October 22, 1926: "The Sun Also Rises" Is Published

October 22, 1926: The Sun Also Rises, written by Ernest Hemingway, is published by Charles Scribner's Sons. Although Hemingway had previously been a journalist, and had published short stories, this was his 1st novel, and it set the tone for a writing style that would change literature.

The novel is a roman à clef: The characters are based on real people in Hemingway's social circle, and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s, and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the "running of the bulls" festival in Pamplona and fishing in the Pyrenees.

Hemingway, then 27 years old, presented his notion that what was already being called the "Lost Generation," considered to have been decadent, dissolute, and irretrievably damaged by their experiences in World War I, which had ended just 8 years earlier, was, instead, resilient and strong. Hemingway investigated the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature, and the concept of masculinity.

However, in his treatment of women, art imitated life: The character of Lady Brett Ashley is promiscuous and untrustworthy. Hemingway married 4 times, and it's been suggested that he mistreated all 4 wives, but got a great novel out of each: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms (a version of his experience in World War I, published in 1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (a version of his experience in the Spanish Civil War, published in 1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (based on stories he heard from fishermen in Cuba, published in 1952).

Along with The Great Gatsby, by his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, The Sun Also Rises is 1 of 3 definitive novels of the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Lost Generation." But it has not really stood the test of time: Not only does Lady Brett look bad in an era of feminism, but the character of Robert Cohn is treated badly, leading to the charge the Hemingway was anti-Semitic; and bullfighting, which Hemingway celebrated in this book and in several short stories, has come to be seen by the wider world as barbaric.

Hemingway himself, though an incredibly talented writer, was a barbaric man, who never met a human being, man or woman, that he didn't want to hit; never met a woman that he didn't want to have sex with; and never met an animal he didn't want to shoot. On July 2, 1961, he shot and killed the most dangerous animal he ever faced: Himself. He was his own worst enemy, and he was just short of turning 63.

*

October 22, 1926 was a Friday. This was also the day that Harry Greb, a former Light Heavyweight Champion of the World, died. I have a separate entry for that event.

The baseball season had just ended, with the St. Louis Cardinals beating the Yankees in the World Series. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't yet been founded. And the NHL season wouldn't begin until November 16. So there were no scores on this historic day.

October 21, 1940: Ernest Hemingway Publishes "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

October 21, 1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is published. It is a tale of the International Brigades, aiding the leftist Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. The novel was far more successful than those to whom it paid tribute.

The title is taken from a 1624 poem by Englishman John Donne, which has put 3 famous sayings into our lexicon. Hemingway left the original spelling in his epigraph, but I'll render it in modern English:

No man is an island, entire of itself.

Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.

If a Cloud be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less

as well as if a Promontory were,

as well as if a Manor of thy friends or thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me

because I am involved in Mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

The International Brigades -- Brigadas Internacionales in Spanish -- were soldiers recruited and organized by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. It is estimated that, during the entire war, there were some 32,000 Brigaders, yet at no single moment were there more than 18,000 actually deployed. among them were Americans who named their group the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

The novel tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerilla unit. As a demolitions expert, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.

The novel was made into a film in 1943, directed by Sam Wood, starring Gary Cooper as Jordan, and Ingrid Bergman as María, a guerilla he falls in love with. The film was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Cooper, and Best Actress for Bergman. But the only winner was Greek actress Katina Paxinou, for Best Supporting Actress.

Both Cooper and Bergman tended to have affairs with their co-stars, and this film was no exception. Hemingway, who had recently made journalist Martha Gellhorn the 3rd of his 4 wives, would have approved.

*

October 21, 1940 was a Monday. Jimmy Beaumont, the lead singer of the Pittsburgh-based doo-wop group The Skyliners, was born.

The baseball season ended 13 days earlier, when the Cincinnati Reds won Game 7 of the World Series over the Detroit Tigers. The NFL was 30 years away from Monday Night Football. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season was 30 days away from starting. So there were no scores on this historic day.

August 26, 1883: Friedrich Nietzsche Publishes "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

August 26, 1883: Friedrich Nietzsche publishes his novel Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.

Born on October 15, 1844 in native of Röcken, in Saxony, in what would be part of East Germany after World War II, Nietzsche became the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, when he was only 24 years old. Unfortunately, other things happened to him early: He resigned in 1879, due to health issues.

