IN HEMINGWAY's NOVELS Charles M?

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PRINCIPLES OF "TRUE FELT EMOTION"

IN HEMINGWAY'S NOVELS

Charles M? Oliver Jl

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1970

Approved by Doctoral Committee lix

CHARLES MONTGOMERY OLIVER II

ABSTRACT

Hemingway was fascinated by the writer's problem of communicating the "true felt emotion" of an action. But it is one thing to state a principle of writing and quite another to practice it, and it is yet another prob lem for the critic to attempt to objectify in the novels examples of this principle of truth-telling. So the purpose of this study was to determine the practicability of the principle in Hemingway's novels.

In considering the question it became evident that there are two subordinate principles involved in the author's method of getting down "true felt emotion." The first involves a merger of fictional form and meaning, the way Hemingway uses the sounds of words or the repeti tion of words or the rhythm of a passage or the length of sentences or even the length of words in order to enhance meaning. The second involves what has become known as the "iceberg principle," the idea that it is what is not said in fiction that matters most. Most of the available Hemingway letters were read to determine whether there might be unpublished statements concerning other methods of communicating "true felt emotion" or clarification of these two; none were found. Further, a study was made of the manuscript versions of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls to determine how aware of his own principles Hemingway might have been in the initial stages of compo sition. Although insufficient evidence was found to support any significant awareness, the manuscript study did, nevertheless, influence conclusions.

The study concluded that Hemingway's principle of communicating "true felt emotion" was made practicable through the method of merging form with meaning and through leaving out knowledge important to total meaning. The most potent examples of the merger of form and meaning were found in the four love-making scenes between Robert Jordan and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, particularly the final one, where the rhythms and sounds of the. passage merge perfectly with the rhythms and emotions of the sex

1* Ill

act and where the continual repetition of the key words "now" and "one" merge with the time and love motifs of the novel. Other examples included the increased ratio of and1s and short sentences to heighten emotional im pact, and the concentration on details by characters desperate to forget mental and/or physical wounds. The study synthesized criticism of the iceberg principle at work in ten of the short stories and concluded that it was of major significance to an understanding of four of the novels (Jake Barnes's frustration and jealousy in The Sun Also Rises; the ending to A Farewell to Arms; "death" in For Whom the Bell Tolls; and "death" and the relationship between Renata and Barone Alvarito in Across the River and Into the Trees) and of minor sig nificance in the other two (Richard Gordon's mis-seeing Marie in To Have and Have Not and the strangers' objectivity at the end of The Old Man and the Sea). Some suggestions were offered for further research on related topics. IV

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One particular note of thanks must be given.

I appreciate the criticism, encouragement, and indepen dence given to me throughout this study by my advisor,

Dr. J. Robert Bashore of Bowling Green State University. 7

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER I: THE MERGER OF FORM AND MEANING...... 9

A. Language as Correlative...... 21

B. "Form" and Sexuality...... 36

C. Concentration on Details...... 41

D. The Sounds of Words and Expressions .... 52

E. Miscellaneous Examples ...... 58

F. Organic Quality in Whole Works ...... 73

CHAPTER II: THE "ICEBERG PRINCIPLE" ...... 81

A. The Short Stories...... 92

B. The Sun Also Rises...... 110

C. A Farewell to Arms...... 124

D. To Have and Have Not...... 134

E. For Whom the Bell Tolls...... 139

F. Across the River and Into theT rees .... 154

G. The Old Man and the Sea...... 169

CONCLUSION...... 177 1

INTRODUCTION

Ernest Hemingway said so much about the importance

of writing truth in fiction that critical scholarship has

accepted truth-telling as a primary Hemingway principle.

But it was not just writing accurately about events which

interested him; he was also fascinated by the writer's

problem of getting down the "true felt emotion" of an action.

Hemingway recalls in Death in the Afternoon his struggles with the craft in the early 1920's:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and' I was working very hard to try to get it.

1Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. 2. 2

Hemingway wanted to communicate not what a character was supposed to feel or had been taught to feel, mentally or physically in war or love, hut what he actually felt — his

"true felt emotion." And there should he no mental blocks for the writer, which might interfere with this truth- telling. For example, he describes the after-feeling one might have in seeing a little girl, one cannot help, struck by a train.

In such a case I suppose he £the writer^} would probably be justified in shutting his eyes as the mere fact of the child being about to be struck by the train was all that he could convey, the actual striking would be an anti-climax, so that the mo ment befor^ striking might be as far as he could represent.

So Hemingway was studying the process by which a writer gets down the truth of emotion, not what one was supposed to feel, but what one actually felt at the moment of an action.

There is a dramatic example of how this recall of emotion works as Hemingway describes seeing the wounding of a bull fighter, but "missing" something in the emotion. He des cribes his coming to awareness of the missing element:

For myself, not being a bullfighter, . . . the problem was one of depiction and waking in the night I tried to remember what it was that seemed just out of my remembering and that was the thing that I had

2Death in the Afternoon, p. 3. 3

really seen and, finally,, remembering all around it, I got it. When he [the bullfighter] stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the dirtiness of the rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit underwear and the clean, clean, un bearably clean whiteness of the thigh bone that I had seen, and it was that which was important.

The "true felt emotion" was recalled, in this incident, only when Hemingway was able to remember what it was that triggered the emotion.

The writer spent a lifetime experimenting with the element of truth-telling, commenting on it repeatedly in nonfictional works and interviews. In his introduction to

Men at War, for example, he made what is perhaps his defini tive statement concerning a writer's integrity:

A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth.4

Certainly one reason for this lifelong passion for truth telling was Hemingway's obvious concern for the degradation of the language following the first world war. The author,

3Peath in the Afternoon, p. 20.

^Ernest Hemingway, "Introduction," Men at War (New York: Bramhal House, 1942), p. xiv. 4

as well as Frederick Henry, was "embarrassed by the words

sacred, glorious, and sacrifice" and all other meaningless

abstractions in the political rhetoric of the times. So in

his writing he refused to include anything that would, as

John Peale Bishop says, "falsify the world without £orj

betray the world within." Charles Fenton records that

Hemingway was constantly writing down the sensations he felt

in boxing matches, while working in Chicago in 1920.6 jn

later discussing this experimentation for George Plimpton's

Paris Review article Hemingway spoke of

searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter's flat-soled gym-shoes, the gray colour of Jack Blackburn's skin when he had just come out of stir and other things I noted as a painter sketches. You saw Blackburn's strange colour and the old razor cuts and the way he spun a man before you knew his history. These were the things which moved you before you knew the story.

And in one of the series of Esquire articles Hemingway

^John Peale Bishop, "Homage to Hemingway," The New RepublicLXXXIX (November 11, 1936), p. 40.

^Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York: The Viking Press, 1958), p. 103.

^George Plimpton, "The Art of Fiction XXI: Ernest Hemingway," The Paris Review, Vol. V (Spring, 1958), p. 85. 5 wrote during the 1930's he describes his advice to a young writer from Minnesota, who was fishing with him in the gulf

stream:

After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader.

Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had. . .

Here then was a statement of methodology, indicating the necessity of working on one's own sensitivity to the point of being able to know what it is that creates emotion and then concentrating on writing it so clearly that the reader will have the same emotion.

But it is one thing for Hemingway to state a prin ciple of writing and quite another to practice it, and it is

^Ernest Hemingway, "Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter," Esquire (October, 1935), pp. 174A and 174B. 6

yet another problem for the critic to attempt to objectify 9 in the novels examples of this principle of truth-telling.

In considering this question, it became evident that there

are two subordinate principles involved, both of which pro

vide illustrations toward the greater concept of getting

down "true felt emotion." The first involves a merger of

fictional form and meaning, the way Hemingway uses the sounds

of words or the repetition of words or the rhythm of a pas

sage or the length of sentences or even the length of words

in order to enhance meaning; this principle will be dis cussed in Chapter I. The second involves what has become known as the "iceberg principle," the idea that it is what is not said in fiction that matters most; this will be dealt with in Chapter II. Further details of organization and methodology are included in the introductory remarks to the separate chapters.

The breadth of material available on Hemingway's

"style" is, perhaps, greater than on any other twentieth

^This study is restricted to the novels, except for the short section in Chapter II, which synthesizes some of the critical comments dealing directly or indirectly with the "iceberg principle" as it works in ten of the short stories. 7

century writer, and the basic ingredients of short sentences

monosyllabic words, choppy dialogue, etc. is, perhaps, as

familiar to Hemingway readers as his plots, themes, or

characters. But none of the stylistic studies has taken for

its primary purpose the testing of the practicability of

Hemingway's own principle of truth-telling in his novels.

Critics are generally the first to remind readers that

authors may not always be believed when they suggest partic

ular points of view toward their own work. Often there is

a good deal of justification for this skepticism, yet when

a writer of Hemingway's stature repeatedly asserts the im portance of getting down "true felt emotion" and spells out

in detail his own methodology, it may be taken as a chal lenge to critical thought to analyze just how well he was able to accomplish that which he set out to accomplish.

This dissertation is devoted to just such a challenge.

As a part of preparation, most of the available

Hemingway letters were read to determine whether there might be unpublished statements concerning other methods of com municating "true felt emotion" or clarification of the two involved in this study; none were found. Further, a study was made of the manuscript versions of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls to determine how aware of his 8 own principles Hemingway might have been in the initial stages of composition. Although insufficient evidence was found to support any significant awareness, the manuscript study has, nevertheless, influenced conclusions. CHAPTER I

THE MERGER OF FORM AND MEANING

There are passages in all six Hemingway novels, hut particularly in For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms, in which the form — the words, or the sounds of the words, or the rhythm of the passage, or, in fact, anything not immediately concerned with meaning -- tends to merge with meaning and, therefore, enhances it.

The word form is perhaps most familiar in poetry where the poet's "control of the stream of sound" is often vital to a reader's "imaginative and emotional" response.

Karl Shapiro calls this element "prosody" and includes within its realm everything "that remains after the seman tic content has as far as possible been excluded." He includes "tempo and sound, pause and flow, line and stanza, rhyme and rhymelessness," and says that "to understand and appreciate poetry as an art, it is as necessary to study these matters as it is to study metaphor, imagery,

1Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum, A Prosody Hand book (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) , p. 2. 10

and connotation." The same claim has not been made for

fiction and, probably, with justification, but not to

recognize the merger of form and meaning in certain fiction

al works (e.g. in James, Proust, or Joyce), is to decrease

the "imaginative and emotional" response.

Mark Schorer talks in terms of "achieved content"

(form) and "experience," which is inseparable from content

(meaning), but which is not yet art. And, he says, "The

difference between content, or experience, and achieved 4 content, or art, is technique." It is the technique that

enables the merger of form and meaning to take place in a work of art. Far too often discussions of form in fiction

involve the standard elements of point of view, plot, etc.;

Schorer argues, for example:

The novel is still read as though its content . has some value in itself, as though the subject matter of fiction has greater or lesser value

9 Shapiro, pp. 3-4.

^Although elements of form can be discussed separate from meaning (e.g. short sentences or monosyl labic words in Hemingway), meaning itself cannot be dis cussed separate from form. There may not be anything of interest in the form of a particular work of fiction, but there is still form, and it is that which means.

^Mark Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," The Hudson Review, Vol. I, No. 1 (Spring, 1948), p. 67. 11

in itself, and as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element, capable perhaps of not unattractive embellishments upon the surface of the subject, but hardly of its essence. Or technique is thought of in blunter terms than those which one associates with poetry, as such relatively obvious matters as the arrangement of events to create plot; or, within plot, of suspense and climax; or as the means of revealing character motivation, rela tionship, and development; or as the use of point of view, but point of view as some nearly arbitrary device for the heightening of dramatic interest through the narrowing or broadening of perspective upon the material, rather than as a means toward the positive definition of theme. As for the resources of language, these, somehow, we almost never think of as a part of the tech nique of fiction—language as used to create a certain texture and tone which in themselves state and define themes and meanings; or language, the counters of our ordinary speech, as forced, through conscious manipulation, into all those larger meanings which our ordinary speech almost never intends.

Schorer is saying that critics too often take for granted the form of fictional prose, concentrating, perhaps, on the figurative language as it enhances meaning, but not on

"achieved content," which is the writer's art, as opposed to "content," which is the writer's experience, his subject matter.

Coleridge referred to this element of "prosody" or

"achieved content" as "organic form." He stated in a

5 Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," p. 375. 12

lecture on Shakespeare early in the 1800's:

The organic form ... is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.^

The word innate may be misleading here, for there is

nothing "inborn" in a word as it appears by itself that

gives it meaning, but only as it moves, "shapes and de

velops," with other words in a passage,. In Hemingway the

form seems organic when there is this merger with meaning

of language elements like the sounds of words, or the rhysthm

of a passage, or the mere positioning of words in a

passage.

In attempting to get down the "true felt emotion"

of an action, rather than what one was supposed to feel or

had been taught to feel, Hemingway systematically arranges

the form so that it becomes one with the meaning and, there

fore, enhances both the meaning and the reader's "imagina

tive and emotional" response to it.

But, there is yet another dimension of meaning which will also be illustrated in this chapter. At least

^Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius," Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, Voi. I, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930) , p. 224. 13

in For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms — and,

perhaps, to a lesser extent in the other novels — the

repetition of the various elements intended to create

emotion often establishes for the reader what might be

called a language correlative. The repetition of words,

or sounds, or rhythm correlates with the "true felt emo

tion" Hemingway is attempting to reproduce. The moment

the reader begins to feel the elements of word or sound

repetition, for example, he also feels the emotion. This

concept is similar to T.S. Eliot's theory of objective

correlative, except that the "objects" Hemingway is

correlating are words or sounds or rhythms rather than "a 7 set of objects, a situation, a chain of events. In

Hemingway's case the language element is the "formula of

that particular emotion."

Probably the most effective example of the merger

of form and meaning—the organic quality—is found in the

final sleeping bag scene of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which

takes place the night before Robert Jordan is to blow up

the bridge. Notice, first of all, the rhythm of the sex

7T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet," Selected Essays of T.S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1960), pp. 124-125. 14

act, created by the rhythm in the repetition of the words

and, one, and now. Notice, second, that there are very few

multisyllable words in the passage until the word "descend-

ingly," which is preceded by thirty single-syllable words;

the orgasmic quality here seems obvious}

Then they were together so that as the hand on the watch moved, unseen ¿now) they knew that nothing could ever happen to the tone"!tha t did not happen to the other, that ho other thing could happen more than this; that this was all and always; this was what had been and ¿now) and whatever was to come. This, that they were not to have, they were having. They were having ¿now?and before and always and ¿now? and ¿now} and ¿now). Oh, ¿now? /£ow? ¿nov^ the only¿now? and above all ¿now? and there is no other ¿now?but thou (now)and ¿now)is thy prophet. ¿Now?and forever ¿now? _ Come ¿now? ¿now? for there is no ¿now?but ¿now? Yes, ¿now? ¿Now? please ¿now? only ¿now? not anything else only this ¿now? and where are you and where am I and where is the other I one/, and not why, not ever why, only this ¿novi- and on and always please then always ¿nowfc always ¿now), for ¿now? a lways Tone(¿nov);) oriel only l one], there is no other (onefbut (dnet&oy), Conef, going ¿now) rising (bow?, sailing ¿now), leaving ¿now? wheeling (now), soaring ¿now*, away ¿now?, all the way ¿how?, all of all the way ¿now); | one 1 and lone 1 is [one?, is | one/, is I one/, is 1 one/, is still (one/, is still {one/, is )one|jjescend- ingly, is 1 oneI softly, is[one]longingly, is)one[ kindly, is jone[happily, is[one/ in goodness, is 1onef to cherish, is fone(fnow) on earth with elbows against the cut and slept-on branches of the pine tree with the smell of the pine boughs and the night; to earth conclusively (now? and with the morning of the day to come. Then he said, for the other was only in his head and he had said nothing, "Oh, Maria, I love thee and I thank thee for this."

^Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), p. 379. All references to this novel and all other Hemingway works used in this paper 15

There are several elements in this passage which help to

create the organic quality. The rhythm and the climax have

been mentioned. But also notice that in the series of "now"

word groups preceding the thirty single-syllable words,

the multisyllable word comes before the "now": going now,

rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling now, soaring

now." Whereas, following the climactic "descendingly,"

the series of "one" word groups has the multisyllable word

after the "one": "is one softly, is one longingly, is one

kindly, is one happily." The ordering of these word groups

might be seen as a building up to and then relaxing of

Jordan's emotions. And the leveling off is made even more

obvious by the sudden cessation of the key, rhythmic words

"now" and "one." Notice also the fusion of sound and sense

in the adverbial series where the -ly and is merge over the

comma: "descendingly, is . . . softly, is . . . longingly,

is . . . kindly, is . . . happily, is . . ." Read aloud,

the comma does not separate the -ly and is but fuses them

in a smoothly, rhythmic passage.

are.to the Scribner Library paperback editions unless otherwise noted; the standard title abbreviations with page references will be noted in parenthesis following the quotation. 16

There is also a counterpointing of the time and

love motifs on the scene. The above passage is quoted from

Chapter Thirty-Seven, which begins with a long paragraph in

which there is a juxtaposing of the two elements of life

most important to Jordan at the moment: time and love.

Now Robert Jordan lay with the girl and he watched time passing on his wrist. It went slowly, almost, imperceptibly, for it was a small watch and he could not see the second hand. . . . The girl's head was under his chin and when he moved his head to look at the watch he felt the cropped head against his cheek, . . . his head dropped, his eyes close to the watch where the lance-pointed, lumi nous splinter moved slowly up the left face of the dial. ... He could see the hand moving on the watch and he held her tighter ... He felt the trembling run through all of the hollow aching and he saw the hand of the watch now mounting in sharp angle toward the top where the hour was. . . . (FWBT, p. 378.)

This isn't the entire passage, but it is sufficient to

introduce the love-making scene in which the word "now" may be seen as representing the time motif and the word

"pne" as representing the love motif, making the merger of form and meaning even more emphatic. The "now" emphasizes the immediacy of the present moment but reminds of the fleetingness of time as well. It is Frederick Henry who quotes Andrew Marvell's lines — "But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near" — to Catherine

Barclay, but Robert Jordan (or at least Hemingway) also has 17

it in mind in this scene. Jordan knows how much life

must be crowded into the time left before blowing the bridge

he thinks about it continually, and, of course, it is during

the love-making scenes with Maria that he feels most em

phatically the "now" but also the constantly moving time.

And it is at the "now" moment in this scene that Jordan

feels "one" with Maria. Notice, as well, the gradual merger of the two motifs; there is an introductory "now" and an

introductory "one" and then the time motif dominates until just before the climax when the love motif dominates, followed by a final now-time reference. Also, the first half of the passage is full of negatives, indicating

Jordan’s attempt to fight the fleeting (negative) aspect of time: "unseen," "nothing," "not,'"' "no other thing,"

"no other now," "no now but now," "not anything else,"

"not why not ever why," and "no other one." Then there are no other negatives until, at the end, when he returns to full consciousness and realizes "he had said nothing," and we are reminded again of the time motif. And fol lowing the adverbial sequence, the leveling off of emotion slowly brings Jordan back to reality. He senses the earth under his elbows ("is one now on earth with elbows against the cut and slept-on branches") and then he really 18

feels it ("to earth conclusively now"). The passage

represents the stream of Jordan's subconsciousness, until 9 he returns to earth-reality.

There is one other example from For Whom the Bell

Tolls that will help set the analysis, and then considera

tion will be given some of the various other methods

Hemingway has employed in developing this organic quality,

in order, the thesis is, to create not the illusion of

emotion, but the true emotion.

El Sordo and his three remaining men are on a

hilltop; they have fired four shots in an attempt to make

the fascists think they are dead. Tension builds through

the dialogue that ensues over whether El Sordo and his men

are really dead or faking. Finally, the fascist captain boldly strides forward up the hill, declaring confidently

that El Sordo is dead. The point of view then shifts to

El Sordo, waiting at the top:

Only one, he thought. We get only one. But from his manner of speaking he is caza mayor. Look at him walking. Look what an animal. Look

^Obviously, a separate study might be made of the potential influence of a number of writers on this element in Hemingway's work — the most obvious being Joyce and Proust, and, perhaps, Laurence Sterne. Such an investi gation is, however, outside the range of the present study. 19

at him stride forward. This one is for me. This one I take with me on the trip [into death}.. This one coming now makes the same voyage I do. Come on, Comrade Voyager. Come striding. Come right along. Come along to meet it. Come on. Keep on walking. Don't slow up. Come right along. Come as thou art coming. Don't stop and look at those. That's right. Don't even look down. Keep on coming with your eyes forward. Look, he has a moustache. What do you think of that? He runs to a moustache, the Comrade Voyager. He is a captain. Look at his sleeves. I said he was caza mayor. He has the face of an Ingles. Look. With a red face and blond hair and blue eyes. With pale blue eyes. With pale blue eyes with something wrong with them. With pale blue eyes that don't focus. Close enough. Too close. Yes, Comrade Voyager. Take it, Comrade Voyager. (FWBT, p. 319.)

Indebtedness is made here to an unpublished dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh on Hemingway's style, both for a reference to Harry Levin's book Contexts of Criticism which mentions this passage and for a discussion of the

"lyrical representation of the sex act" in the second bed roll scene, which will be discussed later, and which motivated interest in this whole concept of the merger of form and

10 meaning.

-^Robert. Howard Sykes, "Ernest Hemingway's Style: A Descriptive Analysis" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Uni versity of Pittsburgh, 1962), pp. 91ff. Sykes has studied 1,000-word passages from "Indian Camp," The Sun Also Rises, The Green Hills of Africa. and The Old Man and the Sea for such elements as the percentage of native English words; the number of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; the number of multisyllable words; the number of inverted 20

Levin points out that the reader has the same

focusing in on the captain that El Sordo does, in the

passage just cited.

Prose gets as near as it can to physical con flict here. The figure enlarges as it advances, the quickening impression grows clear and sharp and almost unbearable, whereupon it is blackened out by El Sordo's rifle.H

At first, there is only the man moving forward; then "the eyes forward," then the moustache, then the stripes on his sleeves, then the face, then the "red face and blond hair and blue eyes," then the no cap and yellow moustache, then the blue eyes again, then "pale" blue eyes, then "something wrong" with them, then "with pale blue eyes that don't focus." And that is close enough. Also, although one can not be quite as confident about it, one might at least see sentences (he finds four in the four samples); the pre dominance of "he said's" and "he asked's" in dialogue; the characteristics of dialogue that make one character dif ferent from another; the significance in Hemingway of titles, epigraphs, characters' names; and the imagery. He often compares his data with data from studies of 18th and 19th century writers like Addison, Johnson, Hazlitt, and Pater and with his own study of a 1,000-word passage from Faulkner's "The Bear." Nearly all the statistics are handled objectively, Sykes rarely attempting an aesthetic evaluation.

■^Harry Levin, "Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway," C.ontexts of ^Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 159. 21

the possibility of a walking cadence for the captain, seen

and, perhaps even "felt," by El Sordo and created by the

rhythm in the relatively regular stress on words like "look"

and then "this one" and then "come," "comrade," and "keep"

and finally "with." In fact, as Levin points out, the word

"with" acts as a coordinating device, helping to move the 12 passage and the captain forward.

A. Language Elements Correlate With Emotion

This leads, then, to a discussion of what happens

when a number of language elements become operative in 13 Hemingway narrative. An increase of and's, a quickened

-L^Levin, p. 159.

l^Hemingway told Lillian Ross that he "used the word ‘and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint." See "Profiles: How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" The New Yorker, XXVI, Pt. 1 (May 13, 1950), p. 60. The repetition of particular notes in Bach con certos and fugues is easily demonstrable, but it is used for "pedal point," not counterpoint. Counterpoint is the superimposing of one theme in music (or literature) on another; the and could act as a connecting link between two themes, but would probably not be the counterpoint itself. On the other hand, pedal point is a single note or tone in music, which is constantly reiterated while other things are going on around it. Bach used it, especially at the be ginning of a piece, in order to establish a sort of base point from which the rest of the selection would revolve. 22

rhythm, a sudden switch to short sentences, or even the use

of harsh or sonorous sounds, all these elements tend to

create a kind of language correlative. The reader recog

nizes the repetition of the language element, which is

immediately correlated with the emotion.

