Ernest Hemingway
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Ernest Hemingway, 1950
Born: July 21, 1899
Oak Park, Illinois
Died: July 2, 1961
Occupation(s): Writer and journalist
Literary movement: The Lost Generation
Magnum opus: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Influences: Gertrude Stein, Pío Baroja
Influenced: Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, Charles Bukowski
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899-July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His distinctive writing style is characterized by terse minimalism and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction. Hemingway's protagonists are typically stoics, often seen as projections of his own character-men who must show "grace under pressure." Many of his works are considered classics in the canon of American literature.
Hemingway, nicknamed "Papa," was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as described in his novel A Moveable Feast. Known as part of "the Lost Generation," a name coined and popularized by Gertrude Stein, he led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime. Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, although he said he "would have been "happy-happier...if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen," referring to Danish writer Karen Blixen.[1] In 1961, at age 61, he committed suicide.
Early life and writing experience
A baby picture, c. 1900Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was the first son and the second of six children born to Clarence Edmonds ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's physician father attended to the birth of Ernest and subsequently blew a horn on his front porch, announcing to the neighbors that his wife had borne a baby boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.
Hemingway's mother had considerable singing talent and had once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow minds."[2] His mother had wanted to bear twins, and when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in similar clothes and with similar hairstyles, maintaining the pretense of the two children being "twins." Grace Hemingway further feminized her son in his youth by calling him "Ernestine."[3] (Though much is made of this by biographers -- especially Kenneth S. Lynn -- it should be noted that middle-class Victorian boys were often treated in this manner.)
While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsy interests of hunting and fishing in the woods and lakes of northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature would instill in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in areas of the world generally considered remote or isolated.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School where he excelled both academically and athletically. Hemingway boxed and played football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was serving as editor for both Trapeze and Tabula, the school's newspaper and literary magazine, respectively.
After high school Hemingway did not pursue a college education. Instead, at age seventeen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star (1917). Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months, throughout his lifetime he used the guidance from the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing style: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."[4]
World War I
A young Hemingway in his World War I uniformHemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He supposedly failed the medical examination due to poor vision (there is no record of this), and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps and left for Italy. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible.
Soon after arriving on the Italian front, he witnessed the brutalities of the war; on his first day of duty, an ammunition factory near Milan suffered an explosion. Hemingway had to pick up the human remains, mostly of women who had worked at the factory. This first, extremely cruel encounter with death left him shaken. The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror; for example, one of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, quoted to him a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next."[5] (Hemingway, for his part, would conjure this very same Shakespearean line in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his famous African short stories.) In another instance, a 50-year-old soldier, to whom Hemingway said, "You're troppo vecchio for this war, pop," replied, "I can die as well as any man."[6] ("troppo vecchio" means "too old" in this context)
At the Italian front on 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, ending his career as an ambulance driver. The exact details of the attack are in dispute, but Hemingway was certainly hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left fragments in both of his legs, and by a burst of machine-gun fire. He was subsequently awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government for, whilst injured, dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety.
After this experience, Hemingway convalesced in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross. At the hospital there was very little to do for entertainment. Hemingway would often drink heavily and read newspapers to pass the time. It was here that he met Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of eighteen nurses attending groups of four patients each. Hemingway fell in love with Sister Agnes, who was more than six years older than him, but their relationship did not last. After he returned to the United States, she fell in love with and married another man. These events provided inspiration and were fictionalized in one of Hemingway's early novels, A Farewell to Arms.
Literary aftermath of WWI
First novels and other early works
After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Driven from the United States in part due to prohibition, in 1920 he took a job in Toronto, Ontario at the Toronto Star. He worked there as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent. It was in Toronto that Hemingway befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this time and showed them to Hemingway, who praised it as fine work. Callaghan and Hemingway would later reunite in Paris.
For a short time from 1920 to 1921, Ernest lived on the near north side of Chicago working for a small newspaper. In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. In September, he moved to a cramped fourth floor apartment at 1239 North Dearborn in a run-down section of Chicago's near north side. The building still stands with a plaque on the front of it calling it "the Hemingway Apartment." Hadley found it dark and depressing, and, partly because of this, the Hemingways decided to live abroad for a time. In December of 1921 Hemingway left Chicago and Oak Park forever.
At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris, where Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Star. After Hemingway's return to Paris, Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginnings of the American expatriate circle that became known as the Lost Generation, a term coined by Stein. Hemingway's other influential mentor was Ezra Pound[7], the founder of imagism. Hemingway later said in reminiscence of this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right."[8] The group often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 Rue de l'Odéon. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States. Hemingway's own first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, during a brief return to Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. Hemingway asked Gertrude Stein to be little John's godmother. Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the Toronto Star and resigned on January 1, 1924.
Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication of the short story collection In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as In Our Time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.
Gertrude Stein was a long-time mentor of Hemingway and served as an important influence on his style and literary development.In April of 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at first close friends, often drinking and talking together. They frequently exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald did much to advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first collections of stories, although the relationship later cooled and became more competitive. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, however, disliked Hemingway from the start. Openly describing him as "bogus" and "phoney as a rubber cheque" and asserting that his macho persona was a facade, she became irrationally convinced that Hemingway was homosexual and accused her husband of having an affair with him.
Whether or not Zelda Fitzgerald's assessment of the relationship between the two men was correct, it has been suggested in some sources that Hemingway's well-documented homophobia and his frequent attacks on openly gay individuals, such as Jean Cocteau, was over-compensation for his own latent homosexuality. In one such instance, an anecdote told by Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé") with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective]). Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil," a salacious and phallic allusion.[9][10] The obvious rage against Cocteau and Radiguet (whose relationship has been heavily contested in other sources) shows an inherent hostility against homosexuals which also becomes a central theme of much of his short fiction, including "The Sea Change". [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]
These relationships and long nights of excessive drinking provided inspiration for Hemingway's first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). It took him only six weeks to finish at his favorite restaurant in Montparnasse, La Closerie des Lilas. The novel, semi-autobiographical in that it follows a group of expatriate Americans in Europe, was successful and was met with critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of literature, he was apparently inspired to write one after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby.
Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas, in 1927. Hemingway converted to Catholicism himself at this time. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a collection of short stories, containing "The Killers", one of Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories.
La Closerie des Lilas was Hemingway's favorite restaurant in the Montparnasse district of Paris. It was here that he wrote The Sun Also Rises.In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old Civil War pistol. This suicide caused great hurt for Hemingway; he immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and caused controversy by vocalizing the Catholic idea that suicides go to Hell. At about the same time, Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and friend of Hemingway from his days in Paris, also committed suicide. In that same year, Hemingway's second son, Patrick, was born in Kansas City (his third son, Gregory, would be born to the couple a few years later). It was a Caesarean birth after difficult labor, details that were incorporated into the concluding scene of his novel A Farewell to Arms.
Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms details the romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical in nature: the plot is directly inspired by his experience with Sister von Kurowsky in Milan; the intense labor pains of his second wife, Pauline, in the birth of Hemingway's son Patrick inspired Catherine's labor in the novel; the real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character Rinaldi is obscure, curiously, he had already appeared in In Our Time. A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. The success of A Farewell to Arms allowed Hemingway to become financially independent.
The (First) Forty Nine Stories
Several of Hemingway's most famous short stories were written in the period following the war; in 1938?-along with his only full-length play, entitled The Fifth Column?-49 such stories were published in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly stated in his own foreword to the collection, to write more. Many of the stories that make up this collection can be found in other abridged collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Some of the collection's important stories include: Old Man at the Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White Elephants, One Reader Writes, The Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. While these stories are rather short, the book also includes much longer stories. Among these the most famous are The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
Only one other story collection by Hemingway appeared during his lifetime, entitled Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War; "The Denunciation" is the most notable story therein. The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972. What is now considered the definitive compilation of all of Hemingway's short stories is published as The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, first compiled and published in 1987.
Early critical interplay
Hemingway's early works sold well and were generally received favorably by critics. This success elicited some crude and pretentious behavior from Hemingway, even in these formative years of his career. For example, he began to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write; he also claimed that the English novelist Ford Madox Ford was sexually impotent. Hemingway in turn was the subject of much criticism. The journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. According to Fitzgerald, McAlmon, the publisher of his first non-commercial book, labeled Hemingway "a fag and a wife-beater"[18] and claimed that Pauline was a lesbian (she is alleged to have had lesbian affairs after their divorce). Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, suggesting that he had derived his prose style from her own and from Sherwood Anderson's[19].
Max Eastman disparaged Hemingway harshly, asking him to "come out from behind that false hair on the chest" (these accusations led to a physical confrontation between the two). Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the Afternoon, a satire of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Another facet of Eastman's criticism consisted in the suggestion that Hemingway ought to give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about contemporary social affairs. Hemingway did so for at least a short time; his article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist magazine, and To Have and Have Not displayed a certain heightened social awareness.
Of criticism, Hemingway said, "You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love," in an interview in The Paris Review, with its founder, George Plimpton, in 1958.
Key West & the Spanish Civil War
Hemingway writing while living in Key WestFollowing the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida where he established his first American home. From his old stone house?-a wedding present from Pauline's uncle?-Hemingway fished in the Dry Tortugas waters with his longtime friend Waldo Peirce, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and traveled occasionally to Spain, gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.
Death in the Afternoon a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932. Hemingway had become a bullfighting aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his writings on Spain he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him that he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he did).
Ernest Hemingway painted by Waldo Peirce for Time Magazine in 1937A safari in the fall of 1932 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in the Mua Hills of Kenya. In Spain reporting on the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway broke friendship with John Dos Passos because Dos Passos kept reporting despite warning on the atrocities, not only of the Fascists whom Hemingway disliked, but also of the Republicans whom Hemingway favored ("The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles" by Stephen Koch, published 2005 ISBN 1582432805) and The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas). In this circumstance Hemingway has been linked to reporter Herbert Matthews. Hemingway also began to question his Catholicism at this time, eventually leaving the church (though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to Catholicism for the rest of his life). The story "The Denunciation" [1] seems autobiographical, thus suggesting that the author might have been an informant for the Republic as well as weapons instructor (The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas). 1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, an account of his African safari. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the fictionalized results of his African experiences.
Some health problems characterized this period of Hemingway's life: an anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids; kidney trouble from fishing in Spain, torn groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching ball, lacerations (to arms, legs, and face) from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a broken arm from a car accident.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939. Hemingway had lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascist nationalists, and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida home due to his 1940 divorce. A few weeks after the divorce Hemingway married his companion in Spain, Martha Gellhorn, as his third wife. His novel For Whom The Bell Tolls was published in 1940; the long work, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War, was based on real events (The Spanish Civil War Hugh Thomas) and tells of an American man named "Robert Jordan" fighting with Spanish guerrillas on the side of the Republicans. It is one of Hemingway's most notable literary accomplishments. The title is taken from the penultimate paragraph of John Donne's Meditation XVII.
World War II and its aftermath
The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, and for the first time in his life, Hemingway sought to take part in naval warfare.
Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking German submarines threatening the shipping off the coasts of Cuba and the United States (Martha Gellhorn always viewed the sub-hunting as an excuse for Hemingway and his friends to get gas and booze for fishing). As the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage--J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of Hemingway from the start, and would become more so later-- Ernest went to Europe as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine.
Hemingway, who was a correspondent for Collier's Weekly, observed the D-Day landings from an LCVP (landing craft), although he was not allowed to go ashore. He later became angry that his wife Martha Gellhorn--by then more a rival war correspondent than a wife-- had managed to get ashore in the early hours of June 7th dressed as a nurse, after she had crossed the Atlantic to England in a ship loaded with explosives. Still later, at Villedieu-les-Poêles, France, he allegedly threw three grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding - although this story needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. Hemingway acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards formed his own partisan group which, in his telling, took part in the liberation of Paris. This claim has been debunked by many historians, who said the only thing Hemingway liberated was the Ritz Hotel Bar; but he was without question on the scene.
