Ernest Hemingway in Context

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Ernest Hemingway’s literary career was shaped by the remarkable contexts in which he lived, from the streets of suburban Chicago to the shores of the Caribbean islands, to the battlefields of World War I, Franco’s Spain, and World War II. This volume examines the various geographic, political, social, and literary contexts through which Hemingway crystallized his unmistakable narrative voice. Written by forty-four experts in Hemingway studies, the comprehensive yet concise essays collected here explore how Hemingway is both a product and a critic of his times, touching on his relationship to matters of style, biography, letters, cinema, the arts, music, masculinity, sexuality, the environment, ethnicity and race, legacy, and women, among other topics. Fans, students, and scholars of Hemingway will turn to this reference time and again for a fuller understanding of this iconic American author.

Debra A. Moddelmog is a professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway and has written a number of articles on Hemingway as well as on twentieth-century American literature, film, and pedagogy.

Suzanne del Gizzo is an associate professor of English at Chestnut Hill College. She has published articles on twentieth-century literature in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, The Hemingway Review, and The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. She is co-editor of Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: 25 Years of Criticism. Spec SD1 Date 26-july Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Er nest Hemingway in Context

Edited by

Debra A. Moddelmog The Ohio State University Suzanne del Gizzo Chestnut Hill College Spec SD1 Date 26-july

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

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First published 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Moddelmog, Debra. Ernest Hemingway in context / Debra Moddelmog, Suzanne del Gizzo. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-01055-0 (hardback) 1. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961. i. Del Gizzo, Suzanne. ii. title. PS3515.E37Z7423 2013 813′.52–dc23 2012023653

ISBN 978-1-107-01055-0 Hardback

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Contents

Figures page ix Notes on Contributors xi Preface xxiii Abbreviations xxix

BIOGRAPHY AND LIFE 1. Chronology 3 Verna Kale 2. biography 12 John Raeburn 3. Critical Overview of the Biographies 22 Lisa Tyler 4. letters 33 Sandra Spanier 5. reading 43 Gail Sinclair

REPRESENTATIONS: IN HIS TIME 6. Contemporary Reviews 55 Albert J. DeFazio III 7. Photos and Portraits 65 James Plath 8. Cinema and Adaptations 76 Jill Jividen

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vi Contents 9. magazines 86 David M. Earle

REPRESENTATIONS: IN OUR TIME 10. Critical Overview 99 Kelli A. Larson 11. Styles 109 Milton A. Cohen 12. Cult and Afterlife 119 Suzanne del Gizzo 13. Houses and Museums 130 Frederic Svoboda 14. Posthumous Publications 141 Robert W. Trogdon

INTELLECTUA L a nd a rtistic MOV EMENTS AND INFLUENCES 15. modernist Paris and the Expatriate Literary Milieu 153 J. Gerald Kennedy 16. literary Friendships, Rivalries, and Feuds 163 Kirk Curnutt 17. literary Movements 173 Carl P. Eby 18. Visual Arts 183 Lisa Narbeshuber 19 music 193 Hilary K. Justice

POPULAR, CULTURAL, AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS 20. Ailments, Accidents, and Suicide 207 Peter L. Hays 21. animals 217 Ryan Hediger Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Contents vii 22. Bullfighting 227 Miriam B. Mandel 23. The Environment 237 Susan F. Beegel 24. Fishing 247 Mark P. Ott 25. Food and Drink 257 Peter Messent 26. Hunting 267 Kevin Maier 27. masculinity 277 Thomas Strychacz 28. Politics 287 Robert E. Fleming 29. Publishing Industry and Scribner’s 297 Leonard J. Leff 30. Race and Ethnicity: African Americans 307 Gary Edward Holcomb 31. race and Ethnicity: Africans 315 Nghana tamu Lewis 32. race and Ethnicity: American Indians 323 Amy Strong 33. race and Ethnicity: Cubans 332 Ann Putnam 34. Race and Ethnicity: Jews 339 Jeremy Kaye 35. religion 347 Matthew Nickel 36. Sex, Sexuality, and Marriage 357 Debra A. Moddelmog 37. travel 367 Russ Pottle Spec SD1 Date 26-july

viii Contents 38. travel Writing 378 Emily O. Wittman 39. war: World War I 388 Alex Vernon 40. War: Spanish Civil War 395 Stacey Guill 41. war: World War II 402 James H. Meredith 42. Women 409 Nancy R. Comley

RESOURCES 43. manuscripts and Collections 421 Susan Wrynn 44. The Hemingway Review and The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society 429 Charles M. Oliver

Further Reading 435 Index 469 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Figures

7.1. Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Yousuf Karsh. 1957 page 66 7.2. Portrait of Ernest Hemingway wearing hat by Helen Pierce Breaker. 1928 70 9.1. The Popular Magazine, cover. January 2, 1931 92 9.2. The Home Magazine, cover, and the article “Mother of Geniuses.” October 1931 95 12.1. Endorsement for Ballantine Ale. 1951 121 13.1. The Hemingway family cottage, “Windemere,” on Walloon Lake, MI. 1901 131 13.2. The Hemingway house on Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park, IL. 1907 134 37.1. Endorsement for Pan American Airlines. 1956 372 43.1. The Hemingway Room at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, MA 425

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Notes on Contributors

Susan F. Beegel is an adjunct associate professor of English at the University of Idaho and editor of The Hemingway Review, an internationally distributed scholarly journal on the work of Ernest Hemingway. She is the author or editor of four books and has published more than fifty-five articles on various aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Milton A. Cohen, professor of literary studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, has written books on Hemingway (Hemingway’s Laboratory: The Paris in Our Time), Cummings (Poet and Painter: The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings’s Early Work), and modernism (Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group 1910–1914). His most recent book is Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. Nancy R. Comley is professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is co-author with Robert Scholes of Hemingway’s Genders (1994) and of articles on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other figures in modernist literature. Kirk Curnutt is a professor and the chair of English at Troy University’s Montgomery campus in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of thirteen books of fiction and criticism, including Coffee with Hemingway (2007), featuring a preface by the late John Updike, and Ernest Hemingway and the Expatriate Modernist Movement (2000). He also co-edited Key West Hemingway: A Reassessment (2009) with Gail D. Sinclair, a collection of essays that developed from the 2004 11th Biennial Hemingway Conference. In addition to serving on The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society board, he is the vice president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and the managing editor of The F. Scott

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xii Notes on Contributors Fitzgerald Review. He is currently at work on a reader’s guide to To Have and Have Not. Albert J. DeFazio III, term professor at George Mason University, is author of Literary Masterpieces: The Sun Also Rises (2000), editor of Dear Papa . . . Dear Hotch: The Ernest Hemingway/A. E. Hotchner Correspondence (2005), and associate editor of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol.1 1907–1922 (2011). He has published annotated bibli- ographies in The Hemingway Review, served on its editorial board, and edited The Hemingway Newsletter. His articles have appeared in Foreign Literatures Quarterly; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1999; and The Hemingway Review. He has published chapters in books such as Bibliography of American Fiction: 1919–1988 (1991), Approaches to Teaching The Sun Also Rises (2003), and A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. His bibliographic essays, “Fitzgerald and Hemingway,” in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual (1992–2001), cover everything written by or about the authors. Suzanne del Gizzo is an associate professor of English at Chestnut Hill College. She has published articles on twentieth-century literature in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, The Hemingway Review, and The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. She is co-editor of Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: 25 Years of Criticism. David M. Earle is an associate professor of transatlantic modernism and print culture at the University of West Florida. He is author of Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (2009) and All Man!: Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (2009). Online projects include the Virtual Newsstand, a digital re-creation of a newsstand from 1925, and the Pulp Magazines Project, a research hub for the study of early-twentieth-century all-fiction magazines. He has also published on James Joyce’s Ulysses and pulp modernism. Carl P. Eby is a Carolina Trustee Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Theatre at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. He is the author of Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (1999) and more than a dozen scholarly articles on the life and work of Ernest Hemingway. In 2006, he directed the 12th Biennial International Hemingway Conference in Málaga and Ronda, Spain, and he now serves on the board of trustees of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. He is currently editing a book of essays on Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Notes on Contributors xiii Hemingway and Spain and writing a reader’s guide on The Garden of Eden. He has twice been awarded the South Carolina Governor’s Distinguished Professor Award. Robert E. Fleming, Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, is the author of The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers (1994, 1996), editor of Hemingway and the Natural World (1999), and co-editor of Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro (2005). He has published some two dozen articles or chapters on Hemingway in journals such as American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, The Hemingway Review, Journal of Modern Literature, North Dakota Quarterly, and Studies in American Fiction and in collections such as Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction, The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, and Critical Essays on The Sun Also Rises. Stacey Guill is the author of numerous articles on the topics of Ernest Hemingway, the Spanish Civil War, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, including articles in The Hemingway Review and The Ivens Magazine. She has been a guest lecturer at Boise State University and the Osher Institute, and she received a Smith-Reynolds Founders Fellowship Research Grant from The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society in 2007 to pursue postdoctorate research on Ernest Hemingway and the film The Spanish Earth. She also served as a research assistant to Rena Sanderson, editor of Volume 3 of the Hemingway Letters Project. Peter L. Hays is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis. He is a former board member of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. Among his books are Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and The Critical Reception of The Sun Also Rises. Ryan Hediger is an assistant professor of English at Kent State University at Tuscarawas. He has published numerous essays on animals, including pieces treating Ernest Hemingway, violence, and disability. He has co-edited two books: Animals and Agency and Animals and War. Ga ry Edwa r d Holcomb is an associate professor of African-American literature in the Department of African American Studies, with a joint appointment in the Department of English, at Ohio University. He is the author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (2007) and co-editor with Charles Scruggs Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xiv Notes on Contributors of Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (2012). He has published articles on black and white modernist intertextual writing in a number of journals, including the Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Arizona Quarterly, and Callaloo, and he has published chapters in collections devoted to such authors as Richard Wright. Jill Jividen is an independent scholar and grant writer at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in English from the University of South Carolina in 2008. Her forthcoming book, “My Old Pal and Bastardly Traducer”: Business and Friendship between Ernest Hemingway and Maurice J. Speiser, looks at Hemingway as writer and businessman via the correspondence with his longtime lawyer. Hilary K. Justice is an associate professor of English at Illinois State University and holds an A.B. in music from Dartmouth College. She is author of The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels (2006); her work has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Resources for American Literary Study, The Mailer Review, the North Dakota Quarterly, and in the collections Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice and A Companion to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. She is currently preparing a reader’s guide for Green Hills of Africa; her other scholarly interests include Harry Potter, Shakespeare in performance, and food and culture. Verna Kale, visiting assistant professor in rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College, has published articles on Hemingway in The Hemingway Review and in Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory (2010). She is currently at work on a critical biography of Hemingway and is editing a collection of essays on teaching Hemingway and gender and sexuality. Jeremy Kaye teaches English at Moorpark College. He has written previously on Jewish themes in Hemingway and in the films of Robert Altman and Woody Allen. His work has appeared in The Hemingway Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Robert Altman: Critical Essays. J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University and former chair of the department. His work on Hemingway includes a chapter in his book Imagining Paris: Exile, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Notes on Contributors xv Writing, and American Identity (1993) and the volume French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad (1998), co-edited with Jackson R. Bryer. His essay “Hemingway’s Gender Trouble” appeared in American Literature, and he contributed a chapter to Scott Donaldson’s The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. He has served as advisory editor for two volumes of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. In 1994, he directed the Hemingway-Fitzgerald International Conference in Paris and later served for 9 years on the board of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. Kennedy is also noted for his work on Edgar Allan Poe and is co-editing The American Novel to 1870 for a multi-volume series on the history of the novel in English. Kelli A. Larson is professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and current bibliographer for The Hemingway Review. In addition to publishing articles on a variety of American writers, including Hemingway, Nella Larsen, and Ambrose Bierce, she is the author of Guide to the Poetry of William Carlos Williams (1995) and Ernest Hemingway: A Reference Guide (1990; rpt. 1992). Leonard J. Leff, who wrote Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (1997), has published essays in Film Quarterly, The Georgia Review, PMLA, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Hemingway Review. His Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood (1987) and (co-authored with Jerold Simmons) The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code (1991, revised edition 2001) were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Published more recently, his two essays on stage and film performer Clifton Webb (Cinema Journal [2008] and Journal of American Studies [2011]) constitute a biography of the actor in the context of his queerness. Now retired, Leff resides in Austin, Texas. Nghana tamu Lewis is the Louise and Leonard Riggio Professor of Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship at Tulane University, where she teaches a wide range of courses on the African Diaspora, social innovation and community organizing, criminal justice reform, and black women’s health. She is the author of Politics from the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920– 1945 (2007) and has published in African American Review, Arizona Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, Comparative Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xvi Notes on Contributors American Studies, and the Journal of American Drama & Theatre. Currently, Lewis is completing Black Women’s Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS, a monograph that examines the roles that the hip hop generation black women artists played in calling attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis among black women between 1990 and 2010. Kevin Maier is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast, where he coordinates the English department and teaches courses in composition, American literature, and literature and the environment. Maier also teaches fly-fishing in the Outdoor Studies Program. He has published essays focusing on Hemingway’s hunting and travel in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and The Hemingway Review. He is currently editing a collection of essays entitled Teaching Ernest Hemingway and the Natural World. Miriam B. Mandel is senior lecturer (retired) in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel. She has published articles on several authors but her main interest is the work of Ernest Hemingway. Her books include Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions (1995, reissued 2001), Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations (2002), and Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer: The Complete Annotations (2008). She has edited two collections of essays: A Companion to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (2004, reissued 2009) and Hemingway and Africa (2011), and she helped translate Death in the Afternoon into Spanish (Muerte en la tarde, 2005). She serves on the international advisory committee of The Hemingway Review (1992–), on the board of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society (2007–), and on the team responsible for the multivolume Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. James H. Meredith is core faculty at Capella University. He is president of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and has researched war literature and film in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, China, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He is author of Understanding the Literature of World War II (1999) and Understanding the Literature of World War I (2004) as well as contributing editor of War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Arts. Meredith has also published articles on Andre Dubus, Henry Adams, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Robert Grave, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Notes on Contributors xvii Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the trauma of modern war. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2004 as a lieutenant colonel after 25 years of service and was professor of English at the Air Force Academy. At present, he is working on a collection of war literature for The Great Book Foundation, which has received grants from the NEH and the Wounded Warrior Foundation. Peter Messent is Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of books on the application of literary theory, Mark Twain (including the recent prize-winning Mark Twain and Male Friendship), and Ernest Hemingway. He has also written widely on other aspects of American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has just completed The Crime Fiction Handbook for Wiley-Blackwell. Debra A. Moddelmog is professor of English at The Ohio State University, specializing in twentieth-century American fiction and sexuality studies. She is the author of essays on American fiction, film, and pedagogy published in journals such as American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, The Hemingway Review, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Pedagogy as well as in collections such as Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Her book Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (1999) has been translated into Japanese. Lisa Narbeshuber is an associate professor in the Department of English and Theater at Acadia University, where she teaches American literature. Her publications include “Hemingway’s In Our Time: Cubism, Conservation, and the Suspension of Identification,” published in The Hemingway Review. She is also the author of Confessing Cultures: Politics and the Self in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath (2009). Matthew Nickel received his PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2011. He has edited numerous anthologies of poetry – recently Kentucky: Poets of Place (2012) – and has published essays on Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Richard Aldington, and Lawrence Durrell. His essay on Hemingway and Under Kilimanjaro appeared in the North Dakota Quarterly (Winter & Spring, 2009), and his book Hemingway’s Dark Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xviii Notes on Contributors Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway is forthcoming. Charles M. Oliver is Emeritus Professor of English at Ohio Northern University, now living in Charlottesville, VA. He was editor of The Hemingway Review (1979–92), editor of The Hemingway Newsletter (1979–2005), and secretary of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society (1980–92). He has published three books in retirement: Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work (1999), Critical Companion to Walt Whitman (2006), and Critical Companion to Ernest Hemingway (2007). He was editor of A Moving Picture Feast: The Filmgoer’s Hemingway (1989) and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: A Documentary Volume (2005). He has written more than ninety essays for a column titled “Good Reading” for the quarterly newsletter of the Northern Ohio Bibliophilic Society. Mark P. Ott teaches at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He is the author of Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream, A Contextual Biography (2008) and editor (with Mark Cirino, 2010) of Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory. He is the general editor for the “Teaching Hemingway Series” with Kent State University Press. Ott has presented academic papers at international Hemingway conferences in Spain, Cuba, Oak Park, Bimini, Italy, Switzerland, and Key West; he has contributed to volumes such as The Key West Hemingway, Hemingway and the Black Renaissance, and Teaching A Farewell to Arms and has published in The Hemingway Review. James Plath is professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University and the author of Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway. His essays on Hemingway have appeared in numerous critical anthologies, most recently in Hemingway and Africa. The former director of the Hemingway Days Writers’ Workshop & Conference in Key West, he also co-edited Remembering Ernest Hemingway, a collection of interviews with Hemingway family members and friends. He takes pride in having run with the bulls in Pamplona during his first International Hemingway Conference in 1992. Russ Pottle is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania. His research interests are in American literature, travel writing, and cultural studies. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Notes on Contributors xix Pottle has published work on the relationship between travel writing and the novel, the intersection of travel writing and autobiography, and the complications of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrity in the 1930s. He is North American vice president for the International Society for Travel Writing, a member of the board of advisors for the Society for American Travel Writing, and a member of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. Ann Putnam teaches creative writing, American literature, and gender studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. She has published short fiction, personal essays, literary criticism, and book reviews in anthologies that include Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice and Hemingway and the Natural World, and in journals such as The Hemingway Review, Western American Literature Quarterly, and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. Her recently completed novel, Cuban Quartermoon, came out of her six trips to Cuba as part of the Hemingway Colloquium, sponsored by the Cuban Ministry of Culture. Her latest publication is the memoir Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye. John Raeburn is Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. He is the author of Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography, and, most recently, Ben Shahn’s American Scene: Photographs, 1938. Gail Sinclair is the executive director and scholar in residence of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College. Her publications include co-editing Key West Hemingway: A Reassessment and the forthcoming War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings, as well as essays in Hemingway’s Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Edith Wharton in Context, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context. She currently serves on the board of directors for The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. Sandra Spanier is general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway and professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is editor, with Robert W. Trogdon, of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 1 (1907–1922), published in 2011. Her essays have appeared in Modern Critical Interpretations: A Farewell to Arms Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xx Notes on Contributors (1987), New Essays on A Farewell to Arms (1990), and Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (2002), and she serves on the editorial board of The Hemingway Review. Her books include Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (1986) as well as editions of Boyle’s Life Being the Best and Other Stories (1988) and Process: A Novel (2001). Spanier is co-editor (with David Morrell) of American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young (2000). She also worked with Martha Gellhorn to bring into print her previously unpublished 1946 play, co-authored with Virginia Cowles, Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts (1995; revised ed. 2009). Amy Strong is an independent scholar and writer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000. She is the author of Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction (2008). Her work has been published in The Hemingway Review, Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism, Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, and the Faulkner Journal. Thomas Strychacz teaches at Mills College, California, where some twenty years ago he began to work out a new approach to Ernest Hemingway based on gender and performance studies that ultimately became Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity (2003). A few years later, Strychacz extended this study into a broader analysis of masculinity and literary modernism in Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, Lawrence (2008). Strychacz has also published Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (1993). He is currently working on a book about late-nineteenth-century female regionalist writers and political economy – an idea that will, he believes, eventually allow him to return to Hemingway studies via that author’s most provocatively political work, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Frederic Svoboda is professor of English at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1980, focusing on American literature and culture and serving as both chair of English and director of the graduate program in American culture. He served as chair of the faculty council and senior faculty advisor to UM-Flint’s chancellor. He also served two terms as a director and treasurer of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. He is past president and current vice president of the Michigan Hemingway Society. Svoboda is the author or editor of several books. The most recent, co-edited Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Notes on Contributors xxi with Suzanne del Gizzo, is collected criticism of Hemingway’s posthumously published The Garden of Eden. Current projects include a critical study of American novelist John Updike and a novel set during the American Civil War. Robert W. Trogdon is professor and chair of English at Kent State University. He is the author of The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature (2007) and editor of Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference (2002). He is currently serving as an editor for the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Lisa Tyler is professor of English at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, OH, where she has taught since 1990. She is the author of Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway (2001) and editor of Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (2008). Her articles on Hemingway have appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language; The Hemingway Review; and Journal of Men, Masculinities, and Spirituality, as well as in several edited collections. Alex Vernon is professor of English and the Humanities Area Chair at Hendrix College in Conway, AR, where he also currently holds the James and Emily Bost Odyssey Professorship. In addition to a number of essays and articles, he has written two memoirs, The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War and Most Succinctly Bred; two works of literary criticism and history, Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O’Brien and Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War; and a cultural study of sorts, On Tarzan. He has also edited three scholarly collections: Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Tim O’Brien (with Catherine Calloway); and Critical Insights: War. Emily O. Wittman is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama. The author of several articles on Hemingway, she is the editor (with Maria DiBattista) of The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography and Modernism and Autobiography. Susan Wrynn is the Ernest Hemingway Curator at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. She joined the John F. Kennedy Foundation staff in April 2004. As curator of the Hemingway Collection, her duties include planning, scheduling, and budgeting for Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xxii Notes on Contributors the preservation of the collection as well as interacting with researchers and donors. Wrynn previously served as a director at the Northeast Document Conservation Center from 1994 to 2003, where she had responsibility for the preservation of collections using various repro- graphic techniques. Wrynn was also responsible for teaching preservation classes at the graduate level. Wrynn was a senior records manager in the engineering field for 20 years. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Preface

The title of Ernest Hemingway’s first major publication, In Our Time (1925), portended a career of a writer in touch with his cultural and historical moment. Indeed, whether it was his status as the first American wounded on the Italian front in World War I, his role as the pugnacious upstart of Paris’s literary circles, or his white-bearded, tanned face that became synonymous with mid-twentieth-century American masculinity, Hemingway was throughout his thirty-five-year career a man and a writer of his times. As a young writer, he studied significant cultural and aesthetic trends and the demands of a changing literary marketplace to such great effect that his writing was not only a major contribution to literary modernism but also came to represent the voice of the “Lost Generation.” Later in life, when Hemingway had become an accomplished, Nobel Prize–winning author and world adventurer, his image and exploits were featured on the covers of magazines such as Life, Time, and Look as the manly representative of the good life lived to the fullest. But Hemingway did more than reflect major cultural and artistic trends; he also created them. His writing and lifestyle arguably played a major role in popularizing certain activities (big-game hunting, deep- sea fishing, bullfighting, and the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, for example) and a clipped form of masculine speech, which would assume its most trendy incarnation in the film noir dialogue of the 1940s. When his first novel,The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926, some American college students followed the lead of its central characters, modeling their dress or speech after Brett Ashley or Jake Barnes.1 In the 1950s, Hemingway’s celebrated exploits in writing and life positioned him as an ideal spokesperson offering his brand of extreme experience to other Americans. For instance, in a 1956 advertisement for Pan American Airlines, Hemingway encouraged American tourists to fly into the heart of China as he had done,2 and in a feature story for Look magazine, he assured prospective travelers that Africa was safe for anyone who wanted xxiii Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xxiv Preface to follow his example and take a safari. Hemingway is thus a unique literary figure not only because he lived and worked in many different contexts, but also because he helped to fashion some of the very contexts in which he lived and wrote. A study of Hemingway in relation to context, however, also reveals the potential pitfalls of this critical approach. Because of his interest in various cultural milieus, Hemingway was considered by some contemporaries and critics as, at worst, an imperial and dominating figure who exploited other cultures and ways of life to serve his writing and, at best, an insincere sam- pler of those cultures and ways of life. As early as the mid-1930s, he was criticized for his chameleon-like sense of identity. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein famously complained about what she perceived as Hemingway’s evasiveness and duplicity when she suggested that he should write the story of “the real Hem.”3 A year later, the March 1934 issue of Vanity Fair pejoratively captured Hemingway’s ver- satility and adaptability when it featured a Hemingway paper doll set in which the main doll, “Ernie as Neanderthal Man” clad in a leopard loin cloth with club in hand, was accompanied by various cut-out costumes that could be affixed to it. These costumes parodied themes familiar from his work, including “Ernie as the Unknown Soldier” and “Ernie as Don Jose, the Toreador.” From the perspective of both Stein and Vanity Fair, Hemingway’s desire to position himself in and write about different situations was presented as a challenge to his authenticity and sincerity; his public personae were considered merely a series of masks behind which he hid the “real Hem,” presumably a stable, knowable entity. The image that Vanity Fair termed “Ernie as Neanderthal Man” emerged as the iconic version of Hemingway for many years. Although some critics gave it a more positive spin – Hemingway as the tight-lipped masculine writer – this common thread of a dominant, hypermasculine man’s man provided a durable sense of coherence and logic to the other contexts in which the author worked and the personae he assumed. As a Barnes and Noble catalog put it in the 1990s, Hemingway is the “‘He-Man’ of American Literature.”4 Early scholars thus presented an image of Hemingway as an exemplar of a certain kind of twentieth-century American masculinity, an image that Hemingway promoted and reinforced with his public behavior. Philip Young’s initial studies of the author, Ernest Hemingway (1952) and Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (1966), offered generations of readers relatively stable and standard lenses for encountering the author and his work. In particular, Young’s concept of the Hemingway code hero Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Preface xxv whose wounding was the singular event of his life dominated scholarship for more than 30 years. This concept advanced a general impression of a wounded or compromised masculinity in which endurance and individualism were valued as a way of recovering personal integrity and surviving in a hostile world. This filter was so powerful – perhaps because it served our needs as twentieth-century readers so well (criticism is contextual too) – that it persisted through the 1980s. In fact, when feminist critics such as Judith Fetterley first turned toward Hemingway in the 1970s and 1980s, they took this basic approach to his work for granted. The code hero and the emphasis on masculine comportment in Hemingway’s texts were now condemned as phallocentric, racist, homophobic, and misogy- nistic, but the existence and accuracy of the Hemingway hero remained unquestioned. In the mid-1980s, Hemingway scholarship underwent a sea change. The release of the posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden (1986), with its focus on gender and sexual role reversal, and the publication of revisionary biographies, most notably Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway (1987), which argued for the enduring influence of Hemingway’s early years when he had been dressed as a girl and “twinned” with his older sister, introduced scholars to irrefutable evidence that challenged the critical consensus of Hemingway and his work. Scholars recognized that Hemingway had been in a sense trapped in a critical context, partly of his own making, that precluded a fuller, more complicated picture of the author and his characters; they began the difficult work of addressing the nuances and contradictions in his life and writing that previous critics and Hemingway himself had, sometimes intentionally, worked to obscure. Over the next 25 years, scholars marshaled new biographical information and insights from The Garden of Eden as well as from other posthumous works, such as A Moveable Feast (1964; restored ed. 2009), Islands in the Stream (1970), True at First Light (1999), and Under Kilimanjaro (2005), to reveal the complexity of Hemingway’s earlier writing as well as his life. Additional complexities are emerging as Cambridge University Press begins to publish his collected letters in a massive multivolume proj ect. The result has been a far more satisfying, if less coherent, image of Hemingway in which deviations from gender, sexual, and racial standards of his time motivated not only some of his own life choices but also the plots and characters of much of his fiction. Thus, the opportunity to capture in one collection this sensibility – that many different angles and perspectives can help readers better understand Hemingway and his work – is of tremendous value and a much-needed counterbalance to Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xxvi Preface years of criticism in which context was deployed in generally reductive and restrictive ways. To state this another way, Hemingway is an ideal candidate for this series not only because he was representative of his times but also because the critical heritage around his work serves as a cautionary tale about the way context can limit and oversimplify. Hemingway often existed in productive tension with many of the literary and cultural movements and contexts he is often seen as representing. For example, he was a modernist torn between his interest in stylistic experimentation and his desire for a mass audience and profit; he was a member of the Lost Generation who mocked the bohemian, café life of the Left Bank; he attempted to balance compassion for others in works like To Have and Have Not (1937) with dogged individualism; and he was (and still is) an icon of masculinity who was dressed as a girl when he was a child and who experimented with sexual and gender role reversal as an adult. In his story “The Sea Change” (1931), Hemingway seems to have understood what his early critics did not when he wrote, “We’re made up of all sorts of things” (CSS 304). The goal of this collection is to consider Hemingway in various contexts that informed his life, writing, and public personae in an effort to shed light on some of the “many things” that made up Hemingway. A study of Hemingway in context thus involves addressing not only the multiple situations in which the author lived and worked and in which his writing took place, but also the narratives – popular and scholarly – that attempted to organize and filter this information for public consumption. The collection has been structured with these issues in mind. First, in an introductory section on “Biography and Life,” contributors consider different approaches to Hemingway’s rich and full life, including a biographical synopsis and an overview of the many biographies of Hemingway and a discussion of Hemingway’s extensive correspondence and reading. In “Representations: In His Time” and “Representations: In Our Time,” contributors address the variety of ways in which Hemingway and his work have been presented to mass and scholarly audiences over the past 80 years. In “Intellectual and Artistic Movements and Influences” and “Popular, Cultural, and Historical Contexts,” authors consider, first, the artistic and intellectual milieus and friendships that informed Hemingway’s work and, second, contemporary contexts particular to Hemingway’s writing and experience. In a final section on R“ esources,” contributors survey the major venues – collections and publications – for Hemingway scholarship. Throughout these six sections, the topics and potential contributors have been carefully selected to combine traditional Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Preface xxvii avenues of Hemingway study – such as hunting, fishing, and war – with newer approaches – such as Hemingway’s changing attitudes toward animals as well as his complex relationship to ethnic and racial groups – in the hope that they complement and illuminate each other while also demonstrating how inquiry into Hemingway and his work has changed since critics and readers started to take notice of him and his work in the 1920s.

Notes 1. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 180. 2. J. Raeburn, Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 138. 3. G. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in C. van Vechten (ed.), Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Vintage, 1990), 1–237; 204; emphasis added. 4. Quoted in D. Moddelmog, Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2.

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Abbreviations

The following abbreviations and short titles for Hemingway’s works are employed throughout the edition. First U.S. editions are cited, unless otherwise noted.

ARIT Across the River and Into the Trees. New York: Scribner’s, 1950. BL By-line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. Edited by William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. CSS The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1987. DIA Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s, 1932. DLT Dateline: Toronto: The Complete “Toronto Star” Dispatches, 1920–1924. Edited by William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1985. DS The Dangerous Summer. New York: Scribner’s, 1985. FC The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories. New York: Scribner’s, 1938. FTA A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s, 1929. FWBT For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner’s, 1940. GHOA Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. GOE The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner’s, 1986. IIS Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. iot in our time. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924. IOT In Our Time. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner’s, 1930. Letters The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Multiple vols. General editor Sandra Spanier. New York: Cambridge, 2011–. MAW Men at War. New York: Crown Publishers, 1942. MF A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s, 1964. xxix Spec SD1 Date 26-july

xxx Abbreviations

MF-RE A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Edited by Seán Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s, 2009. MWW Men Without Women. New York: Scribner’s, 1927. NAS The Nick Adams Stories. New York: Scribner’s, 1972. OMS The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s, 1952. Poems Complete Poems. Edited with an introduction and notes by Nicholas Gerogiannis. Rev. ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. SAR The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s, 1926. SL Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Edited by Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. SS The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s, 1954. TAFL True at First Light. Edited by Patrick Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s, 1999. THHN To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner’s, 1937. TOS The Torrents of Spring. New York: Scribner’s, 1926. TSTP Three Stories and Ten Poems. Paris: Contact Editions, 1923. UK Under Kilimanjaro. Edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005. WTN Winner Take Nothing. New York: Scribner’s, 1933. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Biography and Life

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Chapter 1 Chronology

Verna Kale

1896 October 1 Grace Hall, a classically trained singer, is married to Dr. Clarence Hemingway, a general practice physician. The couple settles in their hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago. The couple will have six children, Marcelline (1898), Ernest (1899), Ursula (1902), Madelaine “Sunny” (1904), Carol (1911), and Leicester (1915). 1899 July 21 Ernest Miller Hemingway is born at home, weighing nine and a half pounds. 1900 Summer The family takes up residence in their new summer home at Bear Lake. The family calls the home “Windemere.” 1902 July On a fishing trip with his father, EH catches his first fish. 1911 July 21 EH receives a 20-gauge shotgun from his paternal grandfather. 1913–17 EH attends high school, where he exhibits mediocre talent on the football team but excels as a contributor to the school paper and literary magazine. 1914 June 28 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated, precipitating the diplomatic crisis that escalates into World War I with the July 28 Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia. Italy will enter the war in 1915. 3 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

4 Kale 1917 October EH takes a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. 1918 May 21 Volunteering with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, EH embarks for Italy. July 8 Stationed near Fossalta on the Piave River, EH is struck by shrapnel from an Austrian shell. He is reportedly the first American wounded in Italy. July 17 EH is admitted to a Red Cross hospital in Milan, where he will fall in love with American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky (1892–1984). November 11 Germany, the last of the Central Powers to capitulate, signs an armistice with the Allies, signaling the end of the war. 1919 January 4 EH sails for the United States. March 7 Still stationed in Italy, Agnes writes that she has fallen in love with someone else. EH is heartbroken. Summer EH aspires to send stories to fiction editors atThe Saturday Evening Post and other slicks. None will be accepted. 1920 January 8 EH moves to Toronto and freelances for the Toronto Star. Autumn EH moves to Chicago and begins a relationship with St. Louis native Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1891– 1979). He becomes acquainted with writer Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941). 1921 September 3 EH and Hadley are married in Horton Bay, Michigan. December 8 The Hemingways embark for Paris, carrying letters of introduction from Anderson to Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). 1922 January The Hemingways take up residence in Paris. Spring With Pound’s encouragement, EH submits work to The Dial and The Little Review but is rejected. EH meets Stein and becomes a frequent borrower of Sylvia Beach’s lending library at Shakespeare and Company. He contributes pieces to the Toronto Star. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chronology 5

May An experimental piece, “A Divine Gesture,” is published by the New Orleans-based little magazine The Double Dealer. December Hadley travels to Lausanne where EH is covering the Greco-Turkish peace conference. A valise containing all his works in progress is stolen at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. The manuscripts are never recovered. 1923 January Six poems by EH appear in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine. Spring The spring number ofThe Little Review contains six vignettes by EH. He continues to place stories and poems throughout the 1920s as he establishes his reputation. May 27 In Madrid, EH witnesses his first bullfight. July EH attends his first festival of San Fermín in Pamplona. Summer Robert McAlmon’s (1895–1956) Contact Publishing Company publishes EH’s first book,TSTP . August 26 EH and Hadley leave for Toronto to await the birth of their first child. EH works full time at theStar . October 10 Hadley gives birth to John Hadley Nicanor “Bumby” Hemingway. 1924 January The Hemingways return to France. EH commits himself fully to his literary career. March Bill Bird’s (1888–1963) Three Mountains Press puts outiot in a limited edition of 170. 1925 February EH receives word that IOT has been accepted for publication by Boni & Liveright. Spring EH meets Vogue writer Pauline Pfeiffer (1895–1951) in Paris. June–July EH attends the festival of St. Fermín with friends and begins work on SAR. October IOT is published by Boni & Liveright in an edition of 1,335. December Pauline joins the Hemingways in Austria and pursues a flirtation with EH; Boni & Liveright rejectsTOS , EH’s parody of Anderson’s recent novel Dark Laughter. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

6 Kale

1926 February Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947), accepts TOS, to be followed by SAR. EH remains with Scribner’s for the rest of his career. May 28 TOS is published. August The Hemingways separate. October 22 SAR is published. 1927 March “The Killers” is published inScribner’s Magazine – EH’s first short story in a major American magazine. April 21 The Hemingways’ divorce is final. May 10 EH and Pauline are married in Paris and honeymoon in Le Grau-du-Roi. October 14 The short story collectionMWW is published. 1928 April The Hemingways arrive in Key West, Florida. June 28 Patrick Hemingway is born by Caesarean section in Kansas City, MO. December 6 Clarence Hemingway commits suicide. 1929 Summer FTA is serialized in Scribner’s Magazine. The magazine is banned in Boston on obscenity charges. September 27 FTA is published and becomes a best seller. 1931 April Pauline’s wealthy uncle helps the Hemingways purchase their Key West home. November 12 Gregory Hancock Hemingway is born in Kansas City. 1932 Spring EH travels to Cuba, takes up marlin fishing, and revises proofs of DIA. September 23 DIA is published. 1933 October 27 EH’s short story collection WTN is published. December EH embarks on a two-month African safari with Pauline; the trip provides material for GHOA, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chronology 7

1934 Spring With earnings from a series of “letters” to Esquire, EH makes a down payment on a fishing boat, thePilar . 1935 September A hurricane kills hundreds of World War I veterans working in the Keys for the Civilian Conservation Corps. EH blames the government in “Who Murdered the Vets?,” published in New Masses. October 25 GHOA is published to mixed reviews. 1936 July 17 A rebel coup is staged against the democratically elected government of Spain, marking the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. December Vacationing with her family, author Martha Gellhorn (1908–98) meets EH at Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West. 1937 March–May Reporting for the North American Newspaper Alliance on the Spanish Civil War, EH also undertakes a film project with director Joris Ivens (1898–1989) to raise awareness in America for the Loyalist cause. June 4 EH delivers a speech to a packed house at the American Writers’ Congress in New York. It is printed as “Fascism is a Lie” in New Masses. Autumn EH returns to Spain, where he works on his only full-length play, The Fifth Column. THHN is published in October. 1938 April 7 In “The Time Now, The Place Spain,” published inKen , EH argues for defending the Spanish Loyalists against Franco’s foreign allies to prevent a second world war. October 14 Frustrated by the failure to bring The Fifth Column to Broadway, EH publishes it in FC. 1939 March Madrid falls to the Nationalists, followed by Valencia, effectively ending the Spanish Civil War. EH is alternately in Key West and Havana, working on FWBT. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

8 Kale

April Though EH is married to Pauline, he and Martha rent a crumbling farmhouse, La Finca Vigía, in the village of San Francisco de Paula outside Havana. September 1 Germany invades Poland, prompting France and England to declare war. 1940 March 7 The Fifth Column, largely rewritten by a Hollywood screenwriter, opens on Broadway; it closes after only eighty-seven performances. October FWBT is published, the Book of the Month Club offers it as a selection, and the movie rights sell for a record-breaking sum. November 21 His divorce from Pauline final, EH marries Martha in Cheyenne, Wyoming. December EH buys La Finca Vigía. 1941 February– Martha travels to China for Collier’s; EH arranges a May contract with PM magazine so he can join her, but it is a miserable “honeymoon.” December 7 The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, initiating the United States’ entry into World War II. 1942 Summer EH organizes “The Crook Factory,” a counterintelligence group formed to root out Nazi spies in Cuba. The following summer, “Operation Friendless” employs the Pilar to patrol the sea for U-boats; none are found. 1943 Autumn Martha, unsuccessful in convincing EH to join her in Europe to report on the war, leaves for England alone. 1944 March EH accepts an assignment as Collier’s front-line correspondent, effectively demoting the less famous Martha and adding tension to their troubled relationship. May EH meets American journalist Mary Welsh Monks (1908–86) in London; they begin an affair. Martha leaves EH. June 6 EH reports on the Normandy invasion from a landing craft. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chronology 9

Summer– EH travels with the Royal Air Force and the U.S. 4th Autumn Infantry Division. October– EH is questioned about bearing arms for the French November Resistance, a violation of the terms of his noncombatant designation. Cleared of charges, he returns to his post, witnessing the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. 1945 May 2 Mary joins EH in Cuba. May 7 Germany surrenders to the Allies. August 14 Japan agrees to the Allies’ terms of surrender, ending World War II. December EH and Martha divorce. 1946 ? EH works on “the Land, Sea, and Air Book,” parts of which will become ARIT, OMS, and IIS, as well as the novel posthumously published as GOE. March 14 EH and Mary marry. 1948 December On a trip to Italy, EH meets eighteen-year-old Adriana Ivancich, who will serve as inspiration for Renata in ARIT. 1950 September 7 ARIT is published to mostly negative reviews. 1952 March 6 EH grudgingly grants Philip Young permission to quote from his works in Ernest Hemingway (Rinehart), the first major critical study of EH. September 1 OMS is published in Life in a print run of more than 5,000,000. Scribner’s publishes the novella in book form a week later to rapturous reviews. 1953 May 4 OMS wins the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for literature. September– The Hemingways go on safari in Africa. January 1954 January 23–4 EH is involved in two plane crashes in two days; newspapers erroneously report his death. October 28 EH wins the Nobel Prize in literature. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