The increased use of these elements seems to come

most often in the most emotionally-packed scenes; the wound

scenes in both A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls

are good examples, and the passages of interior monologue in all the novels have an increase in one or more of these elements, creating simultaneously the correlation with "true felt emotion."

When Frederick Henry receives his wound, for example, there are a number of elements present in the form of the fiction. The wound occurs in Chapter IX, and at the end of Chapter VIII there is a rather quietly descriptive passage, containing twenty-two sentences with an average of twenty-six words per sentence. The first paragraph of

Chapter IX, on the other hand, contains thirty-one sentences with an average length of fifteen words; and the wound chap ter as a whole contains 155 narrative sentences with an average length of thirteen words: thus, there is a decrease in sentence length of thirteen words per sentence in the 23 more emotionally-packed chapter. Furthermore, in the para graph in which Frederick Henry actually receives his wound, there is an obvious increase in the number of and's and a quickened rhythm.

I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh—then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. X breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my headllheard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river. There was a great splashing and I saw the starshells go up and burst and float whitely and rockets going up and heard the bombs, all this in a moment, and then I heard close to me some one saying "Mama Mia I Oh, Mama Mia I" I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him. It was Passini and when I touched him he screamed. His legs were toward me and I saw in the dark and the light that they were both smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other was held by tendons and part of the trouser and the stump twitched and jerked as though it were not connected. He bit his arm and moaned, "Oh mama mia, mama mia," then, "Dio te salve, Maria. Dio te salve, Maria. Oh Jesus shoot me Christ shoot me mama mia mama Mia oh purest lovely Mary shoot me. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Oh Jesus lovely Mary stop it. Oh oh oh oh, 11 then 24

choking, "Mama mama mia." Then he was quiet, biting his arm, the stump of his leg twitching. (FTA, pp. 54-55.)

The increase of coordinating and1s to a ratio of one for

every twelve words, stringing along the noun clauses in a continuous flow of action, gives, as Harry Levin suggests

for a similar Hemingway passage, an approximation of "the 14 actual flow of experience." And the rhythm of the narra tive portion of the passage is basically iambic, as is most of Hemingway's narrative writing, but there are more than twenty anapestic substitutes, giving a more rapid pace to the whole heart-quickening description. And notice, in the following pieces of the passage, the number of times the anapestic "feet" begin with and;

I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. . . . there was a flash, . . . and a roar that started white and went red . . . and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. . . . The ground was torn up and in front of my head . . . In the jolt, of my head . . . and I saw the starshells go up . . .

In the entire wound passage, as in nearly all the more emo tional scenes in Hemingway's novels, the key word is and,

"with its renewable promise of continuity, occasionally 15 varied by then and so."

l^Levin, p. 158. l^ibid. 25

The and's, the numerous anapestic "feet," the shorter

sentences, all these elements of language help to render

the emotional impact of the scene with as much of the "true

felt emotion" of quickened heartbeat as possible.

The wound scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls has the

same ratio of and's (one for every twelve words), but

twenty-nine words per sentence. Hemingway seems still aware of the short and long sentence effect in the later novel

(when Jordan is wiring the bridge, for example, and the emo tion is carried through interior monologue, there are only seven words per sentence in a one hundred sentence narrative passage). So the length of the sentences in the wound scene may be an inconsistency. On the other hand, the possibility exists that the author may have been trying for a sort of conflict of emotions, represented by the paradox of an in creased number of and1s but also long sentences. After all,

Jordan has been thinking about death for three days: Pilar had predicted it and Jordan tries several times "not to think about it," and the whole time motif of the novel has the

l^It is, perhaps, worth noting here that there is no regular distribution of and1s discernible. In this pas sage, as in all the passages with an increased ratio of and1s, the number of words between the and1s will vary from one to twenty or more. 26

effect of foreshadowing his death. So, instead of the full

impact of increased and's and short sentences, the author

increases the and1s to the emotional:.norm of one to twelve,

but lengthens the sentences to allow the reader to feel

Jordan’s lack of surprise.

In order to see the possibility of language correl

ative more closely, it is necessary, of course, to look at

several passages. Since the effect seems clearest in For

Whom the Bell Tolls (there are more examples), it will be

used as the primary example; there are four particularly good

illustrations. In the first, Jordan has just made love to

Maria in the woods, but his thoughts have now returned to

the bridge. Notice, again, the increase in and1s and the basic iambic rhythm, quickened by numerous anapestic sub

stitutes :

Because now he was not there. He was walking beside her but his mind was thinking of the problem of the bridge now and it was all clear and hard and sharp as when a camera lens is brought into focus. He saw the two posts and Anselmo and the gypsy watching. He saw the road empty and he saw movement on it. He saw where he would place the two auto matic rifles to get the most level field of fire, and who will serve them, he thought me at the end, but who at the start? He placed the charges, wedged and lashed them, sunk his caps and crimped them, ran his wires, hooked them up and got back to where he had placed the old box of the exploder and then he started to think of all the things that 27

could have happened and that might go wrong. Stop it, he told himself. You have made love to this girl and now your head is clear, properly clear, and you start to worry. Don’t worry. You mustn't worry. You know the things that you may have to do and you know what may happen. Certainly it may happen. (FWBT, pp. 161-162.)

There are twelve sentences in this passage with fifteen

words per sentence and a ratio of one and for every twelve

words. As the reader begins to feel the various language

elements at work, he immediately correlates them with the

emotional intensity of Jordan's thoughts.

The second example is from the indirect interior

monologue of Andre as he tries to get to Golz with Jordan's

message. He is remembering things from his youth — in

this case, the chasing of bulls. And instead of short

sentences, this example has one long sentence (132 words) but with a ratio of one and per nine words.

In the dust and the heat, the shouting, the bull and man and wine smell, he had been in the first of the crowd that threw themselves onto the bull and he knew the feeling when the bull rocked and bucked under him and he lay across the withers with one arm locked around the base of the horn and his hand holding the other horn tight, his fingers locked as his body tossed and wrenched and his left arm felt as though it would tear from the socket while he lay on the hot, dusty, bristly, tossing slope of muscle, the ear clenched tight in his teeth, and drove his knife again and again and again into the swelling, tossing bulge of the neck that was now spouting hot on his fist as he let his weight hang on the high slope of the withers and banged and banged into the neck. (FWBT, p. 365.) 28

There are two emotional dimensions present here: the recol

lected emotion of an action from Andre's youth concurrent with

the emotion of time-present as Andre rushes toward Golz with

Jordan's message. The and's and the anapestic rhythm carry

the portrayal of emotion here, and, in this case, perhaps

the long sentence does what the short sentences do in the

first example, in adding to the feeling of quickened breathing

or more rapid heart-beat. There are other repetitive ele

ments which also contribute to the emotional impact of the

passage (for example, "drove the knife again and again and

again" and typical Hemingway adjectives, like "on the hot,

dusty, bristly, tossing slope of muscle") .

The third example is the entire last direct interior

monologue of Jordan's as he lies wounded, waiting for Lieu

tenant Berrendo and his men. The passage is too long to

maintain thé one to twelve ratio of and's (too many would

destroy, through exaggeration, the language correlative), but it is probably the longest sustained series of short

sentences in all Hemingway. Though the ratio of and's is

one to thirty-eight, there are only nine words per sentence

in 248 sentences. And when the point of view shifts from

Jordan to the narrator for the last five paragraphs of the

novel, there is also a shift in form. There are twenty- 29

three sentences in the narrator's part, so one would expect

the ratio of and's to decrease (it does from one in thirty-

eight to one in twenty-seven) but the sentences lengthen to

an average of sixteen words, indicating less emotion because

of a greater degree of objectivity. And since the and's

cannot be sustained throughout, Hemingway groups them in

short sections, so that the total effect is still achieved.

There are three relatively short sections in the passage in which the one to twelve ratio appears.

Within the longer passage there is a short section which uses a different language "object" to achieve the correlation. Jordan has been trying not to think about death, so the repetition of his trying to avoid thought has also created language correlative. When he tries to avoid thinking, the reader understands that he is thinking about death. So, it seems appropriate for Hemingway to insert, near the end of this final section, the repetition of the word think, perhaps as a means of tying these correlative elements together. The emotional impact of the entire section seems heaviest here:

Think about them being away, he said. Think about going through the timber. Think about them cros sing a creek. Think about them riding through the heather. Think about them going up the slope. Think about them O.K. tonight. Think about them 30

travelling, all night. Think about them hiding up tomorrow. Think about them. God damn it, think about them. That's just as far as I can think about them, he said. Think about Montana. I can't. Think about Madrid. I can't. Think about a cool drink of water. . . . (FWBT, p. 470.)

The repetition of the word think reminds the reader of

Jordan's emotion of not-thinking, and, of course, what he

is doing here is trying to not-think about death by thinking

about more pleasant things.

In attempting to create the "true felt emotion,"

in other words, Hemingway has established a language correl

ative. As one feels the repetition of and's, short sen

tences, and other elements, all enhancing the quickened

emotion, so does he recognize the emotional impact of the

scene. But, more than that, there are degrees of emotional

impact, based on the intensity of the elements present, such

as in the difference in degree of objectivity between Jordan

and the narrator, at the end of the novel.

Hemingway's only specific reference to the repetition

of an<31 s appears in the Lillian Ross "Portrait," and, there, he refers to their use only in the first paragraphs of A

Farewell to Arms. But he was undoubtedly experimenting with all these elements in the early novels. For instance, the and's appear in a ratio of one to ten in Jake Barnes' prayer 31

in the Pamplona Cathedral:

I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself,, and all the bull fighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing. . . . and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun. The sunlight was hot and hard, and I crossed over beside some buildings, and walked back along side-streets to the hotel. (SAR, p. 97.)

There may be an attempt to create the accurate felt emo

tion in this passage, but it would be difficult to recognize

without knowing about his later successes.

But, the first paragraphs of A Farewell to Arms, to which Hemingway referred in the Ross interview, present an

interesting study in themselves. The first chapter contains

five narrative paragraphs, and there are four more paragraphs

in the second chapter before the initial dialogue. This early narrative is full of and1s (again, at the rate of one to twelve). The difference is that the section does not seem particularly emotional. In fact Frederick Henry begins the narration with a panoramic view from his house in the village,

"that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains," and then progressively focuses in on the village and then on 32

his house, and then on the dining room where they all eat,

and, finally, on the men in his outfit, especially the priest

However, when one begins to infer a rationale for the and's,

he sees the possibility of emotion presented, not stated,

through a kind of pre-symbolism. In light of Frederick's

interior monologue a few pages later and the wound scene a

few pages after that, there may be language correlative that

is only effective as one thinks back to the initial narrative

sections from the perspective of the later, more obviously

emotional scenes. The novel's opening paragraph will be

sufficient illustration:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. (FTA, p. 3.)

There could be a great deal not said here. Hemingway may be indicating, through the continual use of and's through out the chapter, a kind of nervous tension in Frederick

Henry, which the reader will not understand until he begins 33

to feel the cumulative effect of the language correlative

in the later, more obviously emotional passages.

The correlation in the interior monologue passage, for example, is much clearer. Frederick Henry is sitting in his room making out a report on his afternoon trip to the front. The stream of his thoughts begins with his remem bering that it is just two days until the offensive starts.

Then he thinks about home and that it has been a long time since he has written; then he thinks again about the war, then death, and finally about Catherine. There is a gradual increase in the number of and's; the passage as a whole contains a ratio of one to every sixteen words, but the section of thought about Catherine contains a ratio of one to eight:

Maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop at the concierge's desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please. Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the 34

window open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink the capri and the door locked and it was hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. (FTA, pp. 36-38.)

The quickened beat of the anapestic "feet" and the and1s

provide language correlative for Jordan's fidgity emotions.

And the even faster rhythm at the end of the passage

reflects the sexual overtones of his fantasy dream.

There are two short passages in Across the River and Into the Trees similar in their merger of form and meaning and similar in their reflection of sexual overtones in Colonel 17 Cantwell's remembering his relationship with Renata.

The Colonel heard the slap of the waves, and he felt the wind come sharply, and the rough famil iarity of the blanket, and then he felt the girl cold-warm and lovely and with upraised breasts that his left hand coasted lightly over. Then he ran his bad hand through her hair once, twice, and three times and then he kissed her, and it was worse than desperation.

She kissed him kind, and hard, and desperately, and the Colonel could not think about any fights or

17 Renata never actually appears in time-present, because the major portion of the work takes place in Cantwell's memory as he duck-hunts the mouth of the Tagliamento River. For more of this interpretation, see Chapter II, Section F. 35

any picturesque or strange incidents. He only thought of her and how she felt and how close life comes to death when there is ecstasy. And what the hell is ecstasy and what's ecstasy's rank and ser ial number? And how does her black sweater feel. And who made all her smoothness and delight and the strange pride and sacrifice and wisdom of a child? Yes, ecstasy is what you might have had and instead you draw sleep's other brother. (ARIT, pp. 152 and 219.)

The first paragraph reflects his emotional desperation

in love, the second his emotional desperation toward im

pending death.

The only section of interior monologue in The Old

Man and the Sea that contains any hint of the organic pat

tern of the earlier novels is in Santiago's initial dream

of Africa, the night before he goes for the big fish:

He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high caps and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning. Usually when he smelled the land breeze he woke up and dressed to go and wake the boy. But tonight the smell of the land breeze came very early and he knew it was too early in his dream and went on dreaming to see the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea and then he dreamed of the different harbours and roadsteads of the Canary Islands. (QMS, pp. 24-25.)

The ratio of and's is one to eleven, giving one the feeling of continual flow of experience as in the other examples, 36 but, here, the rhythm is not so quickened, and the sonorous

sounds of the words merge with the sense of dreaming. There

are more than eighty m's, w’s, l’s, and r’s in the short passage, enhancing the meaning by merging sound and sense.

Although there are two short passages of interior monologue with an increased ratio of and1s, in To Have and

Have Not, they do not operate as effectively in communica ting "true felt emotion" and so will not be cited.

B. "Form" and Sexuality

The powerful example of merging form and meaning with which this chapter began is but one of several sexually passionate scenes in the novels. The other three sleeping bag passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls and an especially interesting scene of auto-eroticism in To Have and Have

Not all also convey organic qualities.

The merger of form and meaning in the final sleeping bag scene has been discussed, but each of the other love- making scenes between Robert Jordan and Maria have similar qualities. For example, the first one contains several highly connotative words which create rather obvious sex ual overtones:

Now,as they lay all that before had been shielded was unshielded. Where there had been roughness of 37

fabric all was smooth with a smoothness and firm rounded pressing and light and closely holding, closely held, lonely, hollow-making with contours, happy-making, young and loving and now all warmly smooth with a hollowing, chest-aching, tight-held loneliness that was such that Robert Jordan felt he could not stand it . . . (FWBT, pp. 70-71.)

All the underlined word groups move the sexual rhythm of the passage toward the climax, "now all warmly smooth," and the completion with a leveling off of emotion.

In the dissertation for the University of Pitts burgh, referred to above, Robert H. Sykes discusses the

"lyrical representation of the sex act" in the second love- making scene. Sykes calls attention to the connotations of words like "filling," "possessing," "having," "sudden ly," and "always."18

Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on

18Sykes, p. 97. 38

the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, . suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them. (FWBT, p. 159.)

Notice the repetition of the time elements again and the word "nowhere," stressed regularly in helping to create sexual rhythm. And notice the shift in point of view, first to Maria who sees sun-colors through her closed eyes, and then to Jordan who sees the "dark passage which led to no where." There is a sort of suspension-in space feeling for Jordan, the same stream of-subconsciousness mentioned earlier.

A Negative Language Correlative

One could argue a total lack of organic quality in the third love-making passage. For one thing, there is no narration.

"Maria." "Yes." "Maria." "Yes." "Maria." "Oh, yes. Please." "Art thou not cold?" "Oh, no. Pull the robe over thy shoulders." "Maria." "I cannot speak." "Oh, Maria. Maria. Maria. 39

Then afterwards, close, with the night cold out side, in the long warmth of the robe, her head touching his cheek, she lay quiet and happy against him and then said softly, "And thou?" (FWBT, p. 263.)

But even the dialogue has a merger of form and meaning;

the reader can certainly feel the sexual emotion of both

Jordan and Maria in the exchange. And even though the more

familiar elements of the other emotional passages are

missing, one could argue that their conspicuous absence

simply makes the passage organic. The sexual pleasure of

the other scenes is not present. Maria says a few minutes

later, "But it was not as this afternoon." And this is

reflected in the organic quality, as well, making, perhaps,

a kind of negative language correlative. In other words,

there are no language elements operative in the passage because there is not the emotional intensity of the earlier

love-making scenes.

In the passage from To Have and Have Not the wounded Harry Morgan is being towed into Key West, and there

is a series of omniscient narrative looks into the lives of the "haves" in their yachts which Harry's boat passes along the way. One of the "haves" is Dorothy, mistress of a "professional son-in-law of the very rich," who is in her dressing gown on the deck of Irydia IV, noticing the lights of the boat along the breakwater. The direct interior 40

monologue is five pages long, the reader moving through

her thoughts, until, finally, hack in bed and her lover

already asleep, there is this auto-erotic passage:

What can you do but go ahead and do it even though, even though, even anyway, oh, he is sweet, no he isn't, I'm sweet, yes you are, you're lovely, oh, you're so lovely, yes, lovely, and I didn't want to, but I am, now I am really, he is sweet, no he's not, he's not even here, I'm here, I'm always here and I'm the one that cannot go away, no, never. You sweet one. You lovely, yes you are. You lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, yes lovely. And you're me. So that's it. So that's the way it is. So what about it always now and over now. All over now. All right. I don’t care. What difference does it make? It isn't wrong if I don't feel badly. And I don't. I just feel sleepy now and if I wake I'll do it again before I'm really awake. (THHN, pp. 245-246.)

Hemingway probably "tells" too much near the end of this passage, rather than to "show" as he does in most of the others, through the merger of form and meaning in the words and rhythm. But, the organicness is still there. Repeti tion of the words "sweet," "lovely," and "I'm," in particular, enhance the emotional impact. The inward looking aspect is there, but one can also see the vision she holds of her lover. 41

C. Concentration on Details

Concentration on details has already been mentioned

in For Whom the Bell Tolls as providing language correlative when the reader becomes aware that the details are a means of

forgetting or not-thinking for the character. This particu

lar device is not used often in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but

it is used extensively in The Sun Also Rises and a few times

in A Farewell to Arms. These passages are different from the ones in which the character simply indicates he "doesn't want to think about it"; concentrated details provide a language correlative, a means by which Hemingway can create the accurate felt emotion without "telling" that the char acter is trying to forget. .

There are more than a dozen such passages in The Sun

Also Rises. All of them involve Jake, but it is not that he is attempting to forget the physical wound, alone, that he wishes to not-think; in fact, the wound is only important as it causes him frustration in his relationship with Brett.

Brett is frustrated because she cannot have Jake, but she is open about it: "Oh, darling, I've been so miserable" (SAR, p. 24). But Jake suffers inwardly:

But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things dif ferently from when it is light. The hell there isn't! I figured that all out once, and for six months 42

I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. To hell with women, any way. To hell with you Brett Ashley. (SAR, p. 148.)

But, it is not the wound as much as the frustration that

keeps him from sleeping. And, during the day-time, there

is the concentration on details which help him to not-

think. Brett's line, used above, is the last sentence in

Chapter III; Chapter IV begins, then, with Jake concentra

ting on details in order to avoid thinking about his own

frustration:

The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Con- trescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. . . . (SAR, p. 25.)

Later, at the Cafe Select where Brett is the center of at tention, especially from Count Mippipopolous, Jake does not talk much — in fact, he never does when he is with Brett, indicating, perhaps, the never-really-stated love Jake has for her — and, after he breaks away from the party, he provides the reader with the following seemingly unneces sary details:

I went out onto the sidewalk and walked down toward the Boulevard St. Michel, passed the tables of the Rotonde, still crowded, looked across the street at the Dome, its tables running out to the edge of the pavement. Some one waved at me from a 43

table, I did not see who it was and went on. I wanted to get home. The Boulevard Montparnasse was deserted. Lavigne's was closed tight, and they were stacking the tables outside the Closerie des Lilas. I passed Ney's statue standing among the new-leaved chestnut-trees in the arc-light. There was a faded purple wreath leaning against the base. I stopped and read the inscription: from the Bonapartist Groups, some date; I forget. He looked very fine, Marshal Ney in his top-boots, gesturing with his sword among the green new horse-chestnut leaves. . . . (SAR, p. 29.)

There is another paragraph as long with the same kind of

concentration on detail. If there were only one or two of

these passages, one might argue that they are truly irrel evant and that Hemingway simply blundered. But, there are too many to be written off that easily.

Another example is at the beginning of Chapter VI as Jake waits for Brett at five o'clock in the Hotel Crillon.

She fails to show up so Jake takes a taxi to the Cafe

Select:

Crossing the Seine I saw a string of barges being towed empty down the current, riding high, the barge men at the sweeps as they came toward the bridge. The river looked nice. It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris. The taxi rounded the statute of the inventor of the semaphore engaged in doing same, and turned up the Boulevard Raspail, and I sat back to let that part of the ride pass. The Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding. . . . (SAR, p. 41.)

And then follows exposition on why the boulevard is indeed dull riding, ending with the thought that he must have gotten 44

the idea from H.L. Mencken, who "hates Paris, I believe.

So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken."

This final comment may have nothing to do with either Jake or

the language correlative beginning to be recognizable in the

details, but the purpose of the passage as a whole is still

to remind the reader of Jake's need to not-think.

In yet another scene, Jake and Bill Gorton leave

Brett, have an uncomfortable dinner at Madame Lecomte's

restaurant (uncomfortable because there are too many tour

ists) , and then walk around the island, along the Seine.

Upon leaving Brett, they exchange comments about her:

"Quite a girl," Bill said. "She's damned nice. Who's Michael?" "The man she's going to marry." "Well, well," Bill said. "That's always just the stage I meet anybody. What'll I send them? Think they'd like a couple of stuffed race-horses?" "We better eat." "Is she really Lady something or other?" Bill asked in the taxi on our way down to the lie Saint Louis. "Oh, yes. In the stud-book and everything." (SAR, p. 76.)

Though Jake, of course, narrates the next few passages about the dinner and conversation with Madame Lecomte, it is less than a page in length and is followed immediately by the walk, in which once again, we get a concentration of details:

We walked on and circled the island. The river was dark and a bateau mouche went by, all bright with 45

lights, going fast and quiet up and out of sight under the bridge. Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky. We crossed to the left bank of the Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river at Notre Dame. Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses were high against the sky, and the trees were shadows. . . . We crossed the bridge and walked up the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. It was steep walking, and we went all the way up to the Place Contrescarpe. The arc- light shone through the leaves of the trees in the square, and underneath the trees was an S bus ready to start. Music came out of the door of the Negre Joyeux. Through the window of the Cafe Aux Amateurs a girl was cooking potato-chips in oil. There was an iron pot of stew. The girl ladled some onto a plate for an old man who stood holding a bottle of red wine in one hand. (SAR, p. 77.)

Carlos Baker questions the reason for so much detail in this passage:

It is hard to discover . . . what purpose beyond the establishment of the sense of place is served by Barnes's complete itinerary of his walÿgWith Bill Gorton through the streets of Paris.

Even though Jake is a newspaper man and would-be writer, it is difficult to believe he would see all this on a walk with Bill Gorton if there were not some sort of underlying principle at work. It is not just Jake's "sense of place" at work here; what moves under the surface of this detailed description is Jake's desire to not think about Brett. And

1 9 Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 52. 46

the reader correlates the concentrated details with Jake's

emotion of not-thinking.