After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of Eden, which was never finished and would be published posthumously in much-abridged form in 1986. At one stage, he planned a major trilogy which was to be comprised of "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being" (the latter eventually published in 1952 as The Old Man and the Sea). He spent a bit of time in a quaint Italian town called Acciaroli (located apprx. 136KM south of Naples, where he was often seen walking around town, with a bottle always in hand. Acciaroli was predominately known as a fishing village, and it was here where Hemingway was first introduced with the idea for "The Old Man and the Sea." Hemingway became fascinated with Antonio Masarone, an old fisherman whose Italian nickname translated as the "Old Man." (Mastracchio) There was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of these pieces were edited and stuck together as the posthumously-published novel Islands in the Stream (1970).
Newly divorced from Martha, Hemingway married the war correspondent Mary Welsh, whom he'd met overseas in 1944. Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), set in post-World War II Venice. He derived the title from the last words of General Stonewall Jackson. Enamored of a young Italian girl (Adriana Ivancich) at the time, Across the River and Into the Trees is a romance between a war-weary Colonel Cantwell (based on British Lieutenant General "Chink" Dorman-Smith [see Journal of Modern Literature, June 1984]) and the young Renata (clearly based on Adriana; "Renata" means "reborn" in Italian). The novel received largely bad reviews, many of which accused Hemingway of tastelessness, stylistic ineptitude, and sentimentality. Perhaps the last charge was the truest, and fit an emerging pattern: Hemingway was growing old. But 'Across the River' has its latter-day defenders nonetheless.
Later years
Alfred Eisenstaedt's portrait of Hemingway, 1952One section of the above-mentioned sea trilogy was published as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's enormous success satisfied and fulfilled Hemingway, probably for the last time in his life. It earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and restored his international reputation.
Then, his legendary bad luck struck once again; on a safari he suffered injuries in two successive plane crashes. Hemingway's injuries were serious; he sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye (and the hearing in his left ear), had paralysis of the sphincter, a crushed vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and first degree burns on his face, arms, and leg. Some US newspapers mistakenly ran his obituary thinking he had been killed in the accidents [2].
As if this were not enough, he was badly injured one month later in a bushfire accident which left him with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The pain left him in prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.
A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and cholesterol count were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression, aggravated by the drinking, was worsening.
He also lost his Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana, Cuba that he had owned for over twenty years, and was forced to go into exile in Ketchum, Idaho, when the conflict in Cuba began to escalate. And so the final chapter began--with Hemingway under surveillance from the US federal government for his residence and activities in Cuba.
Hemingway and Castro shakes hands; 1960On 26 February 1960, Ernest Hemingway was unable to get his bullfighting narrative The Dangerous Summer to the publishers. He therefore had his wife Mary summon his friend, Life Magazine bureau head Will Lang Jr., to leave Paris and come to Spain. Hemingway persuaded Lang to let him print the manuscript, along with a picture layout before it came out in hardcover. Although not a word of it was on paper, Ernest agreed to the proposal. The first part of the story appeared in Life Magazine on September 5, 1960. The other installments were printed on the following issues of Life.
Hemingway was upset by the photographs in his The Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems?-and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and his continued paranoia, although this may in fact have helped to precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatments. He also lost weight, and his 6-foot frame appeared gaunt at 170 pounds.
Death
Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment again; but, some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961, with a shotgun blast to the head. The gun was purchased at Abercrombie and Fitch. Judged not mentally responsible for his action of suicide, he was buried in a Roman Catholic service. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for "putting him out of business" by destroying his memory; and medical and scholarly opinion has been respectfully attentive to this view.
Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and later his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway's paternal line had a genetic condition or hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis, in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum. Hemingway's physician father is known to have developed bronze diabetes owing to this condition in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Some think Hemingway suffered from bipolar disorder. Throughout his life Hemingway was a heavy drinker and succumbed to alcoholism in his twilight years. One must allow that there is an excess of medical speculation about his final illness and death.
Ernest Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum, at the north end of town. A memorial, erected in 1966, is just off of Trail Creek Road, one mile northeast of the Sun Valley Lodge.
Posthumous publications
Ernest Hemingway was a prolific letter writer, and in 1981 many of these were published by Scribner in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961. It was met with some controversy as Hemingway himself stated he never wished to publish his letters; however the letters provide detail and personality that make the volume more engaging than most Hemingway biographies. Further letters would later be published in a book of his correspondence with his editor Max Perkins, The Only Thing that Counts [1996].
Hemingway was still writing new works up to the time of his death in 1961. All of these unfinished works which were Hemingway's sole creation have been published posthumously; they are A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Nick Adams Stories (portions of which were previously unpublished), The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden.[20] In a note forwarding "Islands in the Stream" Mary Hemingway indicated that she worked with Charles Scribner, Jr. on "preparing this book for publication from Ernest's original manuscript." In that note she stated that "beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest's. We have added nothing to it." Some controversy has surrounded the publication of these works, insofar as it has been suggested that it is not necessarily within the jurisdiction of Hemingway's relatives or publishers to determine whether these works should be made available to the public. For example, scholars often disapprovingly note that the version of The Garden of Eden published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1986, though in no way a revision of Hemingway's original words, nonetheless does not include some two-thirds of the original manuscript[21].
In 1999, another novel entitled True at First Light appeared under the name of Ernest Hemingway, though it was heavily edited by his son Patrick Hemingway. Six years later, Under Kilimanjaro, a re-edited and considerably longer version of True at First Light appeared. In either edition, the novel is a fictional account of Hemingway's final African safari in 1953-1954. He spent several months in Kenya with his fourth wife, Mary, before his near-fatal plane crashes took place[22]. Anticipation of the novel, whose manuscript was completed in 1956, adumbrates perhaps an unprecedentedly large critical battle over whether it is proper to publish the work (many sources mention that a new, light side of Hemingway will be seen as opposed to his canonical, macho image[23]), even as editors Robert W. Lewis of University of North Dakota and Robert E. Fleming of University of New Mexico have pushed it through to publication; the novel was published on September 15 2005.
