Hemingway again

Another little known fact about Hemingway is that he wrote all of his novels longhand using a pencil clenched between his toes. 

The reason he wrote with his feet is that he was a double amputee.  He was very self-conscious of this.  Whenever he left his house he always wore prosthetic upper limbs jammed deep in his pockets so that he wouldn't have to shake hands with anybody.  His refusal to show his disability by taking notes with his feet during his career as a journalist served to develop his memory and ear for dialogue. Hemingway scholars credit this for the origin of his laconic style and direct delivery that would in his later years win him the Nobel Prize for literature.

He sustained the injury in a mortar attack during his time as an ambulance driver in the Great War that I mentioned in my previous post.  He was evacuated to a Red Cross hospital in Milan where doctors were obliged to perform the amputations to prevent gangrene.  Although Hemingway knew that the surgery had saved his life, he remained bitter about it for the rest of his days.  His trials and tribulations in the war and his subsequent experiences in hospital were later to serve as fodder for his novel, A Farewell To Arms.