It is interesting to note that while the group is

at the Fiesta in Pamplona, there is a paucity of passages of

concentrated detail. Jake is drunk most of the time, and,

therefore, does not need anything else to help him forget, either his wound or Brett. But, as soon as he gets back to San Sebastian, near the end of the novel, and is alone, the correlative is brought in once more, and the reader understands Jake's attempt to forget that Brett ran off with a bullfighter:

I unpacked my bags and stacked my books on the table beside the head of the bed, put out my shaving things, hung up some clothes in the big armoire, and made up a bundle for the laundry. Then I took a shower in the bathroom and went down to lunch. . . . After lunch I went up to my room, read a while, and went to sleep. When I woke it was half past four. I found my swimming-suit, wrapped it with a comb in a towel, and went down-stairs and walked up the street to the Concha. The tide was about half-way out. The beach was smooth and firm, and the sand yellow. I went into a bathing-cabin, undressed, put on my suit, and walked across the smooth sand to the sea. The sand was warm under bare feet. There were quite a few people in the water and on the beach. Out beyond where headlands of the Concha almost met to form the harbor there was a white line of breakers and the open sea. Although the tide was going out, there were a few slow rollers. They came in like undulations in the water, gathered weight of water, and then broke smoothly on the warm sand. I waded out. The water was cold. As a roller came I dove, swam out under water, and came to the surface with all the chill gone. . . . (SAR, pp. 234-235.) 47

There is another detailed bathing scene which takes place

the next day, including this closing passage:

I sat in the sun and watched the bathers on the beach. They looked very small. After a while I stood up, gripped with my toes on the edge of the raft as it tipped with my weight, and dove cleanly and deeply, to come up through the lightening water, blew'the salt water out of my head, and swam slowly and steadily in to shore. (SAR, p. 238.)

And immediately following is the arrival of the telegram from Brett asking him to help her out of her most current difficulties. It is the first mention of Brett's name since the end of the fiesta; yet the reader knows she has been present all along.

One would hesitate to suggest this correlative as necessarily thematic, yet the passages of concentrated de tail are sufficiently numerous for the idea of concentrating in order to forget to be considered motif, if not theme.

And the Jake-Brett frustration does, after all, end the novel:

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policemen in khaki direc ting traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" (SAR, p. 247.)

This interpretation of the numerous, otherwise unexplained passages of concentrated detail conflicts somewhat with the standard interpretations of the novel. For example, Barnes, 48

like Frederick Henry, has turned his back on abstractions

in favor of observable details, but not merely because he

is a member of the "lost generation," searching for meaning

in a meaningless world. That makes him a kind of mystical

quester, the sort of character completely incompatible with

the Hemingway canon; one must determine principles to be

lived by and then fight for them always. No, it seems much more reasonable to see Barnes as an extension of Nick

Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River" and as the pattern for later heroes. He has mental and physical wounds he is trying to

forget, particularly the impotency, which leads to frustra- 20 tion and jealousy over Brett. Barnes is trying to forget the abstractions of love and frustration (even impotency is an abstraction) by concentrating on concrete details. Hem ingway's own statement of theme, which, of course, cannot be taken as an end to the discussion, would support this in terpretation. In writing about the critical reaction to the novel in his biography, Carlos Baker discusses Hemingway's concern about the over-emphasis on the Gertrude Stein quote in the epigraph. Baker says,

20See Chapter II for a detailed discussion of this element as a part of the iceberg principle at work in The Sun Also Rises. 49

There was . . .a widespread tendency to take the book as a prime exhibit of "Lost Generationism." Ernest had helped this along by placing Gertrude Stein's remark, "You are all a lost generation" side by side with the quotation from Ecclesiastes about the continuity of the rhythms of the earth. He complained to Perkins [Hemingway's editor] that it was the latter, not the former, that he wanted to emphasize. What he had meant to write was "a damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero."21

Hemingway is using the term "tragedy" loosely here to be

sure, for even in modern tragedy the hero is the tragic fig ure. But, certainly, there is an element of tragedy in

Barnes' frustration over a wound he could not help and which he is not allowed to forget.

There are only two such examples in A Farewell to

Arms, but Frederick Henry, like Robert Jordan, is more active than Jake Barnes, and, therefore, does not need to work so hard at forgetting; and, of course, there is no frustration.

The first example occurs when Frederick has to return to the front after his recuperation in the Milan hospital. He and

Catherine leave to spend a few hours together in a small hotel near the train station where he would catch the mid night train. There is nervous tension, knowing they are going to part:

21carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), p. 179. 50

We crossed the far end of the square and looked back at the cathedral. It was fine in the mist. We were standing in front of the leather goods shop. There were riding boots, a rucksack and ski boots in the window. Each article was set apart as an exhibit; the rucksack in the centre, the riding boots on one side and the ski boots on the other. The leather was dark and oiled smooth as a used saddle. The electric light made high lights on the dull oiled leather. (FTA, p. 147.)

And a little later:

I paid for the cartridges and the pistol, filled the magazine and put it in place, put the pistol in my empty holster, filled the extra clips with cart ridges and put them in the leather slots on the holster and then buckled on my belt. The pistol felt heavy on the belt. Still, I thought, it was better to have a regulation pistol. You could always get shells. (FTA, p. 149.)

Of course, the most potent scene of concentrated detail occurs at the end of the novel as Frederick Henry paces and thinks and tries not to think as Catherine goes through her day-long process of dying. Twice he goes down the street to a restaurant, and the second time there is this lengthy series of details, intended to render his "true felt emotion" of trying to forget.

I ate the ham and eggs and drank the beer. The ham and eggs were in a round dish—the ham under neath and the eggs on top. It was very hot and at the first mouthful IJhad to take a drink of beer to cool my mouth. I was hungry and I asked the waiter for another order. I drank several glasses of beer. I was not thinking at all but read the paper of the man opposite me. It was about the break through on the British front. When he realized I was reading the back of his paper he folded it over. I thought of asking the waiter for a paper, but I could not 51

concentrate. It was hot in the cafe and the air was bad. Many of the people at the tables knew one another. There were several card games going on. The waiters were busy bringing drinks from the bar to the tables. Two men came in and could find no place to sit. They stood opposite the table where I was. I ordered another beer. I was not ready to leave yet. It was too soon to go back to the hospital. I tried not to think and to be perfectly calm. The men stood around but no one was leaving, so they went out. I drank another beer. There was quite a pile of saucers now on the table in front of me. The man opposite me had taken off his spectacles, put them away in a case, folded his paper and put it in his pocket and now sat holding his liqueur glass and looking out at the room. Suddenly I knew I had to get back. I called the waiter, paid the reckoning, got into my coat, put on my hat and started out the door. I walked through the rain up to the hospital. (FTA, p. 324.)

There is too much going on during this crucial scene for

Hemingway to write in (irrelevant detail; it is certainly

intended as aameans of communicating unspoken emotion,

similar to that in The Sun Also Rises. There is a differ ence in the above scene, however, because twice Frederick

Henry tells us that he is trying not to think, a comment that would not be necessary if the author had more confidence in the reader’s ability to correlate details with the emotion of not thinking.

None of the other three novels has this kind of or ganic quality. The Old Man and the Sea has several sections of descriptive detail, but it is used either as a means of establishing the character of Santiago, or as a means of creating story credence. In order to believe that the old 52

man could handle the huge marlin at all, the reader has to

feel the years of learning about fishing Santiago has gone

through. He puts his lines down at forty, seventy-five, one

hundred, and one hundred and twenty-five fathoms because,

though he speaks of "luck," he would rather be exact, then

if luck comes along he'll be ready for it. The descriptive

details help the reader to know that Santiago knows; they

have nothing to do with the kind of organic quality referred

to in the other novels.

D. The Sounds of Words and Expressions

Hemingway constantly shows an inclination to experi

ment with the sounds of individual words or expressions, as

well as with full passages. Sykes discusses in some detail

Hemingway's conscious effort to restore the echoic quality to conventionalized onomatopoetic words that . . . have lost their edge from loose using . . . and it accounts for his using "whunk" in one place to represent the sound of a bullet striking an animal’s body and "whack" in another.22

Any reader of Hemingway's fiction is familiar with the echoic quality of a number of expressions. The calling attention to this kind of organicness by citing a few ex amples from each novel will be sufficient to support the point. But this element represents a never-ending experi-

22sykes, p. 93. 53

mentation by the author, because it permeates all his

fiction from "Indian Camp"^8 to The Old Man and the Sea,

though this discussion will be restricted to the novels.

In Pamplona, the dancers are on the square, and their rope-soled shoes "tapped and spatted" on the pavement

(SAR, p. 165). At another time, the drums kept on "pounding and the pipes were "going" (SAR, p. 205), which is a strange combination; drums pounding is undoubtedly echoic, but why would Hemingway create the opposite effect with the pipes going? Unless, of course, he is again playing with the idea of contrasting effects as a part of the total organic impact of the drunken atmosphere of the whole fiesta section.

When Frederick Henry tries to kiss Catherine in the dark, early in their relationship, she slaps him, and there is a "sharp stinging flash" (FTA, p. 26). In another place, an artillery shell explodes near the river bank where Fred erick would be wounded a few minutes later: "Then there was one that we did not hear coming until the sudden rush"

(FTA, p. 53). The next sentence is also echoic: We both

23sykes discusses several echoic examples from the short stories, but occasionally exaggerates the quality; for example, he suggests that the word "reminiscently" in "Indian Camp" ("The young Indian smiled reminiscently") indicates the breadth of the boy's mouth because it is the longest word in a story of monosyllables. 54

went flat and with the flash and bump of the burst and the

smell heard the singing off of the fragments and the rattle

of falling brick." Words like "flash and bump", "singing

off," and "rattle" are intended? to merge sound and sense

for greater effect, in order to recreate the "true felt

emotion."

The "chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh" of the shell coming in

that actually wounds Frederick was discussed earlier and is

a rather obvious attempt to echo the sound. But the mixing

of sound, sight, and touch sense images in "a roar that

started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind"

(FTA, p. 54) is also meant to be echoic. After he makes his escape into the Tagliamento River and hops a train headed east, Frederick lies in the flat car, which goes

"slowly and clickingly" (FTA, p. 231) along the tracks.

At the beginning of To Have and Have Not, some gunmen shoot up the San Francisco Cafe where Harry Morgan is having a cup of coffee. Morgan says, "I heard the gun going and bop, bop, bop, there were bottles smashing all along the wall" (THHN, p. 6). Whether one feels the word

"bop" is an accurate echo of the sound of bottles being smashed by gun fire, there is no question that Hemingway intended it to. When the Cubans who have hired Harry's 55

boat kill Albert, Morgan describes it like this: "The burst

was so close to his chest that the bullets whocked like

three slaps" (THHN, p. 153). And, then when Harry gets the

upper hand a little later and is able to shoot the Cubans, he describes it as follows: "Then he gave him a burst.

The gun lighted him on hands and knees, and, as the flame and bot-bot-bot-bot stopped, he heard him flopping heavily"

(THHN, p. 171). As Sykes points out with "whunk" and

"whack," Hemingway's sensitivity to the sound of a bullet hitting objects, whether animate or inanimate, rarely allows him to spell the sound the same way twice.

By the time Hemingway gets to For Whom the Bell

Tolls, the reader, if he is reading truly and knows enough, can distinguish the type of shell being used by the spelling of the sound in the text. For example, the bullets are described as "spatting" on the rocks as El Sordo and his men climb the hill for their last-ditch stand. It is also worth noting in this scene (FWBT, p. 307) the attempt to merge form and meaning as the blood spurts from the horse's side as it struggles up the hill:

. . . and when his horse was hit so that he wheezed in a slow, jerking, climbing stagger up the last part of the crest, splattering the snow with a bright pulsing jet . . . 56

The three adjectives describing the stagger and the two

describing the jet of blood merge sound and sense. At the

bridge, Robert Jordan hears Pablo's automatic rifle "spat-

spa t- spat- spatting into the noise of the grenades" (FWBT,

p. 435). The description of the bridge explosion has been

used in another context, but there are several echoic ex pressions, which one now comes to expect in Hemingway:

. . . then there was a cracking roar and the middle of the bridge rose up in the air like a wave breaking and he felt the blast from the explosion roll back against him as he dove on his face in the pebbly gully . . . His face was down against the pebbles as the bridge settled where it had risen and the familiar yellow smell of it rolled over him in acrid smoke and then it commenced to rain pieces of steel. (FWBT, p. 445).

Besides the underlined words, which tend to merge sound and sense, there is also that mixture' of sense impression in "yellow smell," described once before. If the automatic rifle sounds like "spat-spat-spat-spatting," then the cav alry submachine gun sounds like "spot-spot-spotting" a few pages later (p. 451). And still later, the fascists have wheeled in some light artillery: "Then he heard a noise come sweeeish-crack-boom: The boom was a sharp crack that widened in the cracking . . . Sweeish-crack-boomi" (p. 459). The next shell that comes in has a "flat trajectory," however, and the sound is spelled differently: "Wheeeeeeish-ca-rack" 57

Colonel Cantwell thinks about death constantly

in Across the River and Into the Trees; in the following

passage, the reader "hears" the sound of shells coming in,

once again:

Death . . . comes to you in small fragments that hardly show where it has entered. It comes, some times, atrociously. It can come from unboiled water; an un-pulled-up mosquito boot, or it can come with the great, white-hot, clanging roar we have lived with. It comes in small cracking whispers that precede the noise of the automatic weapon ... It comes in the metallic rending crash of a vehicle . . . (ARIT, pp. 219-220.)

Words like "unendingly11 and "interminable" in The

Old Man and the Sea will be discussed in Section E as having organic quality in that their very length is meant

to represent the length of the fish, first as it comes out of the water and, second, as it comes along side the old man's skiff. But these words are not echoic; that is, there

is nothing in the sound that echoes the sense. A similar example occurs when the fish first strikes:

He was happy feeling the gentle pulling and then he felt something hard and unbelievably heavy. It was the weight of the fish and he let the line slip down, down, down, unrolling off the first of the two reserve coils. (QMS, p. 43.)

The "down, down, down" is not an echo of sound here, so much as it is echo of meaning, similar to the nine planes in

"pointed formations of threes, threes, threes" (FWBT, p. 74) 58

Some of these examples, of course, are more obvious

than others, but they are sufficient to show that Hemingway

was attempting, at least, to convey the merger of sound and

sense, part of the merger of form and meaning within the

novels.

E. Miscellaneous Examples

There are a number of scattered examples of the mer

ger of form and meaning, which do not seem to fit into any

of the major categories treated in this chapter, but which

are, nevertheless, interesting and worth discussion. Per

haps it is best to group them by novel; in which case, For

Whom the Bell Tolls again provides the most natural starting

point, since the total effect seems greater.

Immediately following Jordan's vision of the planes

in 'threes, threes, threes," there is a paragraph with a

slightly different method of merging form and meaning.

Critic John Graham calls attention to the grammatical struc

ture of

separate but concurrent actions that become mutually involved. United by no logical rela tion or by cause and effect, the actions draw into closer relation characters or things which 24 reveal or clarify each other.

24john Graham, "Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of Style," Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. VI (Winter, 1960), pp. 309-310. 59

Here is the paragraph Graham quotes as an illustration:

Robert Jordan unrolled the bundle of clothing that made his pillow and pulled on his shirt. It was over his head and he was pulling it down when he heard the next planes coming and he pulled his trousers on under the robe and lay still as three more of the Heinkel bimotor bombers came over. Before they were gone over the shoulder of the moun tain, he had buckled on his pistol, rolled the robe and placed it against the rocks and sat now, close against the rocks, tying his rope-soled shoes, when the approaching droning turned to a greater clat tering roar than ever before and nine more Heinkel light bombers came in echelons; hammering the sky apart as they went over. (FWBT, p. 75.)

Graham says of this narration

The two actions are channeled grammatically— Robert Jordan's dressing in the independent clauses, the planes' flight in the temporal ones. The indepen dent clauses present a base of commonplace activity and flat rhythm from which operates the harshly poetic flight and the climactic rhythm of the de pendent clauses. It is through the earthborn,the personal, the individual of the guerrilla that we approach the diabolic symbol of distant,, impersonal 9 mechanization.

This is, of course, comparable to the juxtaposing of the time and love motifs (the watch and Maria) in the fourth bedroll scene, discussed earlier.

There are two more passages in the El Sordo sec tion of the novel worth noting. Sykes mentions the placement of commas and dashes to create the sound of

25Graham, p. 310. 60

machine-gun firing as the fascists chase El Sordo and his

men up the hill:

. . . in the last lung-aching, leg-dead, mouth- dry, bullet-spatting, bullet-cracking, bullet singing run up the final slope of the hill . . . (FWBT, p. 308.)

The conflicting emotions presented in Jordan's in

terior monologue as he places the sticks of dynamite under

the bridge were discussed briefly earlier, but there is

another element worth mentioning here. There are short,

choppy sentences (6.8 words per sentence) and yet very few

and's, in fact only one for every 62.4 words, which is even

fewer than the norm for a non-emotional piece of narrative.

The paucity of and's, as was suggested earlier, could very well indicate a sort of negative language correlative,

similar to that established in the wound scene, where there were one in twelve and's but long sentences. Jordan is nervous at the bridge, and we feel this in the quickened pace of his mind. On the other hand, he cannot afford to be too nervous, or he will make a mistake, and we feel this in the scarcity of and's. A short excerpt from the page and a half passage will be sufficient to illustrate:

26Sykes, p. 98. 61

This will drop it like what all. Come on. Don't get excited. Do it. Clean and fast as the last one. Don't fumble with it. Take your time. Don't try to do it faster than you can. You can't lose now. Nobody can keep you from blowing one side now. You're doing it just the way you should. This:is a cool place Christ, it feels cool as a wine cellar and there's no crap. Usually working under a stone bridge it's full of crap. This is a dream bridge. A bloody dream bridge. It's the old man on top who's in a bad spot. Don't try to do it faster than you can. I wish that shooting would be over up above. "Give me some wedges, vieejio." I don't like that shooting still. Pilar has got in trouble there. Some of the post must have been out .... (FWBT, p. 437.)

Another element here is the details. As in so many other

passages in Hemingway's fiction, a concentration on detail

provides a language correlative of its own, the reader

knowing that the character is attempting to forget or not-

think, or, perhaps, in this case to simply remain "cool."

And here, as in most similar passages, the reader knows

what it is that Jordan is trying to not-think about — the

possibility of death, in this case through some error in

j udgment.

A few pages later Jordan, having wired the bridge

and moved back so he can blow it up, is worried about fas

cist trucks or tanks coming around the bend in the road before he gets back up the hill where Anselmo is waiting

with the explosive plunger. There are and's in the pas

sage, but the repetition in Jordan's thinking that the road

"was still clear" provides most of the emotional impact. 62

He heard the firing and as he walked he felt it in the pit of his stomach as though it echoed on his own diaphragm. It was closer now as he walked and he looked back at the bend of the road. But it was still clear of any car, or tank or men. It was still clear when he was halfway to the end of the bridge. It was still clear when he was three quarters of the way, his wire running clear and unfouled, and it was still clear as he climbed around behind the sentry box, holding his wire out to keep it from catching on the iron work. Then he was on the road and it was still clear below on the road and then he was moving fast backwards up the little washed-out gully by the lower side of the road as an outfielder goes backwards for a long fly ball, keeping the wire taut, and now he was almost opposite Anselmo's stone and it was still clear below the bridge. (FWBT, p. 445.)

The reader has a clear image here of Jordan moving with the

wire along the gully toward Anselmo, concentrating on the

wire and the bridge, but periodically jerking his head toward

the bend in the road to see if it "was still clear." It is

another excellent example of the effect of the organic quality in Hemingway narration. And when the bridge actually blows, there are words like "cracking roar" and "roll back" and "rolled over him" and "commenced to rain pieces of steel" which provide the same sort of explosive merger of form and meaning.as in the El Sordo passages.

Then he heard the truck coming down the road and he saw it over his shoulder just coming onto the long slope and he swung his wrist once around the wire and yelled to Anselmo. "Blow her I" and he dug his heels in and leaned back hard onto the tension of the wire with a turn of it around his wrist and the noise of the truck was coming behind and ahead there was the road with the dead sentry and the long bridge and the stretch of road below, 63

still clear and then there was a cracking roar and the middle of the bridge rose up in the air like a wave breaking and he felt the blast from the explosion roll back against him as he dove on his face in the pebbly gully with his hands holding tight over his head. His face was down against the pebbles as the bridge settled where it had risen and the familiar yellow smell of it rolled over him in acrid smoke and then it commenced to rain pieces of steel. (FWBT, p. 445.)

The above two excerpts are together in the narration and of equal emotional intensity; yet the and1s in the first paragraph are used at the ratio of only one in nineteen and in the second at the ratio of one in twelve, the norm for creating the language correlative of felt emotion. It seems logical to assume that Hemingway used fewer and1s in the first paragraph in order to emphasize the repetition of the "it was still clear" passages, but more in the second to achieve the language correlative.

In Farewell to Arms the drunken dialogue between

Frederick Henry, Rinaldi, and the Italian major in charge of the ward where Frederick is laid up in the Milan hospital is combined in paragraph form and without quotes in order to create the emotion of drunkenness:

. . . Like the French, said the major. We will get Nice and Savoia from the French. We will get Corsica and all the Atlantic coast-line, Rinaldi said. Italy will return to the splendors of Rome, said the major. I don't like Rome, I said. It is hot and full of fleas. You don't like Rome? Yes, I love Rome. Rome is the mother of nations. I will never forget Romulus suckling the Tiber. What? Nothing. Let's all go to 64

Rome to-night and never come back. Rome is a beautiful city, said the major. The mother and father of nations, I said. Roma is feminine, said Rinaldi. It cannot be the father. Who is the father, then, the Holy Ghost? Don’t blas pheme. I wasn't blaspheming, I was asking for information. You are drunk, baby. Who made me drunk? I made you drunk, said the major. I made you drunk because I love you and because America is in the war. Up to the hilt, I said. You go away in the morning, baby, Rinaldi said. To Rome, I said. No, to Milan. To Milan, said the major, to the Crystal Palace, to the Cova, to Campari's, to Biffi's, to the galleria. You lucky boy. To the Gran Italia I said, where I will borrow money from George. To the Scala, said Rinaldi. You will go to the Scala. Every night, I said. You won't be able to afford it every night, said the major. (FTA, p. 7 6.)

One might add to the run-on dialogue and lack of quotes

evidence that Hemingway also presents ambiguous speakers

in this passage to add to the feeling of drunkenness.

Also, at the height of the chaos during the re

treat from Caporetto, there is a moment when Frederick seems

"out of himself," looking at himself, the way he was able

to be somewhat objective about his own wounding. The Italian

soldiers are lining up all the officers crossing the bridge at the Tagliamento River, questioning them, then marching them off to be shot. Frederick sees this ahead in the jammed up column on the bridge.

The officers were scrutinizing every one in the column, sometimes speaking to each other, going forward to flash a light in some one's face. They took some one else out just before we came opposite. I saw the man. He was a lieutenant-colonel. I saw 65

the stars in the box on his sleeve as they flashed a light on him. His hair was gray and he was short and fat. The carabiniere pulled him in behind the line of officers. As we came opposite I saw one or two of them look at me. Then one pointed at me and spoke to a carabiniere. I saw the carabiniere start for me, come through the edge of the column toward me, then felt him take me by the collar. (FTA, pp. 221-222.)

The end of this passage is like a dream trance in which

Frederick senses himself, as he looks at the situation as if from a distance. It is not "the carabiniere started for me" or "he took me by the collar," but "I saw the carabin iere start for me" and "then felt him take me by the collar.

There is a kind of objectiveness here not felt in the rest of the passage.

The entire Fiesta section of The Sun Also Rises presents an atmosphere of drunkenness, from the opening

"explosion" at the beginning of Chapter IV to the end of

Book II, seventy-two pages. Following some initial drinking and good-natured kidding and joking, the fol lowing paragraph initiates an atmosphere of unrealness which hangs over Jake Barnes and his group throughout the festival:

The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any conse quences. It seemed out of place to think of 66

consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days. (SAR, pp. 154-155.)

This is a regrettable paragraph in a way, for, as he does

with the Frederick Henry restaurant scene, Hemingway really

tells too much. He "tells" that Frederick is trying not to

think, even though the concentration on details "shows"

that; and in the Pamplona passage above, he feels it neces

sary to "tell" that what is coming is "unreal," even though

the very sounds and rhythms of the passage "show" that.

Hemingway does something else in this section which

emphasizes the atmosphere of unrealness, but which, at the

same time, tends to damage the total effect of the section.