Also published after Hemingway's death were several collections of his work as a journalist. These collections contain his columns and articles for Esquire Magazine, The North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Toronto Star; they include Byline: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White, and Hemingway: The Wild Years edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. Finally, a collection of introductions, forwards, public letters and other miscellenea was published as Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame in 2005.
Influence and legacy
The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was considerable and continues today. Indeed, the influence of Hemingway's style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one of the best stories ever written". Pulp fiction and "hard boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway. Hemingway's terse prose style--"Nick stood up. He was all right"-- is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway. Hunter S. Thompson often compared himself to Hemingway, and terse Hemingway-esque sentences can be found in The Rum Diary. Thompson also committed suicide, in a similar fashion to Hemingway, perceived by many as deliberate in Thompson's quest to honour his hero. Beyond the more formal literature authors, popular novelist Elmore Leonard, who authored scores of Western and Crime genre novels, cites Hemingway as his preeminent influence and this is evident in his tightly written prose. Though he never claimed to write serious literature, he did say, "I learned by imitating Hemingway....until I realized that I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take myself or anything as seriously as he did."
In Latin American literature, Hemingway's impact can perhaps best be seen in the work of Gabriel García Márquez, who, for instance, often uses the sea as a central image in his fiction. The 1988 film The Moderns locates itself in Hemingway's Paris with a central character named Nick Hart, who befriends Hemingway. Science fiction novelist Joe Haldeman won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for his novella, The Hemingway Hoax, a story which explored the effect that Hemingway's lost stories might have had upon twentieth century history. The famous heavy-metal band, Metallica were inspired by 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' and penned the eponymous song that went on to become a major hit. In 1999, Michael Palin retraced the footsteps of Hemingway, in Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, a television documentary, one hundred years after the birth of his favorite writer. The journey took him through many sites including Chicago, Paris, Italy, Africa, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. The book is available at his website. Since 1987, actor-writer Ed Metzger has portrayed the life of Ernest Hemingway in one-man stage show Hemingway: On The Edge, featuring stories and anecdotes from Hemingway's own life and adventures. Metzger quotes Hemingway, "My father told me never kill anything you're not going to eat. At the age of 9, I shot a porcupine. It was the toughest lesson I ever had." More information about the show is available at website
At this writing, only one of Hemingway's sons (Patrick) survives. In Harry Turtledove's Alternate History Timeline-191, Hemingway shows up as a character who drove ambulances on the US-Canadian Front in Quebec during the Great War. The character had part of his reproductive organs shot off in the war, giving him severe depression and suicidal tendencies. In Dave Sim's graphic novel Cerebus, the story arc "Form and Void" features Ham and Mary Ernestway, parodies of Hemingway and his wife Mary. The last few years of Hemingway's life, including his electroshock therapy, the safari in which he was badly injured, and his suicide, are used as plot points for the story. The band Ween mentions Hemingway on the song "Don't Laugh I Love You". The lyrics read, "Ernest Hemingway would always be there for me. But now Ernest Hemingway is dead." Punk rock band Bad Religion references Hemingway in their song "Stranger Than Fiction". The lyric in point, "I want to know why Hemingway cracked." Streetlight Manifesto's "Here's to Life" also mentions Hemingway: "Hemingway never seemed to mind the banality of a normal life and I find it gets harder every time. So he aimed the shotgun into the blue. Placed his face in between the two and sighed, 'Here's To Life!'"]
Awards and honors
During his lifetime Hemingway was awarded with:
Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) in World War I
Bronze Star (War Correspondent-Military Irregular in World War II) in 1947
Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man and the Sea)
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (The Old Man and the Sea cited as a reason for the award)
Trivia
Sailors were long-known to especially value polydactyl cats (which have extra toes as a genetic trait) for their extraordinary climbing and hunting abilities as an aid in controlling shipboard rodents. Some sailors also considered them to be extremely good luck when at sea. Hemingway was one of the more famous lovers of polydactyl cats. He was first given a six-toed cat by a ship's captain. As provided in his will, his former home in Key West, Florida (which is now a popular museum), currently houses approximately sixty descendants of his cats, approximately 50% of whom are polydactyl. The house and its feline residents make a brief appearance in the 1989 James Bond film Licence to Kill.
According to various biographical sources, Hemingway was six feet tall and weighed anywhere between 170 and 260 pounds at varying times in his life. His build was muscular, though he became paunchy in his middle years. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and habitually wore a moustache (with an occasional beard) from the age of 23 on. By age 50, he consistently wore a graying beard. He had a scar on his forehead, the result of a drunken accident in Paris in his late 20s (thinking he was flushing a toilet, he accidentally pulled a skylight down on his head). He suffered from myopia all his life, but vanity prevented him from being fitted with glasses until he was 32 (and very rarely was he photographed wearing them). He was fond of tennis, fonder of fishing and hunting, and hated New York City.
The actresses Margaux Hemingway and Mariel Hemingway (sisters) are Hemingway's granddaughters.
He's mentioned in Billy Joel's history themed song "We Didn't Start the Fire", as the first figure in the 13th stanza.
As of 2006 it has been stated that James Gandolfini will portray Hemingway in a biopic about his romance with Martha Gellhorn. The romance is said to have been the inspiration for For Whom The Bell Tolls. Gellhorn will be played by Robin Wright Penn.[citation needed]
He's also mentioned in the song "Here's to life" by Ska/Punk band Streetlight Manifesto: "Hemingway never seemed to mind the banality of a normal life and I find it gets harder every time. So he aimed the shotgun into the blue. Placed his face in between the two and sighed, Here's To Life!"
The Paper Mario video game series features a penguin novelist named "Herringway".
Kay Starr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kay Starr (born July 21, 1922) is an American jazz and popular singer.