This allowed him to do the writing that became Also Sprach Zarathustra. Despite purporting to be the words of Zarathustra, usually known to the modern world by his Greek name Zoroaster -- more so even than Judaism, truly an "old-time religion" -- the book is best known for Nietzsche's statement that "God is dead."

In fact, Nietzsche's text goes further than that. He said, "Dead are all the gods: Now do we desire the overman to live." He describes an Übermensch, which was originally translated as "overman" but came to be thought of as "superman" after his death, as someone "beyond good and evil," beyond any definition of morality, not bound by any religious commandments, a man with "the will to power."

As an example, Zarathustra sees a shepherd choking on a black serpent, which has crept into his throat. At Zarathustra's urging, the shepherd bites the serpent's head off and spits it out. In that moment, the shepherd is transformed into "a laughing, radiant being, something greater than human."

In 1889, only 45 years old, Nietzsche suffered a stroke, which led to vascular dementia. For the rest of his life, until August 25, 1900, just 56, he was in the care of his family.

Just as the deaths of Abner Doubleday and William Webb Ellis left them unable to publicly deny that they had, as was later alleged, invented baseball and rugby, respectively, Nietzsche's intellectual death in 1889, well before his actual death in 1900, left him unable to say, "What I really meant was... "

In particular, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who became first his medical and then his literary caretaker, misinterpreted much of what he wrote to fit her anti-Semitic views. His surviving letters show that he thought anti-Semitism was stupid, and he ridiculed its practitioners.

But Elisabeth lived long enough to promote her brother's works with the Nazis, who were all too happy to bring them into their mythology. When she died in 1935, Adolf Hitler himself attended her funeral. And so Nietzsche's writing, especially Also Sprach Zarathustra, became associated with the Fascism and bigotry of Nazi Germany, something Nietzsche, based on his own letters, would have deplored.

Others got that, but still used it to spread their belief in what would now be called "toxic masculinity." Jim Morrison, lead singer of the rock band The Doors, thought of the Übermensch as someone who faced his fears and overcame them, quoting Nietzsche's line, written in Twilight of the Idols in 1888: "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Nietzsche was not the first, nor the last, person to suggest suffering builds character. But Morrison's belief that he was not bound by society's conventions made him unreliable and misogynistic.

Certainly, novelist and journalist Ernest Hemingway thought of himself as an Übermensch: In his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, he wrote, "We are all broken people, but some of us are stronger at the broken places." But then, he was mentally ill, treated many people (especially his wives) like garbage, and eventually killed himself.

On January 12, 2012, I developed the hardest cold I'd ever had. It left me coughing so hard, it would, on some occasions, leave me dizzy, and force me to remain still for about 30 seconds; and, on others, give me a headache that left me scared that I might have a stroke. I thought of the line, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Personally, I've often found that some things that hurt me without killing me have made me stronger, but some of them just tick me off.

In 1896, German composer Richard Strauss composed the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra. Its opening fanfare, titled "Sunrise," was used by director Stanley Kubrick as the theme song for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That use led Elvis Presley to use it as the opening theme for his concerts from the start of his Las Vegas run in 1969 until his death in 1977. Elvis, too, often operated as if he were an "overman," beyond society's definitions of morality. And, as with Hemingway and Morrison, sometimes this worked to help people, and sometimes it didn't.

Morrison, surely, knew that Nietzsche had said that God was dead. I'm guessing Elvis wasn't aware of it, or else he never would have used the fanfare.

By the time Strauss' composition premiered, Nietzsche was too ill to attend, and it is unlikely he ever heard a recording of it. So it is likely that he never expressed an opinion on it.

In 2000, Britney Spears had a hit single titled "Stronger." In 2002, Christina Aguilera had a song titled "Fighter," sung to an ex-boyfriend whose mistreatment made her stronger. And in 2011, Kelly Clarkson released an album titled Stronger. It included a song titled "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You). It did revive her career after her previous 2 albums didn't do well. It's interesting that all 3 women expressed Nietzsche's idea better than the hyper-masculine Morrison did.