Twice, Hemingway breaks into the action for an expository

passage on the bullfights. The first example is sandwiched

between two relatively long sections of dialogue; here is a

typical excerpt, occurring just before the exposition:

"I want to sit down below, next time." Brett drank from her glass of absinthe. "She wants to see the bull-fighters close by," Mike said. "They are something," Brett said. "That Romero lad is a child." "He's a damned good-looking boy," I said. "When we were up in his room I never saw a better-looking kid." (SAR, p. 167.)

And from this, Jake breaks into the exposition, sober, and straight out of the expository Death in the Afternoon. 67

I had her [BrettJ watch how Romero took the bull away from a fallen horse with his cape, and how he held him with the cape and turned him, smoothly and suavely, never wasting the bull. She saw how Romero avoided every brusque movement and saved his bulls for the last when he wanted them, not winded and discomposed but smoothly worn down. . . . Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero's bull fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bullfighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing. (SAR, pp. 167-168.)

There are twenty-one sentences in the two, full paragraphs with an average length of twenty-two words per sentence, highest average in the chapter. Following the exposition is more dialogue,

"Be a good chap, Jake. Don't tell her anything more about him. Tell her how they beat their old mothers." "Tell me what drunks they are," followed at the end of the chapter by this bit of "cloudy" narration: 68

The next day Pedro Romero did not fight. It was Miura bulls, and a very bad bull-fight. The next day there was no bull-fight scheduled. But all day and all night the fiesta kept on. (SAR, pp. 168 and 169.)

An even better example of straight authorial expo sition in the middle of the "unreal" festival comes a little later in the week, at the height of their celebration.

There is a different sort of attempt at merging form and meaning in an exchange between Mike and Jake:

"Hello, Jake," he said very slowly. "I'm getting a lit tie sleep. I've want ed a lit tie sleep for a long time."

"Don't go. I have n't got ten to sleep yet."

"I'm just start ing. I'm go ing to get a lit tie sleep." (SAR, p. 210.)

And then, less than a page later, is a perfectly unclouded description of the fights, including this passage, again like something out of Death in the Afternoon.

The first bull was Belmonte’s. Belmonte was very good. But because he got thirty thousand pesetas and people had stayed in line all night to buy tickets to see him, the crowd demanded that he should be more than very good. Belmonte's great attraction is working close to the bull. In bull-fighting they speak of the terrain of the bull and the terrain of the bull-fighter. As long as a bull-fighter stays in his own terrain he is comparatively safe. Each time he enters into the terrain of the bull he is in great danger. Belmonte, in his best days, worked always in the terrain of the bull. This way he gave the sen sation of coming tragedy. People went to the corrida to see Belmonte, to be given tragic sen sations, and perhaps to see the death of Belmonte. 69

Fifteen years ago they said if you wanted to see Belmonte you should go quickly, while he was still alive. Since then he has killed more than a thousand bulls. When he retired the legend grew up about how his bull-fighting had been, and when he came out of retirement the public was disap pointed because no real man could work as close to the bulls as Belmonte was supposed to have done, not, of course, even Belmonte. Also Belmonte imposed conditions and insisted that his bulls should not be too large, nor too dangerously armed with horns, and so the element that was necessary to give the sensation of tragedy was not there, and the public, who wanted three times as much from Belmonte, who was sick with a fistula, as Belmonte had ever been able to give, felt degraded and cheated, and Belmonte's jaw came further out in contempt, and his face turned yellower, and he moved with greater difficulty as his pain increased, and finally the crowd were actively against him, and he was utterly contempt uous and indifferent. . . . (SAR, pp. 213-214.)

This is not Jake Barnes when he is sober, let alone Barnes

at the end of a drunken spree in Pamplona. It is pure

Hemingway, and the author's intrusion into the story is an

unhappy one, breaking not only the continuity but the

credence. But it does allow for the comparison to the rest

of the Pamplona section. It is an intrusion at the rate of 37.8 words per sentence, an obvious contrast to the

short-sentence formula established for the "unreal" parts.

Time elements are also confused throughout the fiesta section. Hemingway critic Kermit Vanderbilt calls attention to a number of discrepancies, both in calendar time 70

27 and plot duration. Among other "errors," he notes that

the calendar of 1925 shows June 20 to have been a Saturday

instead of a Monday, as indicated in the narration. But, as Vanderbilt points out, only the internal inconsistencies really count. Jake states (p. 125), "We stayed five days at

Burguete," yet they left Pamplona on Tuesday, June 28, and prepare to leave Burguete on the return trip, Wednesday,

July 6 (p. 127). Bill and Jake arrive in Pamplona on July 6

(p. 130) and Jake indicates the fiesta will begin "day after tomorrow" (p. 145) or Friday, July 8. But Chapter XV begins by stating, "At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded" (p. 152). There are other time inconsistencies, but these will suffice to show that the confusions are real.

The time inconsistencies are so obvious, however, that one wonders if it is possible that Hemingway deliberately con fused time-present during the fiesta in order to heighten the "true felt emotion" of confused time among the characters and, therefore, emphasize the merger of form and meaning. At

Burguete, for example, there is this exchange between Jake and the Englishman Harris, as if to underline their drunken 2 * *

27Kermit Vanderbilt, "The Sun Also Rises: Time Uncertain," Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3 (October, 1969), pp. 153-154. 71

condition:

"What day of the week is it?" I asked Harris. "Wednesday, I think. Yes, quite. Wednesday. Wonderful how one loses track of the days up here in the mounta ins." "Yes. We've been here nearly a week." (SAR, p. 127.)

Not only is Harris confused over the day of the week, but

Jake is confused over how long he and Gorton have been

there; actually, Wednesday is their eighth day.

In other words, the entire fiesta section represents various mergers of form and meaning, all of which enhance

the "true felt emotion" of the confusedly drunken characters

involved.

Finally, there are three short examples from The

Old Man and the Sea which also merge form and meaning. The first occurs as the great marlin jumps the first time. Sykes calls attention to the eleven monosyllable words which pre- 28 cede "unendingly" as the fish leaves the water:

The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. (QMS, p. 62.) The eleven monosyllable words preceding "unendingly" give the four-syllable word the same sort of emphasis given"descendingly" in the bedroll scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was preceded by thirty monosyllable words. "Unend-

28Sykes, p. 102. 72

ingly" creates the image of length which so impressed San

tiago as he watched the event at the end of his line. And,

there is another element here which adds to the organic

nature of the passage. There is a slow-motion effect

achieved, very much like that a modern movie might attempt

with the same scene. The preciseness of the whole passage

gives this effect, but particularly in the words "slowly and

steadily" and the mental picture one has of the ocean bulging,

before the fish is actually seen. The repetition of "came

out," followed by the longest word in the passage,

"unendingly," and, again, the mental picture of water pouring

from the sides of the fish, adds to the effect.

The second example is not as obvious. When the old

man brings the marlin up to the boat, it "started to pass

the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and

interminable in the water" (QMS, p. 93). Sykes says that the word "interminable" again suggests the length of the fish, preceded as it is with one and two syllable words.

The third example involves the flow of narrative

through lack of punctuation: "Just then the fish jumped making a great bursting of the ocean and then a heavy fall"

(QMS, p. 82). The omission of the comma after "jumped" emphasizes the continuous action of the fish. 73

F. Whole Works Reflect Organic Quality

Not only are there words, sentences, and passages which convey the merger of form and meaning in Hemingway, but one could argue that whole works reflect this quality.

In discussing the element of form in James Joyce, Mark Schorer implies a similar merger of form (only Schorer calls it

"achieved content") with meaning in A Portrait of the Artist as a. Young Man:

The opening pages are written in something like the stream of consciousness of Ulysses, as the environment impinges directly on the conscious ness of the infant and the child, a strange, opening world which the mind does not yet subject to questioning, selection, or judgment. But this style changes very soon, as the boy begins to explore his surroundings, and as his sensuous experience of the world is enlarged, it takes on heavier and heavier ryhthms and a fuller and fuller body of sensuous detail, until it reaches a crescendo of romantic opulence in the emotional climaxes which mark Stephen's rejection of domes tic and religious values. Then gradually the style subsides into the austerer intellectuality of the final sections, as he defines to himself the outlines of the artistic task which is to usurp his maturity.

The "achieved content" is considerably different, because

Hemingway uses sentence length as an element of form, but the effect of form on meaning is the same.

29 Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," p. 382. 74

In his study of Hemingway, Philip Young discusses

the emotional intensity of "Big Two-Hearted River," created

to a large extent by the length of sentences. Short sen

tences indicate "a terrible panic . . . just barely under

control," and when

the extreme excitement of a big strike from a trout intervenes the style changes abruptly. The pressure is off the man, he is nowhere but right there playing the fish, and then the sentences lengthen greatly and become appropriately graceful.88

The "panic under control" is Nick's concern for detail in order to avoid thinking, probably, as Young indicates later, to avoid thinking about the mental and physical wounds he has received, the same rationale for packed details as was discussed earlier for Jake Barnes and Frederick Henry, and, in fact, for nearly all the Hemingway heroes.

However, as has already been shown, short sentences appear in the novels for more reasons than to convey "panic under control." In a much broader sense, the long-short sentence dichotomy creates the changing moods of whole sec tions of the longer works, perhaps for the entire work.

For example, this dichotomy is a major controlling

88Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), p. 46. 75

factor in the changing moods of A Farewell to Arms. Except

for the interior monologue near the end of Chapter VII,

where Frederick Henry thinks of the war and Catherine, and

there is both an increase of and's and short sentences, the

entire early narrative up to the wound (in Chapter IX') is

relatively passive and calm. As if to emphasize this calm

ness — before the storm — the chapter's final narrative

paragraphs average twenty-six words per sentence. Then, as

the action picks up, the sentences shorten to thirteen words

though a 155-narrative sentence chapter. In Chapter X,

Rinaldi visits the wounded Frederick in the field hospital, 31 and, although all but the first paragraph is in dialogue, there is a general leveling off of Frederick's emotion, accented, perhaps, by the fact that Rinaldi does nearly all the talking, attempting to cheer up his sick comrade. In

Chapter XI, the priest visits the hospital, and there is further leveling off. In Chapter XII, Frederick gets drunk the night before he is to leave for Milan, and, although there is a slight increase in both and's and short sentences, the general effect of the chapter is passive.

31 No chapter in A Farewell to Arms begins with dia logue, indicating the necessity for setting mood quickly; further note that in the five novels with chapter divisions only ten chapters begin with dialogue. 76

Book Two (Chapters XIII-XXIV) is dominated by the

love theme; Frederick arrives at the Milan Hospital at the

beginning, returns to the front at the end, and is with

Catherine throughout. And except for when Frederick and

Catherine go to the hotel across from the train station the

night he leaves, the entire section contains relatively long

sentences and none of the other elements of the emotion-

packed scenes previously mentioned. The exception is at the hotel in Chapter XXIII when there are several narrative

passages of concentrated detail in short sentences, indica

ting again the nervousness of thought about leaving Catherine and returning to the war. For example:

I went to the window and looked out, then pulled a cord that shut the thick plush curtains. Cather ine was sitting on the bed, looking at the cut glass chandelier. She had taken her hat off and her hair shone under the light. She saw herself in one of the mirrors and put her hands to her hair. I saw her in three other mirrors. She did not look happy. She let her cape fall on the bed. (FTA, p. 152.)

Back in Gorizia at the beginning of Book Three there is no sudden decrease in sentence length, although there is also no question that the tension is mounting. But in the three and one half chapters which narrate the retreat from Capo retto, there are 450 narrative sentences with an average length of twelve words. The final paragraph of Chapter XXX will be sufficient here to indicate the short sentences and 77

emotional intensity, Frederick's farewell to arms — the

climax of the novel:

I looked at the carabinieri. They were looking at the newcomers. The others were looking at the colonel. I ducked down, pushed between two men and ran for the river, my head down. I tripped at the edge and went in with a splash. The water was very cold and I stayed under as long as I could. I could feel the current swirl me and I stayed under until I thought I could never come up. The minute I came up I took a breath and went down again. It was easy to stay under with so much clothing and my boots. When I came up the second time I saw a piece of timber ahead of me and reached it and held on with one hand. I kept my head behind it and did not even look over it. I did not want to see the bank. There were shots when I ran and shots when I came up the first time. I heard them when I was almost above water. There were no shots now. The piece of timber swung in the current and I held it with one hand. I looked at the bank. It seemed to be going by very fast. There was much wood in the stream. The water was very cold. We passed the brush of an island above the water. I held onto the timber with both hands and let it take me along. The shore was out of sight now. (FTA, p. 225.)

The two chapters remaining in Book Three reflect the same sort of leveling off process as at the end of Book One.

Frederick walks south where he jumps the Mestre train, and, although there is" his final, somewhat emotional thinking through to a separate peace (done in short sentences), there is also the smooth transition from war to love.

I was through. I wished them all the luck. There were the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the sensible ones, and they deserved it. But it was not my show any more and I wished this bloody train would get to Mestre and I would eat and 78

stop thinking. I would have to stop.

I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Cath erine. To-night maybe. No that was impossible. But to-morrow night, and a good meal and sheets and never going away again except together. Probably have to go damned quickly. She would go. I knew she would go. When would we go? That was something to think about. It was getting dark. I lay and thought where we would go. There were many places. (FTA, pp. 232 and 233.)

The love theme dominates Book Four and, despite the neces sary tension in running to Switzerland, the sentences are relatively long again, reflecting the happy, generally calm mood of Frederick and Catherine, who feel secure in their being together, alone.

Most of Book Five is more of the same, the first three chapters reflecting the deep happiness of Frederick and Catherine in the mountains near Montreaux and in the

Lausanne hotel. Catherine's caesarian operation and death in the final chapter change the mood, of course, and

Frederick's interior monologue reflects his emotional tension:

You never got away with anything. Get away hell I It would have been the same if we had married fif ty times. And what if she should die? She won't die. People don't die in childbirth nowadays. That was what all husbands thought. Yes, but what if she should die? She won't die. She’s just having a bad time. The initial labor is usually protracted. She's only having a bad time. After ward we'd say what a bad time and Catherine would say it wasn't really so bad. But what if she 7

should die? She can't die. Yes, but what if she should die? She can't I tell you. Don't be a fool. It’s just a bad time. It's just nature giving her hell. . . .

Everything was gone inside of me. I did not think. I could not think. I knew she was going to die and I prayed that she would not. Don't let her die. Oh, God please don't let her die. I'll do anything for you if you won’t let her die. Please, please, please, dear God, don't let her die. Dear God, don't let her die. I'll do anything you say if you don't let her die. You took the baby but don't let her die. That was all right, but don't let her die. Please, please, dear God, don't let her die. (FTA, pp. 320 and 330.)

The short sentences of these passages reflect, once more,

the tenseness of the "true felt emotion" of Frederick Henry

There is almost a plus-one correlation, in other words, between the emotionally tense passages and short

sentences, between the passive or emotionally happy passage

and relatively long sentences.

All these elements of form — the words, the sounds of words, the rhythm of passages, the length of. sentences - provide for the reader the merger with meaning which en hances the meaning and encourages the "imaginative and emotional" response to Hemingway novels which Shapiro dis cusses for poetry. It is the author's attempt to produce the "true felt emotion" of an action — not the emotion one would expect to feel or had been taught to feel, but the 80

true emotion.

As the reader will have no doubt sensed, all of

this discussion deals with matters below the level of sur

face meaning. Yet, they are not strictly elements of

Hemingway's "iceberg principle," which he also experi

mented with most of his professional career, because the

"iceberg" theory does not include what is merely below the

surface of meaning, but what is left out altogether.

The next chapter will deal with these elements of

Hemingway's fiction. CHAPTER II

THE ICEBERG PRINCIPLE

Hemingway's theory that it is what is left out of

fiction that is important is probably the best known and most discussed of all his principles of writing. Several

critics, particularly Baker and Young, have dealt with

this concept either directly or indirectly, especially in

the short stories, and some of their observations will be discussed in Section A. It is possible to discover in the novels literally dozens of examples of things not said but which can be "felt” as certainly as if they had been said and which enhance the meaning of either particular scenes or of the total work. And most of the examples included in this discussion create an intensity of emotion, through understatement or no statement at all, which, as with the merger of form and meaning discussed in Chapter I, creates for the reader the "true felt emotion" which Hemingway is attempting to render in his general theory that one must write "truly".

It is necessary to begin with Hemingway's own 82

familiar comments on the principle of omission in order to

set the limits of discussion, followed by a synthesis of

criticism on the principle as it works in some of the short

stories, and then on the principle as it works in the novels

To Hemingway, a "great enough" writer seems to be born with knowledge, but he really is not;

he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. (DIA, pp. 191-192.)

But there are some things which cost dearly for the obtaining:

They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. (DIA. p. 192.)

Surface knowledge is not sufficient, however, because then the writer must put these things into his work in order to attempt to clarify them. But the "great enough" writer, the writer whose knowledge is deep enough to be "simple," can leave out these things, and the reader will have a feeling for them as if they were stated:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it fsicj being above water. (DIA, p. 192.) 83

As Hemingway later told George Plimpton for The Paris

Review interview, "the knowledge is what makes the under

water part of the iceberg.In his conversation with

Hemingway, Plimpton was interested in the novelist's

concept of how a writer uses his knowledge. In answer,

Hemingway repeated his iceberg theory:

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he doe^ not know it then there is a hole in the story.

Later, he told Lillian Ross he had cut some scenes from

Across the River and Into the Trees. Apparently he did not go into detail, but he did add to his definition of the iceberg theory.

The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away. . . . When I'm writing it, I'm just as proud as a goddam lion. I use the oldest words in the English language. People think I'm an ignorant bastard who doesn't know the ten- dollar words. I know the ten-dollar words. There are older and better words which if you arrange them in the proper combination you make it stick.

■^George Plimpton, "The Art of Fiction XXI: Ernest Hemingway," The Paris Review, Vol. V (Spring, 1958), p. 84. 2 Ibid.

3r.oss, p. 61. 84

By "stick" he means lasting quality, something that always

impressed him and which he was "working very hard to get."

The iceberg principle does not include those ele

ments which are merely below the surface of meaning. It

does not include symbolism, for instance, which operates in

a different way from those elements being discussed in this

chapter. The darkness and rain in A Farewell to Arms, for

¿xaftiple^ develop concurrently with the increasing danger and

ultimate death of the baby and Catherine at the end of the novel; it is the culmination of the symbolic use of rain

throughout the novel. And, it is an aide to movement in the novel, as well. But, there is really nothing left out in the rain symbol. Readers understand it as a symbol, and although symbols are not always seen or understood, they are simply a way of combining concreteness with abstraction. A symbol suggests an object which suggests the meaning. There is really nothing in Hemingway's use of the iceberg principle that is a question of suggestion of objects which then suggest meaning. The reader merely has a "feeling" for knowledge not stated, but which is in the work as surely as if the author had stated it. When the iceberg principle works well, as it does often in Hemingway, the effect is greater than with symbolism, because of a closer, more 85

sensuous relationship between the reader and the writer.

Nor does the iceberg principle include elements

which produce what Carlos Baker refers to as "fenestra- ,,4 tion, or elements which produce a merger of form and

meaning as discussed in Chapter I, even though all these

things may be considered below the surface of meaning. The

iceberg principle refers only to the profound knowledge of

"simple" things, always costly in the acquiring because it

takes so long, and which can be left out (if the writer is

writing "truly") and which the reader will feel "as strongly

as though the writer had stated them."

4Baker defines fenestration as "the ability of a writer to universalize." He says, "Open literature . . . recognizes the necessity of fenestration. Out through its windows we continually catch glimpses of a larger world than that immediately encompassed by the story we are reading. . . . Hemingway early discovered and then steadily experimented with the means by which closed literature could be converted into open literature." See section "Open and Closed Liter ature," pp. 320ff. in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. In a letter, "Carlos Baker to Charles M. Oliver," dated February 4, 1970, Baker states that Hemingway never reacted to the "notion about the importance of 'fenestration' in prose, accomplished (I guess I said) by means of open-ended symbolss" The concept of fenestration might be worthy of intensive study, but if one marks all the "open-ended symbols" in the novels, i.e. everything that tends to extend meaning beyond the limits of a particular scene, one finds bits of universal truth and/or philosophy, which taken separately give "glimpses of a larger world," and which taken together may make the novel "open," but which seem to provide no information more than that on how the conversion actually takes place. 86

In saying that the reader will have a "feeling" for

therthings not stated, Hemingway is, of course, making the

reader's reaction subjective. Although there are a number

of examples in this chapter where one's "feeling" for things

not stated is, perhaps, the most accurate way to describe

what happens, there are also a number of examples where there

are elements (one might call them hints) which may trigger a

more objective interpretation of what moves with the seven-

eighths of the iceberg.

There is difficulty in all this, of course, because

there are degrees of writing truly. One can easily fill in

the missing element in a story like "The Sea Change," for

example; the word "lesbianism" is never used, and to miss the

fact the girl has become a lesbian is to miss the meaning of the story, but the idea prevails throughout the story even though the word is never used. On the other hand, readers who fail to see the distinguishing features of individual characters may do so because Hemingway is simply not writing truly enough. He has been criticized, and with some justi fication, because his characters "look the same," but the reader aware of Hemingway's concept of "leaving out what one knows” may realize a greater degree of distinction among his characters. Hemingway argues, for instance, the 87

difference between "character" in a novel and "people."

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. . . . People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer's assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart, and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. (DIA, p. 191.)

One of the experiments Hemingway tried in attempting to create "people" rather than "characters" was to establish recognizable speech characteristics. Where other writers had attempted to "picture" a character for the reader,

Hemingway attempted to make the reader "hear." Robert H.

Sykes discusses this element as a part of his statistical findings concerning Hemingway's style:

In his dialogue Hemingway does not indicate speech pecularities of the characters by phonetic spelling, by dropping the terminal "g” on present participles, or by other manipulations of con struction. To do so would be "cheating.” The matter-of-fact statements made by Nick ^AdamsJ are formally the same as those made by the Spanish border guard, by the African M'Cola, and by the old fisherman. Regional differences are suggested, 88

instead, by the substitution of a foreign word for the English word or by the elimination of and between nouns and verbs in the speech of oge who is not expected to speak English fluently.

In Green Hills of Africa the reader is introduced early to the native tracker M'Cola, first with two bits of physical description ("bald black skull" and "thin Chinese hairs at the corners of his mouth"), -followed by his first words, which help set the description: "'No good,' he said.

'Hapana m'uzuri.'" Similarly, Santiago and Manolin use

Spanish expressions early in the reader's introduction to them, again as a means of helping to set the persona. At one point, the narrator states that the boy says "Jota" for "J" in John J. McGraw; at another point, he says,

"'Que va, . . . There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you.'" Sykes also points out that the only two verbs Hemingway uses when referring to the act of speaking, anywhere in the four one thousand word passages he studied, are "said" and "asked": "They appear always terminally with simple sentences and medially in compound sentences. Once conversation is established, 6 Hemingway drops the tags completely."

^Sykes, p. 70.

6Ibid. 89

Hemingway restricts himself to ther.unobtrusive "said" and

"asked" because the reader should sense the adjectives in ,

the actual dialogue. To write "he said, softly," or "he

asked, raising an eyebrow," would be cheating. Although

there are, indeed, identifying features in many of Heming

way's characters, one still has the feeling that many are

not delineated well enough to establish any kind of "round

ness" readers have come to expect of twentieth century

fiction.

There are two other minor elements which are included

in the iceberg principle. In inserting foreign words as a

means of helping to identify particular features of "people,"

Hemingway has left many of these words untranslated. Usually,

he will offer a translation in the context of the narration

or dialogue; for example, in an exchange between El Sordo

and Robert Jordan, there is this Spanish-with-translation

exchange: "1Dentro de la gravedad,' he [Jordan] said in

Spanish. 'Within the limits of the danger.'" At another place, there is this: "'That's my town,' Joaquin said.