10 Kale

1957 January EH rediscovers two trunks he had stored at the Paris Ritz Hotel in 1928, perhaps inspiring the sketches that will make up MF. 1959 January 1 Fulgencio Batista (1901–73) goes into exile, relinquishing government control to Fidel Castro (b. 1926). Spring Concerned about the Cuban political situation, the Hemingways buy a home in Ketchum, Idaho. 1960 January– EH works on a long piece for Life about the mano a mano May competition of matadors Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Autumn Suffering from depression and episodes of paranoia, EH seeks treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. 1961 July 2 EH commits suicide at his Ketchum home; his death is initially reported as accidental. 1964 May 5 MF, edited by Mary Hemingway and Harry Brague, is published. 1966 March Unable to halt publication of A. E. Hotchner’s (b. 1920) Papa Hemingway, which reveals EH’s death as a suicide, Mary breaks the story to the media herself. 1970 October 6 IIS, edited by Mary Hemingway and Charles Scribner IV, is published. 1980 July 18 The Hemingway Reading Room at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston opens, and the Hemingway Society holds its first conference. 1981 Autumn The first issue ofThe Hemingway Review (formerly Hemingway notes) is published. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chronology 11

1986 May 28 GOE, heavily edited by Tom Jenks, is published. 1999 July TAFL, EH’s account of his last African safari, edited by Patrick Hemingway, is published. 2005 September UK, a scholarly edition of TAFL, edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming, is published by Kent State University Press. 2009 July A restored edition of MF, edited by Seán Hemingway, EH’s grandson, is published. 2011 October The first volume of the comprehensive scholarly edition The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge) is published. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 2 Biography John Raeburn

As a paladin of modernism, Ernest Hemingway would seem to have thoroughly abandoned the late Victorianism of the suburban Chicago community of Oak Park where he was born in 1899. But that perception would be erroneous, or at least misleading. He never wrote about Oak Park, but its cardinal virtues of self-control, discipline, and forti- tude are the principal values his fiction endorses, and his famous definition of courage as “grace under pressure” brilliantly encapsulates them. Simultaneously, though, his fiction expresses a modernist conception of the relativism of personal morality, a view abhorred by pious, puritan- ical Oak Park; and as his personal life became increasingly public, he advertised himself as a connoisseur of sensuous experiences, which he also highlighted in his fiction – involving food, alcohol, and sex – that Oak Park discounted, disparaged, or turned its eyes from. He thus both repu- diated the village of his childhood and internalized it. Another duality integral to his youth contrasted the impositions of organized civilization with the natural world’s freedom from them. Every summer the Hemingway family traveled by steamer to their cottage on Lake Walloon in northern Michigan. For Ernest, the beguiling opportunities that arcadian setting afforded for independence were an enchant- ment, a rapturous escape from the routines and obligations of Oak Park, and ever afterward northern Michigan would remain in his memory as a lost paradise. His fiction, not least the stories set there, is frequently structured by an uneasy dialectic between social obligation and nature’s pathways for escaping it. Hemingway grew up in a household dominated by females – he had four sisters – a circumstance that encouraged a lifelong desire for the approval of women. It may also help account for his sensitive and empa- thetic depictions of female psychology in such stories as “Cat in the Rain” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” and for his fascination with androgyny, most insistently expressed in the posthumous The Garden of Eden, 12 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Biography 13 topics of his fiction that the assertive masculinity of his public persona tended to obscure, as did the one-dimensional heroines of some of his later fiction. The origins of his fascination with androgyny have also been explained by his mother’s “twinning” him with his slightly older sister, alternating their common dress and hairstyles between male and female, but that theory as yet lacks expert psychological confirmation.1 In any case, sympathy with women stopped with his mother, whom he claimed to hate and made monstrous when he fictionalized her. His physician father, Clarence “Ed” Hemingway, was a dedicated amateur naturalist and outdoorsman and passed on these enthusiasms to his son. But as Ernest approached adolescence, Dr. Hemingway entered a severe and prolonged depression that caused him to withdraw from his children, an aloofness his son felt keenly. Dr. Hemingway’s depressed condition did not abate, and in 1928 he shot himself. Ernest’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was independent in her views, a suffragist, and more involved in self-actualization than domesticity. She had once aimed for an opera career and insisted her children develop cultural interests. In the Hemingway household her imperious presence and propensity for self-dramatization contrasted with her husband’s irritable remoteness. Ernest, frightened by his father’s bewildering behavior, identified its cause as his mother’s overbearingness. That was unjust, but he never relin- quished the conviction, and it echoed in several of his stories and culmi- nated in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which the protagonist’s father’s failure to “[stand] up to that woman and not let her bully him” precipitates the father’s suicide (338–9). Hemingway’s high school graduation coincided with America’s entry into the Great War, but his youth and poor eyesight prevented him from enlisting. Following a cub reporter stint with the Kansas City Star, he volunteered with the Red Cross and was sent to the Italian front in June 1918. On July 8, near Fossalta, as he distributed chocolate in the trenches, he was badly wounded, mostly in the legs and feet, by a mortar shell. Following two weeks in a field hospital, he was transferred to Milan for rehabilitation. There he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse eight years his senior, and after being released he returned to Oak Park in January 1919 assuming they would marry when she completed her duty in Italy. He was devastated when three months later she wrote that he had misunderstood her feelings and she had become engaged to someone else. Ten years later, in A Farewell to Arms, he would transform their dalliance into a passionate love match with a different devastating ending less damaging to the male ego. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

14 Raeburn The Fossalta wounding would eventually reverberate in his fiction too, but in the short term Hemingway unabashedly reinvented it, ascribing to himself extraordinary feats of derring-do and claiming combat experience with the Arditi, a crack Italian unit. These fabrications continued to circulate for years, becoming such an embarrassment that he tried to dissociate himself from them, to no avail. Even at this early date his mythomania was abetted by journalists, for whom he exercised an irresistible fascination. After his return from Italy, a New York newspaper claimed he had been more battered than any soldier facing the Central Powers, and a Chicago paper stated that he was “the worst shot-up man in the U.S.”2 Both claims were wild exaggerations. These accounts suppressed the facts: he had been a Red Cross volunteer and not a combatant, his lieutenancy was a courtesy rank, and the circumstances of his wounding were prosaic. As important as gilding his service with a heroic gloss, his mythologizing concealed the psychological vulnerability that followed his wounding. Only in his fiction could he or would he acknowledge such frailties. In the three years following his return from Italy Hemingway bounced around among Oak Park, Lake Walloon, Toronto, and Chicago, sporadi- cally working at dead-end jobs, hanging out, freelancing feature stories for the Toronto Star, and unsuccessfully trying to place his O’Henry-inspired fiction with popular magazines. He also married Hadley Richardson and was befriended by Sherwood Anderson, who introduced him to modernism and urged him to relocate to Paris, for which the Hemingways sailed near the end of 1921. In Paris Hemingway continued to write features and cover occasional breaking stories for the Toronto Star, but, determined to have a literary career, he eventually resigned from the Star to devote his full energies to fiction. He labored to perfect the pellucid style that would become the twentieth century’s most imitated, and he trained himself to observe intensely so as to identify the details of a setting or experience that would arouse the emotion he wanted readers to feel. Even a sickening misfor- tune late in 1922, when almost all his manuscripts were lost, stolen with Hadley’s suitcase as she was embarking to meet him in Switzerland, did not daunt him for long. His new work, at first in limited edition books from expatriate presses, began to be published in Paris in 1923 and 1924, followed in America by an astonishing five books between 1925 and 1929.3 All received admiring notices and A Farewell to Arms (1929) became a best seller. As the twenties came to a close, a New Yorker profile by Dorothy Parker designated him “far and away the first American artist,” a view widely shared.4 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Biography 15 By then Hemingway had abandoned Paris to return to the United States with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he married in 1927 after his divorce from Hadley. That domestic upheaval did nothing to tarnish the legendary aura the narrative of his Paris sojourn soon acquired. While Left Bank celebrities and pleasures figure in it, as do excursions to ski, hike, and watch bullfights, its most insistent motif links poverty and success as the unknown but self-confident young writer’s dedication to his métier propels him from a garret into the front rank of American literature. He created the template for this narrative not long after leaving Paris. In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway recalls living above a Left Bank sawmill, receiving “all of the stories back in the mail . . . with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always anecdotes, sketches, contes, etc. They did not want them, and we lived on poireaux and drank cahors and water” (70). For himself as a young writer, “hunger was good discipline,” he would insist in A Moveable Feast, published posthumously. His implication that poverty actually enabled his success had particular appeal to Americans, imbued with Horatio Alger’s tales. In most of its particulars this Paris narrative was accurate if romanticized. But in one key way it was a fabulation: Hemingway was never poor. Hadley brought to their marriage several trust funds that could support them comfortably. Pauline had an even larger trust fund, and by the time they married, his writing income was becoming respectable. Hemingway’s middle-class upbringing is likely one reason he dis- sembled poverty: it was humiliating to be beholden to a wife’s support whereas struggling built character. Moreover, a romantic conceit invested impoverished young artists, especially Parisian artists thanks to La Bohème’s great popularity, with cultural cachet. Exercising his propensity for self-dramatization was apparently hardwired, and by enlarging a reputation for overcoming adversity he exalted his literary triumphs by making their hard-won achievement seem even more arduous than it had actually been. In the first half of the 1930s, Hemingway dedicated considerable energy to developing the public image he projected for the remainder of his life. Although in 1933 he published Winner Take Nothing, a short story collection, nonfiction predominated in these years, all of it including large helpings of self-advertising. These publications includedDeath in the Afternoon (1932), monthly “letters” – personal essays – for Esquire magazine (1933– 6), and Green Hills of Africa (1935). All are assertively in the first person, with the character and personality of the author front and center, and their structure is highly discursive, allowing for numerous observations Spec SD1 Date 26-july

16 Raeburn not strongly related to a piece’s nominal topic. The most obvious thread among them is their concentration on his sporting preoccupations, bullfighting in Death, deep-sea fishing in Esquire, and big-game hunting in Green Hills; in each he brings himself forward as a world-class sportsman, one of the key roles of his public persona. Also dramatized are other roles constituent in this persona: the manly man, tough and virile; the bon vivant, a worldly connoisseur of places, food, and drink; the insider whose special knowledge allowed a confident discrimination between the genuine and bogus; and the heroic artist, a romantic conception that stressed experience as basic to craft and suggested that familiarity with the artist’s life would enrich understanding of his art. Similar characteristics appear in his fiction as an attribute of one character or another, but there such a trait’s intensity is considerably more diluted than in his self-representations and is muffled by a fictional complexity of scruple and motive not present in his self-advertisements. Death in the Afternoon is nominally a history of bullfighting and a manual for understanding it, still the best introduction to these topics in English. It is also a guidebook to Spain and an interpretation of its culture as well as a compendium of its author’s opinions on wine, mortality, and sundry other topics. The breezy intimacy of his first person voice signaled a shift in his relationship with his audience, the anonymity of the author’s invisible hand giving way to a close-up view of his personal life, or at least the version that he wanted readers to have. Ernest and Pauline had been drawn to Key West for its year-round warmth, renting and in 1931 purchasing a house there that would remain their home until their marriage dissolved near the end of the decade. Ernest relished the town’s raffish atmosphere, and its opportunities for deep-sea fishing made him covet an expensive, seaworthy boat to ply the Gulf Stream. In 1934 he acquired a cabin cruiser he named Pilar, partially financing it with an advance from the new monthly magazine Esquire for a dozen articles on topics of his own choosing. After discharging his advance’s obligation, Hemingway continued to publish in Esquire, contributing twenty-five letters in all. While a few assessed international political developments and one proffered a tutorial on writing, most concentrated on his sporting activities. Deep-sea fishing predominated, but three letters recounted his East African safari and a fourth related his hunting experiences elsewhere. They all unfolded similarly: an account of a sporting challenge, an exposition of proper technique, and a narrative of his accomplishments and the skills required to achieve them. The Esquire letters’ analytic dissection of sporting Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Biography 17 performance resembled the method of Death in the Afternoon’s disquisitions on bullfighting, except that the author himself had replaced the bullfighter as the center of attention. Green Hills of Africa (1935) was an experiment to discover whether a true account of his African safari could compete artistically with his fiction. He himself believed it did, although few have agreed. The reader interested in learning about Africa should look elsewhere, because Green Hills is more a book about Hemingway set in Africa than one about Africa with him in it. It rather repetitively dramatizes his hunting prowess by recounting his pursuit and killing of several species of game. The book’s discursive structure also permits considerable opportunity for lengthy interruptions unrelated to the safari, notably for bilious retorts to his critics, whom he characterizes as “the lice who crawl on literature” (109). His earlier nonfiction features occasional such ripostes too, but Green Hills more abundantly indicates that he imagined a key function of his public persona was to neutralize critical antagonism. Hemingway was notoriously thin-skinned, but in fact his critical standing had fallen considerably since the twenties. Some observers declared his efforts to promote a personal legend vulgar and his hypermasculinity egregious; others believed that his radical individualism and indifference to politics made his work irrelevant in Depression-era America. Changed circumstances, though, contrived to counter these critiques and to revive his literary reputation, as the Spanish Civil War that broke out in July 1936 both compelled his political engagement and made the legendary Hemingway a political asset to supporters of the Spanish Republic, which included virtually all the literary community. Although he delayed going to Spain until early 1937 while he finished a new novel, once he made the first of four wartime trips he became a whirlwind of support for the Republic: raising funds; sponsoring, writing, and narrating a propaganda film; addressing the Second Writers’ Congress; composing a play; cabling news dispatches to the nation’s major newspapers; and contributing political commentary to the new “insider’s magazine,” Ken.5 His dispatches emphasized his firsthand experience of combat and sometimes described his narrow escapes from enemy fire. His self-possessed imperturbability resembled the tone of earlier narratives of sporting challenges overcome, with the impression of his sangfroid now heightened by the grave danger. Putting himself so deliberately in harm’s way also validated the intensity of his commitment to the Republican cause, suggesting that as a combat-tested observer he was trustworthy on political matters, unlike parlor radicals who, as he contemptuously Spec SD1 Date 26-july

18 Raeburn declared to the Second Writers’ Congress, “spend their time disputing learnedly on points of doctrine.”6 Hemingway thus advertised himself as engaged and politically savvy but not ideological. Only the engagement was novel inasmuch as he had proclaimed his political acumen as long ago as his Toronto Star pieces and reiterated it in his recent nonfiction. Probably due to Loyalist reverses, he edged toward a more ideological stance, or at least one supportive of the Communist direction of the war. To Have and Have Not (1937) hinted at this inclination in the conclusion he added after his first trip to the war. The novel met with a mixed critical response, but even reviewers with reservations commended the conclusion’s renunciation of radical individualism and implicit call for collective action. The Fifth Column, his play published with an omnibus of his short stories in 1938, went considerably further, cosmeticizing and valorizing the Communists’ suppression of competing political formations in the Spanish Republic. In Spain, Hemingway carried on an affair with the journalist Martha Gellhorn, and in 1939 they set up housekeeping near Havana as he began to write his novel of the Spanish war; they married in 1940, just after For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared and his divorce from Pauline became final. Reviewers almost unanimously hailed the novel, many acclaiming it as his finest, and it became a best seller, but an assumption that Hemingway was uninterested in politics has subsequently retarded its recognition as one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious political novels, one that uses the Spanish conflict to probe the fundamental political conundrum of means and ends. Hemingway wrote no fiction in the five years following For Whom the Bell Tolls, the most fallow period of his career. The distractions of war were partially responsible. In 1942 and 1943, with the American embas- sy’s blessing, he established a counterintelligence operation against fascist sympathizers in Cuba and then captained the Pilar on patrols of Cuban waters searching for marauding German U-boats. ThePilar was supposed to gather intelligence but was also equipped with light weaponry in the event of actual contact, fortunately avoided. In 1944, he became the war correspondent for Collier’s in Europe. Two of his half-dozen dispatches centered on his swashbuckling command of irregular troops in the liberation of Paris, an activity that nearly got him court-martialed for flaunt- ing regulations of journalistic conduct (he was awarded the Bronze Star instead) and soon became a celebrated episode in his legend. One marriage ending and another relationship beginning also drew upon his energies. By the time he signed on with Collier’s, it was clear to both Martha Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Biography 19 and him that their marriage was finished, and in England shortly thereafter he began an affair with Mary Welsh, who in 1946 would become his fourth wife. After returning to Cuba in 1945, Hemingway revived an unfinished story set in Bimini in the thirties and began to expand it, planning to integrate material drawn from his wartime experiences in the Caribbean and Europe. Around this time he began to talk about writing a monu- mental war book set on land, at sea, and in the air. It would never be completed, but four stories he initially conceived as parts of it would be published as discrete novels: Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and after his death Islands in the Stream (1970) and The Garden of Eden (1986).7 In the fall of 1947 en route to an autumn sojourn in Idaho, Hemingway made a brief detour to Lake Walloon – his first visit since 1921. The next year he traveled to northern Italy and stayed eight months, establishing a pattern of often lengthy revisits to places once important to him, including Paris and the Midi, Spain, and East Africa. From these travels came a stream of writing: the sketches of his Paris life in the twenties that became A Moveable Feast; The Garden of Eden, much of it set in le Grau-du-Roi in the Midi, where he and Pauline had honeymooned; The Dangerous Summer, a narrative of a bullfighting mano a mano in 1959; and True at First Light, an account of his second African safari in 1953–4 that hovers between fact and fiction Under( Kilimanjaro is an expanded and reedited version of this work). None of this work was published in his lifetime with the exception of about one-third of The Dangerous Summer, commissioned by Life. The number of unpublished manuscripts suggests two conclusions. First, that the raw vitality of his creative affla- tus was unimpaired in these years, especially inasmuch as these manuscripts were lengthy. Second, something had happened to debilitate his follow-through, which had always before been among his strengths as a writer. He was unable to fashion a satisfactory conclusion for most of these narratives, nor with the exception of A Moveable Feast did he have success in pruning, tightening, and shaping them into publishable form. The reasons behind these failures are likely many, but chiefly at fault was his spiraling physical and mental deterioration during his final fifteen years of life. His health problems were many and his well-known zest for the strenuous life sometimes made them worse. Periodically his blood pressure would spike dangerously, and he suffered two serious concussions, in 1944 while Collier’s correspondent, and in 1950 from a fall on the Pilar. His Spec SD1 Date 26-july

20 Raeburn heavy drinking exacerbated the aftereffects of these ailments. In January 1954, while sightseeing after the end of an African safari, he and Mary experienced two aircraft crashes in as many days. In the first their plane sliced through an abandoned telegraph wire over the Murchison Falls and went down in the bush. Their injuries were minor, but after the aircraft was spotted with no sign of survivors newspapers around the world headlined stories of his death. The next day the party hitched a ride on a passing boat that delivered them to a landing strip where they were to be flown to Entebbe. When that plane crashed and caught fire just after takeoff Hemingway had to butt his head against a door to escape. Although he affected nonchalance, his injuries this time were serious, to his head, shoulder, back, liver, intestines, and kidneys, and he never recovered fully from them. That fall, the Nobel Foundation named him the recipient of its annual prize for literature. Perhaps his recent death-defying accidents made it feel it shouldn’t delay, but more likely The Old Man and the Sea, published two years earlier, was decisive, for the novella offered the kind of lyrical treatment of an exalted theme that the Nobel committee especially favored. One effect of the prize was to increase the already substantial number of people making pilgrimages to Hemingway’s Cuban home, including legions of journalists ambitious to feed the tremendous appetite for personal information about such an A-list celebrity. He complained bitterly that these intrusions prevented him from working, although he did little to prevent them. The bipolar episodes he had irregularly experienced all his adult life became more chronic and intense during the fifties, and his psychological abuse of Mary more frequent. A related sign of instability was the depth and durability of his hopeless infatuation with a teenaged Venetian girl – the model for the heroine of Across the River, his most jejune fictional character – which continued for years after the novel’s publication. Side effects from the farrago of drugs that he took for his many physical ailments and for insomnia and anxiety also likely contributed to his mental difficulties. Hemingway began to evince paranoia, believing the FBI was pursuing him, and late in 1960 his physician checked him into the Mayo Clinic for electroshock treatments. After his release, his condition again worsened and twice he attempted suicide. Following another stay at the Mayo Clinic, he returned home to Ketchum, Idaho, where he had moved after the Cuban revolution, and shot himself with his favorite shotgun on July 2, 1961. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Biography 21 Notes 1. K. S. Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987), 38–43. 2. “Has 227 Wounds, But Is Looking for a Job,” New York Sun (January 22, 1919), 3; “Worst Shot-up Man in U.S. on Way Home,” Chicago American (January 21, 1919), 3. 3. The Paris publications areThree Stories and Ten Poems (Paris: Contact Editions, 1923), and in our time (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924). The U.S. publications are In Our Time (New York: Horace Liveright, 1925), The Torrents of Spring (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), Men Without Women (New York: Scribner’s, 1927), and A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner’s, 1929). 4. D. Parker, “The Artist’s Reward,” New Yorker 5 (November 30, 1929), 28–31; 31. 5. The phrase characterizing Ken is Arnold Gingrich’s, its editor (also Esquire’s), in his memoir Nothing But People (New York: Crown, 1971), 133. 6. E. Hemingway, “Fascism Is a Lie,” address to the Second Writers’ Congress, New York, June 4, 1937, reprinted in New Masses 23 (June 22, 1937), 4. 7. R. M. Burwell, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51ff. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 3 Critical Overview of the Biographies Lisa Tyler

We know more about Ernest Hemingway’s life than we do about the lives of most writers before or since. He achieved international fame in his twenties, so his correspondents knew early to hang on to his letters. He wrote for popular magazines and was a nationally syndicated journalist, both of which kept his name before the public, and later won a Nobel Prize for Literature, which gave him a certain highbrow literary stature. He achieved the kind of celebrity more typical of movie stars than literary figures. And he lived at a time when the U.S. mail was delivered four times daily in many cities, so his life is documented privately as well, in the thousands of letters he wrote and received. Publishers have printed more than a dozen scholarly biographies of Hemingway, as well as memoirs from his fourth wife, Mary; his youngest son, Gregory; his daughter-in-law Valerie; three of his five siblings; and assorted friends.1 Given this embarrassment of riches, it is perhaps ironic that what has changed with each new biography is primarily the interpretation, rather than the facts (with a few notable exceptions), of Hemingway’s life. Hemingway’s biographers started early, in 1954, with the publication of Charles Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years.2 Hemingway greatly resented Fenton’s research; he felt (not entirely unreasonably) that he owned his own past and might yet use it for his writing. Fenton was spoiling it for him. Originally written as Fenton’s doctoral dissertation at Yale, The Apprenticeship ends with Hemingway’s break from the Toronto Star in 1924 because Fenton believed that most of the important experiences in Hemingway’s life occurred before he turned twenty-five. Fenton sometimes repeated apocryphal stories that later biographers disproved, such as Hemingway’s claims that he was a frequent runaway as a child and that he joined the Italian infantry after his Red Cross service (12–13, 68). Yet while his historical accuracy was sometimes suspect, Fenton did gather valuable information about Hemingway’s early training as a writer, including his high school years and juvenilia as well 22 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview of the Biographies 23 as his newspaper reporting and its influence on Hemingway’s style, that other biographers have relied on. However, Fenton’s biography was largely superseded by Carlos Baker’s work fifteen years later. Baker’s encyclopedic biography, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969), has the faults of its virtues.3 It is comprehensive and thorough – and sometimes pedantic and less than enthralling to read. Baker is unfailingly conscientious about documenting his sources, so it is easy to verify his information, and his work has the advantage of a comprehensive index. Although his is the “official” biography authorized by Hemingway’s widow, it is not hagiography. On the contrary, Hemingway’s son Jack once complained that Baker’s Life made his father out to be “a son of a bitch.”4 While that is probably an overstatement, Baker does, at times, seem to have developed a distaste for his subject, and he has more than once been accused of being overly conservative in his moral judgments.5 Nevertheless, while more recent biographers have sometimes unearthed new information and offered different interpretations of the material, few have matched Baker’s extraordinary scholarship, to which every subsequent biographer is indebted. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, Scott Donaldson’s By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977) is not a conventional biography.6 As Donaldson explains, “In this book, I set out to discover and record what Ernest Hemingway thought on a variety of subjects, including love and money, religion and politics, sports and war, and then, from these disparate fragments, to construct a mosaic of his mind and personality, of the sort of man he was” (ix). He gathers Hemingway’s statements on a variety of subjects, referencing the biographical facts of his life almost incidentally. In 1978, Anthony Burgess’s Ernest Hemingway and His World, a volume in the British series “Literary Lives,” was published in America by Scribner’s.7 While respectful of Hemingway’s talent, Burgess, probably best known for his novel Clockwork Orange, is less admiring of the man. Burgess covers a lot of ground in this 128-page book, illustrated with 116 black-and-white images, but it is more useful as an introduction than as a scholarly source. Apart from Baker’s book, the best and most authoritative biography of Hemingway is the five-volume work by Michael Reynolds published in the 1980s and 1990s: The Young Hemingway, The Paris Years, The 1930s, The Homecoming (known as The American Homecoming in its British edition), and The Final Years.8 Known for his assiduous research, Reynolds seems more sympathetic than Baker and tries to see Hemingway’s behavior Spec SD1 Date 26-july

24 Tyler in the best possible light, sometimes too much so, as in his disturbing mention of Hemingway’s “benign” racism (Young Hemingway 164). Yet Reynolds points out the extent of Hemingway’s exaggerations and lies about his own past – for instance, Ernest’s misleading claims about exactly when he left his 1921 job with the fraudulent Co-operative Society of America (Young Hemingway 250). There are surprisingly few details about Hemingway’s childhood in The Young Hemingway. In addition, perhaps because he had already covered Hemingway’s World War I experiences in Hemingway’s First War (1987), Reynolds instead focuses his first volume on the period from 1919 to 1923. He is fairer than most in his discussion of Hemingway’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, writing of her sympathet- ically as a talented public performer at a time when that was not a conventional role for middle-class women. He also points out that Grace coped admirably well in raising six children with an often trying husband who suffered from recurrent bouts of mental illness (probably either depression or bipolar disorder). Unlike many Hemingway biographers, Reynolds devotes a great deal of attention to Hemingway’s decline and writes hon- estly (and compassionately) about the disturbing symptoms of mental illness apparent in his behavior during the last years of his life, something that was difficult for Baker to do while Hemingway’s widow remained alive. Replete with details about the sociohistorical context, Reynolds’s biography reads like a novel with an, at times, Hemingwayesque writing style. Yet in part because of its sheer volume, it can be harder to use as a quick reference than Baker’s. In the early 1980s, Peter Griffin published two volumes – Along with Youth and Less than a Treason9 – of what was to be at least a three-volume life of Hemingway left unfinished when Griffin died in 2002.10 Jack Hemingway, Ernest’s son by his first wife, Hadley, gave Griffin access to his mother’s correspondence with Hemingway, and Hemingway’s friend Bill Horne also made available his letters from Hemingway. In Along with Youth, Griffin also included several unpublished Hemingway short stories in their entirety. In his preface to Less than a Treason, Griffin claims that he is recreating rather than analyzing Hemingway’s life. While his books are enjoyable to read and certainly give readers a sense of the era in which Hemingway lived, Griffin’s comment suggests a lack of aesthetic distance characteristic of both volumes. He tends to take Hemingway’s representations of his experience at face value. For example, Griffin quotes from A Moveable Feast – which elsewhere he concedes is fictional Treason ( 180) – without checking its veracity. Even more worrisome, he sometimes Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview of the Biographies 25 uses Hemingway’s fiction as his source – as, for example, when he quotes “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” for information on the Hemingways’ life at 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine or uses Islands in the Stream as his source for information on Hemingway’s outings with his oldest son in Paris (Treason 183, 188). Jeffrey Meyers, author of Hemingway: A Biography,11 is a serial biographer – in addition to his book on Hemingway, he has written biographies of quite a few noted figures in literature and film. He also works quickly, sometimes so much so that his scholarship has been called into question; Meyers “dashed off his cradle-to-grave Hemingway in less than two years,” Scott Donaldson bitingly observes.12 As these two facts suggest, Meyers draws largely on material already made available by others and offers relatively little that is genuinely new. Meyers gives the impression that he neither likes nor approves of Hemingway, and he emphasizes what he sees as the writer’s limitations: “Like his heroes, Twain and Kipling, he never fully matured as an artist” (569). Kenneth S. Lynn’s 1987 psychobiography of Hemingway has probably been the most controversial biography to date; Lynn interprets (or perhaps over-interprets) Hemingway’s life in terms of Ernest’s peculiar childhood experience of being “twinned” with his sister Marcelline by their mother.13 He argues that this early experience of gender confusion was the greatest trauma of the writer’s life, vastly more important to his psyche than his 1918 World War I wounding. The 1986 publication of Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, with its themes of gender and sexual transformation and transgression, made Lynn’s theory more plausible. However, many scholars have objected vehemently to Lynn’s approach for a variety of reasons, among them distaste for his perceived prurience. Perhaps the most aca- demically respectable of those reasons is that Lynn’s thesis-driven biography is too reductive and therefore does violence to his material. To quote a rhetorical question posed by Hemingway Review editor Susan Beegel, “Does your life have a thesis?”14 Arguably one of the more novel approaches to Hemingway’s life is Denis Brian’s 1988 oral history, The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him.15 Despite having the inevitable drawbacks of oral history (reliance on the memories and veracity of those who knew Hemingway), it also has the virtue of offering material not available elsewhere. Those interviewed include three of Hemingway’s four wives as well as his sons, siblings, friends, enemies, and biographers. Brian organizes his material chronologically but loosely into chapters (such as “First War, First Love, First Wife” and “Paris: Victory; Toronto: Spec SD1 Date 26-july

26 Tyler Defeat”); however, because of its conversational nature, the book is very readable and surprisingly entertaining. James R. Mellow’s Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (1992)16 (its title taken from a line in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”) is intended as the third volume in a trilogy along with his two earlier books: Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company and Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.17 Probably as a result, he places Hemingway more clearly in the context of Continental modernism, discussing European poets and writers, not just the usual American and British suspects. Unlike many Hemingway biographers, Mellow scrupulously distinguishes between life and fiction. He writes of Hemingway with polite skepticism: “Chronology does not always substantiate Hemingway’s versions of his life” (Hemingway 247). In part because Mellow’s book was published when homosexuality was no longer the taboo subject it once was, he was able to discuss homosexuality among Hemingway’s circle and homoeroticism in his writing more frankly and with less sensationalism than many earlier biographers. Mellow also comments on his predecessors – noting, for example, the most difficult aspects of Hemingway’s life for his biographers, such as the nature of his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky, his problematic religious pronouncements, and his tendency to lie extravagantly, especially to potential biographers (Mellow, Hemingway 66, 324, 569–70). While Mellow presents little genuinely new information, his interpretation of Hemingway’s life is accurate and a pleasure to read, and his assessment of Hemingway’s place in the modernist tradition does the writer justice. Two noted feminist scholars, Linda Wagner-Martin and Verna Kale, provide recent additions in the field of Hemingway biography. Wagner-Martin’s Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life is not a biography in the traditional sense, but focuses primarily on Hemingway’s writing and publishing career.18 Sensible and dispassionate, Wagner-Martin offers a relatively quick overview of Hemingway’s life that is especially useful as an introduction to readers unfamiliar with Hemingway; she pays particular attention to Hemingway’s relationships with his mother and wives. Kale’s Ernest Hemingway is forthcoming as part of Reaktion Books’ “Critical Lives” series. In addition to the comprehensive biographies, there are volumes on specific periods of Hemingway’s life (organized roughly in that order later in this chapter), and many are well worth consulting. In Hemingway in Michigan, Constance Cappel writes of the Hemingway family’s vacations in northern Michigan.19 In the invaluable Hemingway in Love and War, Hemingway contemporary and fellow ambulance driver Henry Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview of the Biographies 27 S. Villard and scholar James Nagel present extensive information (newly rediscovered in the 1980s) concerning Hemingway’s Red Cross service in World War I, his injury, and his romance with Agnes von Kurowsky.20 In the sixty-page Hemingway in Toronto: A Post-modern Tribute, David Donnell focuses on the events of September to December 1923 when Hemingway lived in Canada with Hadley and wrote for the Toronto Star.21 In Hemingway: The Toronto Years, William Burrill expands that scope to cover the period from January 1920 to January 1924, reprinting twenty-five of Hemingway’s articles for the Star.22 For Hemingway and The Sun Set, Bertram D. Sarason compiled reminiscences from the expatriates whose experiences in Paris and Pamplona in the summer of 1925 inspired The Sun Also Rises; he also interviewed the surviving members of that circle for his own essay, which opens the book.23 Hemingway’s relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald is the subject of two books: Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship and Scott Donaldson’s Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship.24 Key West journalist James McLendon concentrates on the period from 1928 to 1940 in Papa: Hemingway in Key West, which is based on interviews but lacks specific citations.25 In A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream, A Contextual Biography, Mark P. Ott draws extensively on Hemingway’s unpublished handwritten fishing logs during his years in Key West and Cuba.26 Originally written in Spanish by Norberto Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba boasts an introduction by Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.27 A later volume, also titled Hemingway in Cuba, was written by Hemingway’s niece Hilary Hemingway and Carlene Brennen.28 James Plath and Frank Simon compile thirteen interviews with Hemingway’s friends and family, including two of his sons and a daughter-in-law, in Remembering Ernest Hemingway.29 In High on the Wild with Hemingway (later republished as Hemingway: High on the Wild), Ernest’s friend Lloyd R. Arnold writes of Hemingway’s time in Ketchum and Sun Valley, Idaho between 1939 and 1961 and includes photos from his personal collection.30 Peter Moreira’s Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn covers Hemingway’s three-month trip to China in 1941.31 Lillian Ross originally wrote Portrait of Hemingway for the May 13, 1950 issue of The New Yorker; because of the then fifty-year-old Hemingway’s self-indulgent behavior, including his use of pidgin English, his oft-repeated question “How do you like it now, gentlemen?,” and his excessive drinking, it provoked outrage from the public. Some disapproved of Hemingway’s behavior Spec SD1 Date 26-july

28 Tyler as depicted in the piece, while others objected that Ross unfairly ridiculed a great man. The profile was republished as a ninety-four-page book after his death, with Ross adding a preface in which she discussed the controversy her article engendered and professed her own affection and admiration for Hemingway, whom she said she had tried to portray as accurately as possible.32 Christopher Ondaatje chronicles Hemingway’s two trips to Africa, particularly the one in 1953–4, in the heavily illustrated Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari.33 Frederick Voss’s Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time features more than seventy portraits of the author and those in his circle, along with a biographical introductory essay by Michael Reynolds.34 There are also biographical reference books useful to anyone seeking specific information about Hemingway. Critical Companion to Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work is an obvious choice for those looking for a well-organized reference guide.35 In this book, Charles M. Oliver, former editor of The Hemingway Review and its predecessor, Hemingway notes, provides biographical entries for Hemingway’s family members and associates, plot summaries for the novels and short stories, descriptions of fictional characters, and identifications of many of the people, places, and events featured in Hemingway’s work, as well as a detailed chronology of Hemingway’s activities, making this work helpful for tracking down specific references in the fiction. This work super- sedes both Oliver’s earlier work, Ernest Hemingway A to Z, and an earlier chronology, Hemingway: Life and Works by Gerald B. Nelson and Glory Jones.36 Michael Reynolds has also compiled a detailed chronology of Hemingway’s life.37 While not, strictly speaking, Hemingway biographies, Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women, Alice Hunt Sokoloff’s Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway, Gioia Diliberto’s Hadley (re-released in 2011 as Paris without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife), Ruth A. Hawkins’s Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage, Carl Rollyson’s Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn, and Caroline Moorehead’s Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life offer biographical information from the perspectives of several women in Hemingway’s life.38 One of the most useful volumes for researching Hemingway’s life has been Selected Letters of Ernest Hemingway, edited by Carlos Baker.39 Hemingway had asked that all his letters be burned, but his widow Mary could not bring herself to carry out his request (SL ix). The more than Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview of the Biographies 29 600 letters in Baker’s compilation show us Hemingway as he really was and sometimes as he liked his correspondents to think he was. In addition to the work by Villard and Nagel, Hemingway’s letters have more recently been gathered into three specialized collections: Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A.E. Hotchner, The Only Thing that Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947, and At the Hemingways: With Fifty Years of Correspondence between Ernest and Marcelline Hemingway.40 Finally, the most anticipated development in biographical studies of Hemingway is the forthcoming publication of a multivolume scholarly edition of his letters (Cambridge). The Hemingway Letters Project, under the general editorship of Sandra Spanier at the Center for American Literary Studies at Pennsylvania State University, expects to make available somewhere between six thousand and seven thousand surviving letters, approximately eighty-five percent of them never before published.41 No doubt the publication of so much new material will spark a renaissance in Hemingway studies – and probably a new biography or two.