A 2015 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History was titled "Eastern Philosophers vs. Western Philosophers." "Nice" Peter Shukoff played Nietzsche, easily the most recent figure among those involved, alongside "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist as Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC) and Zach Sherwin as French philosopher François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778). The Eastern philosophers were all Chinese: Confucius (551-479 BC) played by Jin Au-Yeung, a.k.a. MC Jin; Sun Tzu (544-496 BC), played by Tim Chantarangsu, a.k.a. Timothy DeLaGhetto; and Laozi, a.k.a. Lao Tzu (life dates unknown, but may also have been a contemporary of the other two), played by Terry Im, a.k.a. KRNFX.    

*

August 26, 1883 was a Sunday. At the time, the only real team sports in America were baseball and college football, and college football, then as now, resisted playing on Sundays. In many States, the playing of professional sports on Sunday was banned by law. In baseball, the National League chose not to challenge this, and refused to schedule games on Sundays.

Founded in 1882, the American Association did not. And when, after its folding following the 1891 season, 4 of its teams were brought into the NL, the NL began playing Sunday games. However, on this particular Sunday, the AA played no games. So there were no scores on this historic day.

July 2, 1961: Ernest Hemingway Commits Suicide

July 2, 1961: Ernest Hemingway dies by his own hand. Contrary to what his wife said in the immediate aftermath, it was no accident.

He had published 4 of the most acclaimed novels of his time: The Sun Also Rises in 1926, about his recent experiences in France and Spain; A Farewell to Arms in 1929, about his experiences in World War I; For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, about his experiences in the recent Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, based on stories he had heard in Cuba.

He had also written, among other things, Death in the Afternoon, in 1932, about bullfighting in Spain, which he had also written about in The Sun Also Rises; The Green Hills of Africa, in 1935, about a safari he and his 2nd wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, took, detailing their hunting; and To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, not well-regarded, but it became a popular movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who ended up getting married as a result.

But mental illness ran rampant in his family. And his constant adventuring had gotten him hurt, over and over again, including head injuries. He married 4 times, and was abusive to all his wives. Many men have tried to copy his writing style. Too many have also tried to copy his dangerous lifestyle. And a few, most notably William S. Burroughs and Norman Mailer, even copied his treatment of his wives.

In 1954, he and his 4th wife, Mary Welsh, went on an African safari, and survived a plane crash -- and then survived another crash the very next day. That 2nd crash gave him another head injury, and accelerated his descent into erratic behavior.

On July 2, 1961, at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, having alienated pretty much everybody in his life, and having hunted just about every animal he could find, he took a shotgun, and shot the most dangerous animal he had ever faced: Himself. He was 61 years old.

In a 1976 episode of M*A*S*H, taking place in 1951, Alan Alda's character, Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, M.D., U.S. Army Reserve, said, “I used to love Hemingway, because he wrote so well. But now, I can’t understand why anyone would willingly go to a war. I'd do anything to get out of here. It's crazy.”

*

July 2, 1961 was a Sunday. These games were played in Major League Baseball:

* The New York Yankees beat the Washington Senators, 13-4 at Yankee Stadium. Bud Daley was the winning pitcher. Roger Maris hit 2 home runs, giving him 30 on the season; Mickey Mantle hit one, giving him 28; Bill "Moose" Skowron hit one, giving him 17; and Elston Howard hit one, giving him 4. Maris would finish with 61, Mantle with 54, Skowron with 28, and Howard with 21.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Red Sox, 12-6 at Fenway Park. Carl Yastrzemski went 3-for-5 with an RBI. But Boston reliever Arnold Earley falls apart in the top of the 10th inning, and reliever Dave Hillman can't stop the bleeding. The Indians scored 6 runs in the inning.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Don Drysdale outpitched Robin Roberts, and helped his own cause with a home run.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers, 6-3 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Brooks Robinson went 3-for-4 with an RBI. Al Kaline went 2-for-3 with a solo home run.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates swept a doubleheader from the San Francisco Giants at Forbes Field, 7-6 and 9-0, the nightcap shortened to 7 innings. Over the 2 games, Roberto Clemente went 3-for-6 with 3 walks and 3 RBIs, and Willie Mays went 1-for-6 with a walk.

* The Chicago Cubs beat their arch-rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, 10-9 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Stan Musial went 0-for-5. For the Cubs, Ernie Banks went 2-for-4 with a walk, and Glenn Hobbie and Sammy Taylor each hit 2 home runs. But it was a single in the 8th inning by former Phillies star Richie Ashburn that won the game for the Cubbies.