'What a fine town but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have . . . .But there are also a number of times when the author fails to translate the word, either because he feels it is clear enough in context or because it 90

is more effective not translated; for example, the word

cojones appears many times in ForWhom the Bell Tolls and

To Have and Have Not, but only once is it translated as

testicles ("balls") . The word j odido as a Spanish slang

expression for the sex act is not translated in For Whom

the Bell Tolls, but it is rather clear in context, never

theless. These words are no doubt not translated because

of their connotative meanings. In many places, there are blanks in place of "four-letter words," and in For Whom the

Bell Tolls Agustin says the word "unprintable" in place of

many of his favorite four-letter expressions: "'Go to the

unprintable, and unprint thyself.'" There is very little

need for translation, here, but the fact of the matter is that Agustin, who probably has the "dirtiest mouth" in all

Hemingway, never actually says anything more unprintable

(even for 1940) than the above or "'And if we do not do this smartly we are obscenitied.'" Again, this is a feature of Agustin's speech that the reader comes to recognize, so that nothing more in the way of "character development" is really necessary.

In a discussion of Hemingway's understatement, critic George Hemphill asks, "Is there an exclamation mark 91

7 g anywhere in Hemingway?" Actually there are several,

but the point is that by leaving out exclamation marks,

Hemingway forces himself to make the language of the dialogue

exclamatory without the crutch of punctuation. For example,

in the two most emotional scenes of For Whom the Bell

Tolls — the death by bombing of El Sordo and his men at

the top of the hill and the wounding of Jordan — no

exclamation mark is needed. Both were used as examples of

the merger of form and meaning in Chapter I, so a repetition

of the shorter El Sordo passage will be sufficient illus

tration:

Then, through the hammering of the gun, there was the whistle of the air splitting apart and then in the red black roar the earth rolled under his knees and then waved up to hit him in the face and then dirt and bits of rock were falling all over and Ignacio was lying on him and the gun was lying on him. But he was not dead because the whistle came again and the earth rolled under him with the roar. Then it came again and the earth lurched under his belly and one side of the hilltop rose into the air and then fell slowly over them where they lay. (FWBT, p. 321.)

This is, perhaps, the most vivid moment of truth in all

Hemingway, yet the explanation of its success is in the

7George Hemphill, "Hemingway and James," Kenyon Review, Vol. XI (Winter, 1949), p. 57. Q See Sykes, p. 168, for a discussion of this element in Hemingway. 92

word "vivid." When a writer is writing "truly," when he

is able to create the "true felt emotion" of an action, no

punctuation heavier than a period is necessary.

But all this is merely material for definition.

The study of the stories and novels themselves will reveal

something of the impact of the iceberg principle on

Hemingway's fiction.

A. The Short Stories

A synthesis of the iceberg principle at work in the

short stories will help set the analysis; it is too integral

a part of Hemingway's short fiction to be passed over, even

in a dissertation devoted primarily to the novels.

Philip Young's theory of the interrelatedness of

the Nick Adams stories deals with the iceberg principle in- g directly. After reading the Nick Adams stories in order,

not of publication but of Nick's chronology, one wonders if

any one story can be completely understood outside the

context of the others. Young argues this, for example, in

discussing "Big Two-Hearted River":

. . . to fail to see that the boy Nick is by now a man is to fail to see the development

g Young, A Reconsideration, Chapter 1, "The Adventures of Nick Adams." 93

that has been taking place in his character, and how the stories are related to each other; it is to miss seeing what kind of man he is, and therefore, of course, what made him that way, and thus it is to read the whole piece wrong. In order to read it right one must place it firmly in the evolution of the hero Hemingway has been tracing, and see how it is the unhappy result of the quiet and sketchy but meaningful pattern the author has been building

This is the story which needs most, perhaps, to be

read in the context of all the other stories. Nick Adams

has all the mental and physical wounds accumulated in the

other stories. Young says,

Clearly, "Big Two-Hearted River" presents a picture of a sick man, and of a man who is in escape from whatever it is that made him sick. And Nick obviously knows what is the matter and what he must do about it and must not do. He must keep physically occupied, keep his hands busy; he must not think or he will be unable to sleep, he must not get too excited or he will get sick, and he must not go into the swamp, which unlike the tent, "the good place," is the bad place. It is as though he were on a doctor's prescrip tion, and indeed he is on the strictest sort^f emotional diet but is his own nutritionist."

Part of his own "prescription" for himself is concentration

on details. Just as with Jake Barnes, Frederick Henry, and

Robert Jordan, Nick Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River" must

18Young, A Reconsideration, pp. 43-44.

11Ibid., p. 47. 94

also concentrate on details so that he will not think about

the wounds he has suffered. No wounds are ever mentioned, but they permeate the story as if they were stated on every page. The most immediate wounds are those suffered in the war, the wounds which caused him to make a separate peace in

"Interchapter VI" of In Our Timé or as Frederick Henry in

A Farewell to Arms,• but there are mental wounds as well, the wound of his initial awareness of his mortality when the

Indian husband cuts his own throat at the suffering of his wife in "Indian Camp" or of the base nature of man in "The

Killers" and "The Battler." These wounds and others are what cause the Nick Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River" to concentrate on detail in order to forget. Here are three excerpts from the story, selected virtually at random, in order to illustrate:

He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface.

Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod- case, jointed it, and shoved the rod-case back into the tent. He put on the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He had to hold it from hand to hand, as he threaded it,-or it would 95

slip back through its own weight. It was a heavy, double tapered fly line. Nick had paid eight dollars for it a long time ago. It was made heavy to lift back in the air and come forward flat and heavy and straight to make it possible to cast a fly which has no weight. Nick opened the aluminum leader box. The leaders were coiled between the damp flannel pads. Nick had wet the pads at the water cooler on the train up to St. Ignace. In the damp pads the gut leaders had softened and Nick unrolled one and tied it by a loop at the end to the heavy fly line. He fastened a hook on the end of the leader. It was a small hook; very thin and springy.

He had wet his hand before he touched the trout, so he would not disturb the delicate mucus that covered him. If a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot. Years before when he had fished crowded streams, with fly fishermen ahead of him and behind him, Nick had again and again come on dead trout, furry with white fungus, drifted against a rock, or floating belly up in some pool. Nick did not like to fish with other men on the river^^ Unless they were of your party, they spoiled it.

These examples of indirect interior monologue — which are

the details of Nick's subconscious or conscious mind, but

selected and controlled by the author -- represent but one-

eighth of the iceberg as it moves with "dignity" through

the narrative. The seven-eighths, the part of the iceberg

that truly gives the story meaning, represents the wounds

Nick is trying to avoid thinki-rig about. And he cannot fish

12 Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River," The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scrib ner's Sons, 1966), pp. 215, 223, and 225. 96

the swamp, just beyond the bend in the river, because

that looks too much like the place along the river in Italy where he was physically wounded. But the last line of the

story states, optimistically, "There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp."

Carlos Baker supports this interpretation of

"Big Two-Hearted River" somewhat more objectively in his biography as he describes Hemingway's working on the story in Paris.

He had lately begun a very long short story which he was going to call "Big Two-Hearted River." It was about the boy Nick Adams, who had appeared in "Indian Camp." Now he was grown up and making a lone fishing trip to the Fox River near Seney in the northern peninsula of Michigan. He had come back wounded from the war, but the story contained no allusion to his wounds or to the war. Ernest was trying his theory of omission once again. He was also drawing on his personal experience of fishing the Fox in 1919 with A1 Walker and Jack Pen tecost. They, too, were omitted so that Nick Adams could fight his therapeutic battle alone.

And Hemingway himself talks about omitting the war from the story: "The story was about coming back from the war

13Baker, A Life Story, p. 127. 97

14 but there was no mention of the war in it." The story is

about Nick's recovering from war wounds; and that is why, as

Young suggests, early critics of the story were so baffled.

Robert Littrell, for example, in an early essay, says that

"this story is nothing more than the account of a man,

Hemingway of course, who goes fishing by himself and enjoys 15 it." Littrell is wrong on both counts. It is not a story

about a man enjoying fishing at all, but about a man who uses

fishing as a means to the end of forgetting the wounds he has

suffered; it is a questing after the self. And it is not

Hemingway, but Nick Adams who does the searching. Littrell and others with the same sort of surface interpretation of the story simply failed to see that "the dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

There is one further note of pertinence in the history of the story. Hemingway's manuscript version had a three thousand word section of interior monologue added to

^Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p. 76. The story's title is not mentioned in this description, but there is little doubt that it is a reference to "Big Two-Hearted River." -^Robert Littrell, "Notes on Hemingway," The New Republic, Vol. LI (August 10, 1927), p. 306. 98

the end, which reflected Nick's thinking about his "old

friends in Michigan and his new ones in Europe. There were

also some observations on esthetic principles," particularly . . 16 on writing, since Nick wanted to be a great writer. The

coda stayed in the story until it reached the publisher;

and a letter from Hemingway asking that the last nine pages 17 be cut probably saved the story from obscurity. The same kind of cut was made in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the

Bell Tolls, both reflecting Hemingway's awareness of ele ments that were more effective Unsaid. These cuts will be discussed later, in sections devoted to the iceberg principle as it works in each of the novels.

In "The Killers" there is a much more obvious ele ment left out, but it has acted as a sort of red herring for readers, obscuring the major portion of the seven-eighths of the iceberg and, therefore, the meaning. Few readers put the story aside without wondering why Ole Andreson is going to be killed and why he does not try to avoid it. He prob ably failed to throw a fight and is simply tired of running,

l^Baker, A Life Story, p. 131. Baker's discussion includes excerpts from the coda, which present an extremely interesting description of the author's love for writing and the world, but which have nothing to do with the narrative. 17 Ibid;, p. 138 • ■' 99 but the best one can do is guess, and Hemingway's theory

of the "dignity of movement of an ice-berg" was not a game between reader and writer. That is why critics who have concentrated on Ole Andreson have missed so much. Littrell,

for example, asks all the wrong questions:

Who was he? What had he done? Why should he expect to be killed? Why did he regard it as inevitable? Who were the gunmen? Who sent them? Did they finally get him? We never know. All we are told is the behavior of the waiting gun men, and the behavior of the fatalistic victim. And yet the new facts we are told are vastly more important, more valuable, than the facts we are not told. If we were told what no other self respecting story writer could refrain from telling us, something would be spoiled.18

Littrell is correct in one respect here at least; every thing one needs to understand fully is in the story. But the critic is looking at the wrong person. Nick is the protaganist, not Andreson. And it is what is not said about

Nick that is important. Philipp Young probably states it best:

Hemingway delineated three distinct responses £to the Andreson incident}: the cook . . . wants nothing whatsoever to do with it. . . . George, the counterman in the diner, is more affected:1' "It's a hell of a thing." But it is of course the effect the incident has had on Nick that Hemingway was interested in:

18Littrell, "Notes on Hemingway," p. 305. 100

"I'm going to get out of this town," Nick said. ... "I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."

George then gives him the advice which Nick is later to give himself: "Well . . . you better not think about it." It is obvious here that Nick, far from being calloused, is an extremely sensitive, even an abnormally sensitive, human being. Of the three reactions here it is George's which is probably "average": Nick's is roughly as excessive as the cook's is deficient. Nick cannot "stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it," and he has got to clear the town completely. If the Hemingway hero were the "bovine," "dull-witted," "wooden-headed," "heavy- footed, " "village idiot" that Wyndham Lewis to much applause once made him out then such a story as this one would be unthinkable. The contact Nick has made here with impending violence and horrifying inertia has made its mark on him, and in "The Killers" the whole pattern of Hem ingway's method of dealing with ^s boy is suggested in the space of a few sentences.

It is Nick's sensitivity to violence that makes the narrative mean something. It is another mental wound, which the Hemingway hero will carry with him always, the source of his wanting to forget and the cause of his inability to sleep.

If a short story is judged by how well it does what it is intended to do, then "The Battler" is a better work of art than "The Killers." Again, there is Nick's

19Young, A Reconsideration, p. 49. 101

sensitivity to violence, but it is more profound in "The

Battler" and there are no red herrings. At the end of "The

Killers," there is a fairly clear statement of authorial

purpose:

"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful." "Well," said George, "you better not think about it."88

In spite of misreadings of the story, this exchange between

Nick and George is, at least, conclusive. In contrast, the

ending of "The Battler" is much more subtle. Nick is moving

on again but with a difference. Not even he is aware of the

effect of what he has seen. When Bugs "taps" Ad on the back

of the head with a black jack to quiet him and then explains

to Nick that he has to do it occasionally when he gets ex

cited, Nick is out of the woods and walking along the railroad

tracks before he realizes he has a ham sandwich in his hand.

Nick's "true felt emotion" is a kind of inexpressible shock; he "wakes" to reality only after he has walked some distance from the campfire where Bugs is still speaking softly to Ad.

Nick's sensitivity is, perhaps, more extreme at the moment of his walk back to the tracks than at any other time in the stories. Young writes of a good deal of critical mis

2^Hemingway, "The Killers," The Short Stories, p. 289. 102

understanding for this story too. In discussing it he says,

People who complain about the sordid nature of many of Hemingway's stories seldom if ever cite this one, perhaps because the unpleasantness is more in the undertones and in things not said than in the outer events which, though not happy, are not entirely extraordinary in our time. But if the subtleties are drawn out and examined, "The Battler^ is as unpleasant as anything its author ever wrote.

Everything that gives the story meaning is in the seven- eighths of the iceberg, one of the best examples of authorial control in all Hemingway.

In writing about "Out of Season," Hemingway states that he

had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

But, again, it would be necessary to guess at this, since there is not enough in the story to suggest this ultimate ending for Peduzzi. And, furthermore, Hemingway supplies an ambiguity which confuses, for it is not Peduzzi but the

"young gentleman" and his wife about whom the story turns.

91 Young, A Reconsideration, p. 36.

22 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 75. 103

They have had an argument:

I'm sorry you feel so rotten, Tiny," he said. "I'm sorry I talked the way I did at lunch. We were both getting at the same thing from different angles.“23

It is the argument that has created the story's main ten

sion, although the tension which exists between Peduzzi and

the young man, because of the argument but also because

"everything" has gone wrong during the day, is also unstated

It is the multiple-tensions that give the story its meaning.

Why the leopard climbed Kibo Peak on Mt. Kilimanjaro

is omitted from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"; in the epigraph

Hemingway says, "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude." But this is not the iceberg principle at work, since the author is deliberately estab lishing a symbolic element here, which may be interpreted pretty much as one likes. The usual interpretation tends to parallel the leopard and Harry, suggesting that the leopard has attained heights in his world that Harry has failed to attain in his. Although the leopard as symbol is no doubt essential to the story’s meaning, why he climbed Kibo Peak is not knowledge left out and, therefore, is not an element of the iceberg principle. In fact, the "knowledge" of the

^Hemingway, "Out of Season," The Short Stories, p. 175. 104

leopard's purpose has an extremely unromantic origin. The

source for the story was a hunter friend in Africa who told

Hemingway that the leopard died on Kilimanjaro because he 24 had been chasing a goat. Hemingway has no intention of

communicating this to the reader, as he does knowledge left

out for the sake of the "dignity of movement" of the one-

eighth of the iceberg.

A number of the stories omit single key ideas, which, unstated, become the seven-eighths of the iceberg. For ex ample, the word "abortion" is never used in "Hills Like

White Elephants," yet it is the key to meaning. The tension between the boy and the girl is completely understood once the reader has seen what moves below the surface. In talking about this story with George Plimpton, Hemingway stated the story's origin:

I met a girl in Prunier where I'd gone to eat oysters before lunch. I knew she'd had an ab ortion. I went over and we talked, not about that, but on the way home I thought of the stor^ skipped lunch, and spent the afternoon writing.

What was left out of the story, just as it was left out of the conversation with the girl that Hemingway describes to * 2

24Baker, A Life Story, p. 253.

25Plimpton, "The Art of Fiction," p. 83. 105

Plimpton, is any mention of "abortion." In the story,

the most overt "hint" at ultimate meaning comes in this exchange:

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all." The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. "I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It's just to let the air in." The girl did not say anything. "I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."88

Tension between the two young people is created, at least in part, because the actual thing they are talking about — abortion — is never stated. On the other hand, leaving it unstated is undoubtedly a more accurate rendering of their

"true felt emotion."

In "The Sea Change," mentioned earlier but not dis cussed, the word left out is "lesbianism." Baker calls this story a "lesser twin to 'Hills like White Elephants.'"

Again it is almost entirely a cafe conversation between a man and woman, who were once lovers; but now the girl has become a lesbian, though the word is omitted. Baker says,

26'Hemingway, "Hills Like White Eléphants," The Short Stories >. 275. 106

Ernest later explained that the prototypes of his people were a couple he had once overheard in the Bar Basque in St.-Jean-de-Luz, though he was notoriously apt to conceal the actual g^igins of some of his stories with invented fibs.

Whether the original was invented or not, the story is another example of the iceberg principle at work. As with

"Hills Like White Elephants," there are a few overt hints at what is not said, but the tension between the young man and woman is created and the accurate emotion is enhanced by leaving the story's actual subject unstated. Near the beginning, the man says, "'I'll kill her,'" and a little later, "'Couldn't you have gotten into something else?

Couldn't you have gotten into some other jam.'" Then the reader understands it is not another man:

"If it was a man----- " "Don't say that. It wouldn't be a man. You know that. Don't you trust me?" "That's funny," he said. "Trust you. That's really funny."28

She does not like his calling the unnamed cause of the ten sion a "vice," so he calls it "perversion," and she says,

"I'd like it better if you didn't use words like that," the girl said. "There's no neces sity to use a word like that."

2?Baker, A Life Story, p. 227.

^Hemingway, "The Sea Change, " The Short Stories, p. 398. 107

"What do you want me to call it?" "You don't have to call it. You don't have 29 to put any name to it."

In both these stories there are things said which trigger

the reader's gradual understanding of what is not said.

In a similar manner "homosexuality" is the word

omitted from "A Simple Enquiry." The orderly Pinin is

called into his major’s room, where the older man is lying

on his bunk. After the major's introductory questions

about Pinin's love for the girl to whom he no longer writes,

the officer makes the "simple enquiry":

"And you are quite sure that you love a girl?" "I am sure." "And," the major looked at him quickly, "that you are not corrupt?" "I don't know what you mean, corrupt." "All right," the major said. "You needn't be superior." "... And you don't really want--" the major paused. Pinin looked at the floor. "That your great desire isn't really--” Pinin looked at the floor. The major leaned his head back on the rucksack and smiled. He was really^ relieved: life in the army was too complicated.

Besides the concept of homosexuality that is left out of this story, there is an ambiguity that is also intriguing.

The major apparently misunderstands Pinin's shyness in

2^Hemingway, "The Sea Change," The Short Stories, p. 400.

30Hemingway, "A Simple Enquiry," The Short Stories, p. 329. 108

looking at the floor; he interprets the reaction as meaning

either Pinin does not know what the major is asking or that

Pinin is innocent of "corruptness." One "feels," to the

contrary, that Pinin does know and is guilty.

In the little play, "Today is Friday," the name of

Christ is never mentioned, although it is obvious that the

man "who was pretty good in there today" is Christ and that

it is Roman soldiers discussing the events on the day of the

crucifixion. As obvious as it is, it is still an early ex

ample of the principle of omission. The play is made more powerful, more dramatic, because a key element is left out.

Baker's description of Hemingway's cutting an entire preliminary episode in "Indian Camp" is also worth noting.

What he revealed to no one was that he had cut his story £"Indian Camp"J rigorously, omitting an entire preliminary episode covering eight longhand pages. This was the story of Nick Adams, a small boy afraid of the dark, firing off a rifle to bring his father and his uncle back from jack- light fishing in the lake. When they returned, he told them a cock-and-bull story about having been scared by some animal "fooling around the tent." Dr. Adams's kindness and sympathy were firmly established as counterpoint to the evident absence of both qualities in Uncle George. Ernest's reasons for lopping off the original opening of his story remain obscure. He may have shortened it to fit the available space in Ford's review. He may have been trying out his new critical theory that something omitted can still affect the reader as if it were there. He may have decided that the comic aspects of the small- boy story softened unduly the hammerblows of violence in the main story's double climax of 109

birth and death. Finally, he may have made the deletion because it clearly indicated the presence of cowardice in Nick Adams, whom he was planning to develop as a hero of tougher fiber.

For whatever reason Hemingway chose to cut the opening few

paragraphs, it is an interesting cut and the type of omis

sion Hemingway made in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the

Bell Tolls as well, where one feels it may have been neces

sary for Hemingway to write in everything in order to

realize what needed to be left out. But more important to

"Indian Camp" than what is omitted at the beginning is what

moves under the surface at the end. Nick's doctor father

has performed a caesarian with a jack-knife on an Indian

woman in labor, and her crippled husband, lying in the top bunk above her, could not endure her screaming and so slit his own throat; the young boy Nick has seen both of these bits of violence. On the way back across the lake to

their cabin, Nick says,

"Is dying hard, Daddy?" "No, I think it's pretty easy, Nick. It all depends."

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.22* *

^Baker, A Life Story, pp. 125-126.

22Hemingway, "Indian Camp," The Short Stories, p. 95. 110

It is yet another example of Nick's sensitivity to violence,

one in which he concludes, in his youngness, that he will

"never die."

B. The Sun Also Rises

F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested a number of cuts in the opening of Hemingway's first novel, and the young author was so impressed with the suggestions that he dropped the first fifteen typescript pages — "the whole biography of

Brett Ashley and Mike Campbell and the autobiography of the 3 3 narrator JatKe Barnes." Baker explains that most of the character development came in later in the novel, and the cuts were a further test of Hemingway's

leading esthetic theory in those years. It had worked with "Out of Season," "Indian Camp," and "Big Two-Hearted River." It might also work with something as long as a novel.3334

And, of course, if an author is writing "truly," he should not need to begin a novel (or a story) with biographical material. That is not how a reader comes to know a charac ter — a person — anyway. It is perhaps ironic, after

Fitzgerald's suggestions, that Hemingway should then open the novel with a somewhat sarcastic description of Robert

33Baker, A Life Story, p. 170.

34Ibid., pp. 170-171. Ill

Cohn's boxing prowess, since Fitzgerald is probably the

prototype of Cohn. To the fact of Cohn's winning the

middleweight championship at Princeton, Barnes says, "Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing

title, but it meant a lot to Cohn" (SAR, p. 3) . But the

irony has nothing to do with the final choice of an opening scene. It is an ingenious opening, actually, because the climax of the novel comes in the drunken fight scene in

Pamplona when Cohn knocks out Jake and knocks down Mike and later Romero. The fight was foreshadowed, if not made inevitable, from the sarcastic opening two sentences of the novel. And those two sentences give the reader more of a

"feeling" for both Cohn and Barnes than fifteen pages of biography could possibly do.

The major iceberg elements in the book, however, are Jake's "impotency" and his jealousy. His physical wound, the degree of his capability (or incapability) to have sexual intercourse is never fully explained. He is not 35 emasculated as some critics have stated, but impotent m

85See, for example, Philip Young's discussion in Ernest Hemingway, p. 54. In Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsider ation (1966) Young reconsiders his original statement that Barnes "was emasculated" by saying he was "'emasculated,' to speak very loosely" (p. 82), but he fails to define his terms. 112

the physical sense; that is, he was capable of sexual de

sire, but intercourse was impossible. And he did not have

a psychic impotence as other critics have suggested-5 but a

psychological or even a merely emotional response to his

physical wound. The only time the word "impotence" is used

in the novel, it is denied, and the word "emasculated" is

never used. During a break in the Pamplona festivities when

Bill Gorton and Jake are trying to sober up with coffee,

Bill says to Jake,

"One group [of Cafe friendsj claims women support you. Another group claims you're impotent." "No," I said. "I just had an accident." (SAR, p. 115.)

Of course, Jake's denial to Gorton means, at most, that he

doesn't understand the meaning of impotence, or, at least,

not at the moment; or that he is lying to save a little

pride.

Hemingway, himself, gave a rather emphatic denial of

the emasculation theory in his interview with George Plimpton,

although one cannot always count on an author's own comments.

When asked about the possible parallel between the dramatis

2^See, for example, Mark Spilka's discussion in "The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises." Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958), p. 239. 113

personae of the bull ring and the characters in the novel

and particularly Jake "who is emasculated precisely as is

a steer," Hemingway said,

Who ever said Jake was "emasculated precisely as is a steer?" Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them. The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not psychological and that he was not emasculated.