Notes 1. The most authoritative memoirs are those by Hemingway’s own family: M. W. Hemingway, How It Was (New York: Knopf, 1976); M. Hemingway Sanford, At the Hemingways: With Fifty Years of Correspondence between Ernest and Marcelline Hemingway (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1998); G. H. Hemingway, Papa: A Personal Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976); V. Hemingway, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways (New York: Ballantine, 2004); M. H. Miller, Ernie: Hemingway’s Sister “Sunny” Remembers (New York: Crown, 1975); and L. Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (Cleveland: World, 1962). Hemingway has also been the subject of nearly a dozen popular biographies: A. G. Aronowitz and P. Hammil, Ernest Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Man (New York: Lancer, 1961); M. Machlin, The Private Hell of Hemingway (New York: Paperback Library, 1962); K. D. Singer and J. Singer, Ernest Hemingway, Man of Courage: A Biographical Sketch of a Nobel Prize Winner in Literature (Minneapolis: Denison, 1963); P. Buckley, Ernest (New York: Dial, 1978); K. Ferrell, Hemingway: The Search for Courage (New York: Evans, 1984); R. B. Lyttle, Ernest Hemingway: The Life and the Legend (New York: Atheneum, 1992); J. Tessitore, The Hunt and the Feast: A Life of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Franklin Watts, 1996); D. A. Yannuzzi, Ernest Hemingway: Writer and Adventurer (Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1998); A. Dillon-Malone, Hemingway: The Grace and the Pressure (London: Robson, 1999); D. Sandison, Hemingway: An Illustrated Biography (Chicago Review Press, 1999); C. Whiting, Papa Spec SD1 Date 26-july

30 Tyler Goes to War: Ernest Hemingway Goes to Europe, 1944–45 (Phoenix Mill, MI: Sutton, 1999). An excellent documentary about Hemingway’s life, narrated by his granddaughter Mariel Hemingway, is available on DVD: Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling with Life (A&E Home Video, 2005). A documentary on Hemingway that aired as part of the American Masters series on PBS is also available on DVD: Ernest Hemingway: Rivers to the Sea (2006). 2. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1954). Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. (New York: Scribner’s, 1969). 4. Hemingway in the Autumn: Ernest Hemingway in Idaho (Ketchum, ID: Centennial Entertainment, 1999). 5. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt calls Baker “maidenly,” and Donald Junkins describes him as “prudish” and “schoolmarmish” (C. Lehmann-Haupt, “A Replica of Hemingway So Real It Moves,” New York Times, August 13, 1968, www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-bakerbio.html); D. Junkins, “Shadowboxing in the Hemingway Biographies,” in F. Scafella (ed.), Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 142–53; 147. 6. (New York: Viking, 1977). Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. (New York: Scribner’s, 1978). 8. M. S. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Hemingway: The 1930s (New York: Norton, 1997); Hemingway: The Homecoming (New York: Norton, 1998); and Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: Norton, 1999). Subsequent references are included in the text. 9. P. Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and Less than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Subsequent references are included in the text. 10. Susan Beegel says Griffin’s biography was originally to be five volumes, while Raymond Carver says it was to be three. S. Beegel, “Conclusion: The Critical Reputation of Ernest Hemingway,” in S. Donaldson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 269–99; 294. R. Carver, “Coming of Age, Going to Pieces,” New York Times, November 17, 1985 www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/ hemingway-carver.html. Subsequent references are included in the text. 11. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Subsequent references are included in the text. 12. S. Donaldson, “Toward a Definitive Biography,” in F. Scafella (ed.), Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 93–103; 100. 13. K. S. Lynn, Hemingway: The Life and the Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 14. S. Beegel, personal conversation, June 21, 2011. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview of the Biographies 31

15. (New York: Grove Press, 1988). 16. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). 17. J. R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974) and Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). 18. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 19. (Waitsfield, VT: Vermont Crossroads Press, 1977). 20. H. S. Villard and J. Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes Von Kurowsky (New York: Northeastern University Press, 1989), and In Love and War, dir. Richard Attenborough, perf. Sandra Bullock and Chris O’Donnell, New Line Home Video, 1996. 21. (Windsor, Ontario: Black Moss Press, 1982). 22. (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1994). 23. (Washington, DC: Microcard Editions, 1972). 24. M. J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994) and S. Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (New York: Overlook Press, 1999). 25. (Miami: E.A. Seemann Publishing, 1972). 26. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008). 27. Trans. Consuelo E. Corwin (Secaucus, NJ: Stuart, 1984). 28. (New York: Rugged Land, 2003). 29. (Key West, FL: Ketch & Yawl Press, 1999). 30. L. R. Arnold, High on the Wild with Hemingway (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1968). 31. (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006). 32. L. Ross, Portrait of Hemingway (New York: Avon, 1961). 33. (New York: Overlook Press, 2003). 34. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 35. (New York: Facts on File, 2007). 36. C. M. Oliver, Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work (New York: Checkmark Books, 1999), and Gerald B. Nelson and Glory Jones, Hemingway: Life and Works (New York: Facts on File, 1984). 37. M. S. Reynolds, Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology: An Outline of the Author’s Life and Career Detailing Significant Events, Friendships, Travels, and Achievements (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991). 38. B. Kert, The Hemingway Women (New York: Norton, 1983); A. Hunt Sokoloff, Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973); G. Diliberto, Hadley (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992); G. Diliberto, Paris without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011); R. A. Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway Pfeiffer Marriage (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012); C. Rollyson, Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); C. Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Holt, 2003). 39. (New York: Scribner’s, 1981). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

32 Tyler

40. A. J. DeFazio III, Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A.E. Hotchner (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); M. J. Bruccoli and R. W. Trogdon (eds.), The Only Thing that Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947 (New York: Scribner’s, 1996); M. Hemingway Sanford, At the Hemingways: With Fifty Years of Correspondence between Ernest and Marcelline Hemingway (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1998). 41. “Hemingway Letters Project,” International Hemingway Society heming- waysociety.org/Default.aspx?content=letters.txt. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 4 Letters Sandra Spanier

On September 18, 1918, Ernest Hemingway’s father wrote from Oak Park, Illinois to his nineteen-year-old son, a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver then convalescing from war wounds in Italy: “Your wonderfull and long letter of description dated Milan Aug 18th received yesterday. It gives us a great picture of your tragic experiences and marvelous deliverance.”1 The same day, Hemingway’s uncle wrote from Kansas City that his own family had “been more than glad to see some of the letters which you wrote to your people in Oak Park” and urged, “please write us one of your best and most original letters as we should be happy to learn all about what you are going through and how you are coming along” (JFK). This provoked the young Hemingway to complain to his parents, “Uncle Ty writes and asks me to write a ‘nice original letter,’ to him. Wonder who the devil he thinks I crib my stuff from” Letters( I 160). Even as a young man, Hemingway was known as a colorful correspondent, his letters eagerly anticipated and circulated among family and friends. They were deemed worthy not only of preservation in the multiple scrapbooks that his mother compiled for each of her six children, but worthy of publication as early as 1918. His August 18 letter home from the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, a vivid account of his wounding during a mortar shelling on the Piave front, appeared in his hometown newspaper, Oak Leaves, on October 5, 1918 (“Wounded 227 Times”) and again in the October 23 Chicago Evening Post. Nor was that the first of Hemingway’s missives to see print. The July 14, 1918 Kansas City Star ran excerpts from two postcards Hemingway had sent from Milan in June to his former newsroom colleagues, reporting that he was heading to the front the next day (Letters I 112). The postcards arrived at the Star on the same day as the news of his wounding. Although Hemingway had multitudes of correspondents during his lifetime, he was, according to his son Patrick Hemingway, “always conscious of the person he was writing to, and he kept a sort of going dialog 33 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

34 Spanier with them about the things they had in common.”2 Hemingway was a natural rhetorician, ever attentive to his audience, and his letters capture the unique flavor of each of his many and varied relationships. His correspondents included key figures of his times – writers, painters, musicians, critics, publishers, editors, movie stars, and the occasional political figure. Among them were Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Sara and Gerald Murphy, William Faulkner, George Antheil, Malcolm Cowley, Maxwell Perkins, the Charles Scribners, Marlene Dietrich, and President John F. Kennedy. Hemingway corresponded prolifically, too, with a vast array of other friends and with family members, as well as responding to letters that arrived unsolicited. Hemingway’s some six thousand letters located to date are directed to more than nineteen hundred correspondents. Doubtless he wrote to many more whose letters no longer survive or have yet to be discovered. Hemingway relished the contact of letters and solicited them eagerly. In October 1923, marooned in Toronto after having lived nearly two years in Europe amid the expatriate avant-garde, he beseeched Pound, “For Gawd sake keep on writing me. Yr. letters are life preservers” (SL 96). He also loved exchanging confidences and was always hungry for gossip. “Well Kid let me slip you an ear full,” he began a letter to his sister Marcelline in 1918 (Letters I 88). “Give me all the dope on whats going on – Huh?” he wrote in 1921 to Grace Quinlan, a teenaged friend in Petoskey, Michigan (Letters I 291). “Write to me and tell me all the dirt,” he urged Fitzgerald in 1926 (SL 232). Letters provided the comfort of conversation, even if one-sided, with those Hemingway loved and missed. During his marriage to Martha Gellhorn, when she was away on assignment for Collier’s magazine, he wrote long, chatty letters from their Cuban home about the cats, the servants, the state of the property, the state of his own writing, and what he, his friends, and his visiting sons were doing in her absence. “Thinks this about washes up the local news. I love you very much Pickly,” he wrote on September 1, 1942, while she was cruising the Caribbean in a thirty-foot potato boat for a series of articles on German activities in the area. “For long long time had never liked to write letters but like to write them to you” (JFK). Hemingway’s letters are unguarded and unpolished, written only for the day and the hour and the person addressed. “Remember Ford Madox Hueffer telling me one time that a writer should write every letter with a view to it being published for posterity,” he wrote to Harvey Breit on January 17, 1951, “and I asked him if it wouldn’t be simpler if we wrote Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Letters 35 letters just as a straight means of communication and kept no carbons.”3 Patrick Hemingway likened a writer to a pope, who does a lot of talking in ordinary life, but when he speaks ex cathedra – “from the chair” – becomes godlike and his words regarded as infallible. It is in his father’s letters, he said, that “you see more of him and less of the Great Writer. You get a little more insight into what he was as a person, and that’s always interesting to people because they don’t really want to deal with gods. They respect good work, but they also want to know how they felt about ham and eggs and the French or whatever, you know.” Hemingway always drew a clear distinction between writing letters and writing for keeps. He liked to write letters, he told Fitzgerald in 1925, “because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something” (SL 166). Of Gertrude Stein’s voluminous outpour- ings that she wished to see published unrevised, he remarked to Bernard Berenson on May 4, 1953, “She wrote every day as we sometimes write letters to avoid biting on the nail and working.”4 A letter dated October 11, 1955 to Scribner’s editor Wallace Meyer even reveals Hemingway’s wariness that letter writing could jinx his literary output: “Am sorry not to handle this typewriter better but do not want to write letters on my lucky typewriter when it is going good.”5 Apologies for the quality and quantity of his letters are a frequent refrain. But Hemingway’s writing priorities were clear. During his early artistic apprenticeship in Paris, while earning a living at journalism, he apologized to his mother for his “dull letters,” but explained, “I get such full expression in my articles and the other work I am doing that I am quite pumped out and exhausted from a writing stand point and so my letters are very commonplace. If I wrote nothing but letters all of that would go into them” (Letters I 329). In 1936 he struck the same chord in his final letter to a young writer with whom he had corresponded generously over several months. “I dont write letters,” he declared (inaccurately): “When I finish my work, if I have worked well, I am too pooped.”6 Receiving the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea (1952) brought a deluge of correspondence that he called “wholly destructive and damaging to work,” and he groused to Princeton scholar Carlos Baker on June 11, 1953, “it is rough when people expect you to answer letters promptly or else be considered a son of a bitch” (Stanford). Winning the Nobel Prize in 1954 only exacerbated the problem for one trained early and well by his Oak Park parents in the habit and etiquette of correspondence. In a letter dated October 11, 1955, he half facetiously asked Meyer at Scribner’s for help in handling the letters he received from “hundreds of kids who Spec SD1 Date 26-july

36 Spanier in English have to choose an author and write about him in a theme.” Perhaps, Hemingway suggested, Scribner’s could have a polite form letter to send in response to such inquiries, along with a piece of metal extracted from his skull as a small token of his appreciation of their interest, and a proof sheet or brochure of “some nonsense” written about him by someone else, “and I would not have the un-answered letter on my conscience” (PUL). Hemingway’s letters were commodities as early as 1930, when a group of them written to This Quarter editor Ernest Walsh was offered for sale by a London bookshop. Scribner’s bought them to get them off the market. What galled Hemingway was not only the violation of privacy, but also that others could reap profits from the words he had set to paper. He would like to keep his letters to Walsh, he told Max Perkins, “and will publish them and his sometime when we’re all broke” (SL 321). As Hemingway’s renown and influence continued to expand, biographers and literary scholars were eager to draw upon the contents of Hemingway letters for the benefit of their own work. He permitted Arthur Mizener to quote from his letters to Fitzgerald in The Far Side of Paradise (1951), the first biography of his old friend, but in hindsight he grew resentful. In an October 30, 1951 letter to Dos Passos, he disparaged “the thesis writers and the ghouls like Mizener” and others who wanted to “play buzzards on me while I’m still alive.”7 The next year, to Charles A. Fenton, then writing a Yale dissertation that would culminate in the first published Hemingway biography, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954), he expressed frustration at the drain of their correspondence on his time and energy. “Any man’s autobiography is his own property. He should have the choice of deciding whether he chooses to write it or not. But he should certainly not feed it piece-meal into letters for another man to use” (SL 777). Hemingway claimed he never wanted his letters to be published and in 1958 typed out a directive to his executors to be opened upon his death, saying, “It is my wish that none of the letters written by me during my lifetime shall be published. Accordingly, I hereby request and direct you not to publish, or consent to the publication by others, of any such letters.”8 However, during his lifetime he had consented to the publication of a handful of his letters, in part or in full, including to Stein, Edmund Wilson, his Italian and German publishers, and the Oak Park Public Library on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary.9 And he wrote others expressly for publication – among them letters to the editor, book jacket blurbs, a 1939 public letter on behalf of the American Committee for Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Letters 37 the Protection of the Foreign Born, a 1954 cabled statement for the Life magazine obituary of his friend Robert Capa, and occasional commercial endorsements, including for Parker Pens, Ballantine’s Ale, and Pan American Airlines.10 After Hemingway’s death, a trickle of additional letters saw print, and a number of scholars began to call for a volume of collected letters. In 1978, E. R. Hagemann counted approximately eighty-three thousand words “in the public print” and urged that the painstaking work continue, not for the sake of “a demand for literary gossip or prurience,” but for the “demand for literary history.”11 Finally, in May 1979, in consultation with her attorney, Alfred Rice, and Hemingway’s publisher, Charles Scribner, Jr., Mary Hemingway determined that posterity’s needs should prevail and tapped Baker, who had written the authorized 1969 biography of Hemingway, to edit a volume of the author’s letters. The 1981 publication of Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 was a landmark literary event. The next two decades each saw the publication of a book-length collection representing both sides of Hemingway’s correspondence with one person. The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947 (1996), edited by Matthew Bruccoli with Robert W. Trogdon, includes 130 letters by Hemingway, some abridged. Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A.E. Hotchner (2005), edited by Albert J. DeFazio III, includes eighty letters by Hemingway. Additional clusters have appeared in a few other books, including Hemingway in Cuba by Norberto Fuentes (1984), Along with Youth: Hemingway: The Early Years by Peter Griffin (1985), Hemingway in Love and War, edited by Henry S. Villard and James Nagel (1989), My Brother, Ernest Hemingway by Leicester Hemingway (1961; rpt. 1996), At the Hemingways by his sister Marcelline Hemingway Sanford (1962; rpt. 1999), and Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends, edited by Linda Patterson Miller (1991; rpt. 2002). Hemingway’s correspondences with Jane Mason, Lillian Ross, and Ezra Pound have been the subject of magazine pieces, and extracts and facsimile reproductions of letters have continued to appear in auction catalogs and dealer listings over the years.12 Still, of Hemingway’s located surviving letters, about eighty-five percent remained unpublished. Early in the twenty-first century, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, holders, respectively, of U.S. and international copyrights to the letters, authorized publication of a comprehensive scholarly edition. In 2002, I was honored Spec SD1 Date 26-july

38 Spanier to be selected as general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. The edition was formally approved for publication by the Syndicate of the Cambridge University Press in October 2004, and the complex contrac- tual arrangements were finalized in November 2006. The Project has proceeded in close consultation with a distinguished editorial advisory committee headed by Linda Patterson Miller and including Jackson R. Bryer, Scott Donaldson, James L. W. West III, James H. Meredith, and Linda Wagner-Martin. A vital component is the involvement of an international team of scholars who serve in a variety of roles, including as expert consultants on particular places or periods in Hemingway’s life, as language consultants, and as editors of individual volumes. The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway was launched in September 2011 with the publication of the first of a projected sixteen volumes. Volume I, spanning 1907–22, was edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, with associate volume editors Albert J. DeFazio III, Miriam B. Mandel, and Kenneth B. Panda, and volume advisory editor J. Gerald Kennedy. Linda Patterson Miller contributed a foreword. In addition to the institutional support of Pennsylvania State University, the Project has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Heinz Endowments. All royalties from sales are directed to the Project to sustain this long-term effort. Of his decision to publish the selected letters in the face of Hemingway’s directive, Charles Scribner, Jr. explained: Hemingway left strict instructions that his letters should not be published. But, with Mary’s approval, I published them – and I think I did the right thing. To begin with, he had kidded my father about publishing his letters, so he had thought of such a thing. Second, I believe his letters show a side of him that nothing else in his work does, and it is a very nice side. I considered that I was justified. It is well known that Virgil left instructions for theAeneid to be burned after his death. Fortunately, not all literary executors obey such requests.13 Patrick Hemingway was more blunt. When asked what had motivated his father’s 1958 directive, he responded that he did not know, that it did not make sense: “If you don’t want your letters published, burn them. It’s simple.” He wishes for the Cambridge Edition to be as complete as possible. “I think that selection is a deadly process,” he said. “I felt that if they were going to publish his letters at all, there shouldn’t be any picking and choosing – that you either got the whole picture of him as a correspondent, as a letter writer, or nothing at all.” The Cambridge Edition includes all extant Hemingway letters that we can locate, presented complete and unabridged, arranged in chronological Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Letters 39 order of their composition. It includes letters previously published as well as thousands new to print. While incoming letters that Hemingway received are not included, they inform editorial comment on the outgoing letters. We define “letters” broadly to include postcards, cables, identifiable drafts and fragments, the letters he wrote for publication, and letters he put away unsent. Volume I even includes notes to friends passed back and forth during class in high school. For Hemingway’s packrat tendencies – as well as his mother’s efforts to document her children’s young lives in the scrapbooks she compiled, history can be grateful. To date we have gathered copies of letters from some 250 sources in the United States and abroad: more than seventy libraries and institutional archives (including the world’s largest repository of Hemingway papers, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston), and scores of dealers, private collectors, Hemingway correspondents, and their descendants. The final volume will feature a section of “Additional Letters” for those that come to light after publication of the volumes in which they would have appeared chronologically. As a result of much detective work, aided by publicity surrounding the effort, hundreds of previously unknown or inaccessible letters have been added to the Project’s master archive. These include more than 150 family letters kept by Hemingway’s sisters Madelaine (“Sunny”) and Ursula, letters he wrote in the 1950s to a college student who had tucked them away in a safe deposit box, transcriptions of letters he dictated on a wire recorder to a part-time secretary in Cuba, and letters that Mary Hemingway left behind at Finca Vigía when she received special dispensation from both the U.S. and Cuban governments to return there in August 1961 to retrieve papers and belongings. Thanks to an historic 2002 cooperative agreement, those letters, now in the collection of the Museo Hemingway, have been preserved and scanned, with original documents remaining in Cuba and microfilm copies deposited at the Kennedy Library in 2009. Some letters Hemingway is known to have written do not survive. Sadly, among them are multitudes that he wrote to the great loves of his life: Agnes von Kurowsky, the Red Cross nurse who inspired the character of Catherine Barkley; Hadley, his first wife; and Pauline Pfeiffer, his second. Under differing circumstances, his letters to each were deliberately destroyed. Untold numbers of letters to others fell victim to tidiness during cleanings of basements or attics. Some people simply do not keep their mail. It is difficult to overstate the interest and value of Hemingway’s letters for scholars and aficionados. They narrate the arc of an epic life story in Spec SD1 Date 26-july

40 Spanier real time. They capture his devastation upon receiving a “Dear Ernie” letter from von Kurowsky in 1919 and his exhilaration at seeing his first bullfights in the summer of 1923. They document the making and marketing of his books and detail the plans for the doomed 1954 air journey in Africa that resulted in two plane crashes in two days and, arguably, precipitated an irreversible decline in his physical and mental health. They illuminate his relationships and complicate the commonplaces – that he had always hated his mother, for example, or that his relationship with fellow writer Martha Gellhorn was a perpetual battle of titanic egos locked in bitter rivalry until their marriage imploded. The collected letters also serve as correctives to the conclusions of biographers who did not have access to letters previously unavailable or unknown. For instance, his letter of February 14–15, 1922, reporting to his mother that Stein “was here to dinner last night and stayed till mid-night,” places Hemingway and Stein’s first meeting a month earlier than generally assumed (Letters I 328). This shifts the ground under suggestions by Baker and others that Hemingway had put off meeting Stein out of intimidation.14 It also requires re-examination of Michael S. Reynolds’s interpretation of another Hemingway letter as calculating and presump- tuous. Believing that Hemingway had first made Stein’s acquaintance on March 8, Reynolds writes, “On March 9, the day after his first visit to Stein’s apartment, Hemingway wrote Sherwood Anderson: ‘Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers and we see a lot of her.’ One meeting does not make a brotherhood, but knowing how enthusiastic Anderson was about Gertrude, Ernest exaggerated without a blush” (Reynolds 36). The letters are valuable, too, for Hemingway’s comments on his own writing – what he was aiming for, how he did it, what he thought he had achieved. As a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star he breathlessly reported to his father in April 1918 the pressures of “Having to write a half column story with every name, address and initial verified and remembering to use good style, perfect style in fact, an get all the facts and in the correct order, make it have snap and wallop and write it in fifteen minutes, five sentences at a time to catch an edition as it goes to press” (Letters I 93). In later letters he expresses the aims of his early experiments in modernist minimalism, his irritation when his language was censored by what he considered cowardly publishers, his satisfaction when he knew he had written well. They testify to his discipline and determination to keep putting down words through illnesses and injuries as well as to his feelings about significant events, such as the suicide of his father, the collapse of marriages, and the deaths of friends. Above all, they testify to how Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Letters 41 integral his writing was to his being. As he told Cowley in 1945: “Suffer like a bastard when don’t write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing” (SL 604–5). Journalism has been described as the rough draft of history. Letters share with journalism the immediacy of the account, unshaped and unfiltered by the long view. With his reporter’s eye and ear, Hemingway was ever keenly attuned to his world and his times. Using Royal Air Force slang for “intelligence,” Hemingway’s sons would ask him, “‘Papa what is the true gen on so and so or such and such’” (SL 603). What we get in the letters is the “true gen” as Hemingway perceived it on any given day. Taken together, his collected letters constitute his truest life story, unself-conscious and unabridged – his autobiography by aggregation, and a chronicle of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. The Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA; subsequently cited in the text as JFK. Quotations are transcribed exactly as they appear in the letters with no editorial corrections. 2. Interview with Sandra Spanier, Bozeman, MT, June 8, 2011. Subsequent quotations from Patrick Hemingway are from this interview. 3. Archives and Special Collections, Harvard University Library. 4. Biblioteca Berenson, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy. 5. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Princeton, NJ; subsequently cited as PUL. 6. To Joseph H. Hopkins, March 31, 1936, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA; subsequently cited as Stanford. 7. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA. 8. Hemingway to “my Executors,” typescript of statement, May 20, 1958 (JFK). 9. These appear, respectively, in D. Gallup, The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York: Knopf, 1953); E. Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Vintage Books, 1952); Il Cinquantennio Editoriale di Arnoldo Mondadori, 1907–1957 (Verona, Italy: Mondadori, 1957); Rowohlts Rotblonder Roman (Hamburg, Germany: Rohwohlt, 1947); and Library Journal 79 (December 1954), 292. 10. Collected in M. J. Bruccoli and J. S. Baughman (eds.), Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006). 11. E. R. Hagemann, “Preliminary Report on the State of Ernest Hemingway’s Correspondence,” Literary Research Newsletter 3.4 (1978), 163–72; 165. 12. A. S. Mason, “To Love and Love Not,” Vanity Fair (July 1999), 108–18ff.; L. Ross, “Hemingway Told Me Things,” New Yorker (May 24, 1999), 70–3; Spec SD1 Date 26-july

42 Spanier M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), “‘Yr Letters Are Life Preservers’: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound,” Paris Review 163 (Fall 2003), 96–129. 13. C. Scribner, Jr., In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 85. 14. See C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 86; J. Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 71; and M. S. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 34. Reynolds’s work is cited subsequently in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 5 Reading Gail Sinclair

In Green Hills of Africa (1935), Ernest Hemingway famously paid homage to an American literary predecessor by proclaiming, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (22). This assertion encapsulates the writer’s journey predicated on foundations laid before him. Hemingway also acknowledged literature of his own time as the bricks and mortar of his artistic education, and though his fame was largely forged upon what has been called an anti-intellectual style, he was a consummate student of literature from the classics to the avant garde. Hemingway proclaimed that he preferred reading to anything but writing, and close examination of his lifelong practices substantiates this assertion. In an effort to understand the literary base that might have informed Hemingway’s artistic vision, scholars have generated several inventories of his books and reading habits. Any study of such lists, however, must provide a disclaimer as we cannot always be certain beyond the titles to which he refers elsewhere that the books on his shelves, his library card checkout lists, or his purchasing receipts were texts he thoroughly devoured. Some might, instead, have been works he started but never finished, glanced through and put aside, or received as unwanted gifts subsequently shelved and forgotten. We can say that Hemingway was a voracious reader, and for him reading was fundamental to learning how to write well. With such qualifications in mind, several sources extensively catalogue Hemingway’s libraries and reading history, and collectively they unveil the rigorous self-education undertaken in his artistic development. Two sources are invaluable for their extensive compilations of Hemingway’s repertoire: (1) James D. Brasch and Joseph Sigman’s Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record focusing solely upon the books and other publications Hemingway owned, a staggering five thousand to seven thousand copies; and (2) Michael Reynolds’s Hemingway’s Reading: 43 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

44 Sinclair 1910–1940, which widens the list to books the author may have read but didn’t own.1 Duplication occurs between these sources, and counts vary according to what was included, but both shed light on Hemingway’s lifelong love affair with the printed word. Both sources establish patterns, and both texts supply facsimile lists and other records for books found on the shelves of Hemingway’s Key West home, the Finca Vigía in Cuba, the Ketchum home in Idaho, the Kennedy Library collection in Boston, and private libraries, as well as checkout lists from Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris and purchase receipts from Scribner’s, among sundry other records. Brasch and Sigman supply a guide to Hemingway’s early childhood reading primarily through his siblings’ reminiscences. Marcelline, the oldest of the children, reported that the works of “Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, and Shakespeare filled many of the shelves,” and she noted that The Suicide Club and Treasure Island by Stevenson, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and the Horatio Alger Ragged Dick series were favorite grade school reading for the older Hemingway children, including Ernest (10). Periodical subscriptions provided other reading material with such familiar titles as National Geographic, Atlantic Monthly, Ladies Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. Leicester, the youngest Hemingway, identifiedSt. Nicholas Magazine and Harper’s among the family’s favorites, and these often traveled with them as reading staples at Windemere on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. Given his enthusiasm for reading, Hemingway was fortunate growing up in the early twentieth century, which saw a dramatic rise in literature’s availability for public use. One of philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s central missions was to establish libraries, which his foundation initially funded only with the promise of guaranteed community tax support to sustain them. Carnegie’s efforts generated nearly seventeen hundred new institutions across America, and though the library in Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois opened as a public lending library in 1902, it likely shared the side benefit of boosted interest in support for these local institutions. The Oak Park Library became a central book supplier for the Hemingway children, who were allowed extended lending privileges over the vacation months. Hemingway would later note in a June 10, 1953 letter to the head librarian upon the institution’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, “I was at sea . . . or I would have sent you a message telling you how much I owe to the Library and how much it has meant to me all my life” (Letters I xvii). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Reading 45 Beyond the rise in public lending libraries in the decades just before and after the turn of the century (1880s to 1920s), the 1920s and 1930s marked a growing availability and affordability of texts given the advent of the portable Little Leather Library miniature books (1920–4), book of the month clubs (begun in 1925), paperback publications (introduced in 1931), Scribner’s most current texts ready to order and ship directly upon request, and various other subscription methods for cheaply obtaining the most up-to-date books. Though these resources were not available until Hemingway was an adult, his childhood passion for reading and carrying a moveable library later made him an obvious subscriber to the concept and a lifelong practitioner. Hemingway’s early literary education was also advanced through his Oak Park High School English courses, although, as Reynolds notes, there is little empirical proof he actually read the works listed on the curricu- lum (Hemingway’s Reading 12–13). According to school syllabi, this education was largely steeped in the classic works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Tennyson, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Dickens. This privileging of British authors possibly established Hemingway’s preference for non-American literature that, with some notable exceptions, characterized his adult inventory and authorial recommendations. Reynolds summarizes Hemingway’s delayed discovery of American writers: His early concepts of subject matter, structure, and style were influenced by neither the American realists nor the naturalists. For Hemingway, the American writers of the 1890s were a deferred generation. He had to go to Paris to discover Stephen Crane. Twain and James were his only significant contact with the American tradition and he did not read James until he met Ezra Pound. (17) Ironically, the early paradigms of one of America’s most recognized and celebrated authors consisted almost solely of European, male-authored texts. What Hemingway digested immediately after high school also remains a matter of speculation. Certainly he was reading the Kansas City Star during his several-month tenure as a cub reporter when “day in and day out, in the Star’s morning and afternoon editions, he read items about the local war-bond drive and dispatches from the European fronts.”2 Little else is known about what he might have absorbed there, during his brief time at the Italian war front, or while recuperating from his wounds in Milan. Hemingway’s sister Marcelline noted that after his return from Italy, he read incessantly all the materials “around the house” and “also Spec SD1 Date 26-july

46 Sinclair took out great numbers of books from the public library,” though the title and nature of these must be mostly surmised.3 Reynolds observes: “Of the prominent Americans, only Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Howells, James, and Harte were fully represented in the public library,” but “Every standard British author was on the shelves in force” (17). Hemingway’s reading while living in Chicago and Toronto (1919–21) also remains sketchy. He had by this time no doubt established his habit of reading the major papers and periodicals. Biographer Carlos Baker concludes that Joseph Conrad was also important in these years.4 Donald M. Wright, an acquaintance of Hemingway, claims that Havelock Ellis’s Erotic Symbolism and The Dance of Life, and likely several works by Anatole France were on the reading list as well (quoted in Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading 18). Reynolds’s addendum to Hemingway’s Reading provides new authors and titles ascertained from correspondence between Ernest and his first wife, Hadley, suggesting they both were perusing Sherwood Anderson, Honoré de Balzac, Joseph Conrad, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, C. S. Lewis, Somerset Maugham, and Siegfried Sassoon during their courtship.5 Hemingway’s most intense immersion into the contemporary literary milieu took place not in the nation’s heartland, but in the Left Bank cafés, bars, bookshops, and ateliers of Paris. The novitiate artist who entered the Paris scene in 1922 barely resembled the initiated author who emerged by 1924 when his first serious publications began to appear. His intensified literary baptism commenced at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore and lending library that not only provided many of the texts Hemingway read but also offered personal introductions to some of the best authors of the time. In the first flush of having found this literary jewel, he excitedly reported to Hadley, “We’re going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them” (AMF 38). Noel Fitch describes this artistic center, 12 rue de l’Odéon, as “the mailing address he shared with James Joyce, George Antheil, Sherwood Anderson, Robert McAlmon, Stephen Vincent Benét, and scores of other English and American travelers and expatriates.”6 It was here that Hemingway first met Ezra Pound, who would later provide his eager mentee a list of classics necessary for a substantive literary foundation, including “Confucius, Homer, Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Dante, Villon, Voltaire, Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Gautier, Corbiere [sic], and Rimbaud” (Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading 22). During this literary initiation, Hemingway also added many established but more contemporary writers to his portfolio. Beyond icons of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Reading 47 the nineteenth century, he was “reading the new masters: Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Ford, Lawrence, and Stein” (Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading 20). He undoubtedly read T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” James Joyce’sUlysses and Dubliners, probably most of Henry James’s novels, and Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XVI Cantos. Beach recommended Russian writers, who quickly became favorites. Hemingway reports in A Moveable Feast that on his first visit to Shakespeare and Company in December 1921 he borrowed “Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches (2 vols.), D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Other Stories” (36), a memory Fitch later substantiated through lending card evidence (158). Beach also pointed him to the literary magazines The Dial and The Little Review, which featured contemporary writing, and Hemingway was soon enlisted to help edit the transatlantic review and This Quarter, periodicals also available at the bookshop and circulating the work of current authors. Firsthand evidence of specific titles from these years is mostly lacking because lending records for Shakespeare and Company end December 31, 1921 and do not resume until October 8, 1925. Subsequent patterns show Hemingway checking out books every few days and borrowing between twenty and forty texts each year (1925–38, whenever he was in the city), so we might infer that during his early days in Paris, Hemingway likely established this pace if not a more rigorous one. Closer scrutiny of Hemingway’s reading habits demonstrates that he regularly availed himself of masterworks. Reynolds concludes, “when Hemingway liked an author, he read him in depth. Roughly 20 percent of the entries in Hemingway’s Reading suggest this pattern. Some of the names confirm what we knew: Conrad, Kipling, Turgenev, Stendhal, Dostoevsky” (Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading 16). Turgenev’s name appears twelve times between 1925 and 1929 with Sportsman’s Sketches checked out four times over eight years though only once is the specific volume identified. British and Continental authors Flaubert, de Maupassant, Stendhal, Balzac, Zola, Mann, Dostoevsky, Yeats, Huxley, Lawrence, and Nietzsche appear as well as Americans Sinclair Lewis, Sandburg, Ford, Stein, Lardner, Wilder, and O’Neill. Hemingway sought more than mere reading pleasure and borrowed books that might supplement or inform his own work. He checked out Donald Ogden Stewart’s A Parody Outline of History while writing his satire The Torrents of Spring (1926), and he had obviously read Turgenev’s work by the same title. When writing A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway apparently looked for models that might generate a Spec SD1 Date 26-july

48 Sinclair stronger sense of verisimilitude, borrowing Darrell Figgis’s Recollections of the Irish War in February 1928 and the next year, as the novel neared publication (October), Lord Beaverbrook’s Politicians and the War in June and Ludwig Renn’s War in September (Fitch 161). Fitch also notes that Hemingway consulted a book on bullfighting while rewriting The Sun Also Rises (1926) and, when back in Paris in the 1930s, borrowed Life and Death of a Spanish Town and a few months later borrowed Homage to Catalonia in relation to work on For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) (161). In interviews attempting to plumb the secrets of Hemingway’s inspiration, he reiterated time and again the authors and works important to him as he established his own distinct style. In a 1935 Esquire article, when asked what books are necessary for a writer to have read, he replied: War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Tolstoi, Midshipman Easy, Frank Mildmay and Peter Simple by Captain Marryat, Madame Bovary and L’Education Sentimentale by Flaubert, Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews by Fielding, Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal, The Brothers Karamazov and any other two Dostoevskis, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane, Hail and Farewell by George Moore, Yeats’s Autobiographies, all the good de Maupassant, all the good Kipling, all of Turgenev, Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. Hudson, Henry James’s short stories, especially Madame de Mauves, and The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, The American. (BL 218) The interviewer complained that he couldn’t write fast enough, and Hemingway promised to provide “about three times that many” another day. Much of this list was duplicated two decades later in the famous 1958 Paris Review conversation with American journalist George Plimpton. Hemingway recalls the authors he read early on, some with whom he also interacted personally during those formative and arguably most artistically productive years in the 1920s. In his Parisian professional/social circle almost from the beginning were Joyce, Pound, and Stein, all of whom he credits, though sometimes reluctantly, for influencing his own developing aesthetic. When asked directly “Who would you say are your literary forebears – those you learned the most from?” Hemingway’s response is specific and generally consistent with writers listed elsewhere. Unique to this compilation is his listing of musicians Bach and Mozart and painters Tintoretto, Bosch, Brueghel, Patonier, Goya, Giott, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.7 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Reading 49 Hemingway is not confused by the question, explaining, “I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. . . . I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious” (23). He substantiates the interconnectivity of artistic disciplines in influencing modernist perspective, and his reading shows he not only studied the canvases but also investigated academic discussions of them. For example, in September 1926, Hemingway borrowed Ambrose Bollards’s Paul Cézanne to learn further what the painter’s work could teach him about how to draw the verbal landscapes he had been trying to create in the same way Cézanne had mastered the painted canvas. Of Hemingway’s literary tutelage in those formative years, Reynolds comments, “There was not a single important British, American, or French author then writing who was not known by one of his teachers” (Hemingway’s Reading 20). The budding author eager to learn his craft could not have received a finer internship between 1921 and 1924, nor could he have been a more willing apprentice. Hemingway’s established pattern became one of mornings spent writing and afternoons/evenings devoted to replenishing the creative wellspring by reading authors he liked or with whom Stein, Pound, Beach, and a growing number of contemporary literati had instructed him to become familiar. Hemingway spoke of this habit saying, “I’m always reading books – as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply” (Plimpton 24). He would also disclose in A Moveable Feast, “When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day . . . it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again” (26). He never abandoned what he came early to understand as a healthy balance between reading and his own creation of the written word. Hemingway’s practice of carrying a library with him, begun in Oak Park when he was a child and which he continued in Paris as a young man, became a lifelong habit as ingrained as was the act of reading. Key West hired hand Toby Bruce reminisced, “We’d move books everyplace he’d go. If we were headed cross-country, he’d have a duffle-bag, later on one of those old Abercrombie and Fitch duffle bags, that’d be loaded with books” (quoted in Brasch and Sigman 13). Hemingway writes of this practice in Green Hills of Africa saying, “P.O.M. [second wife Pauline] got the books out of one of the musettes and she and Pop read while I followed Spec SD1 Date 26-july

50 Sinclair down the ravine. . . . I was glad to lean my back against the tree trunk and read Tolstoi’s Sevastopol” (GHOA 69–70). A second African safari in 1953–4 offered the same scenario with Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, describing the “bag bulging with books” that accompanied them. Beyond simply accruing a large reservoir of literary works modeling the best examples of the craft, Hemingway gained a proficient understanding of languages – first French by reading several daily papers and by taking up Flaubert (especially Madame Bovary), Stendhal, and de Maupassant. He had likely begun this method of language acquisition when learning Italian by reading the local papers in late 1918 and early 1919 during his recovery from war injuries, and he would later continue this practice when working to master Spanish. Reynolds estimates that “When he packed his working library in 1940, at least twenty percent of the books were in a foreign language. On that sort of trip [moving his life from Key West to Cuba], a writer does not carry dead weight” (Hemingway’s Reading 19). In 1931 when Ernest and Pauline shipped the contents of their Paris apartment to their new home in Key West, a detailed book inventory did not seem to exist such as would be created nearly a decade later when Hemingway transported twenty-six crates of books from his personal library to Cuba. Hemingway had certainly purchased many texts at Shakespeare and Company, at Adrienne Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres across the street, at the small kiosks along the Seine, and no doubt at many of the locations to which he traveled for business or pleasure during his years in Europe. But once settled into the large home at 907 Whitehead Street, Hemingway had the room and means to become a true literary connoisseur. A large floor-to-ceiling bookcase built in the wide upstairs hallway dominated the space just outside Hemingway’s bedroom where, Key West friend Lorine Thompson remembers, “Whenever you’d go up there . . . the bed, all around the bed was covered with papers and books” (quoted in Brasch and Sigman 13). Eventually many of the major areas in the house as well as Hemingway’s writing studio over the garage became laden with publications spilling off the shelves and piled wherever they had last been deposited. In the Key West library, the encyclopedic nature of Hemingway’s interests, established in the Paris years, was still apparent. Reynolds notes genre patterns and tabulates the number of entries in each category on the Key West shipping inventory:

Biography/297 (25 percent literary – 17 American, 41 British, 25 Continental) Literary History/Criticism/163 (eclectic collections; French, American, Russian) Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Reading 51 Description & Travel/161 (emphasis on Africa, Spain and bullfighting, hunting) Short Story/136 (de Maupassant, Chekhov, Harte, Boyle, American, German) Poetry/136 (Eliot, Pound, Dante, Baudelaire, Pope, Yeats, Whitman, The Iliad) Military History/Espionage/131 (Civil War, WW I & II, French Revolution, Spanish Civil War, Crusades, decisive wars of history) History/126 (Spain, British India, North America) Murder Mystery/67 (Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie) Reference/62 (Modern art, hunting, fishing, sports, dictionaries, boxing) Drama/56 (Shakespeare, O’Neill, Turgenev, dos Passos, Maugham, Shaw, Wilder) Essays/42 (numerous periodicals with essay features, eclectic collections) Letters/14 (Byron, Napoleon, Crane, Montaigne). (Hemingway’s Reading 23) Reynolds does not list novels in this calculation because of their extensive number and the difficulty of categorizing many of them. He also notes that Ernest and Pauline had a habit of making undocumented book donations to the Key West library. What was retained and taken to Cuba thus serves as a sort of forensic fingerprint revealing what Hemingway found important at the time allowing for whimsy, quirkiness, and the just plain unexplainable – The Romance of Perfume as one example. When Hemingway first established his Finca Vigía library in the early 1940s, he owned approximately 800 books shelved in the crudely built cases in which they had been shipped. In the next two decades, that number grew to something close to nine thousand entries by Reynolds’s count, with every room in the house crammed with books and bookshelves. By that time, Hemingway had become a master author whose critical acclaim and widespread popularity eclipsed many if not most of the writers upon whom he had cut his literary teeth. He was astutely aware of his place in the canon and knew that every aspect relevant to his literary endeavors, and many not so germane, would be scrutinized. The book acquisitions reflect his deep love of the written word and his professional preferences, but his personal and private penchants are also apparent. Such a voracious appetite for learning and reading required the readily available, voluminous library he had accumulated, some 150 to 200 new titles a year. His fictional characters, especially the young Nick Adams or Nick-like protagonists and older Hemingwayesque figures, share their creator’s perpetual habit of reading and bringing reading material with them wherever they travel. Beyond this simple observation, one might note that his characters’ reading habits are often signifiers. George’s immersion in Spec SD1 Date 26-july

52 Sinclair his reading in “Cat in the Rain” speaks to disengagement from his wife and her needs. By criticizing Robert Cohn’s excitement over Hudson’s The Purple Land, Jake Barnes demonstrates his condescension for Cohn’s romantic idealism. And “The Three-Day Blow” characters Nick and Bill set forth in alcohol-induced discussion their impressions of various writers, revealing their youthful enthusiasm and idealism. Reading thus provides subtle cues pointing to how we might “read” these characters’ inner natures and current situations. Books were Hemingway’s steady companions, the only familiar acquaintances he did not tire of or find quarrelsome, and he remained loyal to those he deemed his favorites. He spent a lifetime with books – amassing them, shipping them between continents and countries, trans- ferring them between households and marriages in larger numbers than any other personal possessions. They are the relics of a literary life spent both as a practitioner and a partaker, and their broken spines, faded titles, well-worn pages, and annotated margins bear record of an education found and a reputation earned in their constant company.