Life and career
She was born Katherine Laverne Starks on a reservation in Dougherty, Oklahoma. Her father, Harry, was a full-blooded Iroquois Indian; her mother, Annie, was of mixed Irish and American Indian heritage. When her father got a job installing water sprinkler systems, the family moved to Dallas, Texas. While her father worked for the Automatic Sprinkler Company, her mother raised chickens, and Kay used to sing to the chickens in the coop. As a result of the fact that her aunt, Nora, was impressed by her singing, she began to sing at the age of seven on a Dallas radio station, WRR, first in a talent competition where she finished third one week and won every week thereafter, then with her own weekly fifteen minute show. She sang pop and "hillbilly" songs with a piano accompaniment. By the age of ten, she was making $3 a night, a lot of money in the Depression days.
As a result of her father's changing jobs, her family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and she continued performing on the radio, singing "Western swing music," still mostly a mix of country and pop. It was while she was on the Memphis radio station WMPS that, as a result of misspellings in her fan mail, she and her parents decided to give her the name "Kay Starr". At the age of fifteen, she was chosen to sing with the Joe Venuti orchestra. Venuti had a contract to play in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis which called for his band to feature a girl singer, which he did not have; Venuti's road manager heard her on the radio, and suggested her to Venuti. Because she was still in junior high school, her parents insisted that Venuti take her home no later than midnight.
Although she had brief stints in 1939 with Bob Crosby and Glenn Miller (who hired her in July of that year when his regular singer, Marion Hutton, was sick), she spent most of her next few years with Venuti, until he dissolved his band in 1942. It was, however, with Miller that she cut her first record: "Baby Me"/"Love with a Capital You." It was not a great success, in part because the band played in a key more appropriate for Marion Hutton, which was less suited for Kay's vocal range.
After finishing high school, she moved to Los Angeles and signed with Wingy Manone's band; then from 1943 to 1945 she sang with Charlie Barnet's band. She then retired for a year because she developed pneumonia and later developed nodes on her vocal cords, and lost her voice as a result of fatigue and overwork.
In 1946 she became a soloist, and in 1947 signed a solo contract with Capitol Records. Capitol had a number of other female singers signed up (such as Peggy Lee, Ella Mae Morse, Jo Stafford, and Margaret Whiting), so it was hard to find her a niche. In 1948 when the American Federation of Musicians was threatening a strike, Capitol wanted to have all its singers record a lot of songs for future release. Since she was junior to all these other artists, every song she wanted to sing got offered to all the others, until finally he put out a list of old songs from earlier in the century, which nobody else wanted to record.
Around 1950 Starre made a trip back home to Dougherty and heard a fiddle recording of Pee Wee King's song, "Bonaparte's Retreat." She liked it so much that she wanted to record it, and contacted Roy Acuff's publishing house in Nashville, Tennessee. She spoke to Acuff directly, and he was happy to let her record it, but it took a while for her to make clear that she wasn't a fiddler, but a singer, and she needed to have some lyrics written. Eventually Acuff came up with a new lyric, and "Bonaparte's Retreat" became her biggest hit up to that point, with close to a million sales.
In 1955, she signed with RCA Victor Records. However, at this time, traditional pop music was being superseded by rock and roll, and Kay had only one hit, which is sometimes considered her attempt to sing rock and roll and sometimes as a song making fun of it: "The Rock and Roll Waltz". She stayed at RCA Victor until 1959, then returned to Capitol.
Most of her songs have jazz influences, and, like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, are sung in a style that sound decidedly close to the rock and roll songs that follow. These include her smash hits "Wheel of Fortune" (her biggest hit, number one for 10 weeks), "Side by Side," "The Man Upstairs," and "Rock and Roll Waltz".
One of her biggest hits was her cover version of "The Man with the Bag," a Christmas song, which can be heard non-stop every holiday season in stores, restaurants, and on the radio.
Nevertheless, the pop music avalanche swept her career away, like all of the earlier 1950s recording artists.
Don Knotts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jesse Donald Knotts (July 21, 1924 - February 24, 2006) was an American comedic actor best known for his portrayal of Barney Fife on the 1960s television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show (a role which earned him five Emmy Awards), and as landlord Ralph Furley on the television sitcom Three's Company. He also appeared opposite Tim Conway in a number of comedy films aimed at children.
Biography
Early life
He was born in the university town Morgantown, West Virginia to Elsie L. Moore and William Jesse Knotts, who had once worked as farmers. He graduated from Morgantown High School. His father had a nervous breakdown and lost his farm before Don was born. His mother then ran a boardinghouse in town; he had brothers. [1] His father's family had been in the United States since the 17th century, originally settling in Queen Anne's County, Maryland.[2]
Knotts' father suffered from schizophrenia and alcoholism and died when Knotts was thirteen years old.[3]
At 19 Knotts joined the Army and served in World War II as part of a traveling GI variety show called "Stars and Gripes." He received the World War II Victory Medal. After the war Knotts graduated from his hometown West Virginia University in 1948 with a degree in theater.
Career
After being a regular performer in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow from 1953 to 1955, he gained additional exposure in 1956 on Steve Allen's variety show, appearing in Allen's mock "Man in the Street" interviews, always as a man obviously very nervous about being on camera. The humor in the interviews would be increased by having Knotts state his occupation as being one that wouldn't be an obvious choice for such a nervous, shaking person, such as a surgeon or an explosives expert.
Knotts's portrayal of a bumbling deputy sheriff on the very popular television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show was the role which earned him his greatest recognition. A summary of the show from the website of the Museum of Broadcast Communications describes Deputy Fife:
Most of Andy's time, however, was spent controlling his earnest but over-zealous deputy, Barney Fife. Self-important, romantic, and nearly always wrong, Barney dreamed of the day he could use the one bullet (which he kept in his shirt pocket) Andy had issued to him. While Barney was forever frustrated that Mayberry was too small for the delusional ideas he had of himself, viewers got the sense that he couldn't have survived anywhere else. Don Knotts played the comic and pathetic sides of the character with equal aplomb.
After leaving the series in 1965, Knotts starred in a series of film comedies which drew on his high-strung persona from the TV series: The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964), The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) and The Love God? (1969).