* The Cincinnati Reds swept a doubleheader with the Milwaukee Braves at Milwaukee County Stadium, 8-5 and 4-3. Gordy Coleman won the opener with a home run in the top of the 13th inning. Frank Robinson went 4-for-8 with 3 walks, a home run and 2 RBIs, Hank Aaron went 3-for-8 with a walk, a home run and 2 RBIs, Eddie Mathews went 2-for-6 with 2 home runs and 3 RBIs, and Joe Torre went 2-for-6.

* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Minnesota Twins, 8-7 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. Harmon Killebrew went 3-for-4 with a home run and 2 RBIs. Jim Lemon doubled Killebrew home to tie the game in the top of the 9th. But in the bottom of the 9th, Dick Howser singled home the winning run.

* The Los Angeles Angels beat the Chicago White Sox, 8-3 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where the Angels were renting from the Dodgers.

April 1, 1939, The Spanish Civil War Ends

Monument to the victims of the war,

known as the Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid.

April 1, 1939: The last of the Republican forces surrender, ending the Spanish Civil War. But the path to World War II was now clear.

On April 14, 1931, the Spanish monarchy was overthrown by the Second Spanish Republic, a left-of-center government. On February 16, 1936, Spain's national election was won by the Popular Front, a coalition that included Socialists and Communists -- which, as non-ignorant people know, are not the same thing, and usually don't work together. This time, they did.

And that infuriated a lot of people in Spain, which had traditionally been a very culturally conservative country, dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. On July 17, 1936, the Army of Africa launched a coup d'état in the Spanish-controlled part of Morocco. This coup was soon supported by units all over Spain, but not in the major cities such as the capital, Madrid, or in Barcelona or Valencia.

The coup supporters, the traitors, called themselves the Nationalists, and received support from the fascist governments of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. António Salazar, the fascist dictator of neighboring Portugal, stayed out of it.

The Republicans got aid from the Soviet Union, a Communist nation, and Mexico, which then had a leftward government, if not an outright Communist one. (They had taken in former Bolshevik hero Leon Trotsky after Joseph Stalin expelled him.) The fact that the Soviets were aiding the Republicans caused the United States, Britain and France to continue to recognize the Republican government of Spain, but also to refuse to intervene in the war.

Some people from those countries went to Spain, and enlisted in what became known as the International Brigades. An American group named themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Many liberals defied their own governments to support the Republicans, including American authors Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Hellman, British writer George Orwell, and French writer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Hemingway would write a novel about the war, For Whom the Bell Tolls. (Hemingway had met Picasso in Paris in 1922, before becoming famous, but last saw each other in 1924, before reconnecting following the liberation of Paris in 1944, and did not meet in Spain during the war.)

Hitler and Mussolini really, really wanted to win this war, to send a message to Communists all over the world. Hitler sent his air force, the Luftwaffe, to bomb Republican strongholds. And Mussolini sent troops to aid the Nationalist commander, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. This became known as "Franco's Italian Army."

Franco was quoted as saying, "I have four Nationalist columns approaching Madrid," a column meaning a formation of soldiers significantly longer than it is wide; "and a fifth column, waiting to attack from the inside." By this, he meant supporters, hidden, yet undermining the national government through various means, such as sabotage and misinformation. Thus the term "fifth columnist" was born, and was popular during the subsequent World War II to describe a Fascist sympathizer in the Allied nations. It wasn't used as much during the following Cold War.

The Basque Country, in northernmost Spain, suffered tremendously. The Luftwaffe bombed the town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, inspiring the most famous work of Málaga native Pablo Picasso. As Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson wrote, as part of an article that tried to sum up the 20th Century, "We bombed Guernica, and we painted the bombing of Guernica."

The painting is now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

(Queen Sofia National Central Art Museum) in Madrid.

This is not an illusion: Picasso purposely painted it without color.

Madrid and Barcelona, the country's 2 largest cities, suffered the most. Once Barcelona fell on January 26, 1939, and was cut off from the capital, the Republican cause was doomed. Franco entered Madrid on April 1, and proclaimed victory.

Franco was not magnanimous in victory: He acted like a genuine Fascist, coming down especially hard on Barcelona, and its region, Catalonia, the region that had opposed him the hardest. The governments of Britain and France recognized Franco's government.