Notes 1. J. D. Brasch and J. Sigman, Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record (New York: Garland, 1981); M. Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading: 1910–1940 (Princeton University Press, 1981). Both sources pay debt to predecessors – Richard Layman, Noel Fitch, Carlos Baker, Charles Fenton, and Mary Hemingway – for their contributions to the collective listings. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. S. Paul, “Preparing For War and Writing: What the Young Hemingway Read in The Kansas City Star, 1917–1918,” The Hemingway Review 23.2 (2004), 5–20; 5. 3. M. Hemingway Sanford, At the Hemingways, A Family Portrait (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press), 179. 4. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 101. 5. M. Reynolds, “A Supplement to Hemingway’s Reading: 1910–1940,” Studies in American Fiction 14.1 (1986), 99–108; 100–1. 6. N. Fitch, “Ernest Hemingway – c/o Shakespeare and Company,” Fitzgerald/ Hemingway Annual (1977), 157–81; 157. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. G. Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958), 60–89. Rpt. in L. Wagner-Martin (ed.), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2002), 15–32; 23. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Representations: In His Time Spec SD1 Date 26-july Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 6 Contemporary Reviews Albert J. DeFazio III

Beginning in 1923 with Three Stories and Ten Poems and ending with The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the contemporary response to Hemingway’s work was uneven. To be sure, his work consistently attracted Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, and a handful of prescient commentators, but typical reviews lacked meaningful insight, and many were written with an eye toward book advertisements, other reviewers, and the author himself. Some reviews were simply inaccurate, promoting, for example, the biographical fallacy or the notion that his work was the mere presentation of an amoral world rather than the creation of art. Hemingway further complicated his relationship with reviewers by disparaging them: in 1925 he wrote to Sherwood Anderson, “professional critics make me sick; camp following eunochs [sic] of literature” (SL 162); he took aim at particular critics and literary journals; in 1949 he characterized “New York literary reviews” as “feeding on the dried manure of schism and the dusty taste of disputed dialectics.”1 Not surprising, his reception toggled between praise and disparagement, alternating with each decade but concluding with high praise for Old Man. Indeed, the full context of Hemingway’s contemporary reviews, particularly the earliest, cannot be understood without recognizing how a very young man – about the age of a college senior – was able to ingratiate himself with a transatlantic community of writers and critics. He was calculating in selecting his friends and antagonizing his contemporaries, if only to distinguish his brand of modernism from theirs. While he proved himself an adroit manipulator of the social media of his era, he still needed help in launching his career. It came from Sherwood Anderson who, more than anyone else, shaped the context of Hemingway’s contemporary reception.2 In 1921 the forty-five-year-old Anderson became known to the twenty-two-year-old Hemingway in Chicago through Y. K. Smith, brother of Hemingway’s great friends Bill and Katharine, who were 55 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

56 DeFazio “summer people” in upper Michigan.3 Anderson, just five years younger than Hemingway’s father, was producing books at a furious rate (ten between 1916 and 1926) and winning critical acclaim. Here was a writer ascending, a man who had left business for literature and abandoned a wife and three small children in the process. Anderson’s work impressed prolific New York critic Paul Rosenfeld, who collaborated with Waldo Frank on The Seven Arts (1916–17), and the three became good friends. When the antiwar posture of Frank’s journal led to its demise, most of the defunct journal’s contributors migrated to Scofield Thayer’s The Dial. The editor’s school chum, T. S. Eliot, served as The Dial’s London correspondent; Gilbert Seldes, another friend of Anderson, was managing editor, and Ezra Pound served as the Parisian correspondent. As a Christmas gift in 1920, Rosenfeld gave Anderson paid passage to Europe, landing him in Paris in May 1921. There he stayed at the Hotel Jacob and met Pound, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, who was selling his books at Shakespeare and Company, and William Bird (Rideout 412). Beach introduced him to Gertrude Stein, and a warm and recipro- cal friendship ensued, complemented by Anderson’s laudatory introduction to Stein’s Geography and Plays (1922) and Stein’s favorable review of A Story Teller’s Story (1924) (Rideout 414). Before leaving Paris, Anderson brought Lewis Galantière to Stein’s salon, and en route home, he visited his new English publisher, Jonathan Cape, and dined with Edward J. O’Brien, who had dedicated The Best Short Stories of 1920 to him (Rideout 422). By 1924, his American publisher was Boni & Liveright. Back home, Anderson found himself the 1921 recipient of the $2,000 Dial Award (worth $23,193.54 in 2011 dollars). So in the fall of 1921, it was with the authority of a widely published, newly cosmopolitan, and nationally acclaimed author that he offered his famous advice to Ernest and his wife, Hadley: forego Italy in favor of Paris. They of course agreed, and Anderson supplied several letters of introduction. As a result of these letters, Hemingway met Beach almost immediately, and through her he encountered Joyce. So began his foray into Parisian literary circles, in many ways the mirror image of Anderson’s. In the spring of 1922, he met Pound and fellow journalist and literary man William Bird, owner of Three Mountains Press, who later traveled to Pamplona with Hemingway and published in our time (1924).4 In February 1923, Hemingway visited Pound in Rapallo, Italy, where he met O’Brien, who subsequently published the Andersonesque “My Old Man” and dedicated his Best Short Stories of 1923 to him. Robert McAlmon was there too, and he published Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and joined the pilgrimage Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Contemporary Reviews 57 to Pamplona that became the basis of The Sun Also Rises (1926). Pound later recommended that Hemingway assist Ford Madox Ford with editing responsibilities at the transatlantic review, which published three of his stories and offered him valuable experience and opportunities to assist his friends and tweak his rivals.5 While Anderson’s introduction to Pound led Hemingway to his first two publishers, his letter to Stein eventually led to Hemingway’s first review. The two met in March 1922; within a year, Stein had published a “word portrait” of Hemingway in her friend W. Dawson Johnston’s Ex Libris, and Hemingway had produced a review of Geography and Plays (1922). In this first work in a European publication, Hemingway took aim at D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and other “unbelievably stupid” men who compiled Thayer’s The Dial, as well as Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, and, surprisingly, even Anderson, who is admonished for writing a “restrained” introduction to Geography and Plays, the result, Hemingway surmises, of the “new respectability” borne of his having won the Dial prize. Stein, in turn, reviewed Three Stories. Before the year was out, Stein and her companion, Alice Toklas, would stand as godmothers for Ernest and Hadley’s son, and Hemingway had persuaded Ford to seri- alize Stein’s The Making of Americans in the transatlantic review. In March 1925, Stein and Hemingway both published reviews of Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story.6 Another of Anderson’s letters of introduction had been addressed to Lewis Galantière, who helped the Hemingways find lodging in Paris and sent a review copy of Three Stories to his good friend in New York, Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the New York Tribune. Checking the paper for the review, Hemingway learned that Edmund Wilson had shared with Rascoe the six sketches that he had recently published in The Little Review. Seizing the initiative, he sent a copy of Three Stories to Wilson, hoping for his appraisal – and mentioning Stein and Galantière. Wilson’s positive reply emboldened Hemingway: Could Wilson postpone his notice of Three Stories, which would likely appear unsigned among the “Briefer Mentions,” until in our time appeared and review them jointly? He could and did. Wilson also liked Hemingway well enough to recommend that Donald Ogden Stewart look up the author in Paris and the two became friends – with Hemingway publishing work by Stewart in the transatlantic review and Stewart joining the band of expatriates in Pamplona in 1925. While Hemingway’s own initiative was instrumental in winning him the cooperation of Wilson, the critic was also friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anderson, and in that same fall of 1924, Fitzgerald brought Spec SD1 Date 26-july

58 DeFazio Hemingway to the attention of Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, and Wilson visited Anderson in New Orleans.7 Wilson’s review in The Dial was Hemingway’s most significant early notice. On the basis of these two slim volumes, ninety-six pages of work, Wilson dismissed Hemingway’s poetry but found the prose “strikingly original.” The author, Wilson wrote, despite having clearly been influenced by both Stein and Anderson, seemed to have “almost invented a form of his own.” Other reviewers also appreciated the prose style of Three Stories; for example, an anonymous reviewer for the Kansas City Star admired the “certain superior objectivity” and the description that created “esthetic emotions as much as does good music or good painting.” The significant naysayer was H. L. Mencken, who dismissed the lot as so much tough guy stuff by an atheistic journalist (Meyers 63–6).8 So from his chance meeting with Anderson in Chicago, Hemingway found himself introduced to key players of the Modernist movement: through Pound he met O’Brien, McAlmon, and Ford; Beach introduced him to Joyce; Stein became his first reviewer; his own career in journalism acquainted him with Bird; and Galantière’s friend, Rascoe, provided Hemingway with the opportunity to contact Wilson, who directed Stewart to him as well. And Anderson wasn’t finished: while Hemingway may have followed him to British publisher Jonathan Cape of his own accord, Anderson personally lobbied Liveright to accept Hemingway’s In Our Time (SL 161). At the peak of his popularity and influence, Anderson, as friend, mentor, and advocate, was the chief influence in shaping the context of Hemingway’s early contemporary reception. Hemingway’s works published in Paris, totaling 470 copies – and his social and professional connections – readied the marketplace for his first commercial publication, 1,335 copies of Boni & Liveright’s In Our Time (October 5, 1925). It featured front-cover puffs by Anderson, O’Brien, Stewart, Ford, Frank, and Seldes, nearly all known to Hemingway either directly or indirectly through Anderson. One early reviewer, Paul Rosenfeld, appreciated the “lyricism, aliveness and energy tremendously held in check,” the “raw and pithy terms,” the “freshness and crispness, what the eye sees and the ear hears.” Allen Tate posited a Hemingway who did not conceive his material but presented it, creating a prose “through a careful rejection of ideas.” Fitzgerald, comparing the work with that of Stein, Anderson, and Ring Lardner, noted “an almost autobiographical tint” and concluded his praise by deftly shifting the focus from the work to the man, describing a “renewal of excitement at these stories wherein Ernest Hemingway turns a corner into the street.” If the publication of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Contemporary Reviews 59 Hemingway’s stories in the little magazines and of in our time by Bird and McAlmon had earned some small acclaim, then In Our Time was a successful first, commercial campaign (Meyers 67–72). The Torrents of Spring (May 28, 1926), Hemingway’s parody of Anderson and others, attracted little attention on its own merits. To Allen Tate, it was a “small masterpiece,” but Harry Hansen, who was close to Anderson, scolded Hemingway for mistreating his mentor and called parody a gift of the gods that “missed Hemingway” (Meyers 75–9). Lawrence Morris viewed the novel as a literary declaration of independence. Reviewers seemed to know that the book was a calculated deal breaker, one that could have begun in good fun but ended by excusing Hemingway from his contract with Boni & Liveright and enabling him to leave behind Anderson and follow his friend Fitzgerald to Scribner’s. The reading public ignored the work, and it wasn’t reprinted in the United States until The Hemingway Reader appeared in 1953.9 So by the time Hemingway produced his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (October 22, 1926), a great many reviewers knew who he was, what he had written for the little magazines, and how he had managed to escape his contract with Boni & Liveright. Indeed, one publisher, Alfred Harcourt, seemed to know that “Hemingway’s first novel might rock the country” (Baker, Letters 84). It did. Reviewers of Sun received it as a much-anticipated event by a notable figure. As James Nagel has observed, the novel signaled “an international celebrity, a spokesman for American expatriates, an authority on the bullfight, the most brilliant stylist of his generation, and one of the most powerful forces in literature the United States had ever produced” (Nagel 1). However, some reviewers demurred. For instance, Allen Tate referenced “the recent prophecy that [Hemingway] will be the ‘big man in American letters’” by way of announcing his reservations: Hemingway had “produced a successful novel, but not without returning some violence upon the integrity achieved in his first book”; he had allowed sentimentality to intrude; his characters were mere caricatures; and his penchant for “throwing pebbles at the great,” which was amusing in Torrents, grew disconcerting here (Meyers 93–5). Other negative reviews focused on the subject matter: Time concluded that Hemingway’s “interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy café tables,” and The Dial lamented that he seemed “content to merely make a carbon copy of a not particularly significant surface of life in Paris.”10 But despite the occasional criticism, the predominant response was praise. Conrad Aiken acknowledged, “It has been apparent for some time that Mr. Hemingway Spec SD1 Date 26-july

60 DeFazio is a writer of very unusual gifts.” Aiken spied “obvious” literary debts to Anderson and Stein but praised Hemingway’s “extraordinary individuality of style,” his “sparseness and economy,” his dialogue, and his “objective detachment.” Herbert Gorman observed, “not once does the author inter- vene” and concluded, “Hemingway has been wise enough to adorn his novel with no moral either stated or implied” (Meyers 89–93). Especially praiseworthy were the dialogue and the rendering of detail and character. Here was something new. Men Without Women (October 14, 1927) garnered about half the published reviews and notices that Sun had earned, but its success suggested that Hemingway would thrive in both the novel and short story genres. Virginia Woolf couldn’t abide the abundance of masculinity, and Hemingway’s brand of modernism wasn’t her cup of tea, but the fact that it took her nearly three thousand words to explain her dissatisfaction with the work speaks directly to its importance. Cyril Connolly pronounced the work “irritating, but very readable and full of power and freshness.” Dorothy Parker, noting the surge in popular interest that Hemingway generated following the publication of Sun, found it “a truly magnificent work.” Edmund Wilson observed that the author’s reputation was so prominent that by 1927 “it has already become fashionable to disparage him,” and admired the “complex temperament and extreme sensibility” of the characters. Even Mencken, who had snubbed Hemingway in an earlier review only to find himself similarly treated in Torrents and Sun, pointed to a few of the stories as things “to be sincerely thankful for” (Meyers 108–17). Prior to publishing A Farewell to Arms (September 27, 1929), the thirty-year-old Hemingway serialized it in Scribner’s Magazine. It was promptly banned in Boston. Much about the novel vexed the squeamish conservatives: vulgar language, illicit love, childbed death, the collapse of the Italian army, and the protagonist’s desertion. Robert Herrick read the first two installments and condemned the whole in his review in the influential Bookman, objecting to the drunkenness and lovemaking; he was answered by the publisher, who purchased advertising space in the same journal and printed excerpts of a cogent defense by M. K. Hare, who attributed the drunkenness to the stress of war and declared that sex need no longer be considered a guilty secret (Donaldson 14–15). Most saw the novel as an advancement for Hemingway: Fanny Butcher thought that it was “technically and stylistically the most interesting novel of the year”; Clifton Fadiman saw “no reason why it should not secure the Pulitzer Prize.” T. S. Matthews observed that the “design” of Farewell was Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Contemporary Reviews 61 more apparent than in previous works (Meyers 121–6). T. S. Eliot rejected the notion that Hemingway was either sentimental or hard-boiled, calling him a “writer of tender sentiment, and true sentiment.” Praise also came from John Dos Passos: it was a “firstrate sic[ ] piece of craftsmanship by a man who knows his job” (Meyers 132). Ford’s introduction to the Modern Library Edition (1932) was one of the few contemporary estimations to note Hemingway’s discipline, his ability to sustain the effect of his prose over the course of a novel, and his words, which “strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook.”11 Although Mencken appreciated the “brilliant evocation of the horrible squalor and confusion of war,” he remained cranky about Hemingway’s writing, finding the main characters to grow less real as the novel progresses (Meyers 142). Lewis Galantière, the author’s sometime friend from the early days in Paris, initiated the psychological response: “There are two Hemingways: the positive, creative talent . . . and the negative, fearful writer with the psychological impediments of a child.” Farewell was Hemingway’s most successful work to date. It would be eleven years before he would produce a more successful book (Meyers 133–41). Hemingway was enormously productive in the 1930s, but the public’s response was lukewarm. Death in the Afternoon (September 23, 1932) sold poorly, hardly surprising for a book about bullfighting published during the Depression, and the reviews were tepid. Malcolm Cowley praised it as a treatise on the “art of living” but found it a “less important book” than Farewell (Meyers 164–70); Max Eastman was wholly unimpressed, labeling the text “juvenile romantic gushing” and gratuitously adding, “It is of course a commonplace that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man” (Meyers 172–80). In first-year sales, Farewell outsold Death by 5 to 1 (Trogdon 125). The next offering,Winner Take Nothing (October 27, 1933), garnered only three reviews in the week following its publication and only six more after that (Trogdon 140). Some objected to the collection’s subject matter (suicide, prostitution, homosexuality, insanity, venereal disease, lesbianism, death, and self-mutilation); others, like Wyndham Lewis, observed, “it is difficult to imagine a writer whose mind is more entirely closed to politics than is Hemingway’s” (Meyers 186– 209). Green Hills of Africa (October 25, 1935) proved no more satisfying. Granville Hicks found it a dull book and would have preferred something that depicted a labor strike; Wilson called it “a great disappointment” and observed “something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person” (Meyers 216–21). This was the end to nonfiction book publication for Hemingway in his lifetime. On Spec SD1 Date 26-july

62 DeFazio balance, reviewers found To Have and Have Not (October 15, 1937) wanting. Time was alone in thinking that Harry Morgan was Hemingway’s best character; most others thought that the book diminished his reputation. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (October 14, 1938), featuring Hemingway’s first and only produced play, closed the decade, and Wilson’s assessment was typical: he panned the drama but championed the stories, naming “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” one of Hemingway’s masterpieces (Meyers 266–9). For Whom the Bell Tolls (October 21, 1940), Hemingway’s most successful work, met overwhelmingly positive reviews. In a front-page spread of the New York Times Book Review, J. Donald Adams called it Hemingway’s best book. Wilson welcomed the return of Hemingway “the artist” – it is like having an old friend back – and found much to praise in the novel (Meyers 320–3). The serious novel attracted the serious attention of serious critics, including Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, and Mark Schorer, and invited a good many politically charged responses as well. He had learned from the political criticisms of the previous decade and anticipated the attack from the Left, even subscribing to the Marxist-oriented New Masses so he could monitor the chatter; but the Right was engaged as well, and while the Board unanimously voted to give the Pulitzer Prize to Hemingway, the conservative president of Columbia refused to make the award (Baker 363).12 Again, Hemingway followed a favorably reviewed and commercially successful novel with one that was roundly condemned, Across the River and Into the Trees (September 7, 1950). Thirty years of Hemingway’s heckling critics had alienated him from many commentators, who were increasingly recognizing little distance between the author and his protagonists. Reviewers who lavished praise in earlier decades were disap- pointed and sometimes savage in their assessments. Just as For Whom the Bell Tolls had redeemed the critical failures of the 1930s, The Old Man and the Sea resurrected the author, who only two years earlier had been crucified in the reviews. The novel was originally published in Life in late August 1952, selling 5,300,000 copies in two days. Scribner’s edition (September 8, 1952) met with praise, and many of the very commentators who had buried Hemingway in 1950 came to praise him, perhaps overly much. While fellow author William Faulkner echoed the response of the marketplace and the earliest reviewers in calling the work “[h]is best,” R. W. B. Lewis offered what has become a prophetic view: “I doubt if the book can bear the amount of critical weight already piled upon it” (Meyers 421–3).13 With Old Man, Hemingway had reached more readers Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Contemporary Reviews 63 than ever before, and this time, the Pulitzer was forthcoming in 1953 and the Nobel followed in 1954. Reviewers and the book-buying public had heaped accolades on Hemingway’s works of the 1920s, were generally dis- appointed with his offerings in the 1930s, voiced near universal support for For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, and near universal disdain for Across the River in 1950. With Old Man, Hemingway’s contemporary reception came to a close, echoing the promise that had twice before transfixed his public.

Notes 1. E. Hemingway, Foreword, in E. Vittorini, Conversations in Sicily, trans. A. Salierno Mason, new edn. (New York: New Directions, 1949), v. 2. Two anthologies trace contemporary reception: R. O. Stephens (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977); and J. Meyers (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1982). Overviews are included in J. Nagel (ed.), Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: Hall, 1995); S. Donaldson (ed.), New Essays on A Farewell to Arms (Cambridge University Press, 1990); and J. Flora, Reading Hemingway’s Men Without Women: Glossary and Commentary (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008). Documenting the relationship between author and publisher is R. W. Trogdon’s The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007). Subsequent references to all these works are included in the text. 3. W. B. Rideout, Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, 2 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), vol. 1, 406. Subsequent references are included in the text. 4. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 43. 5. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 123. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6. G. Stein, “He and They, Hemingway: A Portrait,” Ex Libris 1 (December 1923), 192. E. Hemingway, rev. Geography and Plays, ‘Recent Publications,’ Chicago Tribune (European edn.) (March 5, 1923), 2; G. Stein, rev. Three Stories and Ten Poems, ‘Recent Publications,’ Chicago Tribune (European edn.) (November 27, 1923), 4; G. Stein, E. Hemingway, rev. A Story Teller’s Story, Ex Libris 2 (March 1925), 176–7. 7. E. Wilson, “Emergence of Ernest Hemingway,” The Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 115–24; D. O. Stewart, excerpt from July 4, 1972 interview for Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1973 (Washington, DC: Microcard Editions, 1974) rpt. M. J. Bruccoli and R. W. Trogdon (eds.), Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series: American Expatriate Writers, 15 (Detroit: Gale, 1997), 198–9. 8. H. L. Mencken, “Quackery,” American Mercury 5 (August 1925), xxxviii. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

64 DeFazio

9. L. Morris, rev. The Torrents of Spring, New Republic 48 (September 15, 1926), 101. 10. Unsigned revs. The Sun Also Rises, Time (November 1, 1926), 48; and The Dial (January 1927), 73. 11. F. Butcher, rev. A Farewell to Arms, Chicago Daily Tribune (September 28, 1929), II; C. Fadiman, rev. A Farewell to Arms, Nation (October 30, 1929), 498; T. S. Eliot, “Commentary,” Criterion 12 (April 1933), 471; J. Dos Passos, rev. A Farewell to Arms, New Masses 5 (December 1, 1929), 16; F. M. Ford “Introduction” to A Farewell to Arms (New York: Modern Library, 1932), xvi. 12. J. D. Adams, “The New Novel by Hemingway,”New York Times Book Review (October 20, 1940), I. 13. W. Faulkner, rev. of The Old Man and the Sea, Shenandoah 3 (Autumn 1952), 55, rpt. L. W. Wagner, Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1987), 273. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 7 Photos and Portraits James Plath

Every summer in Key West, around the time of Ernest Hemingway’s July 21 birthday, grown men sporting beards and wearing heavy turtle- neck sweaters compete in the sweltering heat to win the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest at Sloppy Joe’s Bar – an event that draws media from around the world. More than anything, the odd competition is a testimony to the iconic place that Hemingway and his likeness still have in American pop culture, affirming that his celebrity is as much the result of his “Papa” persona as it is a life’s work that was good enough to earn him the Nobel Prize. As National Portrait Gallery director Alan Fern observes in his foreword to a book resulting from a 1999 exhibition of Hemingway photographs and portraits, “Most Americans know his name, even if they have never read a word he has written; many can call to mind his grizzled, bearded countenance photographed in late middle age, and they know of his fondness for beautiful women, revelry, bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing.”1 Hemingway sat for a number of professional photographers, but the photo taken by celebrity portraitist Yousuf Karsh in March 1957 sticks with people – the one featuring a full-bearded Hemingway in a cable- knit Christian Dior sweater that Mary Hemingway had bought in Paris and that highlighted his weathered, sun-tanned features and soulful eyes (Figure 7.1). In 1989, when the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) honored Hemingway with a stamp, the artist drew upon that famous Karsh photo but placed the author against a more colorful background of a bright orange and yellow African sky, with antelopes loping along behind him. Significantly, Hemingway was not depicted at his desk writing, and given the choice between releasing the stamp in Oak Park, Illinois, where the writer was born, or in conjunction with the Hemingway Days Festival, the USPS chose Key West, where the Hemingway lifestyle is lauded as much as his writing.

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66 Plath

Figure 7.1. Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Yousuf Karsh. 1957. Copyright: Yousuf Karsh. Used with the permission of the Estate of Yousuf Karsh.

The Karsh photo, which appeared in the December 1957 issue of the Atlantic, struck a chord with the public because it captured the multifac- eted persona Hemingway cultivated: the expatriate, the savvy traveler, the insider with all the information, the friend of movie stars, the war correspondent, the two-fisted drinker and brawler, the skilled big-game hunter, the record-setting saltwater angler, and the writer who, like his subjects, appeared to confront death in order to feel more alive. In January 1954, Hemingway’s persona took on even more power when newspapers ran a page one obituary after his charter plane crashed in Africa and he was thought dead. As it turned out, he and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, survived not one crash but two, and it led to Newsweek trumpeting, “You Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Photos and Portraits 67 can’t kill Papa.”2 Hemingway was larger than life, and the Karsh photo managed to confirm that for an admiring public. That the public held multiple images of Hemingway was evident as early as March 1934, when Vanity Fair featured a full-page caricature spread of paper dolls.3 The doll itself was of “Ernie, the Neanderthal Man” in leopard skin with club, clutching a dead rabbit – apparently informed by Max Eastman’s June 7, 1933 New Republic review of Death in the Afternoon, which accused Hemingway of “wearing false hair on his chest.”4 His outfit changes portrayed him as a suit-and-tie-wearing expatriate sitting by a café table stacked with wine bottles (“Ernie as the Lost Generation”), a striped-shirted fisherman in a tiny boat with six marlin weighing it down (“Ernie as Isaac Walton”), a wounded vet with a World War I helmet (“Ernie as the Unknown Soldier”), and a bullfighter wearing a matador’s costume with his left hand grabbing the bull by the horns and forcing him to his knees (“Ernie as Don José, the Toreador”). In considering the complicated relationship between Hemingway the writer and Hemingway the celebrity, John Raeburn concludes that much of Hemingway’s popularity was the result of his ability to successfully balance two competing personas: the literary man – normally thought to be an isolated introvert suffering in solitude for his art – and the live-life-to- the-fullest devotee revered by emerging men’s magazines like Playboy and Esquire. “Because he reconciled them, he was newsworthy; because he did so in such dramatic fashion . . . he was potentially heroic,” writes Raeburn.5 Like Mark Twain before him, Hemingway became the most celebrated writer of his time in part because he seemed to revel in every photo op, as attested by more than ten thousand photographs archived in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library and another two thousand housed at the Museo Ernest Hemingway in Cuba. The first photographs of Hemingway to capture the public’s imagination featured a handsome eighteen year old grinning from his hospital bed in Milan, Italy – posed snapshots taken by Red Cross ambulance driver Henry S. Villard while his young friend was recovering from wounds sustained on July 8, 1918 in the Piave district after a trench mortar exploded nearby. On September 7, 1918, Oak Leaves, Hemingway’s hometown paper, reported that the young lieutenant “has been hailed by the Italian press and people as the first American to be wounded in Italy.” It doesn’t mention that he was only a volunteer distributing chocolate and cigarettes to frontline troops for the Red Cross. A follow-up story on October 5, 1918 featured a photo of young Ernest lying in bed propped Spec SD1 Date 26-july

68 Plath on an elbow and apparently whistling casually while a headline blared, “Wounded 227 times; Ernest M. Hemingway Describes His Emotions at Supreme Moment.” A similar October 23 story in the Chicago Tribune, headlined “Oak Park Boy ‘Shot To Pieces’ Jokes About It,” quoted from a letter Hemingway had sent to his parents.6 Although young Ernest goes into detail about his treatment for the benefit of his doctor father, the pose of nonchalance he publicly adopted marks the beginning of a developing Hemingway persona – one that stands in sharp contrast to the psychological effect that war has on his alter ego, Nick Adams, in such stories as “A Way You’ll Never Be” and “Now I Lay Me.” “Ernest’s real life was fantastic,” Ernest’s brother Leicester Hemingway said, but “[h]e always wanted to be a little bit more mysterious, a little bit more honcho, a little bit more of an influence, a little bit more of the guy behind the scenes than he ever really was.”7 After those first internationally published photographs, the public would forever associate Hemingway with war. That image was reinforced from 1937–8, when photographers Robert Capa and Joris Ivens shadowed Hemingway in Madrid and with Loyalists in the field on the Teruel front of the Spanish Civil War, their photographs establishing his new pose as a wily veteran consulting with ranking officers or helping a recruit unjam his gun. One of Ivens’s shots was selected for the back cover of To Have and Have Not (1937). During World War II, Hemingway, sporting an enormous, bushy beard, was photographed eating breakfast, typing away in pajamas, recuperating from a car crash, and posturing in the boxing ring with gloves on – the latter a photo that ran in PM and on the wire.8 It was border- line propaganda; the message was clear: Look out, Hitler, Hemingway is here. Later photographs of Hemingway at the Siegfried Line showed him with Colonel Buck Lanham, visiting bunkers, and checking out a map in a jeep en route to “liberate” Paris . . . or rather, the Traveller’s Club and the bar at the Ritz Hotel. But the public didn’t know that. To them, the photos showed Hemingway at war again, fearless as ever, and in the thick of things as always. Though “wartime Ernie” was the initial facet of the persona to be established, it didn’t take long before Hemingway the expatriate came along. By 1924, when Hemingway’s first book, in our time, was published in an edition of 170 copies by Three Mountains Press, his image was already evolving. A woodcut print for that volume by fellow American in Paris Henry Strater, also published in Bookman magazine,9 showed a chiseled and mustached Hemingway looking older and more experienced than his years. This was how Strater and other expatriates saw Hemingway and Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Photos and Portraits 69 how they projected him to the world: a handsome, charismatic young man bursting with literary promise. By 1926, The Sun Also Rises was widely hailed as a quintessential record of the Lost Generation, with the dust jacket sketch featuring Hemingway in a suit looking distinguished, his steely eyes suggesting a critical viewpoint and complementing his strong jaw. Photographs from the period are consistent with this erudite shirt-and-tie image of Hemingway. On December 18, 1927, for example, the Boston Globe ran a photo of him in a suit as a companion to a review feature titled, “He Drank With Them, Played With Them, Wrote A Book About Them,” linking Hemingway’s life with his fiction, as reviewers from then on tended to do.10 During these years, Hemingway indulged a good many artist and photographer friends. In spring 1928, he sat for Helen Pierce Breaker, one of first wife Hadley Richardson’s bridesmaids who had come to Paris to start a photography business. Although his head was still freshly stitched from a March incident when a skylight had fallen on it, Hemingway opted to pose without a bandage. Wearing a sweater, shirt, and tie, he appeared as proud of his new scar as he was of his World War I wounds – a pattern that persisted throughout his life.11 The marketing people at Scribner’s were not of the same mind, however. They airbrushed the scar before using the photograph in an ad campaign announcing the publication of installments from A Farewell to Arms in Scribner’s Magazine. Minus the scar, Hemingway reminded more than a few people of actor Clark Gable – an image much more compatible with the wartime romance that Scribner’s was promoting. Another retouched Breaker photo of Hemingway ran in the September 1928 Vanity Fair and in the March 1929 Scribner’s Monthly, part of a publicity campaign that prompted Dorothy Parker to write, “Sometimes I think that the wide publication of that smiling photograph, the one with the slanted cap and the shirt flung open above the dark sweater, was perhaps a mistake,” because “[t]he effect upon women is such that they want to go right out and get him and bring him home, stuffed.”12 She implied the image was a distraction from the serious literary works that Hemingway was producing, and many reviewers agreed (Figure 7.2). After Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932 and photographs showed Hemingway with bulls and bullfighters, a number of critics assailed him for being self-indulgent. For the public, however, Hemingway the adventurer had already become such a ubiquitous presence that this persona had begun to encroach upon the one Hemingway had been fashioning for himself as a writer. In the early 1930s, magazines and newspapers Spec SD1 Date 26-july

70 Plath

Figure 7.2. Portrait of Ernest Hemingway wearing hat by Helen Pierce Breaker. Paris, France, 1928. Copyright unknown in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. began printing photos of him engaged in dangerous activities that dramatized his love of adventure, standing alongside big-game animals shot on safari or trophy fish taken in the waters off Key West, Cuba, and Bimini. As his brother Leicester writes, “The ‘Key West period’ [1928–40] for Ernest begins in the public mind with a picture of a bronzed giant fighting huge fish, then heading inshore for the roughest, toughest bar to celebrate the catch, possibly pausing somewhere to beat out a letter to Esquire, using words growled from one corner of his mouth.”13 In “Marlin Off the Moro,” Hemingway’s first “letter” for the inaugural issue ofEsquire , seventeen photographs showed Hemingway aboard Joe Russell’s thirty-two-foot boat, the Anita, stalking and fighting his billfish quarry.14 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Photos and Portraits 71 Waldo Peirce, whom Hemingway had met in Paris and who visited him in Key West, painted and sketched a number of portraits of the author, including one of Hemingway as “Kid Balzac,” which depicted him in the same shirt and with his hair combed in the same manner as Honoré de Balzac in a famous daguerreotype. It was an inside joke, because Hemingway thought of literature as a competition and often used boxing as a metaphor. As he told Lillian Ross in her controversial New Yorker profile, “I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal.”15 Hemingway liked Peirce’s portrait so much that he kept it his entire life, posing in front of it for a photographer years later at his home in Cuba – no doubt because he thought of himself as a fighter and wanted others to regard him as a fighter still. In 1937, when To Have and Have Not was published, Time magazine commissioned Peirce to paint a portrait of Hemingway for an October 18 cover story. Peirce drew inspiration from a photograph taken on a recent fishing trip, portraying him in a sailor’s striped shirt with deep-sea fishing rod and reel in hand, the rod bending and Hemingway concentrating on an unseen catch. For a public that already assumed a connection between Hemingway and Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms, Peirce’s painting suggested that the author was in some way connected to the gritty Harry Morgan of To Have and Have Not, who ran a fishing charter and smuggled on the side. The connection between Hemingway and his fiction was even more pointedly made in an unusual cradle-to-present photo spread that accompanied the Time article. Almost all the images were captioned so that readers could see the progressive links between the man and his characters. For example, the caption for a shot of a very young Hemingway holding trout and another hoisting a dead porcupine read, “just like Nick in In Our Time, at 14 Ernest Hemingway caught trout, at 16 shot a porcupine.”16 A photograph of a smiling, satisfied-looking Hemingway kneeling with two kudu skulls and one oryx appeared in Time and on the dust jacket for Green Hills of Africa (1935). Other photos were published in the serialized version of Green Hills in Scribner’s Magazine, while The Saturday Review of Literature – the first magazine to feature him on its cover (October 26, 1935) – showed a beaming Hemingway in a wide-brimmed hat crouching beside a massive, freshly killed greater kudu. To a public whose main exposure to Africa was through travelogues and the popular Tarzan the Ape Man movies that began in 1932, the images only enhanced Hemingway’s celebrity and association with exotic locations. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

72 Plath One of the most famous Hemingway photo shoots was Earl Theisen’s record of Hemingway’s second African safari, published in Look magazine in two installments.17 The requisite shots of Ernest and Mary Welsh Hemingway with their trophies were included, and one of them – a photo of Ernest with rifle and downed leopard – proved to be nearly as iconic as the Karsh photo because of the artful composition and the calm, almost beatific countenance of Hemingway. But the shot was also ironic because Mary and Ernest fired at the same time, and it wasn’t clear who downed the leopard.18 In another case of rising to the image, Ernest told Mary he would pose with the leopard now but shoot another. Other memorable photographs included a quiet moment in the tent with the Hemingways in pajamas with the author preparing to soak his feet, an older but still game Hemingway boxing with one of the safari crew, and a sequence in which Hemingway stalked then faced a charging rhino. Other photos showed time catching up to him, as when he stood tall, hiked up his pants, and sucked in his gut for Miss Mary. But he was still “Papa,” still robust enough to drive magazine sales. John Peale Bishop was among the first to observe that “the author of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises has been transformed into ‘the legendary Hemingway,’ a public figure whose personal fame equaled or even outstripped his literary renown.”19 As a bona fide celebrity, Hemingway was often featured in gossip and celebrity pages, photographed nearly as much with his wives and beautiful women as he was with trophy animals and fish. An April 4, 1934 New York Evening Journal story on the Hemingways and Katharine Hepburn’s return from Paris featured a large head shot of the actress and smaller mug shots of Ernest and Pauline. The subheading fed the myth of Hemingway the insider – “Star of Films Will Play Joan of Arc, Ernest Hemingway Reveals” – as did the way Hepburn played to reporters. “Ernest, what can I say that’s really witty?” she asked as they clustered around her. Meanwhile, a large photograph of Hemingway and Pauline looking every bit the socialites accompanied a July 1934 story in Vanity Fair that pronounced them “America’s Favorite Gypsy Couple,” unseating actor Douglas Fairbanks and his wife. In future years, Hemingway appeared in photos with such celebrities as Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, and Marlene Dietrich. Hemingway was not above using his own fame for personal gain. He promoted Ballantine Ale in a famous 1952 ad in Life magazine and was featured in ads for Parker Pens and Pan American Airways.20 As son Gregory revealed, Hemingway visited Sun Valley Resort in 1939, 1940, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Photos and Portraits 73 and 1941, and “Under [an] arrangement he had worked out with its owners, the Union Pacific, papa and his family would live in Sun Valley and the railroad could tell the literate world that he was there, and could take a reasonable number of pictures of the Hemingways at play. In return, everything was on the house.”21 Whether the author was conspicuously cleaning his guns, typing on the outdoor deck, or backpacking in the mountains in pursuit of his first North American big game, the photographer assigned by the resort to shadow Hemingway was Lloyd Arnold, who, with his wife Tillie, became part of Hemingway’s Idaho “family.” Arnold shot hundreds of photos, many of them picked up by magazines whose interest in Hemingway was piqued even more than usual when he started seeing correspondent Martha Gellhorn and later married her. They were photographed on the bed in their suite at the Sun Valley Resort Main Lodge, canoeing Silver Creek, trap shooting, playing tennis, and hunting birds. In one of the most famous photos, Hemingway, Gellhorn, John, Patrick, and Gregory walk down a dirt road cradling shotguns. Although Hemingway was growing thicker in the face and body, the photo reaf- firmed the charisma that made people want to do what Papa enjoyed. But perhaps in response to critics who felt that he was being promoted more as a celebrity than as a serious writer, Hemingway asked Arnold to take a photograph of him at his typewriter for the dust jacket of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Many have noticed, but Matthew J. Bruccoli said it best: “His fame was not accidentally acquired. Hemingway’s greatest character was Ernest Hemingway.” As Bruccoli explains, “He was a dedicated careerist who skillfully nurtured an heroic public image until the vainglorious role took over the man and it became necessary for him to live up to it.”22 That happened in the 1940s and especially the 1950s, when, as David M. Earle observes, “Hemingway’s image and presence were used again and again as a symbol of virile masculinity. It was Papa as pin-up.”23 The number of photos published during this period multiplied exponentially, with Hemingway’s writing published more frequently in popular and pulp magazines than in literate circles. Maybe that’s why the public saw a Hemingway who smiled less often for the camera, even though the rugged and shirtless Hemingway shown at the wheel of the Pilar and fighting marlin24 was still attractive enough that three years earlier a writer for the New York Post Weekend Magazine had gushed “he looked virile enough to make bobby-soxers swoon by the droves.”25 Soon, however, that virility waned. On the back cover of the embar- rassingly autobiographical Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), a Spec SD1 Date 26-july

74 Plath sad-looking Hemingway avoided looking at the camera while clutching his cat. Even when The Old Man and the Sea was first published in Life magazine on September 1, 1952 and sold more than five million copies within forty-eight hours, the public still saw a serious-looking and slightly somber, even vacant-looking Hemingway staring at them on the cover. This pattern continued with a three-part Life magazine account of “The Dangerous Summer,”26 a much-ballyhooed contest between Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín that Hemingway followed as the matadors fought in different bullrings across Spain in 1959. The white-bearded Papa, who smiled politely on the front cover, clearly favored the younger Ordóñez, perhaps because he was the son of the bullfighter whom Hemingway used as the model for Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises. Some of the most striking shots show Hemingway with Ordóñez leaning on the barrera to watch Dominguín perform, while in another photo both are shirtless, the paunch making Hemingway’s face look even sadder. Hemingway appeared frail in several photos taken of him and Fidel Castro on May 15, 1960 on the occasion of a fishing tournament named in his honor. The two icons, recognizable for their beards, stood side by side, with Castro’s black mane a sharp contrast to Hemingway’s scraggly white hair, a band-aid on the author’s hand accentuating his fragility, and liver spots underscoring his advanced age. The final professional-quality shots of Hemingway, taken by John Bryson in Idaho, depict a plaid-shirted Papa looking older than his years, clearly showing the effects of those two plane crashes in Africa and the Mayo Clinic electroshock treatments. A sad-eyed Papa was shown in close-up with Mary, who was helping him answer correspondence. This was the last photo shoot before Hemingway killed himself on July 2, 1961. But for a public that admired both Hemingway the writer and Hemingway the adventurer, a public that recalled a kaleidoscope of virile images spanning his forty-plus years of celebrity, it’s no surprise that the image it preferred to remember him by was the Karsh photo, which captured him at a time when he was still 100 percent Papa.