In the late 1960s and early '70s, he served as the spokesman for Dodge trucks and was featured prominently in a series of print ads and dealer brochures. He also had a short-lived Tuesday night variety series on NBC during the fall of 1970.
In the 1970s, Knotts and Tim Conway starred together in a series of slapstick movies aimed at children, including the 1975 Disney film The Apple Dumpling Gang, and its 1979 sequel, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again.
Knotts returned to series television in the late 1970s, appearing as landlord Ralph Furley on Three's Company, after Audra Lindley and Norman Fell left the show to star in a short-lived spin-off series (The Ropers). Knotts remained on the show from 1979 until it ended in 1984. In 1986, he reunited with Andy Griffith in the 1986 made-for-television movie Return to Mayberry, where he reprised his role as "Barney Fife". From 1989 to 1992, Knotts again co-starred with Griffith, playing a recurring role as pesky neighbor Les Calhoun on Matlock. More recently, he guest starred on Robot Chicken with Phyllis Diller. The last known filmed role was a guest staring on the 8th season episode of That '70s Show,"Stone Cold Crazy". In the show Don played Fez and Jackie's new landlord. Although the landlord had no name it was obvious to Knotts fans that he was reprising his role on Three's Company as Ralph Furley.
In 1998 Knotts had a small but pivotal role as the mysterious TV repairman in Pleasantville. Seven years later he performed as the voice of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in Chicken Little (2005), his first Disney movie since 1979.
In 2000 he was recognized for his television work with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has a daughter.
Death
Knotts died on 24 February, 2006 at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California at the age of 81 from pulmonary and respiratory complications related to lung cancer. He had been undergoing treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in recent months, but went home after he reportedly had been getting better [4]. Actor Andy Griffith visited Knotts' bedside up until a few hours before he died [5].
Knotts' obituaries began surfacing the Saturday afternoon following his death, mostly noting his Barney Fife character. Some cited him as a huge influence on other famous television stars. Musician and fan J.D. Wilkes said this about Knotts: "Only a genius like Knotts could make an anxiety-ridden, passive-aggressive Napoleon character like Fife a familiar, welcome friend each week. Without his awesome contributions to television there would've been no other over-the-top, self-deprecating acts like Conan O'Brien or Chris Farley."
Knotts is buried at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. [6]
Trivia
Andy Griffith often called Knotts by his first name, Jesse.
Was actually a calm and quiet person, in sharp contrast to some of his characters that he had played (especially Barney Fife and Ralph Furley).
Was parodied in Family Guy, voiced by a sound-a-like.
Was a ventriloquist early in life with a doll named Danny.
Three's Company script supervisor Carol Summers went on to be Knotts' agent--often times accompanying him to personal appearances.
Wakko Warner, from the cartoon show Animaniacs, is a big fan of Don Knotts.
He has been a guest star in the The New Scooby-Doo Movies series.
In his home town of Morgantown, West Virginia, the street formerly known as South University Ave (US 119, US 73) from the Decker's Creek Bridge to the city limits was renamed "Don Knotts Blvd" on "Don Knotts Day" in 1998.
Cat Stevens
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yusuf Islam (Fmr. Steven Demetre Georgiou) Born: July 21, 1948
London, England
Occupation: Singer, musician and songwriter
Yusuf Islam (born Steven Demetre Georgiou on July 21, 1948), better known by his stage name Cat Stevens, is a British musician, singer-songwriter and prominent convert to Islam.
At the outset of his musical career, Islam adopted the stage name Cat Stevens. As Cat Stevens, he sold over sixty million albums, mostly in the 1970s. His most notable songs include "Morning Has Broken", "Peace Train", "Moonshadow", "Wild World", "Father and Son", "Matthew and Son", "The First Cut Is the Deepest", and "Oh Very Young".
Stevens became a convert to Islam in 1977 after a near-death experience. He adopted the name Yusuf Islam in 1979 and became an outspoken advocate for the religion. A decade later, controversy arose when he was reported to have made comments supporting a fatwa calling for the murder of author Salman Rushdie, and in 2004 returned to the public eye when he was denied entry into the United States after his name appeared on a no-fly list.[1]
Yusuf Islam currently lives with his wife and children in London, where he is an active member of the Muslim community. He founded the Small Kindness charity, which initially assisted famine victims in Africa and now supports thousands of orphans and families in the Balkans, Indonesia, and Iraq.[2] Islam also founded the charity Muslim Aid but left as founding Chairman in 1999.
Early life and career
Steven Georgiou was the third child of a Greek-Cypriot father (Stavros Georgiou) and a Swedish mother (Ingrid Wickman). The family lived above the restaurant that his parents operated on Shaftesbury Avenue in London's central district of Holborn, a few steps from Piccadilly Circus and Soho.
Although his father was Greek Orthodox, Georgiou was sent to a Catholic school, St. Joseph Roman Catholic Primary School in Macklin Street.
When Georgiou was about eight years old, his parents divorced, although they both continued to live above the restaurant. Later, his mother moved back to Gävle, Sweden and took him with her. It was there that he started developing his drawing skills, due to the influence of his uncle Hugo (a painter).
At age 16, he left high school and was accepted, then later dismissed from, Hammersmith Art School. It was during this period he was first influenced by folk music.[3]
Early musical career
At age 18 in 1966, eager to establish a music career, Georgiou sought the help of manager/producer Mike Hurst. Hurst enjoyed Georgiou's songs and had a friend financially support his first single, "I Love My Dog". Over the next two years, Georgiou toured with moderate success and placed several single releases in the British pop music charts under the name "Cat Stevens". His debut album was Matthew and Son which was released in 1966. At the end of 1967, Stevens released New Masters which failed to chart in the United Kingdom; the album is now most notable for "The First Cut Is the Deepest" which has become an international hit for P.P. Arnold, Rod Stewart and Sheryl Crow.
On August 14, 1967, his voice joined with other recording artists on the airwaves of Wonderful Radio London bemoaning the loss of the pirate radio station which had helped create his first hit record.
