Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/01/31/how_hemingway_became_a_catholic.php

How Hemingway Became a Catholic

Monday, January 31, 2005

Ernest Hemingway once said that everything worthwhile in the American novel came from Huckleberry Finn. Its themes do variously reappear in Hemingway's work. The raft is a Good Place. Huck lights out for the territories, beyond civilization. Yet though he shared Mark Twain's taste for the tall story, such do not reappear in his own fiction, no doubt for stylistic reasons, his style apparently simple, most meaning unstated, deep beneath, and dark, screaming nada.

Courtesy Dartmouth College Library

— Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer (1927). —

Yet the sunlit Hemingway's whoppers came out in conversation, and A. E. Hotchner brings us a few good ones in Papa Hemingway (1955). I am, to be sure, aware of Philip Young's questions about the provenance of some material here; but there seems no doubt of the story's authenticity. So here is Hemingway's account of how he became a Catholic, after he left his first wife Hadley and married the heiress Pauline Pfeiffer—a pious tale, as befits its subject.

Catholicism, indeed, had been an underground stream in both The Sun Also Rises (1925) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway seriously drawn to it. In 1950 while in Paris he told old Hotchner how he became a Catholic while writing A Farewell to Arms. In addition to trouble starting the novel,

[I] was having a hell of a tough time with Pauline. Don't know if it was autosuggestion from Sun Also Rises or maybe my reaction from just having divorced Hadley, but I was in a hell of a jam—I couldn't make love. Had had very good bed with Pauline all the time we were having our affair, and after Hadley had left me. But after our marriage, suddenly I could make no more love than Jake Barnes. Pauline was very patient and understanding and we tried everything but nothing worked. I became terribly discouraged. I had been to several doctors, I even put myself in the hands of a mystic who fastened electrodes to my head and feet—hardly the seat of my trouble—and me drink a glass of calves' liver blood every day. It was all hopeless. Then one day, Pauline said, "Listen, Ernest, why don't you go pray?" Pauline was a very religious Catholic and I wasn't a religious anything, but she had been so damned good I thought that it was the least I could do for her. There was a small church two blocks from us and I went there and said a short prayer. Then I went back to our room. Pauline was in bed, waiting. I undressed and got in bed and we made love as if we had invented it. We never had any trouble again. That's when I became a catholic.

Yup, miracle. Prayer had raised the dead. Resurrection. Yet this revisits the Catholic themes of his novels: Jake's inability to pray (Eliot's wounded Fisher King of The Waste Land), the fishing trip to the Good Place near the monastery of Roncevalles, Catherine Barkley's Christopher medal, the priest's nobility among the cynical soldiers. The priest comes from the frozen Abruzzi, a Good Place. And Hemingway was some kind of Catholic, though in fact he became one to marry the Catholic Pauline, because he was obliged to.

Yet Hotchner records a visit to Burgos in 1954:

In the northern town of Burgos, Ernest asked Adamo to stop at the cathedral, which is one of the grandest in Spain. "Wherever you see a cathedral," Ernest said, "it's grain country." With my help Ernest pulled himself tortuously from the car and went up the cathedral steps, bringing both feet together on each step. He touch the holy water and crossed the murky deserted interior, his moccasins barely audible on the stone floor. He stood for a moment at the side altar, looking up at the candles, his gray trench coat, white whiskers, and steel-rimmed glasses giving him a monkish quality. Then, holding tightly he lowered his knees onto a prayer bench and bent his forehead onto his overlapped hands. He stayed that way for several minutes.

Afterwards, descending the cathedral steps, he said, "Sometimes I wish I had been a better catholic."

What are we to make of all this? For what it is worth, Catholic Europe was Hemingway country, Paris and Spain especially, as much as the Lake Country was Wordsworth Country. And in Catholic Europe the Church is a huge felt presence, whatever notions you hold. The street names, the Boulevardes, the Avenidas, the cathedrals, the very cobblestones speak of history, often following the old Roman roads; the shrines, the old pilgrimage routes, the monasteries, the density of culture. And in Spain, beneath it all, the deep pagan past, the corrida coming up from Crete, the Moorish presence in the south. As Belloc said, "The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith."

Hemingway was Europeanized, though also very American, and sensitive to the Catholicness of European culture. I once asked an Irish cabinet minister, whom I had met in Spain, whether Connor Cruise O'Brien is a Catholic. "Certainly," the Dubliner said, really meaning O'Brien was Irish. "Well, does he believe in God?" I asked. "Of course not," he said. In Portrait of an Artist, a friend asks Stephen Dedalus (Joyce, more or less) whether he has become a Protestant. He replies that he may have lost his faith, but hasn't lost his mind. In Catholic Europe, it's hard to get away from it if you have a mind at all.

Even in his last years, though not a churchgoer, Hemingway did perform his Easter duties, confession and communion. In this, America is very different. If anything, in America, Catholicness is a little odd, no one more aware of American exceptionalism than the Vatican. In England, it is a little odd too.