Notes 1. F. Ross, Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), vii. 2. “Only His Heroes Die,” Newsweek 43 (February 1, 1954), 19. 3. Vanity Fair 42 (March 1934), 29. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Photos and Portraits 75

4. M. Eastman, “Bull in the Afternoon,” New Republic 75 (June 7, 1933), 94–7; 96. 5. J. Raeburn, Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 26. 6. All three newspaper articles are from a scrapbook kept by Hemingway’s grandparents, housed at the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library in Boston. 7. Quoted in D. Brian, The True Gen (New York: Dell, 1988), 22. 8. PM (May 21, 1944), 7. 9. Bookman 65 (April 1927), 235. 10. J. H. Smyth, “He Drank With Them, Played With Them, Wrote A Book About Them,” Boston Globe (December 18, 1927), Features section, 3. 11. Included in M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 14. 12. D. Parker, “The Artist’s Reward,” The New Yorker 5 (November 30, 1929), 28–9. 13. L. Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 1996), 105. 14. E. Hemingway, “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter,” Esquire 1.1 (1933), 8, 39, 97. 15. L. Ross, Portrait of Hemingway (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 35. 16. Time 30 (October 18, 1937), 80–1. 17. E. Hemingway, “Safari,” Look 18 (January 26, 1954), 19–34; E. Hemingway, “The Christmas Gift,” Look 18 (April 20, 1954), 79–89. 18. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 268. 19. J. P. Bishop, “Homage to Hemingway,” New Republic 89 (November 11, 1936), 40. 20. Ballantine Ale ad, Life 33 (September 8, 1952), 56–7; Parker Pen ad, Life 24 (January 26, 1948), inside cover; Pan American Airways ad, Holiday 19 (February 1956), 60–1. 21. G. Hemingway, Papa: A Personal Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 39. 22. M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), x. 23. D. M. Earle, All Man! Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 61. 24. E. Hemingway, “The Great Blue River,” Holiday 6 (July 1949), 60–2. 25. M. Harrington, “They Call Him Papa,” New York Post Weekend Magazine (December 28, 1946), 3. 26. E. Hemingway, “The Dangerous Summer,” Life 49 (September 5, 1960), 78–109; “The Pride of the Devil,” Life 49 (September 12, 1960), 60–82; “An Appointment with Disaster,” Life 49 (September 19, 1960), 74–96. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 8 Cinema and Adaptations Jill Jividen

Despite a few publicity photos – Hemingway duck hunting with Gary Cooper out West, a shipboard shot of him arm-in-arm with Marlene Dietrich, a glimpse of him laughing with Ingrid Bergman – it is generally forgettable that Ernest Hemingway’s career coincided with the golden age of Hollywood. In its heyday, the late 1920s to the 1950s, Hollywood was marked by money, moguls, innovation, stars, and glamour. Ushered in by the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), the start of Hollywood’s golden era preceded Hemingway’s first critical and commercial success, A Farewell to Arms, by only two years. The 1930s (Hemingway’s most productive decade) through 1945 saw the release of more than seventy-five hundred feature films, and, at the apex of cinema’s popularity, more than eighty million viewers took in at least one film a week.1 Even highbrows could not resist the juggernaut that was Hollywood. The 1920s saw esteemed publishers thinking of manuscripts in terms of Hollywood salability, and during the Depression in the 1930s, major movie studios were a source of steady money to proven writers for new screenplays and scenarios. Hollywood was eager to harness anything with built-in name recognition, and Hemingway’s carefully crafted persona made him a desirable brand name. However, while the two cultural phenomena – the writer that changed American literature and the industry that changed American entertainment and celebrity – were synchronous, they were largely disparate due to Hemingway’s self-imposed separation from the business. He claimed to deplore the filmic adaptations of his work, and he disparaged fellow writers who worked for studios, but the fiscal benefits of his tangential Hollywood association were substantial. During Hollywood’s golden age, the “Big Five” studios dominated: Warner Bros., MGM, Paramount, RKO Radio, and Twentieth Century Fox. These studios were vertically integrated outfits, meaning that they controlled production, marketing, distribution, and exhibition of their movies. Universal, Columbia, and United Artists studios rounded out 76 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cinema and Adaptations 77 the eight conglomerates that collectively produced sixty percent of all American films in this period.2 They were captained by Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Darryl Zanuck, and Irving Thalberg, who became legends in the industry. Studios were recognized for their singular styles, genres, and/or talent. Under the star system, actors were under contract to a single studio (though, as “properties,” they were often loaned out to the competition), and MGM boasted the largest number of recognizable faces – “More stars than there are in heaven” – including Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jimmy Stewart. Paramount enjoyed its own formidable star stable (Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, and Cary Grant), as well as comedic successes (Mae West and the Marx Brothers), and owned the most theaters nationwide. Warner Bros. boasted more character actors (think Cagney and Bogart) than glamorati and produced successful films in almost every genre, but it was appreciated most for its realistic gangster, Western, and war films. Some studios were noted for their brilliant directors, like Columbia’s Frank Capra or Fox’s John Ford, some for their inimitable offerings, like RKO’s Astaire-Rogers musicals or Universal’s horror films. Every major studio produced films heralded today as classics, but MGM dominated the Depression era, maintaining a profit throughout and winding up the decade with two Technicolor masterpieces, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939). Throughout Hollywood’s history, but especially during the first half of the twentieth century, the products of its studios offered both escape from and reflection of politics and culture. In the 1930s, musicals abounded, exploiting new sound technology and offering fanciful diversion from the dark days of the Depression. Numerous gangster films echoed the proliferation of organized crime. Screwball comedies provided laughs, Westerns and swashbucklers provided thrills, the Tarzan movies and King Kong (1933) delivered exotic locales. At the same time, the Hays Office, driven by the Catholic Church and charged with keeping Hollywood moral, became a thorn in the sides of studios with its conservative Production Code – a set of mandates that limited depictions of sex, violence, and obscenity. Ignoring the code risked fines or suppression; Rhett Butler’s famous “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” reportedly cost Selznick $5,000. The loss of foreign markets in the late ’30s and early ’40s (due to war in Europe) caused initial concern among studios, but the industry flourished when the United States entered the conflict in 1941. Limited by rationing, Americans flocked to the movies, where newsreels updated them on the war’s progress and patriotic films bolstered their spirits. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

78 Jividen While Hollywood specialized in escapism for patrons, its influence was inescapable. Even serious writers could not ignore its pervasiveness; on the contrary, many embraced it, cashing in on the easy money. These included William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley, among many others. Writers were often paid a generous sum – $1,500 to $3,000 per week, in some cases – regardless of their success at scenario and script writing. It was a formidable salary during this time, more money than magazines offered for short stories and more than the royalties from novels that were critical achievements but commercial disappointments. Hemingway was often publicly disdainful of these contemporaries. When asked in a 1947 interview what he thought had been the effect of big money (from Hollywood, radio, and popular magazines) on literature, he replied pith- ily, “Most whores usually find their vocations.”3 However, Hemingway was known to enjoy movies generally, even if he did not approve of the adaptations of his own work or of proven writers lending their talents to lowbrow storytelling. Indeed, despite his criticisms of the genre, Hemingway was undoubtedly influenced by the technology and experience of film. A number of critics have theorized on how his narrative technique is cinematic in style: how he zooms in and pans out of scenes; how he uses multiple points of view; how his dialogue resonates in and from film noir. Leonard Leff likens one passage in “Soldier’s Home” to D. W. Griffith’s skilled use of juxtaposition.4 Zoe Trodd writes about Hemingway’s “camera eye,” an aesthetic that imitates film by getting at a scene through a multifocal approach; short sentences, “written in a staccato rhythm, without subor- dination . . . achieve stasis through structure,” she explains. “Events pile up and the result is a sense of eyewitness.”5 She also points to his “cutting technique,” like that used in film editing; early in The Sun Also Rises, for instance, readers must use imagination to interpret the time lapse between Brett Ashley’s two lines: “Send [the Count] for the champagne. He loves to go for champagne.” Then later: “Do you feel better, darling? Is the head any better?” SAR( 62) Hemingway’s prose has also been described as “athletic” and as “having movement,” and one scene from In Our Time intentionally and adroitly connects this embodiment of tempo to moving pictures: There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cinema and Adaptations 79 commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.IOT ( 131) Clearly, Hemingway’s familiarity with the movies played a part in the development of his writing style and form. For all his contempt for writers turned Hollywood sellouts, however, Hemingway harbored his own Hollywood ambitions. Letters to lawyer Maurice Speiser in the 1930s and 1940s express a hearty desire to foray into film. Soon after he discovered deep-sea fishing off the coast of Cuba in 1932, Hemingway prattled to Speiser about how he wanted to turn the experience into the “goddamnedest big fish and fish catching picture ever made” – better than what the “illustrious” Zane Grey had done in Tahiti. He cautioned Speiser not to say a word to anyone, then detailed, in addition, how he wanted to make a bullfight picture in Spain. It was the first time, he wrote, that he had ever been interested in the “goddamned movies.”6 Neither of these proposals came to pass, but as Hemingway’s fame increased, Hollywood courted him more persistently, attempting to attach his name to an original screenplay or project. Various reasons kept Hemingway from venturing into moviemaking, including the outbreak of war, which prevented him from going to Africa with Howard Hawks and John “Shipwreck” Kelly for a “Francis Macomber” adaptation; the need to finish his in-progress novel,For Whom the Bell Tolls; and concerns about making too much money in a year when he had already set aside his estimated income tax payments. Only once – when the government wanted him to write scripts for propagandistic films during World War II – did Hemingway cite a compromise of artistic integrity as a reason to decline. His actual contributions to movies were limited to Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth (1937), a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway helped film and for which he wrote and recorded narration; and he consulted on the filming ofThe Old Man and the Sea (1958), helping crews get footage of jumping marlins. After Hollywood began buying the rights to his fiction and adapting it for screen without his input, Hemingway grew increasingly disillusioned with the industry. He jested that the best way for a writer to deal with Hollywood was to approach the California state line, throw one’s work to the producers, wait for them to throw back the money, then turn around and drive back the way one came. He saw Hollywood primarily as a cash cow and a force that was potentially damaging to his reputation. In Hemingway and Film, Gene D. Phillips claims that since Hemingway tended “to dismiss virtually every film ever made from his work with a derogatory quip – whether he had seen all of it or not – one suspects that Spec SD1 Date 26-july

80 Jividen he somehow felt required to knock almost any movie adaptation of his work in order to preserve his literary status.” That move was unnecessary, Phillips posits, because Hemingway’s literary reputation remained unaf- fected by any film made from his fiction.7 Audiences could distinguish the work of the writer from the work of Hollywood. Predictably, Hemingway’s first experiences with the business promptly followed his first literary successes. After publishing The Sun Also Rises (1926), his rise to fame was fairly swift, and Hollywood liked to capitalize on anything of interest to a large audience. Hemingway’s first brush with the industry left a bad taste in his mouth, however. In 1930, Fox Studios appropriated the title of his short story collection, Men Without Women, for a submarine movie; the tactic took advantage of name recognition, trying to boost audience interest by creating an association with the writer. Titles cannot be copyrighted, but both Hemingway and his editor, Max Perkins, were dismayed by the studio’s decision. They accepted a courtesy payment of $500. A year later, Hemingway contemplated suing when rumors intimated that Fox was going to pull the same trick – this time stealing the title The Sun Also Rises for a bullfighting picture based on a John Monk Saunders novel (ultimately released as The Last Flight [1931]). Hemingway wrote to Perkins that he wanted to stop everyone from “chizelling” [sic] off his work – in other words, borrowing from Hemingway without paying Hemingway.8 He urged Perkins to sell the rights to the novel before it was too late to realize any profits of his own. Perkins had, in fact, been trying to sell Sun to Hollywood since its publication, but interested studios feared handling significant subjects of the book – namely, promiscuity and impotence. As a fledgling writer, Hemingway wanted and needed the exposure; even later, he often wavered between his desires for critical acclaim and for a large audience – two measures of success that are frequently incompatible – but the money and fame that came with movies were quantifiable marks of achievement. A Sun sale was made imminent by both the box office success of A Farewell to Arms and Hemingway’s escalating popularity, and, after long negotiations, RKO finally bought the movie rights in 1932 for $15,000 (Leff 157). Even after the purchase, the studio remained tentative about how to slip the story past the Hays Office. As Hemingway’s status mounted, the studio looked repeatedly at producing Sun, and it went on (and off) the production schedule a number of times throughout the 1930s (Leff 171–2). The property came under the control of Howard Hawks, who later sold it to Darryl Zanuck for $200,000; Zanuck finally produced it in 1957 (Phillips 123). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cinema and Adaptations 81 The adaptation is fairly true to the novel, although there are some notable departures, including added flashbacks to the war. Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn turned in strong performances as Brett Ashley and Mike Campbell, and Phillips calls it the most “underrated” of the Hemingway movies (133). Hemingway had approved the script, adapted by Zanuck, Peter Viertel, and director Henry King, although he was publicly conde- scending; “Any picture in which Errol Flynn is the best actor is its own worst enemy,” he purportedly quipped.9 The early sale and success of Farewell, the first Hemingway work to be turned to celluloid, was integral to subsequent Hemingway movies. The novel was Hemingway’s first unequivocal literary and commercial triumph, and the rights were sold soon after publication in 1929. It garnered an impressive $80,000 from Paramount, but after paying agents and others, Hemingway took home less than a third of that sum. Hollywood tended to manufacture happy endings in order to please audiences, but the scriptwriter, Benjamin Glazer, faithfully retained the tragic ending of Hemingway’s story. Director Frank Borzage, on the other hand, under pressure from the studio, filmed an alternate ending, in which Catherine survives her ordeal; theaters could order either version of the film (although the majority of them chose the one with the original ending in which Catherine dies). While Hemingway praised Glazer for holding out against the “Happy Ending bastards,”10 he was dismayed by Paramount’s concession to romantic conventions; when the studio wanted to hold a premiere in Piggott, Arkansas, where Hemingway was visiting his in-laws, he refused to attend.11 Starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, the movie was a cinematic success nonetheless – the highest grossing film of its year. It earned a nod for “Best Picture” and awards for “Cinematography” and “Sound Recording” (Phillips 26). A quarter century later, David O. Selznick envisioned a different Farewell – this one as a World War I epic on the scale of his earlier Civil War saga, Gone with the Wind. This 1957 remake was more faithful to the novel in some aspects, such as depicting the positive influence of the chaplain on Frederic Henry and the mishandling of the Italian retreat by officers. But the spectacular battle scenes in Selznick’s version risk overshadowing the intimacy of the love story, and the main players, Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones, are miscast in the roles of Henry and Catherine (Jones, married to Selznick, was much too old at thirty-eight to play a convincing twenty-four-year-old Catherine). John Huston was scheduled to direct, but Selznick’s penchant for micromanagement drove him off; Charles Vidor, who was easier for the producer to browbeat (but Spec SD1 Date 26-july

82 Jividen who lacked Huston’s talent), took over the project. The last Selznick film ever made, the movie was critically lambasted upon its release and made only a small profit. By the end of the 1930s, Hemingway was one of the most recognized figures in America, which contributed to his quick sale of the movie rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 – just three days after the novel hit shelves. He earned six figures, plus ten cents for every book sold (up to half a million), for a total of $150,000. It was the largest sum paid for movie rights to date, and triple the unprecedented figure of $50,000 that Margaret Mitchell had earned for Gone with the Wind four years earlier. Sam Wood directed the Paramount production, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman in the lead roles. The love affair was given emphasis over the politics of the story, considering that Franco had won the Spanish Civil War; even so, rumors emerged that the Catholic leagues, which had supported Franco and were still a driving influence in Hollywood, were trying either to suppress the film or eliminate its antifascist sentiments. Hemingway threatened to protest the movie himself if concessions were made to appease the dictator, and he refused to endorse the film without first seeing it. Another complication stemmed from the fact that so much of the novel is told from the subjective view of Robert Jordan; the significance of his internal monologues, especially the last one as he faces the encroaching army, is lost in the film. But the effort was largely successful. The movie was a box office hit, one of the highest grossing films for 1943, and nominated for nine Academy Awards, earning the statuette for Best Supporting Actress, Katina Paxinou as Pilar. Hemingway ultimately praised the performances by Cooper and Bergman, but denounced the portrayal of the Spanish peasants, whose dress had been caricatured and whose survival had been romanticized. To Have and Have Not (1937) spawned three film adaptations in Hemingway’s lifetime. Initially, agents passed on the story due to its violent, naturalistic aspects. The movie rights did not sell until 1939 when Hemingway, in need of money, let the property go to Howard Hughes for $10,000; just three years later, Hughes sold the rights to Howard Hawks for $92,000. The story’s development required a team of screenwriters, including William Faulkner, and underwent numerous changes until the result looked little like the original narrative. Focused on the first part of the novel, which involved smuggling, the setting changed from Cuba to Martinique; Harry Morgan moves Free French fighters instead of Cuban refugees; the love story became sexier. Humphrey Bogart’s rumrunner seems a reprisal of his character Rick from the 1941 mega-hit, Casablanca; Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cinema and Adaptations 83 he evolves from the man with no “strings attached” to the Hemingway (and Hawksian) hero whose loyalty to duty and companions is sacred. The big payoff to the 1944 film is the legendary chemistry between Bogart and newcomer Lauren Bacall. Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca, justified a 1950 version ofTo Have and Have Not by arguing that there was enough material left in the novel to make a movie that was less Casablanca and more Hemingway. Curtiz set The Breaking Point in a small California town, where Morgan smuggles Chinese aliens and is forced to loan his boat to mobsters for a getaway. Phillips calls it “one of the more faithful transcriptions of a Hemingway book to film” (62). A 1958 version, The Gun Runners, updated to take advantage of events in Cuba, was less successful. Directed by Don Siegel, the movie suffered from weak writing and acting and was a curious compilation of elements from the novel and the two previous adaptations. The Old Man and the Sea (1951) was the only fiction turned film that Hemingway collaborated on extensively; according to all reports, he regretted it thoroughly. He sold the screen rights to the novella in 1953 for $150,000 and yielded another $75,000 to act as a technical advisor (Phillips 140). Leland Hayward, Hemingway’s sometime agent, produced; Peter Viertel worked closely with Hemingway on the screenplay. Plagued with problems, including the difficulties of filming a skiff on choppy Gulf seas and of capturing footage of leaping marlins, the movie quickly exceeded its $2 million budget. Crews were sent to multiple locations to get the necessary fishing footage, and the resulting picture, not released until 1958, is a fusion of film sloppily pasted together. Even after all the money spent transporting crews for on-location shoots, the majority of the footage used in the film was shot in the studio tank. Nearly doubling its budget, the movie was a financial catastrophe, but it was reviewed favorably and Spencer Tracy was nominated for an Oscar. Still, Hemingway remained peeved by Tracy’s refusal to lose weight – his obviously healthy stature was contrary to the gaunt Santiago – and by the necessity of a fake fish to film central scenes. Several of Hemingway’s short stories also found their way to Hollywood during his career. The Killers (1946) was reputedly one of the only adaptations of his work that Hemingway appreciated. Starring Burt Lancaster as the fallen code hero, Ole Andreson, and inserting Ava Gardner as femme fatale, the film noir remained faithful to the short story through its opening, as Andreson resignedly faces death as penance for cavorting with gangsters. The rest of the film, the screenplay for which was written by (but not credited to) John Huston, is told through an invented Spec SD1 Date 26-july

84 Jividen series of flashbacks that explains Andreson’s assassination. Another story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” immediately piqued the interest of producers after its 1936 publication in Esquire, and Hemingway had hoped to consult on a Howard Hawks-directed project on location in Africa. Unfortunately, the director and his financial backer, “Shipwreck” Kelly, reneged on a verbal agreement when the outbreak of war made the African trip impossible. Almost a decade later, Hemingway made fivefold the sum Kelly had offered when he sold the story’s rights for $75,000. Although it was a box office flop, The Macomber Affair (1947), starring Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett, and Robert Preston, who all turned in excellent performances, was largely faithful to Hemingway’s narrative. Meanwhile, the short story “My Old Man” appeared as Under My Skin in 1950. Screenwriter Casey Robinson retooled and expanded the original work, with the second half departing significantly from the story and missing the point of it by sparing the boy from disillusionment. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was another $75,000 windfall for Hemingway, but the screenwriter (Robinson again) borrowed liberally from other Hemingway works, including Farewell and Sun, to fill out the stream-of-consciousness reveries of the main character; Hemingway was chafed by the pirated material, which Fox had not paid for. Again starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, the film was praised for its acting, its use of flashback to depict Harry’s memories, and the visual symbolism fashioned by director Henry King. Twelve Hemingway adaptations were filmed during his lifetime, but Hollywood’s interest in Hemingway did not wane after his death in 1961. With the writer’s approval, A. E. Hotchner worked up a screenplay that incorporated ten of Hemingway’s short stories into a kind of Nick Adams epic; Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962) capitalized on the still-fresh news of his suicide and the personality that lived on. The last five decades have seen made-for-television programs, loose biopics, and adaptations of posthumously published work, as recently as 2008’s The Garden of Eden (poorly received at its 2010 U.S. release). But while Hollywood has outlived Hemingway, his worries about reputation were for naught; the movie industry has produced a visual legacy of a writer’s works, but none of Hollywood’s attempts to translate the writer to film has transcended the literature itself.

Notes 1. “The Golden Age of Hollywood: 1930s–1940s,” School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, December 11, 2003, www.ils. unc.edu/dpr/path/goldenhollywood. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

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2. R. B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929–1945 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 51. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. “Hemingway in the Afternoon,” Time 50 (August 4, 1947), 80; quoted in M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 94. 4. L. J. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 12. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. Z. Trodd, “Hemingway’s Camera Eye: The Problem of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form,” The Hemingway Review 26.2 (2007), 7–21; 14–15. 6. E. Hemingway, letter to M. Speiser, May 13, 1932, The Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. 7. G. D. Phillips, Hemingway and Film (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980), 131. Subsequent references are included in the text. 8. E. Hemingway, letter to M. Speiser, August 31, 1931, Speiser and Easterling-Hallman Foundation Collection (box 7, file 197), Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. 9. A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 33. 10. E. Hemingway, letter to M. Speiser, October 1932, Speiser and Easterling-Hallman Foundation Collection (box 7, file 206), Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. 11. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 104. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 9 Magazines David M. Earle

Hemingway’s first novella, The Torrents of Spring (1926), is often disregarded by scholars as simply a satire of Sherwood Anderson, quickly written to break a publishing contract. But despite its Michigan setting, the novella is rich with allusions to Hemingway’s Parisian scene of authors and artists. Mostly though, it is rich with allusions to magazines. Scripps O’Neil, the protagonist, introduces himself as a writer: “I had a story in the Post and two in the Dial. Mencken’s trying to get ahold [sic] of me. I’m too wise for that sort of thing” (TOS 18). Even this relatively throw-away allusion is loaded with insight into the early twentieth-century American publishing scene and the cultural politics behind it. By pairing The Saturday Evening Post, the epitome of middle-class mass culture, with The Dial, one of the most established literary (or little) magazines, Hemingway is making blatant the economics of writing: the Post was Grub Street’s main stage, and publishing there guaranteed that an author had “made it”; publishing in The Dial established an author’s artistic rather than commercial reputation. Furthermore, Scripps’s disavowal of Mencken, the most vocal advocate for American regionalism, echoes Hemingway’s own allegiance to the expatriate modernism of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. This is not the only example of magazines as loaded cultural referents in Torrents. For such a slim volume, references to periodicals are extremely numerous, and include The Forum, Scribner’s, The Mentor, The Literary Digest, The Bookman, The Saturday Review of Literature, New York Times’s “literary section,” the Manchester Guardian, Harper’s, The Century, The London Mercury, and The American Mercury. For Hemingway, as for many other literary modernists, magazines didn’t just give insight into the literary scene, they were the literary scene; by alluding to these magazines, Hemingway illustrates his own position as central to au courant literary fashion.

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Magazines 87

The Rise of the Modern Magazine The first half of the twentieth century witnessed, if not the rise of, at least the solidification of American mass culture – a mediated American identity based upon the shared narratives and texts of the nation, packaged and disseminated through industrialized production. The foremost dis- seminator of this identity, at least until the advent of film and radio, was the popular magazine. Magazines work within culture differently than other forms of media and text; they are more immediate and multivocal than books, and they are less objective and more socially reflexive than newspapers. The termmagazine itself originally referred to a storage house for goods and, in the abstract, a repository for ideas. The evolution of this term’s application to the print form is obvious when considering the range of topics, ideas, and goods sold in modern magazines (fiction, reviews, op-eds, advertisements, profiles, news and journalism, etc.) and the range of suppliers who produce or influence a magazine (editors, authors, adver- tisers, readers, copy editors, publishers, etc.). Multitextual elements are collected under a single title and style, constituting a unified identity (e.g., the distinct personalities of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker). This multiplicity of voices gathered into one rich text parallels how, on a grand scale, the diversity of popular magazines that arose in conjunction with industrialized America embodied the nation’s own emergent modern identity. To understand the popular culture that influenced Hemingway and that he wanted to contribute to as a writer, we must understand “magazine culture” as the first American mass media and the birthplace of American mass culture.1 Turn-of-the-century magazines were dense loaves of texts to be savored and returned to again and again over the month. They often ran to 160 pages of usually double-columned print, with another sixty pages or more of advertising. They featured serialized novels, short stories, recurrent authors, columnists, and departments. They garnered a faithful readership that forged a distinct relationship with the magazine. Furthermore, magazines provided cultural touchstones and shared narratives that helped America navigate the traumas of industrialization and urbanization. This is best illustrated in muckraking journalism, sparked by Ida Tarbell’s exposé on Standard Oil in McClure’s, which directly influenced the reform of corporate corruption and industrial standards. Similarly, magazines helped establish modern consumer culture through their designation of fashion, gender dynamics, and class aspirations; for Spec SD1 Date 26-july

88 Earle example, automobile companies used advertising in women’s magazines in the late 1910s and 1920s to break into a new market and, in doing so, tied into and helped create the flapper’s independence. In other words, magazines through their very prevalence as the first mass media were formative in developing modern American identity. By the 1910s, magazine production averaged four magazines per household. By 1950, this number would jump to four magazines per person in the United States.2 This proliferation of magazines started in the last decade of the 1800s when entrepreneurs such as S. S. McClure and Frank Munsey began publishing affordable magazines that appealed to a great swath of the population and in turn created American mass readership. American publishers had produced magazines in America since Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine in 1741, but until the mid-nineteenth century, they were usually short-lived, of specialized interest, and expensive; later in the century, they were the slim story weeklies and dime novels of the working class. Sparked by changes in the postal codes and the rise of advertising culture, publishers like McClure and Munsey took advantage of new print and communication technology, creating new systems of distribution in order to reach the untapped readership of the emergent middle class. For example, the June 1883 Century included twice as many articles as fiction and twenty-four pages of ads. In comparison, the March 1899 McClure’s featured drastically more fiction and 144 pages of ads. This preponderance of fiction and ads is indicative of the formation of an American mass culture based upon consumer identity (i.e., culture as something bought and sold). This formation was the result of and resulted in a magazine revolution − the creation of hundreds of magazines and hundreds of thousands more readers. Magazines like Harper’s and Century were geared more for high society than general readership, and their circulations of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand were considered highly successful, but by the end of the century, Munsey’s and McClure’s circulation was three times that of Harper’s and Scribner’s. Munsey’s own estimate was that in only a few years after he launched the ten-cent magazine, his buying public jumped from two hundred fifty thousand to seven hundred fifty thousand, and this estimate could be low given the circulatory nature of magazines, that is, how they are passed around and often have numerous readers (Peterson 13). But what is unquestionable is that the craft of fiction changed along with the magazines. The new magazines brought not only much more fiction to the general public, but new kinds of fiction as well. The magazine revolution brought about the rise of all- fiction magazines and the evolution of genre fiction. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Magazines 89

The R ise of Genr e a nd Hemingway as a Popular Author By the early 1910s, there were dozens of magazines in the all-fiction for- mat patterned after Munsey’s successful Argosy (1896), the first wood-pulp paper magazine. These magazines, or “pulps,” used inexpensive wood-pulp paper since Munsey considered the story worth more than the paper it is printed on. In the first decade or so of the twentieth century, dozens of fiction magazines arose that often featured genre fiction; these eventually evolved into the pulps, such as The Black Cat (1895), Adventure (1910), All-Story (1905), The Cavalier (1908), Blue Book (1907), and Romance (1914). Even popular and established magazines such as Short Story (1890), Ainslee’s (1898), Everybody’s (1899), and Popular (1903) changed their for- mat to wood pulp in order to compete in the expanded magazine market. The fiction of these magazines was a distinct departure from the work of authors such as William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, or Henry James. Munsey stated early on, “We want stories. That’s what we mean – stories, not dialect sketches, washed out studies of effete human nature, not tales of sickly sentimentality, not ‘pretty’ writing. . . . We do want fiction in which there is a story, a force, a tale that means something – in short a story” (quoted in Peterson 15). Not only does this comment seem in direct reaction against the authors whose stories filled the pages of magazines like Century just a few short years before, but it also aptly describes Hemingway’s hard style and resistance to sentimentality, for the type of fiction found in many of Munsey’s magazines and their imitators was the reading material of Hemingway’s boyhood. For example, in 1912, Munsey’s All-Story Magazine, eventually subsumed into Argosy, featured Tarzan of the Apes written by another Oak Park resident, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan is indicative of the type of boy’s fiction that rose to popularity in the wood-pulp magazines: full of adventure, exotic locales, and a physical culture ethos. Indeed, in a letter to a boyhood friend dated February 3, 1919, written during the author’s early attempts at professional writing, Hemingway quipped that Burroughs was urging him to write a book (Letters I 168–9).3 Whether this was true or not, examining the subject matter of much of Hemingway’s early fiction through the all-fiction magazines offers a context for his development other than modernism. Hemingway’s fiction is in many ways closer toAdventure and All-Story than to the aesthetic sensibilities of Pound and T. S. Eliot. Biographers have discussed early literary influences on Hemingway, citing most often Ring Lardner, Theodore Roosevelt, and (less often) Spec SD1 Date 26-july

90 Earle adventure writer Stewart Edward White, whose stories of the Northwest influenced Hemingway’s juvenilia. These single-author influences are -eas ily established and undeniable, but critics have cherry-picked them without considering how they were disseminated. The nonfiction stories of these authors appeared serially in magazines that also included emerging genres of fiction: during Hemingway’s boyhood, Roosevelt’s writing appeared not only in Scribner’s and National Geographic, but also in McClure’s and Top-Notch Magazine alongside the fiction of genre writers such as Burroughs and White. It stands to reason that if these authors influenced Hemingway, then so did the stories, genres, and venues that surrounded them. Over the course of the 1910s, and during Hemingway’s formative years, modern genres of fiction grew to maturity on the newsstands. McClure’s and even Scribner’s were influenced by their success. The fiction in magazines such as Railroad Man’s Magazine (1906), Detective Story (1915), and Adventure were the progenitors of the pragmatic, albeit popular, styles of the 1920s pulps, such as the hardboiled school of Black Mask (1920) – rich with slang, action, and terse dialogue. Formulaic melodrama was mod- ernized into spicy romances that questioned Victorian morality for the modern girl in magazines such as Snappy Stories (1912), Saucy Stories (1916), and Brief Stories (1921). Even the more conservative romance was updated in the romance pulps, such as Street and Smith’s Love Story Magazine (1921), which outsold any other genre of pulp magazine. The cultural distinctions we now impose between the all-fiction wood-pulp magazines such as Black Mask or Argosy and general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post or even a literary magazine like Scribner’s were barely in place, not nearly as stringent in the 1910s and early 1920s as they are now. At the time, most magazines, including Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post, tried to compete in the expanding magazine market by including more genre fiction, as did publishers such as Scribner’s. Willard Huntington Wright, better known as mystery writer S. S. Van Dine, was one of Scribner’s most popular authors through the latter 1920s, and the great interest in his work helped the publishing firm weather the Depression. Wright published in All-Story before taking over editorship of The Smart Set in 1913. Fierce competition among the all-fiction magazines gave rise to increasingly specialized genre magazines such as Adventure and Detective Story, which appealed to market niches. By the 1920s, these subject-specific magazines burgeoned into the huge pulp magazine market. By the end of the decade, the pulp-paper readership was an estimated twenty million. From his earliest stories for his school paper to his first serious attempts to break into the magazine market in the years flanking his war experience, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Magazines 91 Hemingway attempted to perfect the popular story formula. His topics and settings are undeniably the stuff of the early genre fiction magazines that composed the general fiction market. Boxing, gambling, mercenaries, trappers, hunters, and the underworld were grist for the pulp mill, as they were for Hemingway in stories like “The Judgment of Manitou,” “A Matter of Colour,” and “Sepi Jingan,” all published in Hemingway’s high-school magazines, Tabula and Trapeze; the influence of early genre fiction can also be seen in “The Mercenaries,” “The Woppian Way,” “The Visiting Team,” “Ash Heel’s Tendon,” and other manuscripts and fragments that survive at the Kennedy Library. Letters of Hemingway from 1919 recount his storming the walls of popular magazines with a barrage of stories. He submitted to Everybody’s, Popular, and Adventure, as well as The Saturday Evening Post, to no avail.4 He received feedback from local author Edwin Balmer, who had recently published in Popular, Cavalier, and Blue Book. He sought advice from Trumbull White, former editor of Everybody’s. His rejection slips came back with advice from house editors. What he learned was to write from experience, avoid happy endings, and include “heart interest.”5 In years to come, he not only perfected this formula but, under the influence of modernist literary experimenters, brought it to an entirely original and modern level. Thus, if Hemingway learned realism from Sherwood Anderson and the Russians, style from Stein, and disillusionment from Pound and other modernists, he learned salability from popular magazines. As he laid out in a letter to his publisher: “[In Our Time] will be praised by highbrows and can be read by lowbrows. There is no writing in it that anybody with a high-school education cannot read” (SL 155). His early published short stories still show the influence of the magazine market, if not in style, then definitely in subject matter. Stories such as “The Battler,” “My Old Man,” “Fifty Grand,” and “The Killers” have the same settings and themes as the stories that filled the popular magazines of the mid-1920s (Figure 9.1). “My Old Man,” Hemingway’s first “mature story,” is indicative of Hemingway’s marketability to the popular magazines. It is about a corrupt jockey as seen through his son’s eyes. It appeared first inThree Stories and Ten Poems, the chapbook published in July 1923 by Robert McAlmon’s modernist Contact Editions. Previously, though, Hemingway showed the story to Edward O’Brien while on vacation in Italy in February 1923. As editor of the yearly anthologies Best Short Stories, O’Brien, an expert on the short story form and its marketability, was impressed enough to urge Hemingway to send the story to Pictorial Review, the second-leading woman’s magazine of the day, and he promised to send a letter of introduction to the editor. According to Michael Reynolds, O’Brien’s letter Spec SD1 Date 26-july

92 Earle

Figure 9.1. The Popular Magazine, cover, January 2, 1931. never arrived and the story, by an unknown and unpublished author, wasn’t accepted. O’Brien later broke his rule of accepting only previously published fiction and included “My Old Man” in his Best American Short Stories of 1923.6 But the fact that he saw the story as the type that Pictorial Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Magazines 93 Review would include is important, and speaks to both Hemingway’s publishing milieu and how close his fiction was to the popular marketplace. In 1923, Pictorial Review had a circulation of two million and the fourth largest advertising sales of all magazines (Peterson 167). By 1924 Hemingway was also publishing short stories in artistic little magazines such as the transatlantic review and The Little Review, magazines with miniscule circulations in comparison to Scribner’s, which would soon become the main outlet for his short stories. Indeed, Robert Trogdon has shown that one of the main attractions leading Hemingway to change publishers from Liveright to Scribner’s was the latter’s magazine.7 For example, The Little Review and The Dial, as the most well-known American little magazines, had a combined circulation of only twelve thousand six hundred in 1923, and Scribner’s around seventy-four thousand.8 For Hemingway, who felt deeply the rejection of his manuscripts – both in his earlier efforts to break into the magazine market and with the recent rejection of “My Old Man” – the little magazines provided a means to establish his position as a modernist and his reputation as a serious author. They gave Hemingway the kind of cultural capital that introduced him to the editors and publishers of larger venues that would eventually allow him to break into the American magazine market and give him a popular audience. What emerges from this publishing history is a cagey marketing scheme: Hemingway made a name for himself in highbrow circles based upon his expatriate networking and little magazine publishing, which in turn allowed him to sell “magazine” stories with popular appeal, such as “The Killers” and “Fifty Grand,” to established magazines. Not only can “The Killers,” which appeared in Scribner’s in March of 1927, be seen as part of the fascination for gangsters generated by genre magazines such as Black Mask (1920), Flynn’s (1924), Detective Story (1915), and Argosy, but even The Sun Also Rises can be seen as pandering to the fads of the popular magazine market. Throughout the late 1910s and 1920s, the public fascination with the bohemian and risqué thrills of Paris were the focus of magazines such as Snappy Stories, The Parisienne, and French Frolics – magazines so popular that the watch and ward societies attempted to ban them in 1925. This Francophilia blossomed after World War I when France captured the imagination of America’s rising youth culture, whose transgressions of parochial values were inspired by dozens of the humor magazines and flapper magazines, such as Flapper’s Experience, The Flapper, Hot Dog, Brewhouse, and even the post-Mencken Smart Set. In Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley reports that Sun was especially popular on college campuses. Whereas it is impossible to prove that Hemingway planned on tapping into this audience, it is telling that right Spec SD1 Date 26-july

94 Earle after the novel was published, he told Perkins that his story “Fifty Grand” should be sent to College Humor (Trogdon 48). For the most part Hemingway ceased publishing in the little magazines once he was established in the American market.9 After the publication of Sun, magazines such as Hearst’s International, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair asked Hemingway for stories and articles, but he was savvy enough not to flood the market and hence kept on with Scribner’s. But there were other reasons behind this decision: he now had the economic patronage of second wife Pauline Pfieffer’s family and didn’t need to write to survive. He witnessed firsthand how Fitzgerald slavishly pumped out stories, which Hemingway believed squandered his talent in order to support his lifestyle. As he pointed out in a letter to Perkins, “This [the numerous requests for his work from magazines] looks so much like the fast smooth flowing shutes that I’ve watched so many of my ancestors and contemporaries disappear over that I’ve decided not to sell or send out anything for a year – unless I have to sell a story to eat” (SL 246). Hemingway’s use of the little magazines and his shift to Scribner’s illustrates the evolution and sophistication of his concept of the literary market and his own growing skill at manipulating his literary reputation. Whereas his subject matter consistently tapped into the au courant topics of the magazine public, he knew that his reputation, founded as it was in the aura of expatriate modernism, garnered him a caché more bankable in the long run than that of pulp journeyman author. Both he and Perkins worked hard to time the publications of stories, serializations, novels, story collections, and ads in such a way that appearances kept his name in the public consciousness throughout his career.