In early 1968, at the age of nineteen, Stevens contracted tuberculosis. After several months in the hospital and a year of convalescence, Stevens returned to recording, but his attempts at a comeback single were poorly received.
Comeback after tuberculosis
In 1970, Stevens signed with Island Records and released Mona Bone Jakon, an introspective, folk music-based album that was markedly different from his earlier work. The album featured the songs "Lady D'Arbanville" that was written for Stevens' girlfriend at the time, actress Patti D'Arbanville; "Pop Star" that commented on his mixed success as a '60s teen hitmaker; and "Katmandu", featuring Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel playing flute.
The album presaged the coming singer-songwriter boom and set the stage for Stevens' international breakthrough album, Tea for the Tillerman. Tillerman combined a brighter sound and subject matter with Stevens' new folk style, and became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, highlighted by the top-10 single "Wild World".
Having established a signature sound, Stevens enjoyed a string of successes over the following years. Teaser and the Firecat (1971) reached #2 in the US and yielded several hits, including "Peace Train", "Morning Has Broken" (featuring Yes's Rick Wakeman on piano), and "Moonshadow".
Subsequent releases throughout the 1970s were met with consistent success; the final album under the name Cat Stevens was Back to Earth, released in late 1978.
Conversion and life as Yusuf Islam
When Stevens nearly drowned in an accident in Malibu in 1976, he pleaded with God to save him. Stevens described the event in a VH1 interview some years later: "I suddenly held myself and I said, 'Oh God! If you save me, I'll work for you.'" The near-death experience intensified his long-held quest for spiritual truth; when his brother David gave him a copy of the Qur'an, Stevens began to find peace with himself and began his transition to Islam. He formally converted to the Islamic faith in 1977 and he legally changed his name to Yusuf Islam.
Muslim faith and musical career
Following his conversion, Islam abandoned his career as a pop star. Song and the use of musical instruments is an area of debate in Muslim jurisprudence (law) and is the primary reason Cat Stevens retreated from the pop spotlight. At one point he wrote to the record companies asking that his music no longer be distributed, but his request was denied.
In 1981 Islam founded Islamia Primary School in Salusbury Road in the north London area of Kilburn.
In 1985, Islam decided to return to the public spotlight for the first time since his religious conversion at the historic Live Aid concert, inspired by the famine threatening Ethiopia. Though he had written a song especially for the occasion, his appearance was skipped when Elton John's set ran too long. [4]
Current musical career
For several years during the 1990s, he made recordings featuring Islamic lyrics accompanied only by basic percussion instruments in his compositions. He also produced an album called A is for Allah as an instruction for children after realizing there were few materials designed to educate children about the Islamic religion.[5] He later established the record label called Mountain of Light Productions that donates a percentage of its proceeds to Islam's Small Kindness charity.
In 2003, after repeated encouragement from within the Muslim world, Yusuf Islam once again recorded the song "Peace Train" for a compilation CD which also included performances by David Bowie and Paul McCartney.
He performed ""Wild World"" in Nelson Mandela's 46664 Concert with his former session player Peter Gabriel, for which he both performed and recorded in the English language for the first time in twenty-five years. Islam explained that the reason why he had stopped performing in English was due to his own misunderstanding of the Islamic faith:
This issue of music in Islam is not as cut-and-dried as I was led to believe ... I relied on heresy [sic], that was perhaps my mistake.[5]
In a separate press release, Islam rationalises his revived recording career:
After I embraced Islam many people told me to carry on composing and recording but at the time I was hesitant for fear that it might be for the wrong reasons. I felt unsure what the right course of action was. I guess it is only now after all these years that I've come to fully understand and appreciate what everyone has been asking of me. It's as if I've come full circle - however, I have gathered a lot of knowledge on the subject in the meantime.[6]
In December 2004, he and Ronan Keating released a new version of "Father and Son". It debuted at number two, behind Band Aid 20's "Do They Know It's Christmas?". The proceeds of "Father and Son" were donated to the Band Aid charity. Keating's former group, Boyzone, had also had a hit with a cover version of the song a decade earlier.
In early 2005, Islam released a new song entitled "Indian Ocean" about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The song featured Indian composer/producer A. R. Rahman; A-ha keyboard player, Magne Furuholmen and Travis drummer, Neil Primrose. Proceeds of the single went to help orphans in Banda Aceh, one of the areas worst affected by the tsunami, through Islam's Small Kindness charity. At first, the single was only released through several online music stores but now highlights Cat Stevens: Gold.
On 28 May 2005 Yusuf Islam delivered a keynote speech and performed at the Adopt-A-Minefield Gala in Düsseldorf. The Adopt-A-Minefield charity, under the patronage of Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills McCartney, works internationally to raise awareness and funds to clear landmines and rehabilitate landmine survivors. Yusuf Islam attended as part of an honorary committee - which also included Sir George Martin, Sir Richard Branson, Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Klaus Voormann, Christopher Lee and others. [1]
In mid-2005, Yusuf Islam played guitar for the Dolly Parton album of cover songs entitled, "Those Were The Days", on her version of "Where Do The Children Play". Parton herself had recorded a cover of "Peace Train" a few years earlier.
2006 album
In March 2006, Billboard magazine reported Yusuf Islam had finished recording his first pop album since 1978. The currently untitled album will be released by Polydor Records in November 2006?-on the 40th anniversary of his first album, I Love My Dog. The album has been produced by Rick Nowels, who has worked with Dido and Rod Stewart.[7] Speaking about the album, David Joseph, co-president of Polydor, said:
Yusuf is one of the most unique artists the UK has ever produced. The new album is sensational and will prove to be one of the biggest musical highlights of the year. His voice and melody are totally timeless.[7]
Islam wrote all the songs for the album and recorded it in both the United States and the United Kingdom.[8]
Controversy
Salman Rushdie
On February 21, 1989 Yusuf Islam addressed students at Kingston University in London about his journey to Islam. He was asked to describe the controversy in the Muslim world and the fatwa promising Salman Rushdie's execution. Islam claims to have only stated the legal consequences from the Qur'an and not actually have made any claims of support for the fatwa. Newspapers quickly denounced Yusuf Islam's "support" for a possible assassination of Rushdie. Shortly afterwards he released a statement clarifying that he was not personally encouraging anybody towards vigilantism.
