Ernest Hemingway
by Ciro Discepolo
“Man
is not created for the defeat. Man can be killed, but never defeated”.
These are the words of the old Santiago, the protagonist of the The Old Man
and the Sea, words that better then many others express the world of fight,
of competition, of the destiny ransom, of the jungle law in which he moved
himself, operated and wrote the great Hemingway. And it will be exactly by
The Old Man and the Sea that the American writer will earn, in 1954, the Nobel
prize for literature.
The novel, simple and brief is very intense, with high dramatic tones, rich
of the principal ingredients of Hemingwayan literature: strength, competition,
fight, blood, violence and death. The old fisher, went fishing for the eighty-fourth
time consecutively without catching only one sea vertebrate, he meets a very
great fish, bigger than his own sail boat that, hooked on his bait, will fight
three days before being killed by the man. He will never debase the animal’s
dignity and he will continue to consider him always a noble creature, during
all the fight: “I’d like to feed the fish. He is my brother. But
I have to kill him and I need to remain strong to do it”. And when,
almost exhausted, he doesn’t know if he will be able to save his own
life in this adventure: “I never saw anything so great and wonderful
and calm and noble as you, brother. Come and assassinate me. I don’t
care who of us that will eliminate the other”. At the end will be the
old man to win, but the “destiny”, like in the major part of his
stories and novels, will be his enemy: the sharks will attack and devour carcass
of his fish and he will return from this extraordinary adventure bringing
with him only a skeleton. Life, for Ernest Hemingway, is a plaza de toros,
an arena for gladiators where blood dust and death will mix themselves to
the noon arrogance and where to man doesn’t remain that to combat. The
image of this bullfight is all inscribed in the important Mars of the writer’s
horoscope, in the first house and squared to Saturn.
Reading his books we cannot avoid to think, compare them, to Victor Hugo’s
novels; for example The Laughing Man, an immense scenario of human miseries,
of the titanic fight of people against a omnipotent destiny. That destiny
that would bring the Fiesta author to suicide.
Hemingway all his life wrote about weapons, wounds and killings.
On July 2, 1961 he became protagonist of one of his stories and he shot a
rifle bullet to his head. His was a great Cancer pessimism, the pessimism
of a kind soul that recognizes of the law that governs the whole world: “Homo
homini lupus (man that is wolf to man)”, man devours his similar, competition
is not a sport but battle for survival. So the hyena of the story The Snows
of Kilimanjaro that sniffing Harry hunter’s death protests, ominously,
its prey. The Moon of the American novelist was in Capricorn and the combination
Cancer-Capricorn is one of the most unhappy. The pessimism of Hemingway, however,
has something more respect the others, contains very often death or, at least,
violence and blood and this, as I wrote earlier, is certainly linked with
his Mars in the first House. We remember that the same position was even in
the natal charts of the Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Aldo
Moro, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Grace Kelly and many other personages went down
in history even for their violent death.
The natal chart of the subject was calculated for 1899, on July 21, at 8:00
A.M., in Oak Park (Chicago). Some biographical fonts indicate the year 1898
as the one of the birth, but the date here examined was confirmed by many
Americans and Italo-Americans fonts (a special thank goes to USIS at the American
Consulate of Naples). Even the Britannica Encyclopaedia reports 1899. Also,
from the exam of the two different horoscopes, historically studied, appears
with a lot of evidence that the Moon has to be about 10 degrees in Capricorn.
This Moon is in the fifth House, opposed to Venus in Cancer and describes
to us the falling in love and the frustrated loves, as the one of the protagonist
of the autobiographical A Farewell to Arms for his Catherine; a love that
knew the clandestineness emotions of the dark rooms of the American Military
Hospital in Milan, to live, after, a beautiful Swiss winter and the inevitable
frustration of the woman that gave a dead son to her Henry.
Hemingway got married four times and for at least three he was unhappy. A
Moon in the fifth House, in Capricorn and in opposition to Venus, corresponds
to a “saturnized” Moon, penalized by destiny. And what is sadder
for a Cancer out of realty that the sentimental life goes wrong?
The Sun in Cancer and Venus in Cancer are the factory label of an extraordinary
sensibility, of a restless soul, enormously in need of affection.