Coda: Hemingway as Magazine Fiction Between 1926, when Torrents appeared, and 1931, Hemingway went from being a relatively unknown expatriate journalist to the rising star of American letters. More than this, though, he became a celebrity. We can gauge his level of celebrity with the October 1931 issue of The Home Magazine, an inexpensive women’s magazine distributed solely on the newsstands of the Woolworth stores. Besides articles on food and fashion, it contained true confessions and real-life stories of famous wives and mothers, of female criminals and working girls, as well as exposés on companionate marriage and single motherhood – something like a pulpish cross between True Story and Ladies Home Companion. Therefore, the article “Mother of Geniuses,” about Grace Hall Hemingway, “the queen mother of the hectic Hemingways,” fits right in (Figure 9.2). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Magazines 95

Figure 9.2. The Home Magazine, cover, and the article, “Mother of Geniuses,” October 1931.

The popular conception of Hemingway’s celebrity is often that of the bearded, drunken, and violent writer, based largely upon magazine and newspaper profiles and misrepresentations appearing with greater fre- quency over the 1930s and 1940s until their apotheosis in the hypermasculine role model of the men’s magazines of the 1950s.10 Yet this Home Magazine article, about Grace Hemingway’s artistic career, makes obvious that Hemingway’s initial fame was in part due to a large female and domestic readership, enough so to warrant this article. Critics, notably Leonard Leff, have seen Hemingway’s rise to fame as due to the Hollywood studio system’s marketing of the film of Farewell to Arms (1932), but this article predates the film by a year.11 We often forget that the aspects that made Farewell a perfect film choice are exactly what made Hemingway popular with the general magazine readership: the novel was the perfect blend of excitement, spice, and melodrama – making him “the most hectic Hemingway of them all,” according to Home Magazine. The success of Farewell in 1929 (fifty thousand copies in its first few months) was due to Hemingway knowing the popular audience. Although today Hemingway is known best for a handful of classic American novels, he was first and foremost a magazine writer. His correspondence with his editor, Maxwell Perkins, consistently evinces a Spec SD1 Date 26-july

96 Earle resistance to writing novels. Of the nine novels published in his lifetime, all but four were either serialized in magazines prior to publication or got their start as short stories in magazines (I include here the nominally nonfictional Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa). In addition, The Dangerous Summer, which wasn’t published in book form until 1985, appeared in three issues of Life magazine in 1960. Of the four that weren’t, The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises were his first, published before he had the reputation that would garner the commitment of serialization from a magazine. That Hemingway dedicated himself to the form of the short story is logical, for the magazine medium was his first model and tutor. The foundational influences of the popular wood-pulp magazines never left him; they were integral to his concept of authorship. More than that, though, they were integral to his concept of audience.

Notes 1. See R. Ohmann’s Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996). 2. T. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 47, 58–9. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. Thanks to Robert Trogdon for pointing this out. 4. See letter from Hemingway to Bill Smith, December 4, 1919 (Letters I, 214– 16), as well as M. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Norton, 1986), 89. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. For accounts of this tutelage, see C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 30–1; SL, 82, 861; Reynolds, Young Hemingway, 59, 89, 125. 6. “My Old Man” did appear in Three Stories previously, but this was a European publication and no one realized that McAlmon would publish so quickly. See M. Reynolds, The Paris Years (New York: Norton, 1989), 128, for the story behind this publication. 7. R. Trogdon, The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Publishing (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), 21, 41. 8. The Audit Bureau of Circulation, Yearly Reports, 1924. 9. Exceptions, such as “The Sea Change” This( Quarter, December 1931), were usually due to controversial content. 10. For a fuller exploration of this claim, see D. M. Earle, All Man!: Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009). 11. L. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Representations: In Our Time Spec SD1 Date 26-july Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 10 Critical Overview Kelli A. Larson

In a world strewn with transitory literary careers, Ernest Hemingway endures as one of the twentieth century’s greatest American authors. The man who drove an ambulance on the Italian front, hunted big game in Africa, chased Nazi submarines in the Caribbean, and then wrote of his globe-trotting adventures continues to capture the minds and imag- inations of readers around the world. Fifty years after his death, Papa Hemingway is a cultural icon with Web sites, films, and novels devoted to his romantic lifestyle and writings. While at times it may seem as though his larger-than-life public persona might eclipse his brilliant writing career, the early respect of fellow writers like Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and the continued work of critics and scholars ensure that Hemingway will survive his legendary image. Significantly, the vast majority of explorations of Hemingway’s life and art are academic in nature, with well over 100 essays, notes, theses, and books appearing annually. Such voluminous industry confirms the author’s can- onization by the literary academy and makes Hemingway studies one of the most daunting but lively areas in literary research today. Over the years the never-ending task of sorting through and keeping track of the cumulating mass of Hemingway scholarship has fallen to a handful of bibliographers. Audre Hanneman’s Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1967) and Supplement (1975) remain excellent resources for secondary and primary materials through 1973. Hemingway’s nascent critical reputation from the 1920s through the mid-1970s is traced in Linda W. Wagner’s comprehensive annotated bibliography, Ernest Hemingway: A Reference Guide (1977). Kelli A. Larson’s Ernest Hemingway: A Reference Guide, 1974–1989 (1990) picks up where Wagner’s work left off, recording the wave of Hemingway scholarship during the watershed years when a vast collection of the author’s manuscript materials and letters opened to the public at the National Archives in Waltham, Massachusetts (1975), the Hemingway Society was founded 99 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

100 Larson (1980), and The Hemingway Review came into print (1981). A quick glance at the numbers reveals the sustained and growing interest in Hemingway over those years, including the significant rise in textual studies as a result of the careful preservation and cataloging of the burgeoning manuscript collection permanently moved to Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library in 1980. While Wagner’s volume spans half a century of criticism with twenty-two hundred entries, Larson’s update covers just fifteen years with over seventeen hundred entries. For access to the most recent criticism, scholars and students turn to the “Current Bibliography” appearing biannually as a regular feature of The Hemingway Review since its incep- tion. The prolific nature of this scholarly activity attests to the complexity of Hemingway’s thought and writing and confirms that Hemingway remains big business. Contextualizing the most recent trends in Hemingway studies neces- sitates a survey of the indispensable groundwork already laid, a review of those past critical studies that have contributed substantively to Hemingway’s reputation. Close reading and biographical interpretation have been the mainstay of Hemingway criticism since the beginning. Because Hemingway relied so heavily on his own experience when creating his fiction, early critics relished drawing parallels between his life and art. Certainly the author’s penchant for modeling characters after recognizable people, as in The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, encourages such biographical interpretation. Many early critics viewed the Nick Adams character as a stand-in for Hemingway, noting their mutual affinity for hunting, fishing, bullfighting, and warfare. Much has been made of Hemingway’s wounding at the Italian front during World War I and his subsequent recovery at a Milan hospital where he met, fell in love with, and was eventually rejected by an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. As critical legends have it, this experience became the stuff of A Farewell to Arms and the source of numerous studies seeking to connect Hemingway’s early war adventures with his later writings. While contemporary criticism recognizes the constricting nature of these readings, which reduce Hemingway the artist to the sum of his experience and his major characters to thinly veiled self-portraits, balanced biographical studies continue to play a vital role in Hemingway scholarship. Despite the abundance of biographies appearing over the years, Carlos Baker’s definitive portrait of the man and his life, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969), remains the most factual and therefore the most valuable single-volume biography on the market. For an equally well-researched but more extensive biographical treatment, Michael Reynolds’s five-volume Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview 101 study beginning with The Young Hemingway (1986) and ending with Hemingway: The Final Years (1999) brings the author to life in meticu- lous and vivid detail. Though Reynolds warns “there is no such thing as a disinterested observer” and that all biographers create their subject matter as they impose “order and reason where little exists,”1 Hemingway scholars are grateful for his exhaustive, well-researched accounts. Other developments in the field of biography encompass the complex and intersecting relationship between Hemingway’s public image and his writing. John Raeburn’s Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (1984) examines Hemingway’s deliberate cultivation of his celebrity through his various roles as sportsman, manly man, world traveler, and heroic artist, among others, between the years 1930 and 1960. Raeburn focuses on Hemingway’s calculated bid for celebrity through his appearance in prominent periodicals such as Esquire, Time, and Life and his nonfiction writings of the 1930s and 1940s, including the North American Newspaper Alliance dispatches, Death in the Afternoon, and Green Hills of Africa. Complementing Raeburn’s work on the construction of the Hemingway persona is Matthew Bruccoli’s Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame (2006). His edited collection of Hemingway’s statements, letters, prefaces, blurbs, and other self-promotional pieces spans nearly forty years and provides a coherent portrait of the author’s marketing of his own reputation. David Earle’s All Man! Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (2009) examines the mid-century’s macho image of Hemingway in relation to postwar hypermasculinity and misogyny created by the mass media. While numerous critics have contributed to our growing understanding of Hemingway and his artistry over the years, no one has had a longer or more powerful impact on subsequent Hemingway criticism than Philip Young. His biographically framed study Ernest Hemingway, A Reconsideration (1966), an extensive revision of his Ernest Hemingway (1952), introduced the terms wound theory and code hero, theories that res- onated with readers and that influenced Hemingway criticism well into the early 1980s. Young’s psychoanalytic approach connected Hemingway’s 1918 wounding to his subsequent lifestyle and art, contending that the trauma sustained by the young Hemingway led to his compulsive need to relive and thus purge himself of his obsessive fears through later frequent brushes with death and through the creation of fictional characters engaged in similar exploits of courage, danger, and violence. Young’s code hero, though not necessarily a part of the wound theory, evolved from it and has been equally influential. According to Young, the Hemingway Spec SD1 Date 26-july

102 Larson code is forged from an ideal of conduct and describes the Hemingway character that exemplifies principles of “honor and courage which in a life of tension and pain make a man a man.” These values allow the code hero to behave with “grace under pressure” in a violent and chaotic world and “distinguish him from the people who follow random impulses, let down their hair, and are generally messy, perhaps cowardly, and without inviolable rules for how to live holding tight.”2 Over the years the code has been applied to a wide variety of Hemingway’s central figures ranging from ill-fated lovers Frederic and Catherine of Farewell to the great white hunter Robert Wilson of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Even in defeat the code hero exemplifies principles of honor, stoicism, and integrity, as with Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Santiago of The Old Man and the Sea. For thirty years Young’s theories reigned, influencing and often dominating other critical readings of Hemingway’s works. In the 1980s, new biographies began to question Young’s cathartic reading and stir up new debates in Hemingway studies. Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway (1987), a psychoanalytic treatment of the author’s life and work was the most controversial, focusing on Hemingway’s androgyny and sexual confusion, harking back to his childhood spent with a mother who dressed him in girl’s clothing in her attempts to “twin” him with his older sister. Lynn’s timing couldn’t have been better, his critical study coming fast on the heels of the posthumously published The Garden of Eden (1986) dealing with the same controversial gender-bending topics. While such diverse subject matter appears throughout Hemingway’s oeuvre, it had been largely overlooked or ignored by a generation of scholars predisposed to reading Hemingway’s classic, and typically masculine, themes of death, loss, endurance, and courage. In Garden these traditional themes are overshadowed by the author’s deliberate treatment of androgyny, bisexuality, and homosexuality, making it no longer possible to dismiss the latter as outliers in the Hemingway canon. With the publication of Garden, Hemingway studies underwent a sea change as critics began to reassess and reevaluate all they thought they knew about the man and his writing. A number of important androgyny and gender studies followed Lynn’s, including Mark Spilka’s Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (1990), and Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes’s Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text (1994). These early androgyny studies challenged conventional readings of Hemingway’s canon by embracing the author’s complex and often contradictory treatment of sexuality, gender, and masculinity. Work continues to build on these earlier studies. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview 103 Debra Moddelmog’s poststructuralist Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (1999) explores how socially constructed concepts of sexuality and power shape readers’ images of the author’s sexual identity and influence interpretations of his texts. Also working with socially constructed representations of gender, Thomas Strychacz’s Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity (2003) and Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence (2008) draw on performance studies to analyze the theatri- cal nature of Hemingway’s work, arguing that the author’s awareness of audience influences his fluid and sometimes paradoxical dramatizations of masculinity. This well-established and ongoing conversation, now over two decades old, confirms that gender and sexuality studies will remain a vital part of Hemingway scholarship as promising new dimensions of the author’s experimentation, especially in his overlooked short fiction, patiently await discovery and further exploration. Developments in critical and literary theory over the past twenty-five years have had a profound impact not only on the study of how gender operates within Hemingway’s oeuvre, but on the author’s treatment of women as well. Given his macho public image and thematic preoccupation with bullfighting, war, and hunting in conjunction with conventional criticism amplifying the “masculinity” of his writings, it is not surprising that Hemingway and his canon came under attack in the 1970s with the rise of feminist criticism. A brief survey of the most influential studies begins with Judith Fetterley’s classic 1978 critique of Hemingway’s “hostility” toward women in “A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway’s ‘Resentful Cryptogram.’” According to Fetterley, buried within Hemingway’s seemingly idealized portrayal of romantic love is a deep-seated contempt for and hatred of women exemplified in Catherine’s death. Fetterley’s examination sparked an evolving debate on Hemingway’s treatment of women throughout his work. Supporting arguments of Hemingway’s sexism is Bert Bender’s 1981 essay “Margot Macomber’s Gimlet” warning readers against sanitizing Hemingway’s sexist values by filtering his fiction through their changing cultural attitudes. And Lawrence Buell calls for the author’s “demotion” within a feminist reshaping of the American literary canon in his 1987 “Literary History Without Sexism? Feminist Studies and Canonical Reconception.” Other feminist scholars have come to Hemingway’s defense. Beginning in the early 1980s, these critics challenged accusations of male chau- vinism and misogyny with new textual studies informed by a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. Joyce Wexler’s 1981 “E.R.A. for Hemingway: A Feminist Defense of A Farewell to Arms” directly Spec SD1 Date 26-july

104 Larson responds to Fetterley’s charge of misogyny by identifying Catherine as a fully developed Hemingway hero instrumental in Frederic’s growth and development. Linda W. Wagner’s “‘Proud and friendly and gently’: Women in Hemingway’s Early Fiction” urges readers to set aside their preconceptions and read closely the words he wrote. In her 1980 analysis of In Our Time and Sun, Wagner argues for Hemingway’s sensitive portrayal of women whom she asserts are more noble and self-aware than their male counterparts. Complementing Wagner’s early assessment are a number of essays appearing in Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland’s edited collection, Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (2002). These competing voices, on both sides of the debate, further underscore the crucial position that feminist criticism has come to occupy in contemporary Hemingway studies. And with so much remaining to be learned regarding the female presence within the Hemingway canon, contributions to this ongoing feminist discussion promise to enliven and complicate Hemingway scholarship well into the twenty-first century. For previous generations of Hemingway scholars, studies of race focused primarily on the author’s treatment of Native Americans, primitivism, and the influence of Ojibway culture in stories such as “Indian Camp,” “Ten Indians,” and “The Light of the World.” The recent renaissance in racial studies concentrates on Hemingway’s enduring and evolving fascination with Africa.3 This rebirth is due largely to the rise of postcolonial theory and the posthumous publication of Hemingway’s two African texts based on his second safari of the mid-1950s, the fictional memoir True at First Light (1999) edited by Hemingway’s son Patrick, and the longer, scholarly version, Under Kilimanjaro (2005). When compared to the writings from his first safari, Green Hills of Africa (1935), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” these later posthumous works, including the African sections of Garden, reveal an evolution in the author’s attitude toward the continent and its people and invite scholars to reassess the roles that Africa and race play in his writings. Recent work embedding Hemingway within racial studies recognizes the intersecting ways in which imperialism, race, and nationalism operate within his oeuvre. Indeed racial criticism underscores the multifarious nature of Hemingway studies, with issues of race often intersecting other critical perspectives such as gender and political studies.4 Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction (2008) examines how the author’s lifelong interest in race and racial difference complicates his creation of the white male protagonist and helps define American identity. Strong’s study casts a wide net, ranging from the brutality of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview 105 white–Indian relations revealed in the early short stories such as “Indian Camp” and “Ten Indians” to issues of ethnicity and racial identity in Garden and Under Kilimanjaro. As with racial studies, ecological approaches examining Hemingway’s connection to the natural world have rebounded since the appearance of the posthumous works. New trends include the complicated issues surrounding the safari industry and its impact on the people and land of East Africa and the ethics of big-game hunting. A number of critics have noted Hemingway’s attitudinal change toward conservationism within the works of the second safari, pointing to evidence of his compassionate treatment of animals and assimilation with his surroundings.5 The more mature Hemingway, far different from the young and competitive trophy-driven, big-game hunter of Green Hills, no longer feels compelled to exploit and conquer the natural world as a way of asserting his individualism or overcoming his own mortality. Critics over the years seem agreed on Hemingway’s divided ecological sensibilities. Robert Fleming’s edited collection, Hemingway and the Natural World (1999), employs a variety of perspectives, including feminist, ecofeminist, and narrative theory, to examine Hemingway’s complicated and evolving sensitivity toward his natural surroundings in “Big Two-Hearted River,” For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Green Hills. Additional essays in the collection situate the author’s place within the larger tradition of nature writing, exploring the influence of such disparate writers as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister and the paintings of Winslow Homer on Hemingway’s vision of the natural world. Mark Ott’s more recent A Sea Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream (2008) draws upon the author’s fishing logs, correspondence, and newspaper articles to reconstruct his complex relationship with the Gulf Stream and its influence on his writing of Farewell, To Have and Have Not, and Old Man. As with earlier ecological studies, Ott too recognizes the author’s complex desire to both conquer and revere his natural environment, arguing that Hemingway’s vision transformed in later years, culminating in the view depicted in Old Man of the Gulf Stream as a harmonious Eden with rejuvenating powers. Ecological criticism, no doubt fueled by contemporary environmental concerns, is a relatively new approach to Hemingway that may offer the richest prospects yet for future study because of the author’s lifelong interest in and affinity with the natural world. Despite claims by some6 that Hemingway was, for the most part, apolitical, the steady stream in this area of Hemingway studies suggests otherwise. Scholarly attention on this topic runs the gamut of Hemingway’s Spec SD1 Date 26-july

106 Larson canon, from the earliest short stories such as “The Revolutionist” and “On the Quai at Smyrna” to the posthumous Islands in the Stream and African books. Not surprisingly, those overtly political works of the 1930s, To Have and Have Not, The Fifth Column, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, continue to garner the most extensive commentary in this area of Hemingway studies. Critical debate rages on regarding Hemingway’s most political novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. While some claim the novel shows Hemingway’s disillusionment with the Spanish Civil War,7 others give evidence of Hemingway’s continued antifascist views and support for the Republican cause.8 David Caute’s assessment of the author’s politics in “Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls” begins by tracing Hemingway’s personal involvement in the war, revealing the historical analogues for some of the novel’s characters and events. Caute argues that Hemingway’s and Jordan’s ambivalent political allegiance to the Republic shows their reticence in following the party line. Complementing Caute’s assessment are a number of essays appearing in Lauretta Conklin Frederking’s edited collection, Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion (2010). Frederking’s analysis of Hemingway’s political views focuses on the author’s opposition to institutionalized power, claiming that of more importance than Hemingway’s political ideology is his belief that politics serve as a cruci- ble for self-discovery. David Conklin’s essay “The Revolutionist” argues that Hemingway’s heroes are not structured upon ideology but rather reflect ordinary individuals frustrated with conditions of inequality and oppression and thus driven to act. Again, while most of the collection focuses on those writings of the 1930s, a few venture to investigate as yet relatively uncharted territory in Hemingway’s other works such as In Our Time, Sun, and Hemingway’s clearest indictment against the Great War, Farewell. William Curtis’s “Hemingway, Hopelessness, and Liberalism” argues that Farewell (along with For Whom the Bell Tolls and To Have and Have Not) exhibits a sense of hopelessness about the ability of politics to improve the human condition. Karsten Piep’s essay “Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and Personal War” (2009) explores the stages of Hemingway’s deepening disillusionment with World War I, attributing it to the author’s exposure to the postwar era rather than the war itself. Likewise, further exploration awaits the African texts. Jeremiah Kitunda’s essays, “Ernest Hemingway’s African Book: An Appraisal” (2006) and “Ernest Hemingway’s Safari into Kama Culture and Language: A Note on the Geographical and Temporal Setting of Under Kilimanjaro” (2006), discuss Hemingway’s complex and sometimes inconsistent tribal and colonial politics. Kitunda goes on to clarify Kenya’s political unrest in Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Critical Overview 107 his cultural and political contextualization of the 1950s East African setting of Under Kilimanjaro. The recent uptick in criticism appearing on Hemingway’s interest in politics goes a long way to correcting the misper- ception that the author was apolitical. But there is still much to accom- plish in this area of research for scholars willing to shift their attention toward a more inclusive investigation of Hemingway’s canon, to recognize that the author’s political vision is not made up of “literary” phases but rather derives from a lifetime of experience. One final area of important critical interest is the guides now appearing on Hemingway’s full-length works. As general readers and scholars alike grow increasingly distant from Hemingway’s era, familiarity with and knowledge of the people, places, and events referenced in his works diminishes. The current “Reading Hemingway” series published by Kent State University Press, including H. R. Stoneback’s Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Glossary and Commentary (2007) and Joseph M. Flora’s Reading Hemingway’s Men Without Women (2008), fills this cultural void by providing invaluable glosses on the unfamiliar and obscure details and allusions found within these works. Miriam B. Mandel’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations (2002) and Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer: The Complete Annotations (2008) perform similar duties as comprehensive guides to the people, places, and other cultural constructs in Hemingway’s treatments of Spain and the bullfight. Susan F. Beegel’s “A Guide to the Marine Life in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea” (2005) references the marine life, both plants and animals, found within the novel and also details relevant contemporary events, issues, and attitudes surrounding particular species. These careful and close readings of what Hemingway actually wrote reveal the depth, resonance, and complexity of an author often wrongly characterized as anti-intellectual or less “learned” than his contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce because he failed to attend college. In many ways Hemingway was self-taught. His extensive use of literary, historical, cultural, and biographical allusions provide ample evidence of the author’s varied and voracious reading habits as documented in Reynolds’s Hemingway’s Reading 1910–1940: An Inventory (1981) and James D. Brasch and Joseph Sigman’s Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record (1981), finally putting to rest Wyndham Lewis’s disparaging characterization of Hemingway in his early essay “The Dumb Ox: A Study of Ernest Hemingway” (1934). Just as Hemingway the writer developed all the years of his life, critical approaches to his writing have also evolved. The shift in Hemingway Spec SD1 Date 26-july

108 Larson studies away from traditional biography, textual studies, and new critical responses over the past twenty-five years toward a number of new and disparate approaches reflects the broader evolution in literary theory. Works such as Sun, Farewell, and Old Man, once considered critically exhausted, are being rejuvenated by a rising generation of scholars utilizing a variety of perspectives and theoretical lenses. The publication of the posthumous works, though editorially flawed, ensures an author who has been dead for some fifty years remains very much alive in the minds of readers and critics around the world. With every turn of the page, new dimensions of his work are discovered and explored, proving to each successive generation of readers that while Hemingway wrote simply, he was not a simple writer.

Notes 1. M. Reynolds, “Up Against the Crannied Wall: The Limits of Biography,” in Frank Scafella (ed.), Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 173, 176. 2. P. Young, Ernest Hemingway, A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), 63. 3. P. L. Hays, “Hemingway’s Use of A Natural Resource: Indians,” in R. F. Fleming (ed.), Hemingway and the Natural World (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1999); R. W. Lewis, “‘Long Time Ago Good, Now No Good’: Hemingway’s Indian Stories,” in J. J. Benson (ed.), New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 200–12; C. Schedler, “The ‘Tribal’ Legacy of Hemingway’s Nick Adams,” Hemingway Review 19.1 (1999), 64–78. 4. N. R. Comely and R. Scholes, “Tribal Things: Hemingway’s Erotics of Truth,” Novel 25.3 (1992), 268–85; C. Eby, “‘Come Back to the Beach Ag’in, David Honey!’: Hemingway’s Fetishization of Race in The Garden of Eden Manuscripts,” Hemingway Review 14.2 (1995), 98–117. 5. G. K. Boese, “Under Kilimanjaro: The Other Hemingway,” Hemingway Review 25.2 (2006), 114–18; K. Maier, “Hemingway’s Hunting: An Ecological Reconsideration,” Hemingway Review 25.2 (2006), 119–22. 6. M. A. Cohen, “Beleaguered Modernists: Hemingway, Stevens, and the Left,” in K. Curnutt and G. D. Sinclair (eds.), Key West Hemingway: A Reassessment (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 77–90; B. Stoltzfus, “Political Commitment in Hemingway and Sartre,” North Dakota Quarterly 68.2–3 (2001), 182–8. 7. K. Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); J. R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). 8. C. Nelson, “Hemingway, the American Left, and the Soviet Union: Some Forgotten Episodes,” Hemingway Review 14.1 (2004), 36–45. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 11 Styles Milton A. Cohen

The Early Style1 When Ernest Hemingway’s first major book, In Our Time,2 appeared in 1925, most reviewers hailed it as “prose of the first distinction” (in Edmund Wilson’s phrase). Though a few were put off by the “sordid” subject matter and the author’s unsentimental treatment of it, on one point all reviewers agreed: Hemingway’s style was something altogether new and powerful, not merely new in form but in its blend of subject and tone, voice and narrative detachment. The terms they chose to describe it show a remarkable consensus: “objective,” “exact,” “terse,” “forceful,” “abrupt,” “brutal,” “raw,” “energ[etic],” “fresh and crisp,” “unliterary,” “powerfully good writing,” “hardboiled,” “astringent,” “like acid,” “harsh,” “bold,” “hard.”3 Interestingly, many reviewers quoted the same prose piece to exemplify these qualities, the little vignette entitled “Chapter V” (IOT 51). The chapter typifies essential features of Hemingway’s early style and for that reason deserves close analysis. Here is how it begins: They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. The five remaining sentences describe how the firing squad attempts – and fails – to execute the sick minister as it does the other five, that is, with the minister standing up. What made this piece so compelling to reviewers in 1925 – and to us today? The subject – the political execution of six cabinet ministers – is, of course, dramatic and typical of the book’s fascination with violence in differing arenas: war, crime, political revolution, bullfighting, man-to-man confrontations. But it is how Hemingway handles this violence that is so striking. Right away, three qualities appear: the writing is terse; it is emotively “objective” or detached; and it is a curious blend of precise physical detail and omitted explanation,

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110 Cohen especially in the first sentence. A reader unfamiliar with the historical context of this execution immediately wonders: Who are “they” that did the shooting? And why are the cabinet ministers being executed? We are told neither the political events leading up to this execution nor its aftermath, only its time and immediate locale (but not city or country). The chapter begins without introduction – in medias res – and ends abruptly with the shooting: “When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.” These omissions should disabuse any who assume Hemingway simply converted his journalistic experience into a literary style: such omissions are the antithesis of the journalistic “Who-What-When-Where” and would have enraged a copy editor. But they were intentional. What the passage does tell us is what precisely happened, what the conditions were like, in sensory images couched in short sentences: the early morning, the hard rain, the wet, dead leaves, the pools of water, the shut- tered windows of the hospital. It also describes – carefully – how a man too sick with typhoid to stand up is carried out into the rain, unsuccessfully propped against the wall, and then sits down in a puddle to be shot. Note what the vignette might have stated but does not: a man too sick to stand is shown no mercy, not even a postponement. Instead, the narrative evokes the opposite: grotesque cruelty. If the man sits with his head on his knees, then his head, not his chest, will receive the bullets. The narrative shows no obvious sympathy for the executed men; its tone is detached, unsentimental. One sentence, however, hints at the narrator’s admiration: “The others stood very quietly against the wall.” No one whimpers or pleads for mercy; they all accept death stoically. Moreover, this description avoids the clichés associated with political executions: the men are not blindfolded; they are not given a final cigarette; they utter no last words. The execution is far removed from Hollywood heroics, and the rain and sick minister sitting in a pool of water make a mess of it. In another detail of a botch, “the first volley” implies that there was a second; the first was not enough to kill all the ministers. We have, then, what seems an emotively deflated, “flat” account of a sordid, botched act. This combination – a violent event narrated in an understated, almost deadpan style – struck readers then and now as extremely powerful. All the more so when Hemingway forces us to look directly at the blood. Chapter X of In Our Time, for example, describes a gored horse, whose “entrails hung down in a blue bunch swung backward and forward as he began to canter.” Just as often, however, Hemingway studies the way his characters anticipate and respond to violence, rather Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Styles 111 than the violence itself. The shooting that ends Chapter V is tangential (in a dependent clause) to the primary focus: how the sick man sits. Treating it either directly or indirectly, however, Hemingway had marked physical violence as one of his specializations and studied carefully how people experience and react to it. If Hemingway’s narratives are loathe to explain the circumstances surrounding action, they nonetheless find other ways to expand its meaning. As countless commentators have observed, the images of Chapter V suggest more than they state. The rain establishes the mood; the “wet, dead leaves” anticipate the wet, dead bodies lying in “pools” of blood; the closed shutters suggest closed eyes, eyes that don’t want to bear witness – and on a hospital, where men should be healed, not shot against its walls! These techniques of foreshadowing, imagistic symbol, and irony reveal literary skill far beyond the reportorial. Hemingway, in fact, developed this practice of using symbolic images to replace explanation into a major technique of his mature style, the so-called iceberg principle.4 Hemingway’s style has often been stereotyped and lampooned as merely a sequence of simple sentences. While he did use more simple sentences than any other writer, it is important to recognize how he used not only simple, but compound, complex, and fragmented sentences in his early prose to achieve particular effects. As he described his intent in Death in the Afternoon:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty . . . was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced . . . the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion. (2; emphasis added) Each sentence type directly affects this sequence. His simple sentences focus on single sensations and actions; a string of them creates a halt- ing, intermittent rhythm: “Then three more came over the wall. We shot them.” His compounds usually establish temporal order (“this and then this”) and a more flowing rhythm: “Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over” (IOT 105). Complex sentences offer the greatest capacity to explain relationships and show causality and hierarchy. Hemingway used them sparingly for intricate sequences: “Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian’s head back” (IOT 18). Hemingway’s chief tutors in this period, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, ironically represented almost opposite styles. Pound’s Imagism taught him to exclude, compress, and let a precise image convey the experience; Stein’s Spec SD1 Date 26-july

112 Cohen overlapping sentences and participial constructions (e.g., “Melanctha Herbert’s mother was now always getting sicker”) showed Hemingway how to manipulate “the sequence of motion and fact” – speed it up, slow it down, make the events seem to happen simultaneously in an ongoing present, freeze them in a kind of tableau: He drew out the sword from the folds of muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over. Villalta standing straight and the red hilt of the sword sticking out dully between the bull’s shoulders. (IOT 105; emphasis added) In emphasizing simple and compound sentences and experimenting with run-ons and fragments while generally avoiding complex sentences, Hemingway’s early style evokes a world of disconnected sensations and rhythmic action sequences. The “what” and “how” come across powerfully; the “why” is intentionally muted, often excluded. But in place of explanation, images, often symbolic, and tone, often ironic, speak powerfully. The epistemological implications of this style are significant. In Hemingway’s world, what we can know for certain is the look and feel of the tangible world; abstractions – explanations, reasons why, ideas, first causes – are suspect and avoided. One can see how this radically empirical, anti-teleological epistemology appealed to a war generation that had had a belly full of high-sounding phrases and assumptions from its elders about how the world works. It also appealed to existentialists in the 1940s and 1950s for the same reasons. Critics and reviewers in 1925 may not have worked out these philosophical implications, but they realized that Hemingway’s style – and the violent, contemporary world it summoned up – was something fresh and altogether new. As Ford Madox Ford put it, “He projects moments when life is condensed and clean-cut and significant, presenting them in minute narratives that eliminate every useless word.”5 We can consider this newness from a double perspective. Obviously, Hemingway’s prose breaks radically from the lengthy, intricately complex sentences of late James and from the loosely verbose ones of Theodore Dreiser (and a host of lesser lights). These writers seek to explain and thus provide the structural linkage that Hemingway systematically removes. But his prose also represents an entirely different approach to modernism, offering not the hyper-subjective narrative of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce, in which the narrator’s voice slides into and Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Styles 113 out of a character’s consciousness, but a hyper-objective detachment that appears to study the exteriors of experience (though these exteriors hint at the protagonist’s interior states). As he developed his style in the novels and stories of the later 1920s, Hemingway dropped some of his experiments with run-ons and fragments, but developed and polished other techniques. Using images sym- bolically to layer thematic meanings became a central technique of his “iceberg principle.” And his sentence rhythms grew more subtle to evoke particular moods, as in the famous opening of “In Another Country” (1927): It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. (CSS 206) Every sentence is compound, conveying limited connectedness and the rhythm of the narrator’s walk to the hospital without the choppy separation of simple sentences or the causality of complex ones. Working in tandem with these compounds, the repetition of key images – “cold” and “wind” – combines with ominous images of the game “hanging” and looking very dead to limn a pervasive mood of death. The compound structure would continue throughout Hemingway’s oeuvre to form the quintessential Hemingway sentence.6

Later Styles Along with the myth that Hemingway wrote only in short, simple sentences, another is that his style never changed. But a close look at the sentences in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) quickly dispels this canard. For example: When the shooting started he had clapped this helmet on his head so hard it banged his head as though he had been hit with a casserole and, in the last lung- aching, leg-dead, mouth-dry, bullet-spatting, bullet-cracking, bullet-singing run up the final slope of the hill after his horse was killed, the helmet had seemed to weigh a great amount and to ring his bursting forehead with an iron band. (325) A compound-complex structure of seventy-five words – as long as some In Our Time chapters – rippling with adjectives and adverbs and modified by dependent clauses, this sentence is not at all exceptional for Hemingway’s Spec SD1 Date 26-july

114 Cohen prose style of the late 1930s. Here are more sentences taken from the same chapter: He climbed as hard as he could with the bullets spatting on the rocks, with the two sacks heavy on his shoulders, and then, holding the horse by the mane, had shot him quickly, expertly, and tenderly just where he had needed him, so that the horse pitched, head forward, down to plug a gap between two rocks. He had gotten the gun to firing over the horse’s back and he fired two pans, the gun clattering, the empty shells pitching into the snow, the smell of burnt hair from the burnt hide where the hot muzzle rested, him firing at what came up the hill, forcing them to scatter for cover, while all the time there was a chill in his back from not knowing what was behind him. (324) The two sentences average sixty-five words each; both are compound- complex and heavily modified with adjectives, adverbs, participles, and dependent clauses. More striking still is their loose construction: and then, holding the horse by the mane, had shot him . . . so that the horse pitched ...... him firing at what came up the hill . . . Clearly, Hemingway now strove for longer, more undulating rhythms, more complex sequences of related actions. Even before For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway experimented with narrative technique in his 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not. Intensely competitive, he knew, of course, how brilliantly William Faulkner had manipulated point of view and narrative voice in his novels and wanted to top him. To Have and Have Not shifts back and forth between different first person and third person narrators; but the transitions are not always graceful or clear, a problem many reviewers pointed out. Another stylistic rival and influence was James Joyce, specifically the interior monologues of Ulysses. To Have and Have Not contains several of these monologues, and the one in chapter 12, when Marie thinks about her husband, Harry, is directly beholden to Molly Bloom’s concluding monologue: I’ve been a lucky woman. There ain’t no other men like that. People ain’t never tried them don’t know. I’ve had plenty of them. I’ve been lucky to have him. . . . Look at him, sleeping just like a baby . . . Christ, I could do that all night if a man was built that way. I’d like to do it and never sleep. Never, never, no never. (115) Despite its narrative unevenness and derivative moments, however, To Have and Have Not represents Hemingway’s efforts to push his narrative techniques beyond the polished perfection of A Farewell to Arms. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Styles 115 When Across the River and Into the Trees appeared in 1950, most critics and reviewers concluded that Hemingway had passed his prime and that the novel unintentionally parodied the famous Hemingway style. Numerous passages suggest that the master’s stylistic tautness had grown flaccid: They stopped and he looked them in the face and smiled his old and worn death smile. Then he looked down at their feet, as you always look at the feet of such people, since they wear their shoes too tight and when you take the shoes off them you see their hammer-toes. (187) Adverbial affectations crop up – for example, “true” for “truly” – that seem more at home in adventure or Western pulp magazines of the time: “Please love me true . . . Just tell me true and hold me tight . . .” (225). Some adverbs simply sound bogus: “Please kiss me good night kindly.” (162) “I love you,” he said. “Take it frontally and formally please.” (201) There is also a self-conscious smirk to dialogue that Hemingway would once have presented straightforwardly: “I love you.” “Whatever that means,” she interrupted. (151) But though battered by the deservedly bad reviews of Across the River and Into the Trees and increasingly more famous for – and a victim of – his celebrity exploits, Hemingway was not quite ready to throw in the towel as a stylist. His next published work – the novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952) – drops the affectations and smirkiness of Across the River and Into the Trees and, in both its story and style, reverts to the crystal- line surfaces of his earlier fiction. Critics were surprised and – initially – delighted that “Papa” seemed to have recaptured his old style; but over time, critical views of the novella’s style and substance have polarized. Most critics find its style echt-Hemingway: the straightforward declarative sentences, the simple diction, the focus on sensuous details and precise actions, the rhythms of interchanging simple, compound, and short complex sentences. A passage describing the first shark attack reveals all these qualities: Sometimes he lost the scent. But he would pick it up again, or have just a trace of it, and he swam fast and hard on the course. He was a very big Mako shark built to swim as fast as the fastest fish in the sea and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws. His back was as blue as a sword fish’s and his belly was silver and his hide was smooth and handsome . . . (100) Spec SD1 Date 26-july

116 Cohen Some critics, however, find the novella’s style, particularly its symbolism, highly self-conscious and obvious: “Ay,” he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood. (107) Readers must decide for themselves whether The Old Man and the Sea recaptures the original Hemingway style or is an over-refined and senti- mentalized reconstruction.