The New York Times reported on May 23, 1989 [9] that Islam was to be on a British television program the following week, and was quoted as saying:
[If Rushdie turned up at my doorstep looking for help,] I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.
Islam's most recent clarification of the issue is stated in a 2003 article on CatStevens.com[10], wherein he says that he never stated support but was straightforwardly describing what he understood of Muslim law, and laying the controversy at the door of "journalistic malice":
I was simply a new Muslim who had stated something which I considered quite plain and obvious and if you were to ask a Bible student you know what the Ten Commandments were you would expect him to repeat them honestly, you wouldn't blame him for doing so; the Bible is full of similar headlines if you're looking for them.
The backlash over the Rushdie incident included the band 10,000 Maniacs, who had covered "Peace Train" on their 1987 In My Tribe album. The band deleted the song from subsequent pressings of their album as a protest against Islam's alleged remarks.
Denial of entry into the United States
On 21 September 2004 Yusuf Islam was traveling on United Airlines Flight 919 from London to Washington. While the plane was in flight, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System flagged his name as being on a no-fly list. Customs agents alerted the Transportation Security Administration, which then diverted his flight to Bangor, Maine, where he was detained by the FBI.
The following day Islam was deported back to the United Kingdom. The United States Transportation Security Administration claimed there were "concerns of ties he may have to potential terrorist-related activities." The United States Department of Homeland Security specifically alleged that Islam had provided funding to the Palestinian Islamic militant group Hamas, although it did not offer any proof of its allegation.
Islam's deportation provoked a small international controversy and led British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to complain personally to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations. Powell responded by stating that the watch list was under review, and added, "I think we have that obligation to review these matters to see if we are right."
His identification as being on the watch list may be in error. On 1 October 2004 Islam was reported to have requested the removal of his name and stated, "I remain bewildered by the decision of the US authorities to refuse me entry to the United States."[1] According to an official statement by Islam, the man on the list was named Yousef Islam, indicating that Yusuf Islam himself was in fact, not the suspected terror supporter.
Libel case
As a footnote to the actions taken by the U.S. government in deporting Yusuf Islam as a terrorist, The Sun and The Sunday Times British newspapers had published reports in October 2004 which stated that the U.S. was correct in its action. As a result Yusuf Islam sued for libel, and received a substantial out-of-court, "agreed settlement" and apology from the newspapers.[11] Both newspapers acknowledged that Islam has never supported terrorism and that, to the contrary, he had recently been given a Man of Peace award. Islam responded that he was:
...delighted by the settlement [which] helps vindicate my character and good name. ... It seems to be the easiest thing in the world these days to make scurrilous accusations against Muslims, and in my case it directly impacts on my relief work and damages my reputation as an artist. The harm done is often difficult to repair.
He added that he intended to donate the financial award given to him by the court to help orphans of the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami. Yusuf Islam wrote about the experience in a newspaper article titled "A Cat in a Wild World".[12]
Awards
Cat Stevens was nominated to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005 but was not voted in. [13][14]
20 October 2005 Yusuf Islam was named Songwriter of the Year and also received Song of the Year honors for "The First Cut Is The Deepest" at a special presentation in London. At the ceremony The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) honored the top British writer and publisher members of the UK's Performing Rights Society. [2]
On 10 November 2004, Yusuf Islam was presented with a Man of Peace award by the private foundation of former USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev for his "dedication to promote peace, the reconciliation of people and to condemn terrorism". The ceremony was held in Rome, Italy and attended by five Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Almost a year later on 4 November 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Gloucestershire for services to education and humanitarian relief.
Well, Try, you may think this odd, but although I like that song about drop dead gorgeous, I think someone long ago wanted to know about this WWI song:
Now when I was a young man I carried me pack
And I lived the free life of the rover.
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback,
Well, I waltzed my Matilda all over.
Then in 1915, my country said, "Son,
It's time you stop ramblin', there's work to be done."
So they gave me a tin hat, and they gave me a gun,
And they marched me away to the war.
And the band played "Waltzing Matilda,"
As the ship pulled away from the quay,
And amidst all the cheers, the flag waving, and tears,
We sailed off for Gallipoli.
And how well I remember that terrible day,
How our blood stained the sand and the water;
And of how in that hell that they call Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.
Johnny Turk, he was waitin', he primed himself well;
He showered us with bullets, and he rained us with shell --
And in five minutes flat, he'd blown us all to hell,
Nearly blew us right back to Australia.
But the band played "Waltzing Matilda,"
When we stopped to bury our slain,
Well, we buried ours, and the Turks buried theirs,
Then we started all over again.
And those that were left, well, we tried to survive
In that mad world of blood, death and fire.
And for ten weary weeks I kept myself alive
Though around me the corpses piled higher.
Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over head,
And when I woke up in me hospital bed
And saw what it had done, well, I wished I was dead --
Never knew there was worse things than dying.
For I'll go no more "Waltzing Matilda,"
All around the green bush far and free --
To hump tents and pegs, a man needs both legs,
No more "Waltzing Matilda" for me.
So they gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed,
And they shipped us back home to Australia.
The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane,
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla.
And as our ship sailed into Circular Quay,
I looked at the place where me legs used to be,
And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me,
To grieve, to mourn and to pity.
But the band played "Waltzing Matilda,"
As they carried us down the gangway,
But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared,
Then they turned all their faces away.
And so now every April, I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me.
And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march,
Reviving old dreams of past glory,
And the old men march slowly, all bones stiff and sore,
They're tired old heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask "What are they marching for?"
And I ask meself the same question.
But the band plays "Waltzing Matilda,"
And the old men still answer the call,
But as year follows year, more old men disappear
Someday, no one will march there at all.
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda.
Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
And their ghosts may be heard as they march by the billabong,
Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda with me?
I think it was Imur.
