"The Itinerant American Traveller": Settings And

“THE ITINERANT AMERICAN TRAVELLER” : SETTINGS AND LOCALES IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S FICTION - Somdatta Mandal Ernest Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. Few writers have lived as colourfully as him, and his career could have come out of one of his adventure novels. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and many other fine novelists of the twentieth century, Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest. Born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway spent his childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, was wounded and hospitalized for six months. After the war, as a war correspondent, he became part of the expatriate community in Paris, wrote of bullfighting in Spain, war on the Italian front, the Spanish Civil War, game hunting in Africa, rarely setting his key novels in the continental United States. Explaining his global aims, Hemingway wrote in 1933 to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Pfeiffer: “I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world - or as much of it I have seen.” This paper tries to analyse how Hemingway’s fiction is “a picture of the whole world” and pitted against the various episodes of his chequered career, becomes an illuminating study, as the novels and short stories then appear to reflect the life history of their author and consequently reveal the plane of reality that the author desires to represent. Both place and story have to do with where we are, with location, but the where of each is distinct. The poetics of place is pre- eminently sensory. Smell, sound, touch, and especially sight are attributes of place, which is consequently visual and spatial. Also, place and story are constructed through “symboling” and hence are reflexive; in both we feel surges of joy and grief and then shape those emotions into artefacts and words whose trajectory extends beyond the immediate, momentary occasion. But place, being visual, situates, while narrative, being verbal, displaces. Set against the biographical career, all Hemingway’s works appear to be a part of his life. As Deborah Tall aptly opines, to think about “sense of place” in relation to Ernest Hemingway, one must first revise the phrase into plural. In each of the places where he set down in different phases of his life and that he 2 experienced intensely - sometimes as a tourist, sometimes as a resident, he had a story to tell. Most of these locales turned up in his fiction as setting and some also became his subject. The ‘I’ of the first person narrative in some of the Nick Adams and many other stories are self-portraits raised to the level of art. In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and others are all narratives of “facts and motions” evoking in the readers the sensations and emotions experienced by the author. As J. W. Aldridge (1951,24) writes: the words he put down seemed to us to have been carved from the living stone of life. They were absolutely marked true because the man believed them and had reduced himself to the bare tissue of his soul to write them and because he was a dedicated man. And they told of strange countries we had never seen that were always white and clear in the sun, of savage, beautiful women and strong men, of good drinking , good companionship, plenty of lusty love. They also told of unforgettable horror and sadness of dead women in the rain, dead soldiers surrounded by torn personal pipes, sunken ships full of floating corpses, drowning mules with their legs cruelly broken, wounded hyenas eating their own entrails; horses gored by bulls, punch-drunk boxers waiting stolidly to be murdered; soldiers out of their minds with battle fatigue; nymphomaniacs, homosexuals and broken down prostitutes; and of times that might have been such good times ( if only Jake had not been sexually incompetent, if only Harry Morgan had better luck, if only Catherine had not died), of fine sunny days of Alpine skiing that had to end, of nights in a farmhouse up in Michigan, nights of the kind of incomparable conversation that comes to young men once only and that can never come again. (24) This felicitous mingling of life and art began right from his early literary career and continued till the end - probably till the end, when, discouraged by a troubled family background, illness, and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, so that he shot himself to death in 1961. The place was of course mainland American, Ketchum, Idaho. In any discussion of Hemingway’s works, the biographical details are extremely relevant because they conform and inform the portrait which the works so faithfully and aesthetically present. The background of violence, war-injuries, near-fatal shocks and death-defying adventures in war and the African jungles and the sensation of blood-curling scenes in bull rings, all offer a psychological explanation of some of the eccentricities of the Hemingway heroes. These were the result of his belief in the “cult of experience”, often set in exotic surroundings. 3 Carlos Baker’s (1961:1) brilliant summary of his career reveals how well Hemingway matched and blended his experiences in real life with his fiction and how actual experiences and locations have become the undisguised material for creative writing. At eighteen he was busily scribbling reporter’s notes in the police courts and hospital wards of Kansas city. At nineteen, with one leg nearly destroyed by Austrian shrapnel he was carried from a blown up dug-out near Fossalta on the Italian front ….. to an American hospital at Milan. When he was twenty and twenty-one, he turned back…..to the hard trade of writing in Petoskey, Chicago and Toronto. At twenty-two, he was watching tuna fishermen at Vigo, Spain, exploring the tourist resorts of Switzerland and discovering for the first time that colony of American expatriates which had already sprung up in the Montparnasse section of Paris. In Thrace and Anatolia during his twenty third year he gazed curiously at the dead men wearing while ballet shirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them while the Turkish army swept the ill-equipped Greek soldiery before their charge. By the age of twenty-four he had interviewed Clemenceau, Mussolini and Lloyd George, discovered that Spanish bull-fighting was more tragedy than sport, fished for trout in Swiss, French and Italian rivers and learned the joy of Alpine skiing. If we set Hemingway’s fictional career side by side with these biographical details we find that most of his creative writing was shaped by these personal experiences - so much so that it is often difficult to distinguish between the real and the imaginative world. He went to Europe from Michigan, U.S., at first as a volunteer in the World War I only to return home to realize that war in Europe and peace back home were all devoid of meaning to life. Stricken by this “unreasonable wound” of war, he called his first real book In Our Time ( 1924, Paris & 1925 U.S.). With the use of symbolism, he laid bare the reality as it was manifest then. The figure of Nick Adams recurs in many of the stories, Nick as a boy full of illusions about life living with his parents in the Michigan countryside, Nick as an adolescent with a growing boy’s problems and finally Nick as a soldier in Europe making his separate peace. The horrifying aspects of the contemporary war scene has been portrayed with compelling force in the stories. In some of his earliest reflections on writing, Hemingway had insisted on the primacy of place. Commenting on his Nick Adams stories, he wrote to Edward O’Brien in 1924, “ What I’ve been doing is trying to do country so you don’t remember the words after you read it but actually have the Country. It is hard because to do it you have to see the country all complete all the time 4 you write and not just have a romantic feeling about it.” In another letter to his father in 1925, he noted, “I’ve written a number of stories about the Michigan country - the country is always true - what happens in the stories is fiction.” Hemingway was, unmistakably the kind of writer who needed to uproot himself, and who formed, and evoked in his work, a passionate attachment to a number of foreign places. But there is, at the same time, a nostalgic stance in some of his work, the looking back at Michigan and according to Deborah Tull, “Michigan looms Edenic in his imagination, with every place after, perhaps, a postlapsarian search for the raptures of childhood in the wild.”(341) In Our Time was followed by the publication of Torrents of Spring, a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter. In 1926, Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises was published. Apart from the fictional element this book may be treated as a document of post-war society in Europe in the early 1920s. A story of frustrated love set against the backdrop of Paris and Spain during this time, Hemingway captures the sights and sounds and smells of his settings better than any other writer. The bohemian Paris during the great expatriate days and the maniac week long feria at Pamplona with the running of the bulls are captured brilliantly.

Load more