This is almost a textbook definition of "organic" impoten-

cy, which may be caused by an anatomical defect in the sex organs,

such as malformations or severe injuries to the penis or scrotum. In some cases sexual desire is present, but intercourse is impossible because of defective erection or extreme pain.3^

The three other types of impotency are: "Endocrine," which is caused by diseases of the endocrine system; "Neurologic, which is caused by diseases of the nervous system; and

"Psychic," which covers a multiple of psychological prob- 39 lems of which the person may or may not be aware. Jake's * 39

3^Plimpton, "The Art of Fiction," pp. 76-77.

33Harold W. Jones, M.D., "Impotence," The Encyclo pedia Americana, ed. Lavinia P. Dudley, Vol. VII (1958),p. 226.

39Ibid. 114

impotency, in other words, is organic and not psychological.

The mental difficulties began after he met Brett Ashley.

The point is that a more precise explanation within the novel

would impair the emotional impact, would, in fact, be cheating

Jake's refusing to define it more precisely is part of his

"true felt emotion." He does not think about it himself

and so should not narrate it to readers.

There are three "introductory" mentions of Jake's

wound, before the initial dialogue about it between Brett

and Jake. When he picks up the prostitute, she "touches

him" in the taxi; he puts her hand away and says,

"Never mind." "What's the matter? You sick?" "Yes." (SAR, p. 15.)

And a little later, Jake says,

I had picked her up because of a vague senti mental idea that it would be nice to eat with some one. It was a long time since I had dined with a poule, and I had forgotten how dull it could be. (SAR, p. 16.)

This is the first hint of Jake's wound, and in retrospects.

the reader feels the emotion "not stated," yet the "true

felt emotion," because Jake is, after all, accustomed to the

emotional consequences of the wound and so not only does not

talk about it but does not even think about it — at least not any more than he is forced to by Brett. He cannot sleep that same night, because he is thinking about his frustration 115

over Brett: "To hell with Brett. To hell with you, Lady

Ashley." And he says, "Of all the ways to be wounded. I*

suppose it was funny"; and a little later, "My head started

to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to

be wounded ..." (SAR, pp. 30-31.)

Then comes the first of many passages revealing the

tremendous frustration of both Jake and Brett over their in ability to consummate their attraction for one another.

Brett says, "'Oh darling, I've been so miserable,'" and Jake

immediately concentrates on something else — the taxi ride

in order to not-think. The dialogue that ensues brings the frustration out full force:

"Don't touch me,1 she said. "Please don't touch me." "What's the matter?" "I can't stand it." "Oh, Brett." "You mustn't. You must know. I can't stand it, that's all. Oh, darling, please understand!" "Don't you love me?" "Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me." "Isn't there anything we can do about it? ..." “I don't know," she said. "I don't want to go through that hell again." "We'd better keep away from each other." "But, darling, I have to see you. It isn't all tha t you know." "No, but it always gets to be." "That's my fault. Don't we pay for all the things we do, though?" . . . "When I think of the hell I've put chaps through. I'm paying for it all now." "Don't talk like a fool," I said. "Besides, what happened to metis supposed to be funny. I never think about it." (SAR, pp. 25-26.) 116

But, of course, he does think about it. He is hardly ever

not thinking about it, except when he is able to concentrate

on the items in shop windows, or on people in a cafe, or on

fishing the Irati River, or when drunk. This exchange also

makes it clear they have "tried" some kind of sexual grati

fication ("'I don't want to go through that hell again'"),

although the specifics are left unsaid. And they "try"

again later when she sends Count Mippipopolous from Jake's

room for champagne after the count and Brett had broken into

his sleep late one night.

She was gone out of the room. I lay face down on the bed. I was having a bad time. I heard them talking but I did not listen. Brett came in and sat on the bed. "Poor old darling." She stroked my head. "What did you say to him?" I was lying with my face away from her. X did not want to see her. "Sent him for champagne. He loves to go for champagne." Then later: "Do you feel better, darling? Is the head any better?" "It's better." "Lie quiet. ..." "Couldn't we live together, Brett? Couldn't we just live together?" "I don't think so. I'd just tromper [deceive^ you with everybody. You couldn't stand it." "I stand it now." (SAR, p. 55.)

When she asks if his head is "any better," she is not

indicating that she has just given his neck a rub-down, but rather that there has been some sort of sexual grati

fication. Sheiis asking whether the "thinking," the sexual 117

frustration, is any better. And his little-boy's response

("'Couldn't we live together, Brett? Couldn't we just live

together?'"), similar to that with the previously-quoted

passage, may be construed, perhaps, as his "true felt

emotion" in frustration.

The next night they dance together, again while the

count sits aside, and Brett says, "'Oh, darling, I'm so miserable.'" And Jake feels the frustration coming on once more:

I had the feeling of going through something that has all happened before. . . . I had the feeling as in a nightmare of it all being some thing repeated, something I had been through and that now I must go through again. (SAR, p. 64.)

It is not mere frustration, then, but a "nightmare"; and her going off with someone (Cohn; though Jake does not know it yet) to San Sabastian is not helpful, as Brett thinks it is, because part of his frustration, part of his nightmare, is caused by jealousy, the second major unstated element in the novel.

It is not jealousy of Cohn alone, just because he managed to take Brett to San Sabastian with him. But Jake is jealous of anyone who has managed to have what he could not have; even the good Count Mippipopolous is not immune to

Jake's jealousy. The Count may be one of the Hemingway 118

"code heroes," hut it is Brett and Brett alone who makes

any such claim. Jake never affirms that the Count is "one

of us." As was suggested in Chapter I of this study, the

repeated concentration on details is Jake's way of putting

out of his mind, at least temporarily, his frustration over

his relationship with Brett. Only he is unable to not-

think constantly, and so the jealousy motif moves along,

under the surface of Jake's mood of frustration.

Jake's anger and sarcasm directed at Cohn in Pamplona

is not surprising, since the book's opening sarcasm about

Cohn's boxing prowess at Princeton has prepared the reader

for the eventual, more open scorn. At first, there is the

mere sarcasm of narration on their first morning in Pamplona:

We went out into the street again and took a look at the cathedral. Cohn made some remark about it being a very good example of something or other, I forget what.

We paid for the beers, we matched and I think Cohn paid. Cohn came down, finally, . . . (SAR, pp. 90-91.)

There are several of these little bits of sarcasm, fol

lowed later by the more straightforward comment that "Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in any body" (SAR, p. 98). And, finally, there is this narrative

statement of jealousy, the only time the word surfaces anywhere in the novel: 119

Why I felt that impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unfor- givingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. I do not think I ever really hated him until he had that little spell of superiority at lunch. . . (SAR, p. 99.)

Jake is taking it "as a matter of course," although it is, perhaps, regrettable that Hemingway feels it necessary to have his hero "tell" the reader. The fact that Jake has, at least to this point in the novel, understated or not stated his personal frustrations, because he has taken them as a matter of course, is precisely his "true felt emotion."

And it is this which makes up the seven-eighths of the ice berg .

But there is more to it than that. Not even his friends (with the exception of Brett, of course) know of his subsurface frustrations and jealousy. When Jake and Bill

Gorton are trying to nap on the banks of the Irati River, there is this exchange:

"Say," Bill said, "what about this Brett business?" "What about it?" "Were you ever in love with her?" "Sure." "For how long?" "Off and on for a hell of a long time." "Oh, hell!" Bill said. "I'm sorry, fella." "It's all right," I said. "I don't give a damn any more." "Really?" "Really. Only I'd a hell of a lot rather not talk about it." (SAR, pp. 123-124.) 120

Gorton, one of Jake's best friends, and constant companion

since Bill's arrival in Paris, is not aware of Jake's true

relationship with Brett. And although Jake says he no longer

cares, he also does not want to talk about it, which is ex

actly where he has been throughout the novel. The reader,

at least, knows Jake does "give a damn."

Later on, in one of the most interesting scenes in

the novel because of what is not said, the friends are ob

viously unaware of Jake's feelings as they talk about Cohn

and Brett. Mike Campbell, Brett's fiance, has mercilessly

"gored" Cohn by calling him a steer at the bullfights.

"It's no life being a steer," Robert Cohn said. "Don't you think so?" Mike said. "I would have thought you'd loved being a steer, Robert." "What do you mean, Mike?" "They lead such a quiet life. They never say anything and they're always hanging about so."

- • "Come off it, Michael. You're drunk," Brett said. "I'm not drunk. I'm quite serious. Is Robert Cohn going to follow Brett around like a steer all the time?"

"Tell me, Robert. Why do you follow Brett around like a poor bloody steer? Don't you know you're not wanted? I know when I'm not wanted. Why don't you know when you're not wanted? You came down to San Sebastian where you weren't wanted, and followed Brett around like a bloody steer. Do you think that's right?" (SAR, pp. 141 and 142.)

And, then, a few minutes later, as they discuss Mike's behavior, he says, 121

"Mark you. Brett's had affairs with men before. She tells me all about everything. She gave me this chap Cohn's letters to read. I wouldn't read them."

And Jake says, "'Damned noble of you.'" There is a great

deal of meaning in this exchange. They are all drunk and so

are probably saying things they might not otherwise say, but

the effect is still achieved. Mike is not aware of Jake's

sensitivity throughout this whole scene or he would not be

so open in his own relationship with Brett. And further, it

is obvious that Brett does not tell him "all about every

thing" or he would know about her and Jake. The only comment

Jake makes throughout this entire scene is his sarcastic

"Damned noble of you" to Mike's saying he never reads Cohn's letters. Jake's whole attitude, his unhappy mood, his total frustration over not being able to have Brett himself, his total jealousy of anyone who can, all this moves heavily in the seven-eighths of the iceberg. Jake says nothing, yet everything. And it is also significant that Gorton, who now knows about Jake and Brett, says nothing either, until he intercedes by taking Cohn away from the arena.

Besides these two major iceberg elements in The Sun

Also Rises impotency and jealousy — there is also a lesser, but nevertheless important, element which helps perpetuate the iceberg principle. 122

A great deal has been said here about the Hemingway

hero's attempt to avoid thought about his many physical and

mental wounds. He often cannot sleep, because lying in bed

awaiting sleep is a time when he often can no longer avoid

thinking. And, as was discussed in Chapter I, the hero's

concentration on details during waking hours helps him to not-think. The real introduction to this philosophy comes early in The Sun Also Rises where Jake describes having re ceived the advice from the Catholic Church, but there is also in this passage the initial statement of Jake's real feeling for Brett:

I never used to realize it, I guess [the effect of his physical wound on the rest of his life], I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn't keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I was thinking about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep. (SAR, p. 31.) 123

In other words, he might have been all right with the wound

if it had not been for his meeting Brett; it is not the

physical wound but she who has caused him to try the advice

of the Catholic Church. And although he is somewhat sarcas

tic about the advice, it nevertheless works for him; in fact,

he is finally able to go to sleep in this scene only when

his mind is off the wound and Brett and, instead, on "the

heavy trams" going by and down the street.

After Jake has received the telegrams from Brett

asking to help her out of trouble in Madrid, he takes the

night train, but cannot sleep: "I did not sleep much that

night on the Sud Express." That is all the narration there

is about the train ride south; but there is ambiguity, be

cause people often have trouble sleeping on a train; Jake has trouble sleeping everywhere. And finally, when they are

together again in Madrid, Jake orders two bottles of wine and immediately proceeds to get drunk:

I drank my glass and poured out another. Brett put her hand on my arm. "Don't get drunk, Jake," she said. "You don't have to." "How do you know?" "Don't," she said. "You'll be all right." "I'm not getting drunk," I said. "I'm just drinking a little wine. I like to drink wine." "Don't get drunk," she said. "Jake, don't get drunk." (SAR, p. 246.) 124

She understands perfectly that he drinks to not-think and

that he has trouble sleeping. She is frustrated too, but

the difference is that she can do something about hers; Jake

cannot. And the novel ends on this note of frustration:

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki direc ting traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

A great deal hinges on Jake's tone of voice in the final

line of the novel. Yet, that too is left unstated. If he

is nostalgic, it fits her mood of not wanting him to get

drunk and of remembering how it could have been. On the

other hand, it would be more consistent with his character

if he is at least partially contemptuous at the end, reflec

ting his suppressed despair and reminding the reader of the

opening sarcasm about Cohn — thus, bringing full circle his relationship with Brett: and the sun also rises.

C. A Farewell to Arms

With the exception of the ending, in which so much depends on what is not said, the examples of the iceberg theory in A Farewell to Arms seem somewhat fragmented com pared to those in The Sun Also Rises. There are four un stated elements, which, though not as powerful in their 125

emotional impact as the ending, are, nevertheless, interes

ting examples of the iceberg principle at work in the novel.

One must begin, however, with the ending. The pub

lished ending, which includes the final twenty-odd lines

after Catherine dies, is considerably different from the

manuscript ending, printed for the first time by Carlos 40 Baker. The original ending did everything expected of it

by readers of "well-made novels." It tied up all the loose

ends and took Frederick Henry through a night's sleep to

morning awareness of what had actually happened. Hemingway

"tells" everything and "shows" nothing. But one wonders if

the very wording might have made him aware that he was saying

too much. He began the original ending (Baker's version) by

saying "There are a great many more details. . ." and 41 closed by saying "... but that is the end of the story."

40Baker printed the "original ending" in Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Ma jor Novels, but his version is probably a second draft; Hemingway made several inter esting revisions before arriving at the Baker version, which, of course, was later dropped in favor of the final, pub lished version. 41The "first draft" ending is more philosophic than particular, restating in repetitious modern idiom the tenor of the Ecclesiastes epigraph to The Sun Also Rises. The world continues on regardless of what happens to the people in it; the world moves on as long as one is alive, and then it just keeps on moving, etc. The manuscripts of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are in the Houghton Li brary at Harvard; they may be studied but not quoted. It is 126

But the loose ends are better left loose, and Hem

ingway knew it. What does it matter what the arrangements

were with the undertaker or burial in a foreign country, or

that Rinaldi was cured of syphilis, or that the priest lived

as a priest in Italy under Fascism, or that Ettore became a

fascist, or that Piana became a taxi-driver in New York? The

draft Baker printed has for a final paragraph the following:

I could tell you what I have done since March, nineteen hundred and eighteen, when I walked that night in the rain, back to the hotel where Catherine and I had lived and went upstairs to our room and undressed and slept finally, because I was so tired— to wake in the morning with the sun shining in the window; then suddenly to realize what had happened. I could tell what has happened since then, but that is the end of the story.

Frederick Henry is describing something of his loneliness in this version, but the reader understands this without being told; he has deserted the army and lost Catherine. And his aloneness and what he has done since March, 1918, move with more dignity as part of the seven-eighths of the iceberg.

expected that the manuscripts to the other novels (which are at present in the Hemingway estate) and to the short stories and non-fiction works (most of which are in the estate) will be placed in the new John F. Kennedy Memorial Library at Harvard upon its completion.

■^Hemingway, "The Original Conclusion to A Farewell to Arms," printed in Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels, ed. Carlos Baker (New, York: Charles Scrib ner's Sons, 1962), p. 75; MS. second p. 652. 127

But then, of course, so is the entire original ending bet

ter left unstated. So Hemingway left it all out, the tying

of loose ends and the last, sympathetic look at Frederick

facing reality the next morning. Instead, the author closes

with somewhat objective dialogue between the apologetic doc

tor and Frederick, followed by the dismissing of nurses from

Catherine's room, and this final narrative paragraph:

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (FTA, p. 332.)

It says nothing, yet everything. Because of what we know

about the manuscript version and revisions, this paragraph

is as near as possible the perfect example of the iceberg principle at work. But the ending works, not because we know what the original says, but because the reader has a

feeling for those things not said as strongly as though

Hemingway had stated them. And one feels, perhaps more

strongly here than any where else in the major works, that, yes, "the dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." 128

Also at the end of the novel, there is a short section where strangers show the world’s objectivity to individual heartache. As Catherine is readied for operation, two nurses rush toward the gallery:

"It's a Caesarean," one said. "They're going to do a Caesarean." The other one laughed, "We're just in time. Aren't we lucky?" They went into the door that led to the gallery. (FTA, p. 324.)

In a way, of course, the nurses are symbolic of the world's coldness to someone else's pain, but there is a difference; because Frederick Henry is the narrator and aware of the nurses' objectivity, the reader feels something of his un stated pain, something of his unstated empty, sad-strange- ness and futility. After all, he is not at all objective.

It would be difficult to argue that Hemingway was aware of this extra dimension; in fact, he probably was only aware of the universal truth the nurses represent, but that takes nothing away from the effect of the unstated part, the seven-eighths of the iceberg.

As was indicated at the beginning of this section, except for the novel's ending, the other iceberg elements in A Farewell to Arms are somewhat fragmented. One of the most mysterious of these passages is near the beginning of the novel where Frederick is apologizing to the Priest for 129

not visiting the priest's home town, Abruzzi, during his

leave. It is mysterious, because the unstated meaning is

not "felt" so easily (and, perhaps, not at all) . Frederick

speaks to the priest in an impassioned manner about the

difference between the night and the day, and "how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold" (FTA, p. 13). Then Frederick says, but

I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know. He [the priestjf had not had it but he understood that I had really wanted to go to the Abruzzi but had not gone and we were still friends, with many tastes alike, but the difference between us. He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later. (FTA, pp. 13-14.)

What it is the priest knows about Frederick that Frederick does not know at the time, but will learn and be able to forget, is never "felt" quite so well as the other unstated elements discussed in this chapter. It may mean that Hem ingway had intended to make it clearer later in the novel, but forgot to, or that it is just not an example of the ice berg principle at work. On the other hand, one may find the solution in the only other conversation Frederick has with the priest. While Frederick is in the Milan hospital, the priest visits him for a short time, bringing with him a more 130

open hatred for the war than he had exhibited in the opening

chapters. He feels "very low," and Frederick says to him,

"You have the war disgust."

"No. But I hate the war." "I don't enjoy it," I said. He shook his head and looked out of the window. "You do not mind it. You do not see it. You must forgive me. I know you are wounded." "That is an accident." "Still even wounded you do not see it. I can tell. I do not see it myself but I feel it a little." (FTA, p. 70.)

But it is not "seeing" the war literally that the priest has in mind, but seeing it figuratively. He is telling Freder ick that it is what the war does to men that is hateful; a few exchanges later, the priest says,

"... There are people who would make war. In this country there are many like that. There are other people who would not make war.” "But the first ones make them do it." "Yes." "And I help them." "You are a foreigner. You are a patriot." (FTA, p. 71.)

Frederick Henry understands what the priest is telling him here, but he does not fully understand until he makes his own separate peace after Caporetto with his stumbling dive into the Tagliamento River, after he had seen "good" Italian

"patriots" shooting their own officers for allowing the retreat. For Frederick Henry, "anger was washed away in 131

the river along with any obligation."

. . . I was through. I wished them all the luck. There were the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the sensible ones, and they de served it. But it was not my show any more and I wished this bloody train would get to Mestre and I would eat and stop thinking. (FTA, p. 232.)

And, it was this change in attitude that the priest saw coming in Frederick; it was this that Frederick had in mind earlier when he said, "He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget."

This is one additional mental wound the Hemingway hero spends a lifetime trying to forget.

Sexual overtones dominate in the final three ex amples; although, again, they dominate only in the seven- eighths of the iceberg. While Frederick is getting well in the hospital, he and Catherine still have sexual intercourse, or, as in the following instance, at least sexual gratifica tion:

"You mustn't," she said. "You're not well enough." "Yes, I am. Come on." "No. You're not strong enough." "Yes. I am. Yes. Please." "You do love me?" "I really love you. I'm crazy about you. Come on please. . . ." "All right but only for a minute." "All fight," I said. "Shut the door." "You can't. You shouldn't." "Come on. Don't talk. Please come on." 132

Catherine sat in a chair by the bed. The door was open into the hall. The wildness was gone and I felt finer than I had ever felt. She asked, "Now do you believe I love you?" (FTA, p. 92.)

It does not take much imagination to fill in the blank space in the text, except that it is probably not intercourse that they have; later, Catherine says, "'I don't want to do anything more to you.’" On another occasion, she goes to his hospital bed again:

"All right. I’ll come." "Oh, darling, darling, darling,” I said. "You see," she said. "I do anything you want." "You're so lovely." "I'm afraid I'm not very good at it yet."

The last two lines are not in the manuscript version,in dicating, perhaps, that when he inserted them, Hemingway wanted to emphasize the one-sidedness of the arrangement.

Finally, in the hotel room across from the train station on the night Frederick is to leave for the front, the reader gets an even clearer picture of Catherine's atti tude toward the affair. She is pregnant and they are lying in bed listening to the rain and the cars on the street below. Frederick, concerned for catching his train, quotes from Marvell’s "To His Coy Mistress":

"'But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.'" 133

He's only thinking about fleeing time, but Catherine thinks

about the poem's full meaning and of its appropriateness for

them: "I know that poem," Catherine said. "It's by Marvell.

But it’s about a girl who wouldn't live with a man"'' (FTA, p. 154)'. She understands her part in the relationship.

All three of these scenes, in fact, seem to indicate, rather powerfully because it is never stated, a selflessness on

Catherine's part; she is in love, and, of course, love is its own rationale, but, objectively, she has gotten very little and given much. And, ultimately, she will give her life.

One would hesitate to go too far with this, perhaps; but one wonders whether there is a moment just before her death when she sees how onesided the relationship has, in fact, been, despite Frederick's love for her:

"I'm going to die," she said; then waited and said, "I hate it." I took her hand. "Don't touch me," she said. I let go of her hand. She smiled. "Poor darling. You touch me all you want." (FTA, p. 330.)

After all the selflessness, there is, perhaps, one brief moment of humanity in Catherine's implication of blame in her "'Don't touch me.'" The entire narrative is given to the reader by Frederick Henry, who can only narrate what he knows and feels. Hemingway, on the other hand, also knows what Catherine knows and feels; and in these passages there 134 is the hint — the closest one gets in the novel to her unspoken thoughts — of subsurface emotion. To have Cather ine state her thoughts in some sort of lengthy emotional out burst to Frederick would be cheating. Yet, the reader has the few moments in the one-eighth of the iceberg sufficient to help him "feel" the seven-eighths.

D. To Have and Have Not

The primary example of the iceberg principle at work in To Have and Have Not has to do with the juxtaposing of the Harry Morgan and Richard Gordon themes. The contrast between the two characters is too well documented to need more than brief review here; Carlos Baker, for example, says:

One would scarcely need Hemingway's melancholy diatribe on sold-out American writers in The Green Hills of Africa in order to recognize Gordon as a representative figure. His character and activi ties likewise serve as a foil for those of Harry Morgan. Harry's marriage is a success, Gordon's a miserable failure. Harry is tough, bitter, honest with himself; Gordon is a self-deceiver, a self apologist, a self-pitier. One is an expert strat egist in all that concerns his means of livelihood and his life as a man, while the other is a false practitioner who manages to conceal his limitations even from himself. Morgan can handle his own affairs; Gordon is a kept man in a morally un- 4 3 kempt society.

48Baker, The Writer as Artist, p. 212. 135

There is one magnificently ironic scene in which Gordon

"sees" Marie Morgan and wants to write her into his book yet

has not "seen" her at all and so blunders into the very kind

of "untruth" in writing Gordon was trying to avoid.

The page-and-a-half chapter is so good an example

of the iceberg principle that it is tempting to quote it

all; but, perhaps, most of the first paragraph and another

short passage will suffice. As with the nurses excited about

the Caesarian in A Farewell to Arms and the couple on the

cafe porch misunderstanding Santiago's heroism at the end of

The Old Man and the Sea, so does Richard Gordon miss seeing

everything about Marie.

Riding his bicycle, he passed a heavy-set, big, blue-eyed woman, with bleached-blonde hair showing under her old man's felt hat, hurrying across the road, her eyes red from crying. Look at that big ox, he thought. What do you suppose a woman like that thinks about? What do you suppose she does in bed? How does her husband feel about her when she gets that size? Who do you suppose he runs around with in this town? Wasn't she an appalling looking woman? Like a battleship. Terrific. (THHN, p. 176.)

The popular novelist is going to write her into "today's chapter" of his book about a strike in a textile factory.

Her husband when he came home at night hated her, hated the way she had coarsened and grown heavy, was repelled by her bleached hair, her too big breasts, her lack of sympathy with his work as an organizer. He would compare her to the young, firm-breasted, full-lipped little Jewess that had 136

spoken at the meeting that evening. It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true. He had seen, in a flash of perception, the whole inner life of that type of woman. Her early indifference to her husband's caresses. Her desire for children and security. Her lack of sympathy with her husband's aims. Her sad attempts to simulate an interest in the sexual act that had become actually repugnant to her. It would be a fine chapter. (THHN, p. 177.)

