have paid it little attention. In Hemingway’s Faith (Rowman & Littlefield, 256 pp.), however, Mary Claire Kendall presents the life of the author as a distinctly Catholic one.

In his writing, Hemingway frequently depicts “bad Catholics”—protagonists who follow a moral code of quiet strength in the face of the abyss, but for whom the possibility of faith and even saintliness remains sympathetic and attractive, if a bit naïve. For instance, the character Frazer, in “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” is a patient in a hospital, and we gradually discern he is both spiritually and physically broken. The closest to Christian belief he can come is to recognize that the Marxist doctrine of “religion is the opium of the people” does nothing to discredit religion: He identifies both music and bread as “the opium of the people.” Life, Frazer thinks, is suffering, and all these things make life hurt a little less. But Frazer’s closest companion is the religious sister Cecilia, who serves in the hospital. Frazer cannot pray, but she does, and he reveres her for it. When the Notre Dame football game plays on the radio, she repairs to the chapel to pray for Our Lady’s university, while Frazer sends her scoring updates.

So also, in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” an old and lonely waiter in a café understands why his last customer does not want to go home. The solitude of one’s bed at night is the place where the nothingness of the universe makes itself felt. The waiter recites to himself a form of the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary with “nada y pues nada” and “nothing full of nothing” replacing the names of the Father and the Blessed Mother. The universe is empty, the waiter believes, but its emptiness is a God-shaped abyss.

These stories are unusual, but Hemingway fills out his other work with more incidental Catholic characters and details, most of which hold an attraction for his protagonists—even when it is a wistful and disillusioned one, where the fullness of faith remains out of reach. The faith often appears, as it does in The Sun Also Rises, as a beautiful cathedral, “nice and dim”: a place one can admire from outside or even from time to time enter and pray for the gift of faith.

Kendall’s biography shows us with impressive evidence that Hemingway was in life something more than the bad Catholic he portrayed in his fiction. Hemingway served as a volunteer with the French Red Cross during WWI. Early in his service, an exploding mortar shell scored his body with 227 wounds, while it killed one soldier near him and severed the legs of another. Instinctive and heroic, the 18-year-old Hemingway raised up the wounded soldier and carried him to safety—although machine gun bullets ripped through his right knee and foot as he did so.

While medics bandaged Hemingway’s wounds, an Italian priest anointed him. Kendall asserts that from the moment of this blessing—was it a prayer? Extreme Unction? Baptism?—Hemingway considered himself a Catholic. Kendall pushes her case beyond what the evidence shows, and yet she does demonstrate that, by 1926, a somewhat older Hemingway had come to describe that blessing as one of conversion: “If I am anything I am a Catholic. Had extreme unction administered to me as such in July 1918 and recovered. So guess I’m a super-Catholic … cannot imagine taking any other religions at all seriously.”

In any case, the battlefield-traumatized, depressive, unstable, and alcoholic Hemingway would marry his second wife, the Catholic Pauline Pfeffer, in 1927, and numerous testimonies from the author and others indicate that he practiced the faith somewhat consistently over many years. His was a specifically Catholic form of Christianity, too: The apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, such as those at Fatima in 1917, seem to have convinced him “that the Catholic Church was the true church.”

Kendall attempts to make this conviction as central to Hemingway’s life as it is to the biographer’s, but she interpolates her own devotion into moments of the author’s life where his is not evident. She never misses an opportunity to point out the “coincidence” of Hemingway or someone else doing something on one of the church’s feast days. Her narrative is probably too flattering to Hemingway’s claim that, though he was frequently a sinful and failed person, his writer’s discipline was nonetheless a way of sanctity. We might more plausibly call this excuse-making.

Kendall, the author of two previous books on Hollywood movie star converts to Catholicism, seems more interested in Hemingway as a friend of Gary Cooper’s than as a great writer; she writes too often that something or someone is “iconic.” Her prose is filled with dependent clauses destined forever to remain fragments, while her sentences are studded with initial conjunctions that make the meaning of her sentences zig-zag in defiance of all logic. Even so, Kendall’s case is substantial and finally convincing. If Hemingway was part of a generation of writers made famous for trying to dramatize the possibility of moral seriousness in a culture increasingly suspicious of Christian faith, he did so in a manner that continuously held up that faith as a real possibility—a possibility just out of reach for his protagonists, but not for all his characters, and certainly not for his readers, to whom Hemingway shows again and again that only one thing can fill the God-shaped abyss in the soul.