Leftists around the world wanted to know why the Western democracies did nothing. There were 2 reasons. One was the fear of provoking the Nazis, which had already manifested in the Munich Agreement the year before, essentially handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler's Third Reich. Nobody seemed to want a World War II, so they chose not to antagonize Hitler.

The other was the Catholic Church. Since the Republic was perceived as Communist, and thus atheist and indeed anti-Catholic, the Church went out of its way to convince Catholics all over the world to avoid aiding the Republic. And the Church still had a lot of influence in America and France in particular.

George Seldes, a leftist American journalist, was one of the last living people to have covered the war, and to the end of his life in 1995, he refused to call it "The Spanish Civil War." It was simply "The Spanish War." He saw the Western democracies betray their beliefs -- America: "All men are created equal"; France: "Liberty, equality, brotherhood" -- because they were afraid to have to fight for those beliefs for a 2nd time in 20 years. Seldes wrote, "Spain broke the heart of the world."

What's more, by not interfering, the Western democracies were essentially telling Hitler (who had already annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia by April 1939) and Mussolini (who had begun building a "new Roman Empire" in Africa, with Libya, Ethiopia and Somalia) that they could do whatever they wanted, and the democracies wouldn't care.

And for what? On September 1, 1939, just 5 months later, Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France went to war with him anyway.

The name "Franco's Italian Army" would be revived in 1972, by Al Vento, owner of an Italian restaurant in Pittsburgh, who formed a fan club in honor of Franco Harris, the half-Italian, half-African-American running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who capped that season with a play known as "The Immaculate Reception," and eventually helped the Steelers win 4 Super Bowls on his way to a Hall of Fame career. Francisco Franco was still alive and in power when the fan club was founded, and while Vento and his members were not openly political, neither did they seem to have a problem with a name associated with Fascism, which some of its members had fought 30 years earlier.

By 1975, it had become clear that Franco was dying. And he didn't have a son to take over after his death, only a daughter. After the death in exile of King Alfonso XIII in 1941, his son, Juan, Count of Barcelona, was considered the heir to the Spanish government. But Franco believed that Juan would not be likely to continue his policies, but that his son, Juan Carlos, would. So Franco stripped Juan of his right to the throne, and proclaimed Juan Carlos the new heir.

Franco died on November 20, 1975. It was a big story on the American national news. A new TV show, Saturday Night Live, featured a "news" segment titled Weekend Update, and, for weeks, anchorman Chevy Chase would say, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

On November 22, Juan Carlos was proclaimed King of Spain. And while he was considerably more conservative than the Second Republic, he betrayed Franco -- who had, of course, betrayed the entire country -- and dismantled the Fascist state. In 1978, a new Constitution was ratified. Since then, Spain has had conservative governments, but never again a Fascist one. King Juan Carlos I abdicated in 2014, in favor of his son, King Felipe VI.

But the liberal/conservative divide is still seen in Spain, often in sports, especially the favorite sport, soccer: The most successful team, Real Madrid CF, was once run by allies of Franco; while the 2nd-most successful team, FC Barcelona, are considered the resistance team. The fact that both teams have achieved a significant amount of success through dishonest tactics shows that (Cliché Alert) maybe they're not so different, after all.

*

April 1, 1939 was a Saturday. Actress Ali McGraw and Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Phil Niekro were born on this day.

The baseball season had yet to begin. Football was out of season. There was no NBA yet. But the NHL season was coming to a close, with the Stanley Cup Semifinals. In Game 6 of one series, the New York Rangers beat the Boston Bruins, 3-1 at the old Madison Square Garden. However, the next day, at the Boston Garden, the Bruins won Game 7, 2-1 in triple overtime, on a goal by Mel Hill. It was the 3rd time in the series that Hill had won a game in overtime, and he became known as "Sudden Death Mel Hill."

In the other series, the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings, 5-4 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. This game also ended in overtime, and it was Gordie Drillon who scored the winner. On April 16, the Bruins beat the Leafs, 3-1 at the Boston Garden, in Game 5, to take the Cup.

And in English soccer, Arsenal lost to Yorkshire team Middlesbrough, 2-1 at the Arsenal Stadium, a.k.a. Highbury, in North London.