It is regrettable that Hemingway felt it necessary to "tell" his readers in the last sentence of the chapter that the woman Gordon has seen is Marie Morgan, for it would be dif

ficult to miss the description. But this factor does not . take away from the irony of Gordon's complete misreading of the woman. Actually, Gordon has subconsciously described his own wife, who is indifferent to him, has no sympathy with his work, and has sought sexual satisfaction with others. In contrast, Marie and Harry Morgan have a good marriage, one in which there is mutual understanding and love and a good sexual relationship, the kind of marriage a man like Gordon would never understand.

Hemingway, who often wrote about the writer's ability to perceive character by simply looking at someone on the street, is adding another dimension to this ironic scene by showing his own awareness of the limitations of such per ception. 137

Two other examples of the iceberg principle at work

in To Have and Have Not involve the description of the death

boat, adrift at sea near the end of Book III and Marie's

seeing in Harry's dead face all the suffering he had gone

through. As with some of the short stories discussed in

Section A of this chapter, there is a key word missing from

the death boat passage. One of the men on board is lying on his face near the edge of the deck, his fingers almost

touching the water;

there was a school of small fish, about two inches long, oval-shaped, golden-colored, with faint purple stripes, that had deserted the gulf weed to take shelter in the shade the bottom of the drifting launch made in the water, and each time anything dripped down into the sea, these fish rushed at the drop and pushed and milled until it was gone. (THHN, p. 179.)

The word "blood" is missing from this description and is avoided throughout the scene. One could argue that drip

pings into the sea is more vivid than "blood," and, there fore, a matter of description rather than of not stating; on the other hand, with all the other examples of the ice berg principle rendered in previous works, it seems more likely that this is simply an additional attempt at dignity of movement, weak though it may seem.

When Marie arrives at the hospital where Harry has been taken, the doctor informs her that he is dead, that 138

"'He went very peacefully ... He was in no pain'" (THHN,

p. 256). And then, at her request, the doctor takes her to

see him, and one can "see" the doctor lift the sheet from

Harry's face, trying to comfort her again with assurance

that he died peacefully:

"He didn't suffer at all, Mrs. Morgan," the doctor said. Marie did not seem to hear him. "Oh, Christ," she said, and began to cry again. "Look at his goddamned face." (THHN, p. 256.)

Although the narrator never describes Harry Morgan's face

through the lengthy ordeal of death on board the borrowed

boat and the doctor assures Marie her husband died peace

fully, the reader can "feel" all the terrifying experience

Harry has gone through in Marie's simple reaction: "Look

at his goddamned face." One might argue that even this line

is unnecessary if the iceberg principle is working properly,

that the reader should feel Harry's fear during the ordeal.

But the reader has no more time to think about Harry’s

emotions then than Harry does, so Hemingway has gotten down

the "true felt emotion" of the action; there is no felt fear, because there is no time for it. And the author leaves it

to Marie to remind the reader of the horror Harry must have

felt. 139.

E. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Death dominates For Whom the Bell Tolls. It hangs

over everything that happens in the novel like a dark cloud.

Whether Robert Jordan is concerned with "time" or "love" or

with not reading the letters of the young fascist he has just

killed (never send to know for whom the bell tolls), it is

"death" that is the seven-eighths of the iceberg. In fact,

the word is hardly ever used; "to die" is used, but it is less

connotative and so more acceptable. Death is referred to

most often as "it" or, perhaps, "that," but it is the great

unmentionable five-letter word.

The most obvious unmentioning of death is in what

Pilar sees in Robert Jordan's palm:

"Let me see thy hand," the woman said. Robert Jordan put his hand out and the woman opened it, held it in her own big hand, rubbed her thumb over it and looked at it, carefully, then dropped it. She stood up. He got up too and she looked at him without smiling. "What did you see in it?" Robert Jordan asked her. "I don't believe in it. You won't scare me." "Nothing," she told him. "I saw nothing in it." (FWBT, p. 33.)

He pursues it, but she refuses to say what she saw. A little

later, she says to him, "'I like very much your way of

speaking. I try to speak frankly.1" And Jordan tries again: 140

"Then tell me what you saw in the hand." "No," she said and shook her head. "I saw nothing. Go now to thy bridge. I will look after thy equipment." (FWBT, p. 34.)

In spite of his insistance that it does not matter because

he does not believe in it, he asks her several more times

what she saw in his hand, but she always says she saw

"nothing." Later, as Jordan tries to figure out the charac

ter of Pablo, he realizes that the tough Spanish resistance

fighter understands more than he states. Pablo says, for

example,

"Am I the only one who sees the seriousness of this?" [the blowing of the bridgej. I believe so, Robert Jordan thought. Old Pablo, old boy, I believe so. Except me. You can see it and I see it and the Woman read it in my hand but she doesn't see it, yet. Not yet she doesn't see it. (FWBT, p. 54.)

But she has seen death in Jordan's palm. As they discuss the bridge over dinner in the cave, Maria asks if she will be allowed to "see the doing of it," and Pablo plays on the word "see": "'You will see it," Pablo said from his end of the table. "I believe that you will see it.'" And the narration then picks up Pilar's anger:

"Shut up," the woman of Pablo said to him and suddenly remembering what she had seen in the hand in the afternoon she was wildly, unreasoningly angry. "Shut up, coward. Shut up, bad luck bird. Shut up, murderer." (FWBT, p. 58.) 141

It is true Pablo has murdered, but the gypsy Pilar is

speaking of something else. It is bad luck to speak of death; in fact, if one speaks of death regarding another person, it is considered a contributing cause of death.

Pablo understands perfectly well what she is saying:

"'Good,' Pablo said. 'I shut up. It is thou who commands now and you should continue to look at the pretty pictures.

But remember that I am not stupid.'" The pictures are those she saw in Jordan's palm, and Pablo knows what she saw there as well as she does. This is really an ingenious exchange; the irony obtained in feeling Jordan get one meaning and

Pablo another from Pilar's "Shut up" speech heightens the sensitivity to the "true felt emotion" of the exchange.

And to emphasize Pilar's feelings, there is this narrative paragraph to end the chapter:

The woman of Pablo could feel her rage changing to sorrow and to a feeling of the thwarting of all hope and promise. She knew this feeling from when she was a girl and she knew the things that caused it all through her life. It came now suddenly and she put it away from her and would not let it touch her, neither her nor the Republic, and she said, "now we will eat. Serve the bowls from the pot, Maria." (FWBT, p. 58.)

Despite what she has seen, the Republic is more important, and, therefore, it is necessary to go on with the bridge.

The gypsy superstition about death is part of their "true 142

felt emotion," so Hemingway's leaving unstated the element

uppermost in the minds of nearly all the characters is per

fectly appropriate and helps move the one-eighth part of

the iceberg with dignity.

This superstition is carried to such an extent that

they cannot even use the word "kill" when they talk about

killing Pablo to eliminate his danger to them.

"The gypsy said I should have----- "he ¿Jordan] began. "No," the woman interrupted. "He is mistaken." "If it is necessary that I----- " Robert Jordan said quietly but with difficulty. "Thee would have done it, I believe," the woman said. "Nay, it is not necessary. I was watching thee. But thy judgment was good." "But if it is needful----- " (FWBT, p. 68.)

Later, this superstitious element seems to have rubbed off

on Jordan, but he is more concerned in the next illustrative

quote with his own attitude toward life. Agustin tells

Jordan that he is "rare," that "'there is a great differ

ence between thee and the last dynamiter who worked with

us. ' "

"I am alive and he is dead," Robert Jordan said. Then: what's the matter with you? he thought. Is , that the way to talk? Does food make you that slap happy? What are you, drunk on onions? Is that all it means to you, now? It never meant much, he told himself truly. You tried to make it mean something, but it never did. There is no need to lie in the time that is left. (FWBT, p. 289.)

The "it" in this case is life, but even in thinking about his own life, he is thinking of death and cannot quite express it 143

The passages in which Jordan looks at the papers and

letters of the boy he has killed provide an interesting study

in contrasts. The military papers show the boy to be twenty-

one and from Tafalla in Navarra, from which come the people

Jordan likes "better than those of any other part of Spain."

He goes through extreme mental anguish as he wonders "how

many of those you have killed have been real fascists? Very

few. But they are all the enemy to those whose force we are

opposing force" (FWBT, pp. 303-304). Then follows a long

argument with himself over the necessity of killing:

I believe in the people and their right to govern themselves as they wish. But you mustn't believe in killing, he told himself. You must do it as a necessity but you must not believe in it. If you believe in it the whole thing is wrong. (FWBT, p. 304.)

But Jordan feels good that he did not read the boy's per

sonal letters; he read the military papers and a letter from

the boy's fiancee, but concerning his not reading any of the boy's own letters, Jordan says, "I guess I've done my good

deed for today, he said to himself. I guess you have all right, he repeated." But he has read enough to make himself unhappy over the whole situation and to know that one should

"never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." 144

The same thematic element applies later when, after Pablo

has rounded up some extra men for the bridge and informs

Jordan he will not have to worry about having enough horses,

Jordan senses what is never stated:

I wonder what the bastard is planning now, Robert Jordan said. But I am pretty sure I know. Well, that is his, not mine. Thank God X do not know these new men. (FWBT, p. 404.)

He does not want to know, or even think about, what will

happen to the new men after the blowing of the bridge; but he knows Pablo will kill any survivors. And still later,

Jordan looks through his Zeiss 8-power glasses at the sentry.

He watches him leaning against the sentry box, lighting his cigarette and smoking.

Then he took the glasses down, folded them together and put them in his pocket. I won't look at him again, he told himself. He lay there and watched the road and tried not to think at all. (FWBT, p. 433.)

Jordan knows the young sentry will be the first to die when they move to blow the bridge, and, once again, he is aware, as with the boy from Tafalla, that "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." He does not want to know any more than is necessary about the man who is about to die. 145

Finally, the atmosphere of the whole ending of the

novel is heavily weighted with unstated death. He tells

Maria that she can not stay with him to await the fascists

coming up the hill:

"Nay, rabbit. Listen. That people cannot do together. Each one must do it alone. ..." FWBT, p. 463.)

"That" and "it" are euphemistic. And after they are all

gone and Jordan is left alone,

He felt empty and drained and exhausted from all of it and from them going and his mouth tasted of bile. Now, finally and at last, there was no prob lem. However all of it had been and however all of it would ever be now, for him, no longer was there any problem.

You have had much luck. There are many worse things than this. Every one has to do this, one day or another. You are not afraid of it once you know you have to do it, are you? No, he said, truly. (FWBT, p. 466.)

As the pain and tension build, he considers suicide, but realizes he can still delay the fascists a little longer if he can just hold out through the pain:

You're not so good at this, Jordan, he said. Not so good at this. And who is so good at this? I don't know and I don't really care right now. But you are not. That's right. You're not at all. Oh not at all, at all. . . . (FWBT, p. 470.)

And, finally, his "luck holds" and the cavalry begins to come riding out of the woods and across the road and up the 146

trail toward him. And "he could feel his heart beating

against the pine needle floor of the forest." Even at the end, impending death is left unmentioned.

According to Carlos Baker, Hemingway added two chapters to this ending,

a kind of epilogue, two short chapters designed to knit up every dangling thread as neatly as possible. One part told of a meeting between Karkov and General Golz after the failure of the Segovia offensive, and of their driving together back to Madrid, discussing Jordan's blowing of the bridge and his subsequent disappearance. The short final chapter described Andres and his visit to the abandoned camp of Pablo and Pilar, where he stood for a moment gazing at the wrecked bridge in the gorge below.4

As with the ending of A Farewell to Arms which told too much, Hemingway undoubtedly felt that this ending too was better left unsaid. As Baker suggests, the novelist probably had to write the epilogue before he could know he did not need it. He deleted it in a letter to Scribner’s, explaining that he had wanted to round out the novel:

But now he saw that the novel really stopped when Jordan lay on the pine-needled floor of the forest just as he had lain sixty-eight hours earlier in the opening sentence of the

44]3aker, A Life Story, p. 350. 147

first chapter. This was all the rounding out that the novel required.43

The remaining examples of the iceberg principle in

For Whom the Bell Tolls are related by indirection to the

death theme, but may be discussed as separate elements.

The first involves Jordan's early anxiety over Pablo; the

second involves Jordan's relationship to Maria; and the

third involves a series of separate, lesser examples.

Jordan notices a "sadness" about Pablo at their

first meeting and it worries the American:

. . . in his sullenness there was a sadness that was disturbing to Robert Jordan. He knew that sadness and to see it here worried him.

But I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out. (FWBT, p. 12.)

And, finally, Jordan presents the reader with the ultimate

in foreshadowing:

Maybe he is just one of the gloomy ones. No, he said to himself, don't fool yourself. You do not know how he was before; but you do

45 Baker, A Life Story, p. 351. Scribner's edi tors must have discarded these two chapters, because they are not with the original manuscript. And, it is also per haps noteworthy that the manuscript ending is hardly touched in revision. In the last thirteen manuscript pages, there are but a few single-word insertions and two single-word deletions. 148

know that he is going bad fast and without hiding it. When he starts to hide it he will have made a decision. Remember that, he told himself. The first friendly thing he does, he will have made a decision. (FWBT, p. 16.)

The sadness is never mentioned again. But it is not neces

sary. Much later, when Jordan and the gypsies are at the

peak of emotion over the possibility of killing Pablo, he

walks into the cave.

He ¡JPabloJ was smoking one of the Russian cigar ettes and in the glow, as he drew on the cigarette, his round face showed. They could see his heavy, long-armed body in the starlight. "Do not pay any attention to the woman," he said to Robert Jordan. In the dark the cigarette glowed bright, then showed in his hand as he lowered it. "She is difficult sometimes. She is a good woman. Very loyal to the Republic." The light of the cigar ette jerked slightly now as he spoke. He must be talking with it in the corner of his mouth, Robert Jordan thought. "We should have no difficulties. We are of accord. I am glad you have come." The cigarette glowed brightly. "Pay no attention to arguments," he said. "You are very welcome here." "Excuse me now," he said. "I go to see how they have picketed the horses." He went off through the trees to the edge of the meadow and they heard a horse nicker from below. "You see?" the gypsy said. "Now you see? In this way has the moment escaped." Robert Jordan said nothing. (FWBT, pp. 61-62.)

And, in saving "nothing," Jordan says everything. Here is

Pablo's first "friendly" move, the one Jordan had warned himself to watch for fifty pages earlier, and Jordan real

izes, without saying it, that Pablo has made a decision. 149

When he finally does leave, taking with him the dynamite

exploders, Jordan is least surprised of all; and the reader

is not surprised either — provided, of course, he is aware

of the subsurface "movement."

Jordan's relationship with Maria also involves

elements not stated. In his initial meeting with her, he

"saw her face turned at an angle and at the same time saw

the strange thing about her" (FWBT, p. 22). The "strange

thing" may be Jordan's instincts toward love rather than

something in Maria, for on the next page "the thickness still came in his throat when he spoke to the girl." And later, when he realizes that he and the girl are not alone in the cave as he had thought, he remembers that he is

violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the man tobacco and leave the women alone; and he realized, very suddenly, that he did not care. (FWBT. p. 24.)

The love theme develops slowly, of course, Jordan admitting first to her and only later to himself that he loves her.

After the first sleeping bag scene, he asks her if she has

"loved others," meaning in the same way they have just

"made love." She says,

"Never." Then suddenly, going dead in his arms, "But things were done to me." "By whom?" "By various." 150

Now she lay perfectly quietly and as though her body were dead and turned her head away from him. "Now you will not love me." "I love you," he said. But something had happened to him and she knew it. (FWBT, p. 71.)

Maria lying "perfectly quietly and as though her body were

"dead" may be the unstated way she reacted to the multiple

rapinge she suffered when the fascists attacked her village.

And the "something" that happens to Jordan is the empty

feeling he has, realizing other men have had intercourse with her.

In an interesting, quick review of the last two days of his life, Robert Jordan discusses love and especially his love for Maria, referring to the emotion as "it."

What a business. You go along your whole life and they girls seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing that you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guer illa bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria. Sure. That is what you would do. You ran into her rather late, that was all. So a woman like that Pilar practically pushed this girl into your sleeping bag and what happens? Yes, what happens? What happens? You tell me what happens, please. Yes, That is just what happens. That is exactly what happens. Don't lie to yourself about Pilar pushing her into your sleeping robe and try to make it nothing or to make it lousy. You were gone when you first saw her. When she first opened her mouth and spoke to you it was there already and you know it. Since you have it 151

and you never thought you would have it, there is no sense throwing dirt at it, when you know what it is and you know it came the first time you looked at her as she came out bent over carrying that iron cooking platter. It hit you then and you know it and so why lie about it? (FWBT, p. 167.)

This is Jordan's first willingness to admit, how, to himself,

that he loves Maria, but he is still not yet willing to utter

the word to himself, although, of course, he has to her.

In what is probably the most obviously poor attempt

in all these examples at creating "true felt emotion,"

Hemingway has Robert Jordan smile "with the front of his

face" at Maria as he tries to convince her everything that

is about to happen at the bridge will be all right. In this case, the author is much more successful at conveying

Maria's emotion than Jordan's.

He looked up from where he was squatted by the table and saw Maria and she smiled at him. He grinned back with the front of his face . . .

He grinned at Maria again but the grin was still no deeper than the skin that felt tight over his cheekbones and his mouth.

". . .We will do all very well" Pilar said. "Why not?" Robert Jordan said and the very thinnest edge of the skin in front of his face smiled. "Of course we will. All will be well." (FWBT, pp. 386-387.)

This is a regrettable series, a weak attempt to show Jor dan's emotions. Hemingway is really conveying his own 152

lack of knowledge of Jordan's internal feelings, because,

if one believes the author's own principle of truth

telling, and this whole essay is an attempt to prove its

practicability, then one must accept his theory that a writer

can leave out those things he knows, and the reader will feel

them as if they were there. And the reader cannot feel

Jordan's true emotions, because they are "described" as in

any second-rate novel, rather than "rendered" as in most of

Hemingway.

Another excellent example, however, may be found in what is not said about Pilar's emotional reaction to the

Jordan-Maria relationship. There is an extreme loneliness in Pilar's character that never quite surfaces; the closest it gets to overt statement is in her questioning of Maria, following the love-making scene in the forest. Robert

Jordan was right in his earlier interior monologue thought that Pilar had shoved Maria into his sleeping bag the first night. And she also insisted the two of them lag behind on the return from El Sordo's camp. So that when she begins to question Maria to tell "how it was" with Jordan, there is a feeling of contempt for Pilar's earthiness.

"Maria," the woman said again. "I said it seems to agree with thee." "Oh, leave her alone," Robert Jordan said again. "Shut up, you," Pilar said without looking at him. "Listen, Maria, tell me one thing." 153

"No," Maria said and shook her head. "Maria," Pilar said, and her voice was as hard as her face and there was nothing friendly in her face. "Tell me one thing of thy own volition." The girl shook her head. Robert Jordan was thinking, if I did not have to work with this woman and her drunken man and her chicken-crut outfit, I would slap her so hard across the face-7----- "Go ahead and tell me," Pilar said to the girl. "No," Maria said. "No." "Leave her alone," Robert Jordan said and his voice did not sound like his own voice. I'll slap her anyway and the hell with it, he thought. (FWBT, p. 173.)

But Jordan, and perhaps the reader and Maria, have misunder

stood Pilar's emotion. She is not perverted, as Jordan says

in the following interior thought; it is something else,

something "not for slapping." Though what it is is not

stated, one feels her bitter loneliness, caused, perhaps, by her vital, earthy, primitive nature. Jordan feels it too:

Pilar did not even speak to him. It was not like a snake charming a bird, nor a cat with a bird. There was nothing predatory. Nor was there any thing perverted about it. There was a spreading, though, as a cobra's hood spreads. He could feel this. He could feel the menace of the spreading. But the spreading was a domination, not of evil, but of searching. I wish I did not see this, Robert Jordan thought. But it is not a business for slapping. (FWBT, p. 173.)

Maria finally tells the older woman "the earth moved," and, then, Pilar seems all right. But Jordan understands that the gypsy woman's sickness is worse than perversion; it is loneliness, for Jordan the worst sickness of all. If one 154

has not been aware of Pilar's loneliness before this

scene — her rather awkward relationship with Pablo and her

long story of his killing of the fascists in her town —

then Hemingway intends the reader to be aware now. But,

as with other "renderings" of character, it is the seven-

eighths of the iceberg, that which one feels rather than

sees, that is important.

F. Across the River and Into the Trees

It is too bad Hemingway’s fifth novel cannot be criticized more on its own merits without the-'"autobiograph ical" elements. The reading of the work as an authorial wish-fulfillment is to misread it entirely, and if future critics can fan away the autobiographical smoke, there may be a renewed interest in the "new" "Across the River and Into the Trees. Philip Young indicates that "Big Two-Hearted

River" was misunderstood by most critics for twenty-five 46 years, because they failed to see what was not said; perhaps the same may be said of Across the River.

For this novel too is about death; not death in war but death in age. Colonel Cantwell has had three heart

48Young, A Reconsideration, p. 43. 155

attacks when the novel opens, recalling the third one in

flash-back two-thirds of the way through the book, and then gets the fourth and fifth "strikes" after the return to time present near the end. Chapter one and the last six chapters are in time present, chapters two through thirty- nine take place in Cantwell's mind (through indirect interior monologue, similar to that in "Big Two-Hearted River”) as he recalls the recent events leading to his Venice trip and up 47 to the final good-bye to Renata. She, interestingly enough, never makes an appearance before the reader, only as

Cantwell recalls her through his own thoughts. So that the entire novel, then, is a sort of life-flashing across his mind as he waits for what he knows will be the final heart attacks.

Young comments on this "fleeting instant" element in the novel without seeming to realize it:

Hemingway remarked somewhere of his chewed-up Across the River and Into the Trees that having been through albegra and geometry and trigonometry he had now moved into calculus. It is not safe to dismiss such a statement as simply pretentious. Years before when he wrote of "the fourth and fifth dimensions that can be gotten" in prose it turned

47Baker mentions that the name Renata means "reborn," and that Hemingway "wanted her to represent . . . the spirit of youth, reborn in the mind of his fifty-year-old Colonel." See A Life Story, p. 477. 156

out that he had something in mind. Perhaps someday it can be shown how the calculus, which is often described as a symbolic means of "gras ping the fleeting instant," throws a more attractive light on the novel than has yet been observed. °

The calculus, the "grasping of the fleeting instant," is in the very structure of the novel, time-present moving from

"two hours before daylight" (p. 1) Sunday morning to "early darkness" (p. 305) that same evening. Everything else occurs in Cantwell's mind as he sits in a boat, hunting ducks at the mouth of the Tagliamento River and remembering his past life in general and the immediate past Friday and

Saturday in particular. It is fourth or fifth dimension, perhaps, but it is certainly movement in the seven-eighths of the iceberg.

.•. And below the mostly unstated death theme is yet another dimension, that of the relationship between Renata and Barone Alvarito and the three-way understanding that develops between Renata, Alvarito, and Richard Cantwell.

But the death theme will be discussed first.

48'Young, A Reconsideration, p. 275. 157

Since the duck-hunting trip is merely the structur al frame-work for the rest of the novel, the story actually begins in Chapter II at the doctor's office where Cantwell

is given a "clean" bill of health by the skeptical (with reason) army surgeon. The colonel has taken mannitol hex anitrate to speed up his blood flow in order to pass the doctor's test. But the doctor is not fooled:

"... don't you ever run into anything, or let any sparks strike you, when you're really souped up on nitroglycerin. They ought to make you drag a chain like a high-octane truck. . . . "Your cardiograph was wonderful, Colonel. It could have been that of a man of twenty-five. It might have been that of a boy of nineteen." (ARIT, p. 9.)