The author of For Whom the Bell Tolls would have liked to live in a world
of pacific vegetarians, with a great blind fold on his eyes so not to see
the world horror. And, instead, in his life, he was many times in Africa in
contact with beasts and with men more sanguinary of the beasts and he was
at the bull fights in Spain and everywhere there was war and death, battle
and blood, pain and horror. Even his story The Short Happy Life Of Francis
Macomber has an African scenario of the wounded and ferocious lions, of the
unjust and fearful hunters, of the adultery consumed in according to the jungle
laws, of the apparently accidental homicide and instead subordinated to a
miserable objective. This same world of unjustness and evilness, of battles
and defeats, that has, like common denominator the “cruel destiny”,
we re-find substantially in all his literature production, from The First
Forty-Nine Stories to Death in the Afternoon in 1932. It is the very clear
thematic that was developed in the short story The Capital of the World in
which the boy Paco was knifed to death simulating a bull fight. Then, for
Hemingway life is certainly a bull fight and, in the opposite way of the great
Eduardo De Filippo (great Italian dramatist) the subject thought that the
“long dark night” would have never passed and that the only pitiful
veil of death would have covered that big square of pain that is life. The
psychiatrics, today, would be able to combat the depression of the novelist.
With a few grams of Benzedrine or something similar would have been able to
show the world to him in a less dark way, but if this would have deprived
us from his masterpieces, let’s say: “Viva depression!”.
This same depression, however, has even killed him and the transits of that
event testimony it. Pluto was in conjunction with the Ascendant and so even
Mars (2° in Virgo); Jupiter gave an opposition to the Sun and Saturn was
sesquisquare to the Ascendant and in opposition to the Sun; Uranus, at 23°
in Leo, was on the natal Mercury, in sesquisquare to the Moon.
Another time the aspect of 135° comes out, with arrogance: this aspect
is erroneously ignored by many colleagues and, instead, I think that it is
very important, at the same measure of the semisquare. The German school of
astrology, but even the American one, it is useful to remember that, utilize
a lot these aspects, while they give very little importance to the sextile
and no importance to the semisextile. My personal practice pushes me in perfect
accord to this vision. Coming back to our author it is necessary to remember
two “significant circumstances” that accompanied the redaction
and the published of A Farewell to Arms. While Hemingway was writing this
book his father killed himself (Saturn in the fourth House in opposition to
Pluto and square to Mars) and when the novel was born, on the same day, there
was the great crush at the American stock. Even here I like to remember, launching
a point of ideal identity, the words of Eduardo De Filippo: “War is
not over, nothing has finished”. The thematic of A Farewell to Arms
is particularly significative and expressive of the Hemingwayan thought: love
that faces itself to the war absurdities, of destructions, of death. And after
the escape of the two protagonists in Switzerland, a country considered like
an island, an oasis of safety. The one of the island is a dear argument for
Cancer, as in the case of the director Ingmar Bergman and his extremely northern
island or Piero Chiara (an Italian novelist) in his novel The Bishop’s
Room (the lake is like an upside down island in which waters the protagonist
of the romance hides himself to escape the traps of the world represented
by the coasts of the still land).
But, now, let’s speak about the Hemingway writer. Note, first of all,
the presence of Jupiter in the third House that although being in Scorpio
and square to the Sun has so strongly incised in his production and in his
literature success. Many people, reading him, have the impression to discover
a rough and not cultured prose, inspired, certainly by the Virgo-Capricorn
values, values of “frugality”, of essentiality. But Agostino Lombardi
(an Italian critic) so writes: “A prose controlled and conscious, cultured
and even precious”. Ernest Hemingway, however, doesn’t let people
love him for the form, but, instead, for the substance of his novels, because
being a Cancer he touches to the bottom of the lector’s heart, he involves
them, he makes them participants of the human dramas of his personages, not
permitting the abstraction and dominates the emotion. He was not the greatest
writer of all times, but a fantastic protagonist of our world, “a ferocious
and violent world, without faith and without love, where man tries to grab
on some fixed point passionately and vainly searched”.
Translated by Ciro Discepolo and Anna Mellone
