On Oct. 28, 1954, the day he received word that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Ernest Hemingway made a decision few expected. He announced he was gifting his Nobel Prize medal to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity in Cuba, (the Virgin de la Caridad del Cobre).
This Valentine’s Day, in the wake of the ongoing controversy surrounding the receipt by President Trump of the Nobel Peace Prize he was gifted by María Corina Machado of Venezuela, Hemingway’s decision is worth recalling.
It embodies the essence of Valentine’s Day.
The Virgin del Cobre is the patron saint of Cuba, and in gifting his Nobel Prize medal to the sanctuary for her in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, Hemingway was distinguishing his love for the people of Cuba, his home for more than a decade, from his support for the government of Cuba, which in 1954 was controlled by the strongman dictator Fulgencio Batista.
In her memoir, “How It Was” Mary Hemingway tells the story of how her husband in a talk he gave in Spanish to the Cuban press announced his decision to gift his medal.
But it was not only the people of Cuba Hemingway sought to honor with his Nobel Prize. In meeting with the American press, Hemingway spoke of such past American writers as Mark Twain and Henry James, who had never received the Nobel Prize for Literature but who he believed deserved it. He then went on to say he thought that among living writers, Isak Dinesen, Bernard Berenson, and Carl Sandburg were worthy of the Nobel Prize.
In honoring past and present writers, Hemingway was doing the opposite of Trump, who has found it necessary to diminish the accomplishments of others in order to enhance his Nobel laureate claims.
Hemingway was following the path that Santiago, the fisherman-hero of his novel “The Old Man and the Sea,” takes after he has gone 84 days without catching a fish. When Santiago finally hooks a huge marlin, he promises to make a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Virgin del Cobre if he is able to land his catch.
Hemingway’s catch was the Nobel Prize, and he was confident that the fathers running the Sanctuary of the Virgin del Cobre would treat his medal with the same care they treated all gifts of devotion. They would not use the medal to publicize the sanctuary.
How honorable Hemingway’s decision seems in comparison to all that has happened since Machado turned over her medal to Trump.
In his White House meeting with Machado, the president made clear what he thinks it means to receive a gift of the Nobel Peace Prize and how the honors associated with the prize are ones he is now entitled to claim. “María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done,” the president boasted on social media.
In an official statement the Nobel Committee disagreed. “A laureate cannot,” the committee declared, “share the prize with others, nor transfer it once it has been announced.”
Will the president heed the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s pronouncement? Probably not. But this Valentine’s Day that does not matter. If we are looking for a lesson in receiving and giving that moves us, we can do no better than turn back the clock to 1954 and Hemingway’s example.
Mills is co-chair of the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.”