The doctor knows that Cantwell has speeded up his blood flow to make the cardiograph look good so he will be allowed the trip to Venice. Cantwell knows he hasn't long to live and so wants the trip as a kind of final farewell to the things he has most enjoyed in life. But the first real in dication of his impending death comes (in his remembering) as he arrives at Harry's Bar in Venice. Looking at the church of Santa Maria del Giglio, he says,

Damn, I wish I might walk around this town all my life. All my life, he thought. What a gag that is. A gag to gag on. A throttle to throt tle you with. Come on, boy, he said to himself. No horse named Morbid ever won a race. Besides, he thought, ... I don't feel so badly. There is only the buzzing. . . . 158

Then, as he climbed, he felt the twinges . . .

There's a lot of oxygen in this air, he thought, as he faced into the wind and breathed deeply. Then he was pulling open the door of Harry's bar and was inside and he had made it again, and was at home. (ARIT, pp. 77-79.)

Cantwell feels the irregular "twinges" of heart trouble as

he struggles toward Harry's Bar, "home," where he feels he

will be able to relax. The first direct statement of his

impending death is handled matter-of-factly by the girl, as

would be appropriate since the point of view is Cantwell's

as he remembers her speaking about it over drinks at Harry's

Bar. He tells her she looks sad:

"I am not, really. I am as happy as I ever am. Truly. Please believe me, Richard. But how would you like to be a girl nineteen years old in love with a man over fifty years old that you knew was going to die?" (ARIT, p. 91.)

Then the subject of his heart attacks becomes more penetra ting and, in this case, even competitive, as he compares health notes with his old army friend the "Gran Maestro."

Cantwell asks him about his health and learns of his friend's

"small cardiac condition" for the first time: "'No,' the

Colonel said, and his heart rose and he felt it choke him.

'You only told me about the ulcers.'" The Gran Maestro indicates two heart attacks. 159

"I'm ahead of you," the Colonel said. "But let's not be macabre. Ask Donna Renata if she wishes more of this excellent wine." "You did not tell me there were more," the girl said. "You owe it to me to tell me." "There has been nothing since we were together last." "Do you think it breaks for me? If so, I would come and simply be with you and care for you." "It's just a muscle," the Colonel said. "Only it is the main muscle. It works as perfectly as a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. The trouble is that you cannot send it to the Rolex representative when it goes wrong. When it stops, you just do not know the time. You're dead." (ARIT, p. 138.)

Renata knows Cantwell is going to die, and she worries that he has not told her about every attack he has had. On the

other hand, he is more objective, certainly less serious about his impending death than she is. And before Renata goes home that night, Cantwell asks her if she will call him when she wakes:

"Yes. But why do you always wake so early?" "It is a business habit." "Oh, I wish you were not in that business, and that you were not going to die." "So db I, " said the Colonel. "But I'm getting out of the business." (ARIT, p. 160.)

His business is the army and that too is important to him as his life moves before him in the boat on the icy lagoon.

That is why so much time is spent thinking about the things he has said to her about his army life, including why he was

"busted" from general. And he remembers wondering out loud 160

to the waiter after she had gone, "'Why do we have to

get old?'" (ARIT, p. 177).

Then, still thinking about yesterday’s events, he

remembers his third heart attack, after he had called her

that morning:

Coming out of the telephone booth he, suddenly, did not feel good and then he felt as though the devil had him in an iron cage, built like an iron lung or an iron maiden, and he walked, gray-faced, to the concierge's desk and said, in Italian, "Domenico, Ico, could you get me a glass of water, please?" . . . and he took four tablets of the type that you take two, and he continued resting as lightly as a hawk rests. (ARIT, p. 196.)

But, of course, he has already had this attack when the

novel begins, since it takes place in his remembering, from

the vantage point of the boat on the icy lagoon; that is why

he is so aware of his impending death as he duck hunts the

mouth of the Tagliamento River. There are other mentions

of death, to be sure, including his "quick decision" when

she asks him where he would like to be buried: "'Up in the hills ... on any part of the high ground where we beat

them'" (ARIT, p. 228). And, when Renata tells him she would

like to go along when he dies, he says very much the same

thing Robert Jordan does to Maria; only Cantwell is a bit

less romantic: 161

"That is the one thing we do alone. Like going to the bathroom." "Please do not be rough." "I meant that I would love to have you with me. Bht it is very egotistical and an ugly process."

Both Renata and Cantwell are aware of his impending death,

in other words, in nearly everything they say to each other.

There is, no doubt, love shared but also the pain of his

coming death. The whole novel is taken up with this con

cept of their relationship. Near the end of the flashback,

as they talk about his military career, he tells her he is

bored by it all:

"I bore myself, Daughter." "I don't think you do, Richard, you would not have done something all your life if you were bored by it. Don't lie to me please, darling, when we have so little time." "I won't."

"Don't you know I want you to die with the grace of a happy death? ..." (ARIT, p. 240.)

Time is as important to them as it is to Robert Jordan and

Maria, who live a lifetime in sixty-eight hours. And that

is about as long as the reader sees Renata and Cantwell

together — from Friday to Sunday, although Cantwell's remembering allows glimpses of other moments and other times. Time is pushing Cantwell as surely as it is Jordan and for the same reason — he too is going to die. 162

The tone of the novel is nostalgic. But it is

Cantwell, not Hemingway, who lives the novel, who has had

the heart attacks and is waiting to die. It is Cantwell

who remembers so vividly the battles he has fought and his

relating of them to Renata on their last weekend together,,

the weekend he dies, the weekend the reader is most familiar with. And it is Cantwell, not Hemingway, who has gone back to the scene of his wounding of thirty years before to create a "monument" to his own memory of himself.

Below the death theme in the novel, which is closely tied to the major love theme and to the whole structural framework of the story (i.e. Cantwell's remembering these things), moves another element equally interesting. There are four passages in the novel which hint strongly at the third relationship already mentioned in the introduction of this section, that between Renata and Barone Alvarito. Ren ata and Alvarito are childhood friends, he about three years older than she: "'We knew each other as children,' the girl said. 'But he was about three years older. He was born very old'" (ARIT, p. 130). Alvarito and Cantwell are also

"good friends," and it is Alvarito who has invited Cantwell on the duck hunt. The Italian is in another boat as the novel opens and is waiting by the fire in the stone house 163 when Cantwell lands his boat at the end.

While Renata and Richard are having dinner together in Harry's Bar, the Barone walks up to their table. He is described by the omniscient narrator of Cantwell's memory:

He was almost tall, beautifully built in his town clothes, and he was the shyest man the Colonel had ever known. He was not shy from ignorance, nor from being ill at ease, nor from any defect. He was basically shy, as certain animals are, such as the Bongo that you will never see in the jungle, and that must be hunted with dogs. "My Colonel," he said. He smiled as only the truly shy can smile. It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the poli tician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a deep mine, that is within them. (ARIT, p. 129.)

This description of Alvarito's shyness is almost overdone; enough done, at least, so that one wonders about unstated potentialities for this persona. For example, is he so shy that he must wait until the relationship between Renata and

Cantwell "runs its course" before he feels he can renew his sought acquaintanceship with her? Or is the description ironic, indicating a touch of jealousy on the part of

Richard Cantwell? One thing seems almost certain; there is a subtle element underlying Alvarito's role in the, story. 164

In the above scene he only appears for the moment to set the meeting time and place for the next day's duck shoot? when asked to sit down, he says,

"No ... We can meet at the Garage at two- thirty if you like? You have your car?" "Yes." "That makes it very good. Leaving at the hour, we will have time to see the ducks in the evening." "Splendid," the Colonel said. "Ciao, then Renata. Good-bye, my Colonel. Until two-thirty." (ARIT, p. 130.)

After stating that they had known each other as children,

Renata does not speak again (while Cantwell and the Gran

Maestro discuss good wines) until she is asked what she wants for dessert. Then, she is described as having been "quiet and a little withdrawn, since she had seen Alvarito. Some thing was going on in her mind, and it was an excellent mind. But, momentarily, she was not with them" (ARIT, p. 131). When Cantwell asks her what is wrong, she says,

"Nothing. Never anything. Always nothing." "You might as well pull out of it. We haven't time for such luxuries." "No. I agree. We will devote ourselves to the cheese." "Do I have to take it like a corn cob?" "No," she said, not understanding the colloguialism, ', but understanding exactly what was meant, since it was she who had been doing the thinking. . . . (ARIT, p. 132.)

It is clear that the iceberg principle is at work in this passage, and it seems relatively clear that what is unstated 165

is her thinking about her relationship to, or, at least, her potential relationship with, Barone Alvarito. What is not clear in the seven-eighths is how much Cantwell knows.

But, in the next mention of Alvarito, late in the novel, the shyness is what is noted first:

Alvarito, the Barone, was standing by the open fire in the middle of the room. He smiled his shy smile and said in his low pitched voice, "I am sorry you did not have better shooting." (ARIT, p. 300.)

Again, one is not sure whether the shyness is over the potentially awkward, but "understood," triangular relation ship, or is used sarcastically by Cantwell to indicate an ironic tone. But, it seems more reasonable here, and in the following exchange, to believe Cantwell is not sarcastic, that there is a serious understanding developing between the two men over the girl. After small talk about their duck shooting luck, there is this exchange:

"I always love the shoot," the Colonel said. "And I love Venice." The Barone Alvarito looked away and spread his hands toward the fire. "Yes," he said. "We all love Venice. Perhaps you do the best of all." The Colonel made no small talk on this but said, "I love Venice as you know." "Yes. I know," the Barone said. He looked at nothing. Then he said, "We must wake your driver." (ARIT, p. 301.)

The Barone's shyness gives him away here, for it is not

Venice (except indirectly) but Renata that they both love; 166

and this is reflected in Alvarito's looking away and at

nothing. There is understanding here, between the two men;

each is aware of the other's love for Renata, and there is

deep respect. It is an emotion for both which it is im

possible to put into words, but which the reader "feels"

(or is intended to feel) as surely as if the author had

stated it.

Then a little later, the Colonel drops Alvarito

off at his villa and they say good-bye:

"You're sure you won't come in?" "No. I must get back to Trieste. Will you give my love to Renata?" "I will. Is that her portrait that you have wrapped in the back of the car?" "It is." "I'll tell her that you shot very well and that the portrait was in good condition." "Also my love." "Also your love." "Ciao, Alvarito, and thank you very much."

"In case of any unforeseen contingencies would you ask her to have the portrait picked up at the Gritti?" "Yes, my Colonel." (ARIT, pp. 303-304.)

Again, there is a great deal not said here. The "under standing" has developed; it probably began with the meeting^ at Harry's Bar and worked in Cantwell's mind until he be came fully aware of the triangular relationship, but not sure enough of it to express it openly, not even in his re 167 membering — the "true felt emotion" working in the seven- eighths of the iceberg.

49 Critic Delbert Wylder says Renata is pregnant.

If so, it would lend even more support to the "understood" relationship between Renata and Alvarito, because she could marry him after Cantwell's death and have a father for her child. Wylder bases his evidence of pregnancy on the statement by Renata: "'I have a disappointment for you,

Richard,'" and Cantwell's reply: "'My poor daughter,'"

(p. 110). In his reasoning Wylder then follows with Cant well's question concerning Renata's mother: "'Do you think she would mind if we had a baby?'" But that statement is made before Renata tells him she has a disappointment," and, although Wylder certainly makes an interesting case (and one that fits the iceberg principle quite neatly), it is, perhaps, more likely that she is simply telling him it is the wrong time of the month for sexual intercourse. They have just gone through a rather passionate love scene, and it seems reasonable to believe she is merely warning him of her condition, her "disappointment." And this is certainly

49Delbert E. Wylder, Hemingway's Heroes (Albuquerque, N.M.: The University of New Mexico Press, 1969) pp. 188ff. 168

a more valid explanation of their lack of further inter

course than is pregnancy.

Finally, riding toward Trieste in the car and

thinking about a last note to Renata but rejecting it be

cause they had said everything, Cantwell acknowledges

again the three-way relationship:

You have said good-bye to your girl and she has said good-bye to you. That is certainly simple. You shot well and Alvarito understands. That is that. So what the hell do you have to worry about, boy? I hope you're not the type of jerk who wor ries about what happens to him when there's nothing to be done. Let's certainly hope not. (ARIT, p. 306.)

Alvarito does "understand," and there is nothing "to wor

ry about." Cantwell is going to be out of the picture

soon, anyway, and so is not worried about after that; he

is not worried about Renata and Alvarito and, in fact, he

probably is glad that she is to be well taken care of.

But all this, Cantwell's love for Renata and friend

ship for Barone Alvarito, his love of Venice, his love of his military life, his love of duck hunting (all of which is

involved on his last weekend in Venice), all these things

are part of the novel's theme — death. The entire book is

a flashing of Cantwell's life across his mind as he lives

the last few hours before his imminent death. Yet, 169 most of it moves below the surface as a part of the seven-

eighths of the iceberg. Baker relates in his biography that

Hemingway's friend Chink Smith, a retired Lieutenant-General and former British Army Chief of Staff in the African cam paign, once asked the novelist how he could know "things that were known only to retired army officers? "’You understand <50 sorrow . . .'" he told him. The rendering of the old colonel, lonely and seeking the "spirit of youth," reborn through Renata in his remembering, is, in fact, one of the most moving of all character portrayals in Hemingway fiction.

G. The Old Man and the Sea

Because of comments Hemingway made himself on things

"left out" of his sixth published novel, The Old Man and the

Sea makes a good summary study for the whole concept of the iceberg principle as postulated in this chapter. And it does so even though there are few internal examples and none with the impact of what is unstated in Jake's "emasculation" and jealousy, or in the ending of A Farewell to Arms, or in the irony involved in Richard Gordon's mis-reading Marie, or in the death themes moving as the seven-eighths of the iceberg in For Whom the Bell Tolls and especially in

SOBaker, A Life Story, p. 483. 170

Across the River and Into the Trees.

In answering a question by George Plimpton dealing

with leaving out "anything you know," Hemingway spoke of

how this worked in The Old Man and the Sea. The novel, he

told Plimpton,

. . . could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, etc. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read some thing it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. . . . I've seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I've seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge.is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.^1

But the knowledge that is left out is not meant as a kind of guessing game between author and reader, a strictly sub jective attempt to understand, although there are certainly times when it comes close to that. It is rather intended as a part of that "true felt emotion" of a character which if stated would be cheating. Like the unstated triangular

53-Plimpton, "The Art of Fiction," p. 84. 171

understanding in Across the River, or the strangers'

objective attitude at the end of The Old Man and the Sea,

the emotion is unstated because it cannot be put into

words by the characters themselves. Instead, the reader,

"if the writer is writing truly enough," has "a feeling of

those things as strongly as though the writer had stated

them."

There are several parallels in Hemingway's fiction

to the strangers' lack of understanding at the end of The

Old Man and the Sea. The nurses rushing to see the caesarian

in A Farewell to Arms has been discussed; but there is also

the series of "Haves" who are totally uninterested in Harry

Morgan's impending death at the end of To Have and Have Not, and there is Colonel Cantwell's driver, Jackson, who, in

spite of his colonel’s command, will send his belongings

"through channels." Two similar examples out of the short stories are the Negro cook in "The Killers" who wants to stay in the kitchen, hidden from the violence; and the young waiter in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" who has no under standing whatever of the tragedy of the old man's not wanting to go home. In all these examples, there is an outsider reflecting on the most important event in another person's life and seeing little or nothing of importance himself. 172

Underneath the superficial objectivity of the outsider is the kind of selfish arrogance Hemingway hated.

Of these examples, the most moving one is probably the one at the end of The Old Man and the Sea. Except for the old man and the boy, no other characters appear in the novel until a couple of tourists at the Terrace restaurant look down in the water "among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas" at the "great long white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide." Although her simply worded question carries no surface connotation, one can feel the contempt in her voice:

"What's that?" she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the great fish that was now just garbage waiting to go out with the tide. (QMS, p. 126.)

Another writer might have described her tone of voice, but here, the tone is part of the iceberg principle; one must

"feel" it in the two words she utters, no says — "What's that?"

Then the Spanish waiter answers by starting to tell the whole, dramatic story: "'Tiburon,' the waiter said.

'Eshark.' He was meaning to explain what had happened."

Tiburon is shark and "Eshark" is his translation of the word for the woman and her companion; but the tourists are 173

not listening — they really are not interested: "'I

didn't know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed

tails.' 'I didn't either,' her male companion said."

They did not give the waiter a chance to explain about the

sharks devouring the 1,500-pound marlin, whose skeleton

it is they see. The first word they hear in way of expla

nation is sufficient for them to misunderstand everything.

There are a few other lesser examples of the ice berg principle at work in the novel, comparable, perhaps, to the fragmented examples in some of the other novels.

For instance, there is the old man's thought that "the set ting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish"(QMS, p.

73); though unstated, it is a difficult time, because dusk is generally considered by man to be best for fishing.

Although the old man sees the marlin from a distance of about six hundred feet when it jumps the first time, he does not get the full impact of the fish's length until it passes as a "dark shadow that took so long to pass under the boat that he could not believe its length. 'No,' he said. 'He can't be that big'" (QMS, pp. 89-90). And, a moment later, the narrator describes a new something Santiago feels: "The old man was sweating now but from something else 174

besides the sun." The unmentioned "something" is fear, the

kind of stomach-churning, cold-sweating fear one feels when

confronted suddenly by the very thing he wants but just as

suddenly is doubtful of his ability to handle it. Here,

again, then, is the "true felt emotion" Hemingway worked so

hard to get, and it is all part of the iceberg's seven-

eighths, the part that causes the one-eighth to move with

so much dignity.

Perhaps the best way to summarize what has been said

in this chapter is to restate what the iceberg principle is

not by using two additional examples from The Old Man and

the Sea.

In the novel's opening paragraph there is the state

ment that the old man's sail was "patched with flour sacks

and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat"

(QMS, p. 9). Then, late in the novel there are two refer ences to the patched sail which are intended to remind the

reader of Santiago's "permanent defeat." After he has lashed the marlin to the skiff, he

stepped the mast and, with the stick that was his gaff and with his boom rigged, the patched sail drew, the boat began to move, and half lying in the stern he sailed south-west." (QMS, p. 97.)

Since he has just caught the huge fish, the reference to 175

the patched sail is seen as a foreshadowing of defeat.

When he gets to shore, after the sharks have taken his fish,

he "unstepped the mast and furled the sail and tied it"

(QMS, p. 121). Both of these sentences carry a kind of

emotion that moves beneath the surface of meaning, but the

reader has been told what the patched sail stands for and

so it is not a true illustration of knowledge left out.

Secondly, Santiago's statements that he had gone 5(2 out too far, although never fully explained in the novel,

are also not part of the iceberg principle. There is not

knowledge left out in order to create "true felt emotion"

in these statements, but they are better seen as symbolic

elements, statements which help give the novel its fenes

tration, its "open windowness" on the world, its universal ness .

None of these things — repetition of key ideas,

foreshadowing, or symbolism — are examples of the iceberg principle. It is rather some bit of knowledge the author has but which he feels is better omitted; and "if the writer is writing truly enough," the reader will have "a feeling

S;2see foreshadowing (he "knew he was going far out") on pp. 14 and 28, and statements that he had gone too far out on pp. 110, 115, 116, and 120. 176

of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." And it is this which gives the work the same sort of dignity of movement which an iceberg has, only one-eighth of it showing above water. HH

CONCLUSION

The best summary of what Hemingway accomplished in his effort to communicate "true felt emotion" may well have been stated two years before he was born. In his at tempt to merge form and meaning, in his attempt to leave out knowledge which, when grasped by the reader, would en hance meaning, Hemingway appealed to the senses in a way

Joseph Conrad had in mind when he wrote the preface to

The Nigger of the Narcissus; there the Polish-English writer of simple, declarative sentences explained his concept of the artist's need to tell the truth, to blend "form and substance," to go as far "as his strength will carry himz" and to make his readers "see":

All art . . . appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of pain ting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music— which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blen ding of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an 178

evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words; of the old, old words, worn thin, de faced by ages of careless usage. The sincere endeavour to accomplish that cre ative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:—My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That— and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimçse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

Hemingway was a great admirer of Conrad's work and must certainly have appreciated this succinct statement of the artist's task. Hemingway spent a lifetime experimenting with the principles involved in reaching the reader's "secret spring of responsive emotions," in order to make him "feel," in order to make him see.

It was the purpose of this study to determine the practicability of the principle of communicating "true felt emotion" in the novels, to determine whether one could be

Joseph Conrad, "Preface," The Nigger of the Narcis sus, Vol. XXIII, Canterbury Edition (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924), pp. xiii-xiv. 179 made to "feel" and see through the concept of merging form and meaning and through the principle of leaving out knowl edge important to total meaning. The affirmation of this practicability has been stated and documented throughout.

Perhaps the epitome of Hemingway's merger of form and meaning may be found in the final sleeping bag scene in For Whom the

Bell Tolls where the rhythms and sounds of the prose blend perfectly with the rhythms and emotions of the sex act and where the continual repetition of the key words "now" and

"one" merge with the time and love motifs of the novel. And perhaps the epitome of the "iceberg principle" may be found in Across the River and Into the Trees, where nearly every thing important to total understanding and appreciation is left unsaid, moving with "dignity" in the seven-eighths of the iceberg.

The entire study brings to the surface elements not immediately discernible in Hemingway's fiction, but which are, nevertheless, essential to the reader's imaginative and emotional response. BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Primary Sources

Hemingway, Ernest. Across the River and Into the Trees. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950.

______. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scrib ner's Sons, 1957.

______. A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964.

... Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932.

______. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940.

______. "Introduction," Men at War. New York: Bramhal House, 1942. Pp. xi-xxvii.

.______. "Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter," Esquire (October, 1935), pp. 21, 174A, and 174B.

______. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952.

______. "The Original Conclusion to A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Ma j or Novels, ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962. P. 75.

______. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966.

______. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scrib ner's Sons, 1926.

______. To Have and Have Not. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. I*1

B. Manuscripts Consulted

Hemingway, Ernest. (MS. A Farewell to Arms in The Houghton Library, Harvard University).

______. (MS. For Whom the Bell Tolls in The Houghton Library, Harvard University). I would like to express here my appreciation to the staff at The Houghton Library and particularly Mrs. Carolyn E. Jakeman for allowing me to study these two Hemingway manuscripts.

C. Critical Sources Cited

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York; Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.

______. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Bishop, John Peale. "Homage to Hemingway," The New Republic, LXXXIX (November 11, 1936), pp. 39-42.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius," Coleridge1s Shakespearean Criticism. Vol. I. Edited by Thomas Middleton Raysor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930. Pp. 219-224.

Conrad, Joseph. "Preface," The Nigger of the Narcissus. Vol. XXIII. Canterbury Edition. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924.

Eliot, T.S. "Hamlet," Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1960. Pp. 121-126.

Fenton, Charles A. The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway. New York: The Viking Press, 1958.

Graham, John. "Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of Style," Modern Fiction Studies, VI (Winter, 1960) , pp. 298^313. Hemphill, George. "Hemingway and James," Kenyon Review, XI (Winter, 1949), pp. 50-60.

Jones, Harold W., M.D. "Impotence," The Encyclopedia Americana (1958 ed.), VII, pp. 226-227.

Levin, Harry. "Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway," Contexts of Criticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957. Pp. 140-167.

Littrell, Robert. "Notes on Hemingway," The New Republic, LI (August 10, 1927), pp. 303-306.

Plimpton, George. "The Art of Fiction XXI: Ernest Hemingway," The Paris Review, V (Spring, 1958) , pp. 60-89.

Ross, Lillian. "Profiles: How do you like it now, Gentle men?" The New Yorker, XXVI, Pt. 1 (May 13, 1950), pp. 36-62.

Schorer, Mark. "Technique as Discovery," The Hudson Re view, I, No. 1 (Spring, 1948), pp. 67-87.

Shapiro, Karl and Beum, Robert. A Prosody Handbook. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Spilka, Mark. "The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises," Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958. Pp. 238-256.

Sykes, Robert Howard. "Ernest Hemingway's Style: A Des criptive Analysis." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1962.

Vanderbilt, Kermit. "The Sun Also Rises: Time Uncertain," Twentieth Century Literature, XV, No. 3 (October, 1969), pp. 153-154.

Wylder, Delbert E. Hemingway's Heroes. Albuquerque, N.M.: The University of New Mexico Press, 1969. i«3

Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1952.

______■ Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966.