Influence Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954 for “his mastery of the art of narrative . . . and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” This influence was and is so pervasive that it would not be exagger- ating to assert that, stylistic differences among writers notwithstanding, Western prose simply changed as a result of Hemingway’s style – changed toward shorter, more direct sentences, more objective presentation with less authorial explanation, greater transparency of surfaces, and, of course, understatement and symbolism to suggest many layers of meaning beneath the surface. Raymond Chandler frankly acknowledged that influence – and indeed the entire “hardboiled” school of detective fiction of Chandler, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane exaggerates it, especially in the spiky sentence structure of this genre. Or consider the opening of Albert Camus’s The Stranger: Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday. Other authors whose style owes something to Hemingway’s muscular prose include James T. Farrell, John O’Hara, J. D. Salinger, Nelsen Algren, James Jones, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, and Philip Roth. Updike, in particular, cited Hemingway’s style in several articles, for example: “I suspect few readers younger than myself could believe . . . how we did love Hemingway and . . . love him still.”7 For a later generation of minimalists, particularly Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, Ann Beattie, and Joan Didion, it was Hemingway’s laconic understatement, his refusal to explain, that modeled their own compressions. Didion did not mince words in her homage for the Hemingway centennial: “[T]his was a writer who had in his time made the English language new, changed Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Styles 117 the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would speak and write and think.”8 Writers immediately following Hemingway might well have echoed Brahms on the difficulty of composing in Beethoven’s shadow. Norman Mailer, obviously an inheritor of Hemingway’s legendary fascination with machismo, worried about the weight of his stylistic influence: “I was one of the few writers of my generation who was concerned with living in Hemingway’s discipline . . . I could not become a very good writer unless I learned first how to keep my nerve, and what is more difficult, learned how to find more of it.”9 At the beginning of his first novel,Dangling Man, Saul Bellow felt impelled to repudiate the emotive reticence Hemingway popularized – and even to take a swipe at Hemingway directly – to clear the ground for his protagonist’s confessionalism: [T]o keep a journal nowadays is considered a kind of self-indulgence, a weakness, and in poor taste. For this is an era of hardboiled-dom. Today, the code of the athlete, of the tough boy . . . that curious mixture of striving, asceticism, and rigor . . . is stronger than ever. Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them. . . . Most serious matters are closed to the hard-boiled. They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring. . . . To hell with that! I intend to talk about [my difficulties].10 Bellow might have been speaking for an entire generation emerging after World War II, particularly the confessional poets, who did indeed intend to challenge modernist impersonality and make their personal problems central to their writing. Such anxieties and repudiations as Mailer’s and Bellow’s are hardly surprising, if new writers are to forge their own paths. But they again testify to the length of Hemingway’s shadow. Long after his famous existential “code” ceased to resonate with modern critics, and biographers have deconstructed his swaggering persona into a bundle of anxieties, Hemingway’s style remains – and will remain – something as fresh and potent to new readers and writers as it was to those first reviewers of In Our Time in 1925.

Notes 1. To be precise, “the early style” was not Hemingway’s first style. His earliest attempts at the short story, begun while still in Italy in 1918 and continuing through 1919, employed fairly long sentences and an often facetious tone. 2. Confusingly, Hemingway used this title for three separate publications. The first “In Our Time” was six little chapters published in the spring 1923 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

118 Cohen edition of The Little Review. The second, in our time (Paris, March 1924), added twelve more chapters. Finally, in 1925 a much larger In Our Time interspersed these chapters with new short stories. Most of the reviews cited in this article were of the 1925 In Our Time. 3. Reviews of In Our Time, rpt. in M. Reynolds (ed.), Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983), 15–26. 4. See Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), 192. 5. “M. R.” (Ford Madox Ford), review of in our time, the transatlantic review 1 (April 1924): 247–8. 6. The compound was also the structure in which Hemingway naturally composed. The drafts for the chapters of In Our Time (at the John F. Kennedy Library of Boston) reveal that he often began a sentence as a compound, then revised it to simple or another form to create a particular effect (see M. Cohen, Hemingway’s Laboratory: The Paris in our time [Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005], passim). 7. “Papa’s Sad Testament,” New Statesman 80 (October 16, 1970), 489; qtd. in R. P. Lamb, Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 229. 8. “Last Words,” New Yorker, November 9, 1998, 76. 9. Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam’s, 1959), 265. 10. S. Bellow, Dangling Man (New York: Penguin Classics, 1944; 1996), 9. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 12 Cult and Afterlife Suzanne del Gizzo

Ernest Hemingway looms large in American – and, for that matter, global – culture. His name and image are used to promote festivals, writing contests, bars, and restaurants and to sell everything from shoes and glasses to furniture and safari vacations. The man and his work have inspired songs, plays, and comic books, and fictionalized versions of “Papa” can be found in novels on the New York Times best seller list and in popular films. His likeness has adorned a U.S. postage stamp, many of his homes have been carefully preserved and some opened to the public, and his name is used in newspaper and magazine articles to orient readers on topics as diverse as bullfighting, food, and literary politics. He has been the subject of more than a dozen full-length biographies, and Cambridge University Press has committed to a multivolume publication of his letters. Hemingway may very well be America’s most famous author. Almost as striking as the variety of places one encounters Hemingway’s name and image is the consistency with which they are deployed. “Ernest Hemingway” serves as cultural shorthand for a brand of mid-twentieth-century white, heterosexual, American masculinity characterized by privilege, entitlement, bravado, discipline, composure, and accomplishment. He is presented as a globe-dominating figure, comfortable tracking game in Africa, fishing in the Gulf Stream, writing in a Paris café, and hanging out with movie stars in the American West, and as a man who fused intellectual achievement with physical prowess. But this does not mean that Hemingway’s image is stable, uncom- plicated, or uncontested.1 While his name may be interchangeable with a certain brand of American masculinity, the construction, presentation, and interpretation of the qualities associated with this masculine persona depend on the cultural moment and the concerns and values of particular readers. The history of Hemingway’s persona – its creation and subsequent resilience as a site of debate and reinterpretation – highlights one of the 119 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

120 del Gizzo primary insights of poststructuralist theory: the author is a construction knowable only through “the representational practices of the media, literary critics, booksellers, editors, teachers, publishers, biographers, and authors themselves.”2 Consequently, examining how Hemingway’s authorial identity was and continues to be constructed and circulated in American culture provides a way of learning not just about the persona but about ourselves. Although the overall trend, as Debra Moddelmog observes, has been toward preservation of the author’s mainstream masculine image (7), Hemingway’s endurance as a compelling cultural figure arguably extends from the fact that his well-known persona is constructed along fault lines of gender, sexuality, race, and nationality that continue to shift and rumble beneath our feet. Hemingway’s status as major cultural celebrity and icon is unusual for an author, and partly has to do with the media landscape in which he came of age as an artist. Just as Hemingway was shopping for a publisher in the 1920s, the publishing world was adopting a more explicit business model, which included the development of sophisticated publicity campaigns to promote books and authors using the astonishing multiplication of mass media outlets, particularly magazines and new media like film. With his movie star good looks, his charismatic and domineering personality, and his willingness to negotiate the modern literary marketplace, Hemingway was an ideal figure for this environment. This new form of promotion involved positioning authors as personalities, a practice that included generating interest in their private lives. Almost from the beginning, Hemingway’s life was used to sell his books and promote film adaptations of his work. A Farewell to Arms (1929) provides a good example. The publicity and reception, particularly of the 1932 film adaptation, brazenly conflated the lives of Hemingway and his hero, Frederic Henry. TheLos Angeles Times ran a headline, “Author Lived Story Showing on Screen Here,” and the New York Mirror declared that “much of Hemingway’s material [was] autobiographical.”3 Although initially Hemingway rebuffed, or pretended to rebuff, such links between his writing and his private life, by the 1930s, he shed his reservations and decided to harness the media in an effort to become, as John Raeburn puts it, “the architect of his public reputation.”4 He spent most of the decade writing nonfiction works like Death in the Afternoon (1932), Green Hills of Africa (1935), and a series of “letters” for a new men’s magazine called Esquire. These pieces, which foreground Hemingway’s life, experiences, and voice, not only began to cement his public image Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cult and Afterlife 121

Figure 12.1. Endorsement for Ballantine Ale, 1951.

as the manly adventurer, sportsman, and connoisseur who lived life to its fullest, but also gave readers a sense of intimacy and connection with him. Still, during these early years especially, colleagues detected the element of performance in the persona in the making. Virginia Woolf famously remarked in a 1927 review of Men Without Women for the New York Herald-Tribune that Hemingway was too “self consciously virile,”5 and in 1934, Vanity Fair ran its now notorious Hemingway paper dolls featuring a “Neanderthal” doll that readers could dress in a variety of costumes representing different personal interests of the author such as bullfighting. By the 1950s, Hemingway’s fame and masculine persona had become an unquestioned fixture in American life. He was a Nobel Prize- winning author whose familiar face had appeared on covers of magazines like Life and Time and in advertisements for Pan Am, Ballantine Ale, and Parker pens (Figure 12.1). The June 1956 cover of Modern Man exclaimed without irony that Hemingway was “America’s No. 1 He-Man.” However, while the public embraced “Papa” and Hemingway continued to cultivate the image publicly and in print, there is evidence in his unpublished writing from the time that he had also begun to chafe against the persona as both artistically and personally limiting. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

122 del Gizzo Even given his extraordinary degree of fame for a writer, Hemingway has had an unusually active cultural afterlife. The he-man persona is a major part of this continuing attention. Fluctuations in Hemingway’s reputation have often been tied to changing cultural attitudes toward the constituent elements of the persona: whiteness, heterosexuality, American masculinity. Over the course of the twentieth century, each of these elements, uncritically placed at the ideological center of American life, has been thoroughly interrogated (and even dismantled). This also accounts for the emotional investment that often attends discussions of Hemingway’s persona. It is why Hemingway could be presented as a hypermasculine ideal “for the American male who was having trouble adjusting to a postwar suburbanization”6 in the conservative 1950s and then vilified as an animal-killing, racist, and misogynist bully in the late 1960s and 1970s with the rise of civil rights and liberation movements. But another factor keeping Hemingway in the public eye has been a series of revelations about him that have come most notably through the rich store of unpublished manuscripts left behind when he committed suicide in 1961. Material from this trove has been published at the rate of nearly one book per decade, including A Moveable Feast (1964; restored edition 2009), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), The Garden of Eden (1986), and True at First Light (1999; published in a scholarly edition as Under Kilimanjaro [2005]). In addition, Hemingway left behind a series of mysteries and conundrums that enrich and complicate his persona. His well-known life story contains gaps and incon- sistencies – the question of his suicide (the circumstances leading up to it as well as his decision to commit an act he found cowardly in his father); the manuscripts lost by his first wife, Hadley, in 1922; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) file with its fifteen redacted pages; and some of the material in that great store of manuscripts, particularly the gender-bending Garden. Hemingway left behind just enough traces of his complexity that serious observers could not simply accept the public persona. With this in mind, it becomes interesting to examine the way Hemingway has been memorialized, presented, and used in various places and discourses since his death. In general, the image of Hemingway circulating in mainstream culture today is a slightly domesticated version of the 1950s he-man. The hypermasculine, hairy-chested “Papa” has been repackaged to emphasize Hemingway as an adventurer, literary craftsman, and discriminating connoisseur, qualities that resonate comfortably and widely in American consumer culture. This repackaging of Hemingway’s image is perhaps most Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cult and Afterlife 123 visible in the promotional materials for Hemingway Ltd., a company founded in 1992 by Hemingway’s sons to license the author’s name and image. This venture is responsible for the explosion of Hemingway-related products (known as The Ernest Hemingway Collection), including everything from clothing, furniture, hunting gear, and hotels to pens, shoes, teddy bears, and mattresses. The Hemingway Collection Web site establishes the aspirations for the brand through careful framing of the author. It features images of Hemingway with accoutrements of his adventurous life (foreign coins, a U.S. passport, a compass). Samples of his handwriting and signature are scattered across pages designed using rich earth tones as well as wood and parchment backgrounds. The author is described as “a prolific writer, world-traveler, and constant adventurer,” and although the site makes frequent reference to his masculine exploits, they are encoded in benign phrases like “avid outdoorsman” as opposed to “big-game hunter.” The copy defines the “Hemingway lifestyle” as possessing a patina of nostalgia and quality that the brand’s products can ostensibly deliver. Even his discipline and precision as a writer is recast as a way of guaranteeing quality: “each piece of the Ernest Hemingway collection is marked by superb craftsmanship, attention to detail, and an authenticity in materials, design, and construction.”7 The “upper-middle market position” (The Ernest Hemingway Collection) of the Hemingway brand solidifies a connection between the author’s name and the good life (albeit one increasingly defined by luxury) that began during his lifetime in pieces like the Esquire letters. As Raeburn observes, these letters gave the impression that Hemingway “seemed to spend more time in leisure than at work” and offered readers access to pleasures that “were beyond ordinary reach” (47). The brand’s positioning also speaks to the way the Hemingway image continues to be refashioned to meet the needs of his various publics. Although the packaging used to market his persona changes over time and according to audience, Hemingway is frequently presented as a salve for suburbanization and an antidote to middle-class mediocrity. The message of the brand is clear: even if you can’t live like Hemingway, you can share in the spoils and look as if you do. Take, for example, the best-known product line to use the Hemingway name, Thomasville Furniture’s Ernest Hemingway Collection. The heavy wood, glass, and leather furniture not only has a distinctly masculine feel, but also evokes a sense of intimacy with Hemingway while conflating elements from his life and work as can be seen in pieces like the “Anson chair” (Hemingway’s paternal grandfather’s name), the “Romero mirror,” and the “Elephant accent table.”8 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

124 del Gizzo The products – glasses, pens, hospitality, and even home furnishings – associated with the Hemingway Collection generally make sense; they are appurtenances of a particular lifestyle, but the power of the Hemingway name is evident in a variety of other products (not associated with the Collection) such as the “HemingWeigh” scale9 and the “Hemming My Way” snap hemline solution system.10 Such products have nothing to do with Hemingway – and are not in any clear way connected to aspects of his persona; rather they bank on the familiarity of the name. Not surprisingly, the Hemingway deployed in the marketplace is a conservative and sanitized version of the author, emphasizing quality and connoisseurship, while downplaying less appealing qualities like his questionable treatment of women and people of color. But other variations on this conservative theme, which do emphasize Hemingway’s masculinity, continue to crop up throughout American culture. The Hemingway Days Festival, held every year in Key West, Florida around the time of Hemingway’s birthday, invites attendees to emulate the author by participating in a range of Hemingway-inspired activities from drinking at Sloppy Joe’s to fishing tournaments; there is even a version of the running of the bulls.11 The festival’s signature event is a Hemingway look-alike contest, which floods the streets of Key West with Hemingway imitators, generally copies of what Gioia Diliberto calls “stage-three Hemingways with white beards and safari jackets straining over their bellies.”12 Such tributes embrace the “Papa” persona almost to the point of caricature and hyper-reality. Interestingly, the festival began in 1980 at the same time that Hemingway’s he-man image was skewered in academic circles by feminists such as Judith Fetterley, who argued in a 1978 study of A Farewell to Arms that for Hemingway the only good woman was a dead one.13 As divergent as the lionization of the festival and Fetterley’s critique may seem, it is worth noting that Fetterley is responding to that same one-dimensional masculine image that the festival celebrates – just from a different perspective.14 A similar divide in attitudes toward the persona can be seen in plays about Hemingway’s life. For example, John DeGroot’s Papa, produced in 1996, presents Hemingway as a drunk, bully, misogynist, and liar, while Laurence Luckinbill’s one-man play, Hemingway (performed off Broadway in 2004), takes a more sympathetic approach, portraying an older Hemingway haunted by regrets in the hours before his suicide. In both instances, however, the core masculine persona is left unquestioned. More common in recent years are celebrations of the author’s masculinity tinged by sentimentality and nostalgia, even as they recognize Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cult and Afterlife 125 its limits. In 2010, country music artist Kenny Chesney remade Guy Clark’s 2009 song, “Hemingway’s Whiskey.”15 The popular song evokes Hemingway’s legendary fondness for alcohol, and drinking whiskey becomes a metaphor for the type of life that is both hard and worthwhile and one to be imitated: “if it [the whiskey] was bad enough for him, you know it is bad enough for me.” But even as the lyrics valorize this form of masculinity, they suggest a vulnerability as Hemingway’s inability to handle things is implied by the song’s focus on drinking and an allusion to his suicide in the line “Live hard die hard.” The song, like Luckinbill’s play, idealizes the masculine image, but there is a sense of disturbance beneath it, a suspicion about the insufficiency of the persona. The complexity of Hemingway’s image in contemporary American culture, however, is most clearly observable in the way the posthumous works have been published, presented, and received, particularly The Garden of Eden. With its focus on gender and sexual role reversal as well as desired racial transformations, Garden is often described as the book that initiated a sea change in Hemingway scholarship. For many Hemingway scholars and readers, Garden, along with extended attention to Grace Hemingway’s twinning of the young Ernest with his sister Marcelline in Kenneth Lynn’s 1987 biography, suggested a Hemingway with a much more nuanced and complex relationship to gender, sexuality, and race (darkening the skin and Africa are major motifs in the novel) than previously acknowledged. The ability of scholars to explore the implications of these issues, however, has been limited and resisted in a variety of ways. Most obviously, it has been limited materially by the fact that the novel was published only in a highly edited trade edition. According to scholars who studied the original manuscripts at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the editorial decisions in the published version ultimately served to protect Hemingway’s masculine and heterosexual persona (Moddelmog, Reading Desire). Even reviews of the book cast the controversial gender material on relatively safe and familiar ground, such as when E. L. Doctorow read the novel as an attempt at late-career innovation that is the mark of “true bravery as a writer.”16 Initial scholarly work on Garden, though perceptive, also seemed circumscribed by a reluctance to question the heterosexual, masculine persona. For example, the use of the word “androgyny” in early critical efforts arguably obscured significant details of the gender and sexual crossings in the novel.17 Similar efforts at the preservation of Hemingway’s masculine persona can be seen in many of the fictionalized versions of the author that Spec SD1 Date 26-july

126 del Gizzo circulate. Over twenty novels have been published since his death in which the author figures as an important character or guiding presence. Two examples demonstrate how these fictionalizations often gravitate to the gaps in Hemingway’s life story to promote a particular view of the author. In Adiós, Hemingway (2005), Leonardo Padura Fuentes builds a detective story around the blacked-out pages of Hemingway’s FBI file to help explain the author’s suicide. The narrative speculates that the FBI relentlessly tailed Hemingway, contributing to his paranoia, which led to a misdiagnosis of mental illness and subsequent electroshock treatments that arguably took away his will to live.18 In The Hemingway Hoax (1996), a science fiction novel, Joe Haldeman constructs a complex story in which the fates of several universes hinge on an attempted forgery designed to recreate one of the manuscripts lost by Hadley in 1922. The story involves the forger of the lost story, a Hemingway impostor, and two world leaders who have uncritically adopted Hemingway’s macho values and are now on the brink of a full-scale nuclear war. Although the intersections of the plot are too complicated to rehearse here, the novel explores anxieties about masculinity, identity, and authenticity that lie at the heart of many readings of Hemingway’s authorial image.19 In recent years, however, more nuanced and even playful versions of Hemingway have emerged in American culture. Interest in Hemingway’s Paris years, particularly his relationship with his first wife, Hadley, has provided a popular point of entry. These fictionalizations, the best known of which is Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife (2010), though tinged with nostalgia and sentimentality, tend to offer readers a human version of the author in the quiet before the storm of his fame. This image of Hemingway is also invoked in Mary Chapin Carpenter’s 2010 “Mrs. Hemingway,” a song that poignantly retells the story of the Paris years from the perspective of an older Hadley.20 But there have also been a few well-publicized, tongue-in-cheek versions of Hemingway, which provide another method of revising the Hemingway image. Two recent standouts are Marty Beckerman’s The Heming Way, which uses Hemingway’s macho lifestyle as the foundation for a playful guidebook targeted at emasculated contemporary men, and the parodic Hemingway of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). These versions of Hemingway signal a move away from sentimentality and sincerity and toward a recovery of the irony and sense of performance in that image that was flattened out in the 1950s. Beckerman, for example, revels in those politically incorrect aspects of Hemingway’s identity that Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cult and Afterlife 127 have been minimized in recent years – the subtitle of his book is How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy- Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within. . .Just Like Papa! – to argue that contemporary men are “manscaping” “eunuchs” who could learn from Papa’s example.21 Corey Stoll, the actor who portrays Hemingway in Midnight in Paris, acknowledges that he played the role “tongue-in-cheek,” “unspooling” Allen’s Hemingway-inspired, paratactic lines from under a carefully constructed masculine gaze. For Stoll, his deadpan delivery of the “unnat- urally long sentences” is “where the comedy is” in his performance.22 In addition, these sentences are punctuated by humorous lines that exploit mainstays of the Hemingway myth, like: “You’re too self-effacing, it’s not manly. If you’re a writer, declare yourself the best writer, but you’re not as long as I’m around, unless you want to put on the gloves and settle it” or “Have you ever shot a charging lion?”23 Such versions of the author begin to sound out the limits of the type of American masculinity that Hemingway often represents while also acknowledging cultural affection and nostalgia for them. In the process, they may begin to help us see how this identity is now historical; part of the reason it can be the source of nostalgia and laughter is that it is no longer a truly viable identity. Although tempting, it is probably an overstatement to suggest that we are moving beyond the he-man version of Hemingway. Even though commentators have been bidding “Farewell” to Hemingway’s macho persona for over thirty years now,24 the fact is that many Hemingways continue to circulate in American culture simultaneously and typically with very little impact on each other. The nuanced versions – some sentimental, some playful – of Hemingway coexist with the image promoted in the Hemingway Collection and the popularity of tribute events like the Hemingway Days Festival. This ability of the Hemingway image to sustain different readings is arguably what made it possible for both 2008 presidential nominees, Barack Obama and John McCain, to claim Hemingway as their favorite author (even sharing For Whom the Bell Tolls as their favorite book). Unfortunately, it does not seem that Hemingway will provide the bridge between the blue state/red state divide; rather he can and does mean different things to different constituencies of readers. Hemingway’s dynamic authorial image is not coherent, but it carries the traces of a man who forged a public and private identity profoundly in touch with some of the defining issues, anxieties, and aspirations of American life. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

128 del Gizzo Notes 1. This chapter focuses on Hemingway’s reputation in the United States, but the cultural and commercial use of his name and image are global phenomena, and an essay could certainly be written on this global circulation of his persona. 2. D. A. Moddelmog, Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. L. J. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997), 175. 4. J. Raeburn, Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 7. Subsequent references are included in the text. See also Leff as well as R. W. Trogdon, Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007). 5. Quoted in M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 153. 6. D. M. Earle, All Man!: Hemingway, 1950’s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 18. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. The Ernest Hemingway Collection. 2012. Web. January 14, 2012. www. ernesthemingwaycollection.com. Subsequent references are included in the text. 8. Thomasville. n.d. Web. January 14, 2012. www.thomasville.com. 9. HemingWeigh. n.d. Web. January 14, 2012. www.hemmingmyway.com. 10. Hemming My Way. n.d. Web. January 14, 2012. www.hemmingmyway.com. 11. The Florida Keys and Key West. n.d. Web. February 8, 2012. www.fla-keys. com/hemingwaymedia/. 12. Qtd. in M. Dowd, “A Farewell to Macho,” New York Times, October 15, 2011. Web. January 14, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/ dowd-a-farewell-to-macho.html. 13. J. Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 71. 14. Interestingly, while all this was going on, the Ernest Hemingway Society was founded on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor by a small group of academics committed to deep and careful study of the author’s life and work. 15. G. Clark, “Hemingway’s Whiskey,” perf. K. Chesney on Hemingway’s Whiskey, 2009. Web. January 14, 2012. www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/ clark-guy/hemingways-whiskey-28585.html. 16. E. L. Doctorow, “Braver Than We Thought,” New York Times, May 18, 1986. Web. January 14, 2012. www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/ hemingway-eden.html. 17. For an overview of critical responses to Garden, see S. del Gizzo and F. J. Svoboda, Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Twenty-Five Years of Criticism (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2012). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Cult and Afterlife 129

18. For analysis of this and other fictionalizations around Hemingway’s FBI file, see D. A. Moddelmog, “Telling Stories From Hemingway’s FBI File: Conspiracy, Paranoia, and Masculinity,” in C. A. Culleton and K. Leick (eds.), Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 53–72. 19. For more analysis of this and other fictionalizations around the lost manuscripts, see R. McFarland, “Recent Fictional Takes on the Lost Hemingway Manuscripts,” Journal of Popular Culture 44.4 (2011), 314–32. 20. M. C. Carpenter, “Mrs. Hemingway,” perf. M.C. Carpenter, 2010. n.d. Web. January 14, 2012. www.lyricsreg.com/lyrics/mary+chapin+carpenter/ Mrs.+Hemingway/. 21. M. Beckerman, The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within. . .Just Like Papa! (n.p.: Infected Press, 2011). 22. C. Stoll Interview by M. Ryzik, “The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway,” New York Times n.d. Web. January 14, 2012. video.nytimes.com/video/play- list/arts/carpetbagger/1194811668553/index.html#100000001249088. 23. Midnight in Paris, dir. W. Allen. perf. C. Stoll, Sony Classics, 2011. 24. See M. Dowd (cited in note 12) and A. Latham, “A Farewell to Machismo,” New York Times Magazine, October 16, 1977, 52–5, 80–2, 90. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 13 Houses and Museums Frederic Svoboda

While renowned as a globe-trotting adventurer, Hemingway also is well known for several of the houses that he inhabited, and these have reflected and influenced his public persona and work. But carefully viewed, they do something further. These dwellings tend to encapsulate and then reveal the several realities of Hemingway, perhaps more so than do the public and cultural images of the famed author and celebrity. While they form a part of his public image as dweller in far-flung places, they also complicate that image when viewed with care, showing a domestic as well as adventurous side, and also suggesting the importance of his private life as family member and hard-working writer. It probably should go without saying that any successful literary artist likely is not a simple personality, but the public image of Hemingway has tended to obscure the multiple identities that contribute to the richness of his work. For instance, we should be able to see Hemingway in many ways as an heir to Victorian values and ideals even as we acknowledge his role as a great proponent and popularizer of literary modernism. The houses in which he lived may lead us to consider aspects of Hemingway as family man and member of several family circles, enriching the popular image of Hemingway as macho adventurer. We often see Hemingway as outdoorsman and man of the world, forgetting that in his early upbringing but also much of his continuing home life he might also be seen as having a rather conventional, middle-class side. Still these secure locations provided home bases from which he explored the wider world. Easily seen through both the locations in which he lived and his public persona are the opposed qualities of Hemingway as, on one hand, an explorer of rural and wild settings but, on the other hand, an appreciative urban dweller, particularly in his experiences of great European cities such as Madrid, Venice, Milan, and, especially, Paris, the birthplace of the modern. Similarly, we can easily see that Hemingway is simultaneously and quintessentially an American, yet also a cosmopolitan citizen 130 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Houses and Museums 131

Figure 13.1. The Hemingway family cottage, “Windemere,” on Walloon Lake, Michigan, 1901. From the James Sanford Collection at the Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University. Used with the permission of James Sanford. of the entire world; in fact, one of his great roles as author is as interpreter of the Old World to citizens of the New World. An exhaustive list of the places Hemingway inhabited would take far more space than is available here; however, several iconic places, some open to the public, reflect Hemingway’s complex identity and help us to trace more fully his development as an author. (See the brief appendix at the end of this chapter for a list of some of these, whether they may be visited or not, and links to online resources regarding them.) Probably the most famous of these houses – because it is most clearly reflected in Hemingway’s fiction – is “Windemere,” the white clapboard, two-bedroom Hemingway family cottage in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan near Petoskey on Walloon Lake (Figure 13.1). Windemere was built in 1899, the year of Hemingway’s birth. Its covered porch offered a view of the lake, with a gated railing keeping the young children from wandering. In later years a separate kitchen Spec SD1 Date 26-july

132 Svoboda was added, with a covered breezeway and eating area (later completely enclosed) linking it to the main cottage. A separate annex eventually added more sleeping space for children and guests. Hemingway spent summers there through his childhood and teen years, sleeping first on one of the window seats in the main room and later in a tent in the yard. Windemere is the basis for the settings of many of the Nick Adams stories, the mostly early career short stories of the most nearly biographical of Hemingway’s protagonists, portrayed from childhood through teen and early adult years into early middle age. Seen particularly clearly in one story of Nick’s childhood, “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” the lakeside cottage is perched on the dividing line between civilization and the wilderness with its encircling fence marking the division. It is also on the dividing line between difficult domesticity and Edenic freedom in the Michigan woods; in this story the division is also between female and male spheres of activity, much as one might expect of Hemingway’s Victorian forebears. The conflict in the story at first seems to exist in the male sphere and between Dr. Adams (Nick’s father) and Dick Bolton, a local Indian who picks a fight with the doctor in order to avoid working off a debt for his wife’s medical treatment. The doctor intends for Bolton to saw up logs lost from a lumber drive down the lake, but Bolton outwits him. He suggests that to do so would be stealing from the lumber company and backs up this ploy with a threat of violence. Bolton, the man of nature, bests Dr. Adams, the man of civilization. However, the real and essential conflict in the story involves both spheres and is between the doctor and his wife, a Christian Scientist nursing a sick headache by retreating to her bedroom who apparently believes neither in the doctor’s vocation nor in the rough world of duplicity represented by Bolton’s challenge to the doctor’s authority. Ironically and reflecting her domestic isolation from the realities of the world, she “really can’t believe that anyone would do a thing of that sort intentionally” when the doctor describes the situation (NAS 26). Her opinion seems hollow and unrealistic even to little Nick, portrayed as if about seven or so years old. He chooses sides in the family argument and suggests to his father at story’s end that they leave domesticity behind and go off to look for black squirrels, special but quite real inhabitants of the Michigan north woods. (The late story “Fathers and Sons” similarly recalls his father’s role in introducing Nick to the joys of nature study, hunting, and fishing, important subject matter throughout Hemingway’s writing career that is intimately related to his experiences at Windemere, from which he first ventured into the larger world.) Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Houses and Museums 133 It is important to note that the cottage of the short stories is not precisely the real Windemere, any more than the doctor and his wife are the biographical Clarence Edmonds and Grace Hall Hemingway. Nor are the fictional lake and woods of the short story precisely the actual Walloon Lake of early twentieth-century cottagers. These vacationers intended a life closer to family and to nature than that provided by the resort hotels popular in the nineteenth century (and which remained popular well into the twentieth). Even so, Walloon Lake was rather a civilized place, hardly a wilderness, with twice daily pickups and deliveries of mail and grocer- ies via a small circulating steamboat, and easy access via rail to genteel Petoskey. As with all of Hemingway’s dwellings reflected in his fiction, we see highly shaped versions of the real places, adapted in order to fit the author’s methods and concerns. A contrast to the northern Michigan cottage is formed by the Hemingway houses in suburban Oak Park, Illinois, that outpost of New England on the prairie west of Chicago where more of the author’s childhood and teen years were spent. The richly decorated house at 339 North Park Avenue, in which Hemingway was born in 1899 and spent his first six years, provides the greatest contrast. It was Victorian Queen Anne in style, built for his maternal grandparents in 1890, and serves to remind us that Hemingway was in many ways rooted in the Victorian values of his parents and grandparents, values sometimes obscured by the modern surfaces of his fiction but still existing beneath those surfaces. The house has been beautifully restored by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. To walk up the front steps onto its wide veranda and into the home is to walk into the hierarchical and formally ordered world of high Victorianism, with spaces carefully allocated to males and females, owners and the help. There is a formal parlor and dining room for the family, a library for the master (Grace’s father, Ernest Hall), family bed- rooms upstairs, and a tucked away pantry, kitchen, and other servants’ spaces. Although born here, Hemingway did more of his growing up at Windemere and the Oak Park home a few blocks away to which his family moved in 1906. The massive two-and-a-half story home at 600 North Kenilworth Avenue in which Hemingway spent his later childhood and teen years is far more modern in appearance (Figure 13.2). While not a product of famed Oak Park resident Frank Lloyd Wright, it is very much of the Prairie School of architecture. It faces west and when built in 1906 reportedly looked out onto the Illinois prairie. Its main instigator seems to have been not Dr. Hemingway but Ernest’s mother, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

134 Svoboda

Figure 13.2. The Hemingway house on Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois, 1907. From the James Sanford Collection at the Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University. Used with the permission of James Sanford.

Grace, who sold the Oak Park Avenue house after her parents’ deaths. She was Grace Hall Hemingway, keeping her own family name as well as assuming that of the doctor’s family. Grace was an independent woman moving confidently into the twentieth century and directing the design of the Kenilworth Avenue house into what looks much more like a modern machine for living than a monument to Victorian values. This home has a kitchen whose function would be instantly recognizable to any twenty-first-century cook with its counters and wall-mounted cabinets, much unlike the nineteenth-century-style kitchen on Oak Park Avenue with its hutch, work table, and cast iron wood-burning stove. The living room hearth was intended to become the heart of the new home (and is not all that different in appearance from the massive fireplace in the main room at Windemere). There are many more rooms than in the birth home, providing space for a large brood, enough space that the house currently is divided by floors into three large rented flats. The Kenilworth Avenue house also included a compact office and an examining room for the doctor just inside the front door as well as a thirty-by-thirty-foot rehearsal/performance hall (with balcony) for Grace, whose budding career as opera diva had been redirected by marriage into choir directing, recitals, and providing voice lessons, but not ended. In the early years of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Houses and Museums 135 their marriage, she made more from her profession than the doctor did from his. Neither of the Oak Park homes nor Oak Park itself figures significantly in Hemingway’s published fiction, reportedly because he did not wish to uncover family secrets while those involved were still alive. These “secrets” included what he saw as the mismatch between his parents reflected in the northern Michigan story “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”; Grace’s relationship with Ruth Arnold, her young protégé who became almost a family member but was seen by the doctor as a rival for Grace’s affections; Hemingway’s general ambivalence about male/female relationships most clearly seen in the posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden; and the debt that he owed to cultured, respectable Oak Park. In 1933 in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein famously remarked, “Hemingway, after all you are 90% Rotarian” and went on to report his supposed reaction: “Can’t you, he said, make it 80%. No, said she regretfully, I can’t.”1 As reportage, this of course lacks authority given the state of the relationship between Stein and Hemingway at the time (as fraught as that with his mother, whom he had come to blame for his father’s 1928 suicide), but as Stein’s perceptive evocation of Hemingway’s roots in comfortable, middle-class America, it rings true and probably struck a little too close to home. Farther from home, Hemingway’s two famous Paris apartments, at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine and 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, have become iconic of the young, innocent literary craftsman making his way in the world and helping to remake literature in English along with such luminaries of modernism as Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce, to name just a few. The fourth floor walk-up on rue du Cardinal Lemoine in a working-class neighborhood a couple of kilometers from the center of literary Paris was the first (1922) apartment of Hemingway and his equally iconic first wife, Hadley Richardson, when they arrived in the Eden of poverty described so elegaically in the posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast (1964). This urban Eden may have been one of pretended poverty given Hadley’s highly useful if modest trust fund and Ernest’s income as foreign correspondent. Reportedly the apartment was without running water or real indoor plumbing, served instead by slop buckets behind curtains on each landing, apparently close enough to actual poverty for literary purposes. Returning to Paris in 1924 after an interlude in Canada for the birth of their son Bumby (in Toronto, where Ernest continued to write for the Star as he had earlier in Paris), the young Hemingways lit much closer Spec SD1 Date 26-july

136 Svoboda to the center of things on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, one street over from Boulevard du Montparnasse and within easy walking distance of La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Dôme, Le Sélect, and other famous cafés of literary note. A sawmill operating daily in the courtyard gave the appropriate note of proletarian authenticity, but by this point in his life Hemingway was beginning to transcend his reputation as a highly competent journalist to become the rising young star of American letters. Ending his apprenticeship with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, he also was coming near to trading the motherly and domestic and decidedly ill-dressed Hadley for chic Pauline Pfeiffer, a Paris correspondent for the influential fashion magazine Vogue and an heiress of real note. The well-known Hemingway house with its nearby workroom in Key West, Florida at 907 Whitehead Street was one fruit of his marriage to Pauline and her ever-supportive Uncle Gus Pfeiffer, as was a Piggott, Arkansas studio. (Both are open to the public.) In workrooms converted from a coach house and barn, respectively, the author worked on the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms (1929), the novel that clearly made him a best seller as well as literary artist and that solidified his status as literary celebrity. The Key West house, built for a sea captain in the mid-1800s, served as the first base for Hemingway’s fishing voyages into the straits of Florida and the Gulf Stream, main elements in his then- and now-famous public persona. Like the Paris apartments, Key West also brought him close to working-class people who informed his proletarian bent during the 1930s (in works such as the 1937 Key West novel To Have and Have Not) and later, through the people who worked for him and those he met at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, also still a Key West landmark (though moved in 1937 from its original location, now the site of Captain Tony’s Saloon). The Whitehead Street house now vies with Sloppy Joe’s as the most famous Hemingway tourist attraction. Though entertaining, it is not quite authentic; its current furniture was added later and its famous six-toed cats were not present as pets during the author’s time in the house, though peacocks and rac- coons were kept, according to Patrick Hemingway, Pauline and Ernest’s older son. Still, it is attractive, a square stucco two story with tall, shut- tered windows and central through hallway for air circulation, a wide, overhanging roof, and an iron balcony running around the house and with a walkway to Hemingway’s workroom, set in a walled yard with a pool. The Pfeiffers’ Piggott house and barn studio set up for Hemingway are a more scholarly presentation under the sponsorship of Arkansas State University, though unfortunately off the beaten path for most travelers. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Houses and Museums 137 The seemingly most distant Hemingway house, La Finca Vigía near Havana, Cuba, actually shares a great deal with Windemere. In the last two decades of Hemingway’s life, it occupied roughly the position and importance of the northern Michigan family retreat in his first decades. While the Finca is a walled estate with its own swimming pool, lush grounds, and even a multistory tower built as a workroom for Hemingway, its spirit is similar. He mostly ignored the tower, usually working standing up in his bedroom to be closer to what was going on in the household. Like Windemere in later years, the Finca includes an annex built for young people, in this case for Hemingway’s three sons (one by Hadley, two by Pauline) during their summer visits to their father. Like a Michigan cottage it is well suited to relatively casual living, open to cooling breezes (on a hilltop rather than waterfront site), with rooms that mostly flow easily into each other without intervening hallways. When compared to Windemere’s lakeshore setting, the waterfront is a little distant. (Hemingway’s yacht, Pilar, was based at Cojímar on the coast to the east of downtown Havana, while the Finca is southeast of the central city. Pilar now can be seen up on blocks on the site of the former tennis court at the Finca.) La Finca Vigía had been discovered as an alternative to hotel (and bar) living in downtown Havana by Hemingway’s third wife, author Martha Gellhorn. She met him in 1936 in Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, and they cemented their relationship as fellow war correspondents and lovers in 1937 in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Gellhorn had hoped to become a partner to Hemingway in support of liberal causes but came to be seen by him as a rival in writing, particularly during World War II, even though his best-selling novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) had far outstripped her works in popularity. The Finca was presided over for most of his tenure by his fourth wife, journalist Mary Welsh, who, unlike the independent Martha, gave up her professional career in service to his. In his years living at the Finca from 1939 to 1960, Hemingway published little that drew on it as a setting. (However, Cojímar and its proletarian fishermen contributed greatly to his famous short novelThe Old Man and the Sea [1952], which helped to earn him the Nobel Prize for literature and made him a continuing hero in his adopted second homeland, Cuba.) Even so, the Finca was a constant refuge in his life, one that sustained and uplifted him. Also like Windemere, it was a place that he was forced to leave, in the case of the Finca by the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s take- over of Cuba. From the Finca, Hemingway went not to the greater world of experience and fame that followed his departure from Windemere, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

138 Svoboda but to a sadder destination, the concrete-imitating-log house in Ketchum near Sun Valley, Idaho, which he bought in 1959. Like Windemere and the Finca, the Sun Valley home was a house with a view from its picture window and balcony – in this case of mountains and the Big Wood River – but it was more compact and self-contained and did not look out figuratively upon the author’s years of promise or of achievement. Rather, it was the end point, the place in which he killed himself as the tensions, injuries, and disappointments of his not-so-long life added up to nada for one last time.

Appendix While renowned as a globe-trotting adventurer, Hemingway also is well known for the houses that he inhabited, and these have reflected and influenced his public persona and work. Among these are: • Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Home, 339 North Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois (restored and maintained by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, and open for tours). This is a Victorian, Queen Anne-style home built for Hemingway’s maternal grandparents, Ernest and Caroline Hall, in about 1890. See information and images online at ehfop.org/. • Boyhood Home, 600 North Kenilworth Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois. Owned by the Oak Park Hemingway Society and currently rented as three flats, the boyhood home is not usually open to the public. This is a Prairie Style home built for Hemingway’s parents in 1906 after the death of Ernest Hall the previous year and with a design largely influenced by Hemingway’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway. Grace’s large, attached music recital/practice room to the north of the main house has been torn down. Also of interest in Oak Park is the Ernest Hemingway Museum focusing on Hemingway’s early years. The museum opened in 1991 and is located within the lower level of the Arts Center of Oak Park, 200 North Oak Park Avenue. The Arts Center is the former First Church of Christ, Scientist of Oak Park, built in 1914. For information see: ehfop.org/. • “Windemere Cottage” near Petoskey, Michigan, on Walloon Lake. Windemere was built in 1899 by Ernest’s parents, added to several times over the years, and is currently owned by Ernest’s nephew, Ernest Hemingway Mainland, who has preserved and restored it to much of its appearance in his uncle’s time. The cottage is closed to visitors except Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Houses and Museums 139 during occasional special fundraising events. For an image see: clarke. cmich.edu/hemingway_tab/windemere/windemere_pic4.html. • “Grace Cottage” near Petoskey, Michigan, on Walloon Lake. Built in 1919 by Ernest’s mother, Grace, and intended as her studio and retreat from the pressures of family life at Windemere, which is on the opposite shore of the lake, Grace Cottage is privately owned, not located on a public street, and not normally accessible to the public. For an image see: clarke.cmich.edu/hemingway_tab/cottage_life/cottage_life_pic8. html. • “Pinehurst” and “Shangri-La” cottages in Horton Bay, Michigan, on Lake Charlevoix. These were the setting for Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s wedding reception in 1921, and Hemingway stayed there as a young adult when he clashed with his mother at Windemere. The cottages still exist, privately owned by Robert and Sue Metzger, and are only occasionally open to public tours. Shangri-La is available as a vacation rental. See: www.shangrilahouse.com/. • Paris Apartment, 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Hemingway’s first Paris apartment, a third floor walk-up with a toilet on the landing at the time. The building still exists and is marked by a commemorative plaque dedicated during the 1994 joint international conference of the Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald societies. The apartment is not open to the public. • Paris Apartment, 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Hemingway’s second Paris apartment – located above a sawmill at the time – was important in his life but has been replaced by a more modern building, though one can easily reach its approximate location. • Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Education Center, Piggott, Arkansas. The main house and the barn studio in which Hemingway worked are owned by Arkansas State University and open for tours. See: hemingway.astate.edu/. • Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, 907 Whitehead Street, Key West, Florida (privately owned and open daily for tours). See: www. hemingwayhome.com/. • The two successive locations of Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West also are of interest and, unlike the Paris bars that Hemingway frequented, not covered by literary guidebooks. See: • Sloppy Joe’s Bar: sloppyjoes.com/ • Captain Tony’s Saloon: capttonyssaloon.com/. • La Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”), San Francisco de Paula near Havana, Cuba. Hemingway’s fishing boat, the Pilar, also is located Spec SD1 Date 26-july

140 Svoboda on the grounds. The Finca is owned by the Cuban government, furnished as it was when Hemingway left it, and open for tours, though difficult to reach for most citizens of the United States for political reasons. See the Web site of El Consejo Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural del Ministerio de Cultura de la República de Cuba: www.cnpc.cult. cu/ and virtual tour at: www.cnpc.cult.cu/Patrim_Mueble_Museos/ Museos/VVFinca_Vigia/Principal.htm. For information in English, see the Web site of the U.S./Cuban Finca Vigía Foundation: fincafoun- dation.org/overview.html. For additional images see: havanajournal. com/gallery/image_full/3/. • Ketchum (Sun Valley), Montana Home. This home is owned by The Nature Conservancy and not usually open to visitors, though used for occasional special and fundraising events. This is built of the same reinforced-concrete-simulating-log construction as the famed Sun Valley Lodge at which Hemingway stayed and which is easily accessible to the public. The Sun Valley house is a time capsule, its interior and furnishings still looking very much as they did when Hemingway committed suicide in its foyer on July 2, 1961. For image and information see: http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/ unitedstates/idaho/explore/hemingway-preserve.xm.

Note 1. G. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; New York: Vintage, 1990), 220. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 14 Posthumous Publications Robert W. Trogdon

Since his death in 1961, there have been fourteen books published containing previously uncollected or unpublished material by Ernest Hemingway, most issued under the imprint of his American publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons. Such extensive publishing activity reflects the continuing popularity of Hemingway and his works – both with academic and popular audiences – but it is also one of the most problematic aspects of Hemingway scholarship. Specifically, the works Hemingway had not completed or had chosen not to publish, most written between 1945 and 1961, were subject to extensive and often misguided editing by members of his family, employees at Scribner’s, and scholars who had no training or experience in textual editing. With the opening of the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in 1980, more attention has been paid to the unreliable versions in which many of the posthumous works have appeared. In recent years, the Hemingway estate and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society have taken steps to correct and provide more reliable versions of some of the books to give clear-text versions (as opposed to full critical editions) that more accurately reproduce the manuscripts Hemingway left behind. But to date there has been no systematic plan on the part of the family, publisher, or scholarly community to reissue all the posthumous material published since 1964 in sound, trustworthy editions. Roughly speaking, half of the books issued since 1961 have contained material by Hemingway that had been published in magazines and newspapers but never collected into book form. These include collections of his journalism by William White (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway [New York: Scribner’s, 1967] and Dateline: Toronto [New York: Scribner’s, 1985]) and of his Kansas City Star articles and high school writings by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Ernest Hemingway: Cub Reporter [Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970] and Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship [Washington, DC: Bruccoli Clark/NCR Microcard Books, 1971]). All 141 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

142 Trogdon four collections relied upon published versions of the stories and articles, and are for the most part reliable texts. But they are far from complete. White’s second collection reprints 172 articles Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star newspapers; in 1994, William Burrill, in Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Toronto: Doubleday, Canada), reproduced twenty-five stories Hemingway wrote for several Toronto newspapers that White had overlooked. By-Line also has significant gaps; White reprints only seventeen of the twenty-five essays Hemingway wrote for Esquire, only nine of the twenty-eight dispatches from the Spanish Civil War, and only two of the thirteen articles written for Ken. While Bruccoli apparently was able to find all the high school writing, he no doubt missed some of Hemingway’s stories in the Kansas City Star because most of his contributions were not bylined. Other collections have made Hemingway stories and poems more accessible to readers. Several of the stories he wrote between 1919 and 1921 were printed for the first time in Peter Griffin’s Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), including “The Mercenaries,” “Crossroads,” “Portrait of the Idealist in Love,” “The Ash Heel’s Tendon,” and “The Current.” Hemingway’s poetry has been edited and collected by Nicholas Gerogiannis in Complete Poems (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), which supplants the unauthorized edition of Hemingway’s poems published by an unknown publisher in San Francisco in 1960 and expands on Gerogiannis’s earlier edition titled Ernest Hemingway: 88 Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1979). Because these collections contain work accessible only in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library or in hard to find little magazines, they are a welcome addition to the Hemingway canon. As for Hemingway’s fiction, Scribner’s published four uncollected stories – “The Denunciation,” “The Butterfly and the Tank,” “Night Before Battle,” and “Under the Ridge” – in The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969). All of these stories had previously been published in either Esquire or Cosmopolitan in 1938 and 1939. In 1987, Scribner’s issued in book form three additional uncollected stories in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway – “Nobody Ever Dies” (published in Cosmopolitan in 1939), “A Man of the World,” and “Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog” (both published in the Atlantic in 1957). In addition, the collection included two fables first published in Holiday in 1951: “The Good Lion” and “The Faithful Bull.” As Scribner’s apparently based its typesetting on Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Posthumous Publications 143 the published sources, there has been no controversy about the legitimacy of these texts. The same cannot be said of the other books published by Scribner’s since Hemingway’s death: A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Nick Adams Stories (1972), The Dangerous Summer (1985), The Garden of Eden (1986), the material in section three of The Complete Short Stories, and True at First Light (1999). With the exception of the story collections, all of these texts were culled from manuscripts that Hemingway composed primarily between 1945 and 1961. For the most part, their motifs and themes address issues of creativity, memory, and gender and sexuality in a way that Hemingway had not done in the fiction and nonfiction published in his lifetime. In addition, they are stylistically unlike his other work, perhaps due to his inability to edit his work and his increasing mental health problems. None of the works were edited by individuals who had previously edited Hemingway’s work for publication. For the most part, the Hemingway estate and Scribner’s attempted to edit these works to make them like the rest of the Hemingway canon and to eliminate material that could be considered obscene. In doing so, however, they altered the style of these works and cut significant plots and characters. As Joan Didion put it in her New Yorker article on the publication of True at First Light, “What followed [Hemingway’s death] was the systematic creation of a marketable product, a discrete body of work different in kind from, and in fact tending to obscure, the body of work published by Hemingway in his lifetime.”1 Didion argues that Hemingway’s unfinished work should not have been published, but such a view ignores the third option of publishing the works as closely as possible to the state Hemingway left them in at the time of his death with an awareness that they are incomplete. Shaping them into commercial publications mis- represents what they are and obscures Hemingway’s artistic intentions. Evidence from the manuscripts and Hemingway’s correspondence suggests that Feast, Islands, Garden, and True together form, in the words of Rose Marie Burwell’s outstanding study of these works, “a tetralogy that is Hemingway’s portrait of the artist as writer and painter, as son, husband and father; but their serial nature, and their place in the body of his fiction, has been unrecognized, misconstrued, and undervalued because of the manuscript deletions made for publication, the order of which [they] appeared, and the restrictions of archival material that clarifies much of their composition and intentions.”2 But while, with the exception of Feast and True, the posthumous works have not been reedited and Spec SD1 Date 26-july

144 Trogdon republished in more reliable versions, scholarship has outlined the myriad problems with the posthumous works and provides some guidance for the informed scholar and reader. Although these works fit into a larger pattern, the same cannot be said of The Dangerous Summer and the new stories included in The Nick Adams Stories and The Complete Short Stories. The first was started in 1959 when Hemingway agreed to go to Spain to cover the mano a mano bullfights between Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez for Life. Spending the summers of 1959 and 1960 following the fights, he started to see the work as a sequel to Death in the Afternoon (1932) and exceeded the five-thousand-word length the magazine wanted. With the assistance of A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway cut 67,516 words from his 688-page typescript. The edited text ran in the September 5, 12, and 19, 1960 issues of Life. When Scribner’s published the book version in 1985, they restored about sixteen thousand words but did not publish the entire typescript. In both published versions, Hemingway’s intentions and style are obscured by editing that emphasizes only the account of the bullfights and reduces descriptions of travel in Spain.3 The publication of heretofore unpublished stories in The Nick Adams Stories and in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway provides another example of how not to handle work left incomplete by an author and illustrates the uncritical approach Scribner’s took with Hemingway’s texts. Specifically, The Nick Adams Stories, edited by Hemingway scholar Philip Young, presents the stories and fragments arranged in such a way as to depict Nick’s growth over the course of the stories, from a young child in “Indian Camp” to a father in “Fathers and Sons.” Aside from the questionable decision to include manuscript fragments and material Hemingway edited out of early drafts of many of the stories, Young received extensive criticism for his inclusion and editing of “Summer People” (probably composed in 1924) and “The Last Good Country” (begun in 1952 but left unfinished). In the first story, Young mistran- scribed “Stut” (a nickname for Katy Smith, one of Hemingway’s friends) as “slut,” failed to transcribe one page of the manuscript altogether, ignored a cut Hemingway made, and made other substantive revisions. When the story was reissued in The Complete Short Stories, “slut” was emended to “Stut,” but no other corrections were made.4 The same type of problem exists in the published version of “The Last Good Country,” in which two openings in the drafts were compiled to create a new opening. In addition, the text was sanitized to excise references to Nick having had sexual intercourse with his Native American girlfriend, Trudy, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Posthumous Publications 145 more explicit intimations of an incestuous relationship between Nick and Littless, and instances when Nick uses obscene language.5 The publication ofThe Complete Short Stories is also problematic due to Scribner’s decision to include material culled from other manuscripts and presented as short stories. These include “A Train Trip” and “The Porter” from the manuscript of the unfinished novel “A New Slain Knight” (abandoned in early 1928); “The Strange Country,” cut by Hemingway from the draft of the novel published as Islands in the Stream; and “An African Story,” excised from the published version of Garden. Neither John, Patrick, and Gregory Hemingway’s “Foreword” nor Charles Scribner, Jr.’s “Publisher’s Preface” gives any justification for including this material or for including the other stories in the book’s third section, “Previously Unpublished.” To date, no published scholarship has analyzed the textual soundness of these texts. Much more attention has been paid to the published versions of Feast, Islands, Garden, and True. Written during the last fifteen years of Hemingway’s life, these texts reflect his concern over the role of the artist and are his attempts to come to terms with his past, either through fiction (Islands and Garden) or nonfiction Feast( and True).6 All were first published in flawed versions, but the nonfiction works have been reedited and reissued in more reliable versions. A Moveable Feast was the first posthumous title published. Intending the work as an account of his life in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway wrote the chapters primarily between 1958 and 1959. Despite his attempts to revise his drafts for publication in 1960 and 1961, the work was incomplete at the time of his death. In 1964, Hemingway’s widow, Mary, along with Hotchner and Harry Brague at Scribner’s, edited the work for publication. According to Mary, she gave the drafts the “same hard-headed editing I would have done if I had been copying Ernest’s original typing . . . put in or removed commas, checked spelling, sometimes but rarely cut out repetitious words or phrases . . . [and] With Harry Brague . . . made a few further cuts when we went over the manuscript together, and we switched about a couple of chapters for continuity’s sake. No one added any word to the book.”7 None of the reviewers of the book questioned Mary’s statements or the right of the estate to publish it. But with the opening of the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library, the valid- ity of the text as published has been called into question. Specifically, the work of Gerry Brenner and Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin has shown how extensive and intrusive the editing was. They found that not only had the order of the chapters been changed but that Hemingway’s style had been Spec SD1 Date 26-july

146 Trogdon fundamentally altered; quite often in the drafts Hemingway employed a second person point of view, which the editors revised to first person. Edits had been made that rendered his judgments of people such as Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald harsher than the opinions Hemingway had expressed in his drafts. All references to Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, were eliminated, and Hemingway’s account of the breakup of his first marriage to Hadley Richardson had been edited in a way that removed his expression of culpability. They also showed how the “Preface” by Hemingway had been compiled from various manuscripts by the editors.8 In 2009, Scribner’s published A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Edited by Seán Hemingway (the author’s grandson), this edition more closely reproduces the latest drafts Hemingway produced, restores his original ordering, and includes several chapters not published in the 1964 edition. While not a true critical edition, it is a vast improvement over the first. In total, there are 373 substantive differences between the two editions, with the majority of the emendations restoring material cut by Mary Hemingway and her fellow editors.9 Islands in the Stream was the second book and first novel posthumously published by Scribner’s. Issued in 1970, the novel is based on Hemingway’s time in Bimini in the summers of 1935, 1936, and 1937 and on his submarine hunting during World War II. Originally conceived by him as a book that would cover combat on land, air, and sea during the war, the novel was composed primarily between 1945 and 1949. The air portion was never written and the material for the proposed land section was used instead in Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). The work was supposed to include a fourth section about an old Cuban fisherman, but Hemingway excised it and published it as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. The editing was attributed to Mary Hemingway and Charles Scribner, Jr., but was primarily the work of Hemingway’s first biographer, Carlos Baker.10 Very little scholarship exists on the differences between the drafts Hemingway left and the published version. Susan Seitz, in her dissertation on the posthumous works, notes that the book versions of the final two sections of the novel, “Cuba” and “At Sea,” correlate almost exactly with Hemingway’s latest drafts. Seitz also notes, however, that in “Bimini,” several cuts and changes were made. The most significant is the deletion of the account of Thomas Hudson traveling to France to retrieve the bodies of his two dead sons, his encounter with his hostile former brother-in-law, and his reunion with his surviving son, Tom, in Paris. In addition, the editors conflated chapters and restored cuts that Hemingway had made (Steiz 136–47). Baker left no account describing his Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Posthumous Publications 147 editorial principle (indeed, he never acknowledged his role in the process). But Burwell believes that his editing supports “his own inclination to see the narrative as following what he called ‘The Narcissus Principle’ [in his Hemingway: The Writer as Artist]; and in doing so he treated Hudson only as an uncritical reflection of the author” (Burwell 94). While perhaps not as heavily edited as the other posthumous books, Islands as published is still a flawed text. No other Hemingway work has generated as much critical and textual attention as The Garden of Eden, published by Scribner’s in 1986. Composed primarily between 1948 and 1959, the novel deals with matters of creativity and sexuality in ways unlike any of Hemingway’s previous works. Specifically, the novel, as edited by Tom Jenks for Scribner’s, focuses on writer David Bourne, his wife, Catherine, and their mutual lover, Marita. Over the course of the novel, the trio experiment with gender switching and other sexual games while David struggles to write an account of his boyhood in Africa. Catherine becomes more distraught and jealous of David’s writing about Africa, eventually burning the manuscript. At the conclusion of the novel, Catherine leaves and David is able to begin rewriting the work she destroyed. But the novel as Hemingway left it is quite different. In creating a work with a unified plot, what Jenks called a commercial edit, he cut the narrative from forty-eight chapters with between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand words to thirty chapters and seventy thousand words. The editing completely excised another plot involving a painter, Nick Sheldon, his wife, Barbara, and a writer named Andy Murray. As Garden was the first posthumously published work issued after the opening of the Hemingway Collection, scholarly reaction was uniformly negative, though the subject matter elicited a great deal of attention. One of the best critiques of the editing was Matthew J. Bruccoli’s editorial “Packaging Papa: The Garden of Eden,” in which he wrote, “To patch and rearrange his work is more disrespectful to one of the greatest writers who ever lived: it diminishes the value of literature as the expression of genius, which is always singular.”11 Most significant critical works on the novel, such as those by Burwell, Robert Fleming, Hilary Justice, and Carl Eby, use the material at the Kennedy rather than the published version alone. The last posthumous book by Hemingway to appear was True at First Light, published in 1999 to mark the centenary of his birth, an account of his and Mary’s 1953–4 African sojourn. Written from October 1954 to February 1956, the work revisits the setting of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935). Although Hemingway wrote 843 pages of what he referred to Spec SD1 Date 26-july

148 Trogdon as “the African book,” he did not complete it.12 Excerpts were published as “African Journal” in three issues of Sports Illustrated (December 20, 1971, and January 3 and 10, 1972). The work was edited by Patrick Hemingway (the author’s son). He presented the work as a “fictional memoir” and estimated that he had culled the two-hundred-thousand-word manuscript down to a “fiction half that length.”13 The younger Hemingway had the great advantage of having been with his father during much of his 1953–4 African trip and thus was able to easily identify many of the characters and incidents his father depicted. The editing of the work elides some of the accounts of hunting and some of the banter between Hemingway and the character G. C. as well as some of his exchanges with other members of his party. It also, in the words of Burwell, changes the depiction of Mary, “for her comments, reprimands, and questions become a shrewish refrain here, while in the full manuscript she sometimes seems to be the only sane mind in the camp.”14 Aside from Burwell, only Robert Lewis and Debra Moddelmog addressed the limitations of Patrick Hemingway’s editing in the book for the True section of the fall 1999 issue of the Hemingway Review. This was probably due to the fact that before the publication of the 1999 edition of the African book, the Hemingway Estate and the Hemingway Foundation had agreed in 1997 to a two-part publishing plan. Following the publication of the trade version by Scribner’s, the Hemingway Foundation oversaw the publication of a full-text edition (available only in the United States and only in hardcover).15 Edited by Lewis and Robert Fleming, this edition was published under the title of Under Kilimanjaro by Kent State University Press in 2005. Although not a true critical edition, Lewis and Fleming adapted the editorial principles used by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., in their edition of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1962) (Lewis and Fleming ix). Aside from correcting spelling, punctuation, grammar, and factual errors of quotation, the editors were conservative in their approach, producing what is essentially a clear text transcription of the latest stage of Hemingway’s draft. Although they lack textual apparatus to show exactly what emendations were made, Lewis and Fleming’s edition and Seán Hemingway’s edition of Feast are the most reliable of the posthumously published works; they best reflect the drafts as Hemingway left them without cuts made for the sake of creating a uniform narrative as is the case in Islands and Garden. Until the family approves the publication of a critical edition of all of his works, one undertaken by scholars who understand editorial theory, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Posthumous Publications 149 the vast majority of Hemingway’s posthumous works will be available to most readers only in unreliable versions. Whether the author would have ever published these works is not the question. As one of the most popular and most important American authors, everything Hemingway wrote adds to our understanding of his craft and life. Only when his works are published in editions as close as possible to the way he intended or – in the case of works he did not finish – in editions that reproduce his last drafts will we come close to understanding the writer as artist as he wanted to be understood. Hemingway’s posthumous works in their published versions do not give us this unfiltered view but rather a version of the man and his work as his publisher and family wanted him to be.

Notes 1. J. Didion, “Last Words,” The New Yorker, November 9,1998, 74–80; 77. 2. R. M. Burwell, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. A. E. DeFazio III, “Introduction” in A. E. DeFazio III (ed.), Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 9–10. See also his “Notes on The Dangerous Summer” in the same volume (311–17). 4. For accounts of the problems with both published versions of the story, see P. M. Griffin, “A Substantive Error in the Text of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Summer People,’” American Literature 50.3 (1978), 471–3; P. J. Lindholt, “Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Summer People’: More Textual Errors and A Reply,” Studies in Short Fiction 20.4 (1983), 319–20; and S. Seitz, “A Final (?) Note on the Textual Errors of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Summer People,’” The Hemingway Review 11.2 (1992), 2–5. 5. S. M. Seitz, “The Posthumous Editing of Ernest Hemingway’s Fiction” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 1993), 85–93. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6. For studies of the interconnections between these volumes, see Burwell’s Hemingway: The Postwar Years and Posthumous Novels; R. E. Fleming, The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994); and H. K. Justice, The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006). 7. M. Hemingway, “The Making of the Book: A Chronicle and a Memoir,”New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1964, 27. 8. G. Brenner, “Are We Going to Hemingway’s Feast?” American Literature 54.4 (1982), 528–44; and J. Tavernier-Courbin, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: The Making of a Myth (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

150 Trogdon

9. For a fuller discussion of the differences between the two editions, see R. W. Trogdon, “A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition: A Review and a Collation of Differences,” The Hemingway Review 29.1 (2009): 24–45. 10. C. Scribner, Jr. In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 80–1. 11. M. J. Bruccoli, “Packaging Papa: The Garden of Eden,” Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1986, ed. J. M. Brook (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1987), 79–82; 82. See also Bruccoli’s interview with Jenks in the same volume (82–7). 12. R. W. Lewis and R. E. Fleming, “Introduction” in R. W. Lewis and R. E. Fleming (eds.), Under Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), vii–viii. Subsequent references will be cited in the text. 13. P. Hemingway, “Introduction” in P. Hemingway (ed.), True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1999), 9. 14. R. M. Burwell, “Something’s Lost and Something’s Gained,” The Hemingway Review 19.1 (1999): 20–3; 22. 15. L. P. Miller, “From the ‘African Book’ to Under Kilimanjaro: An Introduction,” Hemingway Review 25.2 (2006), 79–80. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Intellectual and Artistic Movements and Influences

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Chapter 15 Modernist Paris and the Expatriate Literary Milieu J. Gerald Kennedy

As World War I neared its horrific conclusion, eighteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway caught his first glimpse of Paris in May 1918 while en route to Italy as a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver. He returned in December 1921, accompanied by his bride, Hadley Richardson, eager to take up residence in what he later described as “the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is” (MF 182). Without question, his roughly six years abroad in the 1920s, spent mostly (though not exclusively) in Paris, shaped his life and writing more profoundly than any comparable period in his life. As if to escape the pieties of his parents and the constraints of his bourgeois upbringing in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway plunged into the strange, seductive culture of modernist Paris. Gertrude Stein famously remarked that “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” The momentous revolution in painting that led from impressionism to fauvism to cubism identified the city with modern art and all that was new, shocking, and avant-garde. Paris could accommodate “exciting” radical change, Stein speculated, because of its change- lessly “peaceful” traditionalism.1 Seeking personal and artistic freedom, exiles from around the world flocked to the French capital at the beginning of the century to create a dynamic cosmopolitanism that fostered innovative collaboration. The dissonant music and grotesque choreogra- phy of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, as performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, created a scandal at its Paris debut in 1913 and epitomized the ferment that incited all truly modern artists – painters, writers, composers, sculptors, dancers – to renounce the past and reinvent the forms and practices of artistic production. Although the war slowed the efflores- cence of modernism, altered its content, and interrupted or ended some careers, Paris continued to foment revolutionary creativity. In human terms the Great War exacted a staggering toll, especially in France, where three-quarters of its mobilized troops were killed or wounded. Stein first heard the phrase “lost generation” from a French

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154 Kennedy mechanic lamenting the postwar scarcity of young workmen, and she reappropriated it (or so Hemingway implies in A Moveable Feast) to characterize the riotous young Americans who came to Paris after the armistice. France faced stark postwar problems: plagued by recession and bent on a futile quest to extract war reparations from bankrupt Germany, the country contended with reduced productivity as well as a plummeting birth rate and struggled to accommodate the needs of those mutilated in combat. Paris nevertheless saw an influx of global expatriates eager to exploit the labor shortage or to profit from the mounting inflation that produced crazy exchange rates: a dollar valued at seven francs in 1919 fetched more than fifty francs by 1926. For Americans, Parisian cafés and bars offered an escape from Prohibition, and many watering holes, like the two featured in The Sun Also Rises (the Select and the Dingo), styled themselves “American bars” to attract thirsty U.S. exiles. After four years of carnage, the war’s end triggered an epoch of gaiety and recklessness. F. Scott Fitzgerald described the “Jazz Age” in America as “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” and a similar frenzy swept Europe, where the French dubbed the 1920s “the crazy years.”2 The arrival in Paris of African American musicians and performers – such as Buddy Gilmore, Sidney Bechet, and Josephine Baker – enlivened the city’s music halls as well as the jazz scene in Montmartre, infusing a raw sensuality, as Hemingway suggests in Sun through the nightclub scene at Zelli’s (62–5). Young people born around the turn of the century rejected Victorian prudery and sought sexual adventure; women bobbed their hair, smoked in public, wore hemlines above the knee, and affected a chic androgynous look. Freud had revealed the primacy of the sex drive as well as the danger of repression, and many coming of age in the twenties, immersed in the pleasure-seeking ambiance of Paris, explored what Joseph Boone has called the “libidinal currents” of modernism.3 The heroine of Sun, Brett Ashley, personifies the boyish, trousered female as well as the lusty, sexually liberated jazz-age woman. Meanwhile, homosexuality had become commonplace in Paris. The tomb of Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise cemetery was becoming a pilgrimage site, and Marcel Proust (who died in 1922) had transformed a gay life into a moving roman-fleuve, a river-like multivolume series of novels. In print, Hemingway tended to mock male homosexuality (as in the story “Mother of a Queen” [1933]), but he and Hadley befriended several lesbian couples in Paris, and his 1930 short story “The Sea Change” unmistakably associates the city with lesbian desire, finally hinting at the possible sexual ambivalence of his male protagonist. Hemingway’s late, unfinished novel, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Modernist Paris and the Expatriate Literary Milieu 155 edited and published posthumously as The Garden of Eden (1986), projects a fascination with gender changing and (in manuscript) associates Paris with the onset of those forbidden desires embodied by Rodin’s statue, The Metamorphosis. Although the notebook draft of Sun begins with a nasty caricature of the “fairies” inhabiting the Montparnasse quarter, there seems little doubt, as Debra Moddelmog has suggested, that homosexual attraction underlies – and intensifies – Jake Barnes’s later admiration for the bullfighter Pedro Romero.4 In the 1920s, several Left Bank dance halls adopted same-sex formats or catered to both straight and gay patrons. This is precisely the fluidly erotic setting Hemingway depicts in his first novel when Jake encounters Brett dancing with gay men at a bal musette. The sexually charged city to which the apprentice writer returned in 1921 maintained its eminence as the capital of modernism. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Marc Chagall were taking painting in new directions, and movements such as dadaism and surrealism published brash manifestos reconceiving the relation of art to culture. Hemingway scorned dadaist absurdities and in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) caricatured the group’s standard bearer as “a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, [and] who always wore a monocle and had a headache” (CSS 49). His own appreciation of modern art developed through conversations with Stein, his first literary mentor in Paris. She owned a remarkable art collection and helped Hemingway discern what was new and important in the work of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Gris, and others. Probably through Stein, Hemingway became acquainted with Picasso, who agreed to provide an illustration for Hemingway’s story “The Undefeated” when it first appeared in a German magazine (1924) SL( 158). She also introduced him to Joan Miró and André Masson, painters who were, in their own ways, struggling toward surrealism. Despite his modest means, Hemingway acquired Miró’s The Farm as well as Masson’s The Throw of the Dice and several smaller paintings. He also knew Juan Gris and bought two of his paintings, as well as a work by Paul Klee titled Monument. He moreover befriended Bulgarian painter Jules Pascin, whom he memorably recalled in Feast (99–104). Cézanne, however, was the painter who most profoundly influenced Hemingway’s early work. In a 1924 letter, Hemingway told Stein that in writing “Big Two-Hearted River” he was “trying to do the country like Cézanne” (SL 122), and thirty-five years later he recalled walking to the Luxembourg Museum and “learning something from the painting of Cézanne” about the “dimensions” he was trying to put into his stories Spec SD1 Date 26-july

156 Kennedy (MF 13). As critics have remarked, the expatriate author learned from the Cubists the principle of collage, seen in the cover art of in our time (1924) as well as the juxtaposed prose-poems and stories in the full-length In Our Time (1925). Often, however, disturbing incongruities unsettled his prose miniatures, suggesting Hemingway’s familiarity with surrealism. The author’s quasi-surrealist interest in dreams and the unconscious also surfaces occasionally in Sun in Jake’s night thoughts and when he imagines himself, in Pamplona, carrying an invisible suitcase (192–3). Late in life Hemingway acknowledged how much he had learned about writing from painters, and in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970), he returned to the irresistible subject of painting and its indelible association with the Paris of the 1920s. But another significant influence on his early fiction came from Hemingway’s reading in Paris and from his interactions with other expatriate authors. Thanks to Sherwood Anderson’s letter of introduction, he met Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, on Valentine’s Day 1922 and soon became a regular visitor at their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. There Stein gave him an illustrated seminar on the radical changes in modern art over two decades, and she invited him to her Saturday salons to meet the painters. Often mocked in the press, where she was called (among other things) the “Mama of Dada,” Stein had suspended the principles of grammar, syntax, and genre to effect in literature a revolution as dramatic as the shift to abstract, nonrepresentational art. Her fondness for the present continuous tense, use of repetition, and fascination with the sound and rhythm of words all made an impression on Hemingway, whose style began to reveal similar touches. The repetitive “he liked” phrases in “Soldier’s Home,” written in Paris in 1924, betray such experimentation (CSS 112). In her autobiography, Stein recalled visiting Hemingway’s apartment, reading through his early manuscripts, and advising him to “begin over again, and concentrate.”5 And in 1924 Hemingway significantly deleted the talky ending of “Big Two-Hearted River” on her advice. In Sun, though, we detect signs of a rift: mock- ery of Stein’s “lost generation” remark figures in Bill Gorton’s madcap indictment of Jake as an “expatriate” who has “lost touch with the soil” and will “drink [himself] to death” (115). Although Hemingway’s letters from 1922–4 repeatedly confirm his respect for Stein’s critical judgment, the friendship faded, especially after he ridiculed her (and Anderson) in The Torrents of Spring (1926). Stein would then skewer Hemingway in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), though he had the last word, posthumously, by caricaturing her in his memoir. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Modernist Paris and the Expatriate Literary Milieu 157 Hemingway’s other principal mentor, Ezra Pound, arrived in Paris in late 1920, disgusted by the London conservativism that had thwarted the revolutionary movement he called vorticism. Pound had been a teacher of Romance languages, and his fascination with archaic dialects and obscure poetic traditions made him a paradoxical modernist who strove to “make it new” by ransacking old forms and conventions. He thus shared the innovative traditionalism of his friend T. S. Eliot, whose manuscript of The Waste Land (1922) Pound was editing in Paris when Hemingway first came calling. In exchange for boxing lessons, the poet instructed Hemingway in what to read and how to write. He urged his protégé to distrust adjectives and to appreciate the precise language and concrete symbolism of Flaubert; he also recommended the novels of Stendhal. No admirer of democracy or the press, he urged Hemingway to abandon journalism to concentrate on literary work. Pound was nevertheless instrumental in advancing Hemingway’s career, introducing him to influential figures and touting him as a rising talent. He played a role in gettingThree Stories and Ten Poems (1923) published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions and in our time published by Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press. He helped Hemingway publish poetry and prose-poems in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review. Pound also introduced Hemingway to English novelist Ford Madox Ford, who (on Pound’s recommendation) invited the young American to edit an issue of his magazine, the transatlantic review, while Ford was abroad. The friendship would founder on politics: the two disagreed sharply about Mussolini and Italian fascism, but as Feast indicates, Hemingway never forgot Pound’s early generosity. Many other expatriate authors and literary types had a hand in Hemingway’s apprenticeship. Arguably, his sporadic encounters with James Joyce – whose modernist epic Ulysses had just been published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach – stirred his literary juices, but he learned from Joyce mostly by reading him, for the Irishman never played a tutelary role. Michael Reynolds asserts that Hemingway knew all of Joyce’s work, which he probably borrowed or purchased from Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore.6 Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) seems an obvious influence on In Our Time; Hemingway must have appreciated Joyce’s knack for beginning a story immediately, without preliminary framing, as well as his talent for juxtaposing images ironically or infusing sexual innuendo. Hemingway’s occasional forays into stream-of-consciousness narration may also owe something to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses. But in his memoir Hemingway never portrays the Irishman as a close friend. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

158 Kennedy Somewhat to Hemingway’s chagrin, Pound’s friend Ford was also influential, publishing several of the American’s early stories (such as “Indian Camp”) in the transatlantic review and permitting a neophyte to edit an issue of an avant-garde magazine. Hemingway used the occasion to publish an excerpt from Stein’s The Making of Americans and to insert an editorial swipe at T. S. Eliot – a move that offended both Ford and Pound. Hemingway went out of his way to ridicule Ford and thus to deny his influence, but Ford’s fine novel The Good Soldier (1915) had introduced themes of infidelity, moral uncertainty, and disillusionment that seemed especially relevant in postwar Paris. In letters to Pound, Hemingway recurrently belittled Ford, and he satirizes him as Braddocks in Sun. Years later, in “Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple” (MF 81–8), his portrait of the English novelist as a pretentious gasbag displays a gift for wicked insinuation. Hemingway had little to learn from Robert McAlmon, but for a time he profited from McAlmon’s generosity as well as his literary connections and ambitions. The two met by chance in Rapallo, where Pound was staying, and McAlmon felt an immediate and tacitly homosexual attraction to Hemingway. The older writer had acquired wealth through a sham marriage to an English heiress (and lesbian poet) and, launching Contact Editions in Paris, McAlmon was looking for innovative works to publish. In 1923, he paid Hemingway’s expenses and accompanied him to the bullfights at Pamplona; that summer he brought out the chapbook Three Stories and Ten Poems, which marked the younger author’s first published book. McAlmon was part of the entourage Hemingway collected to attend the Pamplona fiesta of 1924, but the two eventually parted ways, especially after McAlmon (a notorious gossip) began circulating rumors in 1929 that Hemingway was a homosexual. Among many others who created literary opportunities for Hemingway in Paris, journalist Bill Bird deserves mention both for his friendship and his publication (on a hand press he operated himself) of the modernist prose miniatures that comprised in our time. Another expatriate who handed Hemingway an opportunity was Ernest Walsh, who with Ethel Moorhead established the journal This Quarter. For a time in 1925, Hemingway became the managing editor of the inaugural issue honor- ing Ezra Pound, and the number included arguably his best short story, “Big Two-Hearted River.” Walsh also published “The Undefeated” and lauded Hemingway in a review as one of the literary “elect” – for which kindnesses he was satirized in A Moveable Feast as a tubercular con man. A third figure, John Dos Passos, published a World War I novel, Three Soldiers (1920), shared with Hemingway the experience of driving an Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Modernist Paris and the Expatriate Literary Milieu 159 ambulance on the Italian front, and met him in Paris just in time to join the Pamplona posse of 1924. Later that year, Dos Passos took Hemingway’s bundle of In Our Time stories to New York seeking a publisher, and the following year he introduced Hemingway to Gerald and Sara Murphy, the wealthy expatriates whose villa in Antibes ultimately figured in the psychodrama of 1926, when Hemingway established a ménage à trois on the Riviera with his wife and his mistress, Pauline Pfeiffer. Another valuable Paris friend, poet Archibald MacLeish, came to Hemingway’s aid by taking him to the American Hospital in Neuilly when he gashed his forehead by pulling down a skylight. Surely the most celebrated of Hemingway’s literary friendships from the Paris years was his competitive camaraderie with Fitzgerald. They met in the Dingo Bar in late April 1925, and on that occasion Fitzgerald loomed as the major celebrity, with two early novels and two volumes of short stories already to his credit and The Great Gatsby just out. An established contributor to The Saturday Evening Post and a Scribner’s author, Fitzgerald enjoyed a robust income that the exchange rates of 1925 multiplied significantly. Hemingway, by contrast, had published (beyond some stray stories and poems) only two slender volumes from private presses in Paris. Fitzgerald had already apprised Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, of Hemingway’s talent, and he praised Hemingway in a review. In various ways he later enabled Scribner’s to acquire Sun. In Antibes, Fitzgerald read the manuscript of the Paris-Pamplona novel, offering key suggestions that improved the opening chapters. He later provided a valuable critique of the unpublished A Farewell to Arms. For his part, Hemingway gave Fitzgerald boxing lessons, wrote him hilarious letters, and (according to Hemingway’s memoir) reassured Fitzgerald about his masculinity in the face of Zelda’s ridicule. But from the moment of their first encounter, Fitzgerald’s career began an inexorable decline, while Hemingway enjoyed a rapid ascent, becoming with the publication of Farewell in 1929 the bigger literary star from that point forward. That year, Hemingway (on a return visit to Paris) mostly avoided Fitzgerald, whose drunken antics had become irksome. They both attended a dinner party at Stein’s that summer, however, and Stein antagonized Hemingway by declaring that Fitzgerald’s talent burned with a brighter flame. The two novelists met again in Hollywood in 1937 for the debut of the political film, The Spanish Earth, which Hemingway had narrated, but although they corresponded, they never saw each other again. Another key facet of Hemingway’s expatriate experience is the role of the bookstore at 12 rue de l’Odéon run by Sylvia Beach. As Noel Riley Spec SD1 Date 26-july

160 Kennedy Fitch has shown, Shakespeare and Company was far more than a shop selling Anglophone books and journals – it was a meeting place, a site for readings and performances, a lending library, and (briefly, at least) a publishing house that brought out the most important modernist novel in the English language, Ulysses. Along with her partner, Adrienne Monnier, who operated a French bookstore across the street, the demure Beach had a significant impact on literary Paris, in part by bringing together French and Anglophone authors at dinner parties, receptions, and readings. In her memoir Beach called Hemingway her “best customer,” and he drew extensively from her lending library to complete the reading assignments given him by Pound or to pursue his own interests. Importantly, he read the great Russian novelists and short story writers – Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov – and from Turgenev in particular he derived new ideas about landscape and country. He read Maupassant and borrowed novels by André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry James. Later he wrote lyrically of the opportunity provided by Beach: “To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you” (MF 134). For the first two years of his Paris sojourn, Hemingway was also filing reports as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. In this capacity he became a regular at the Anglo-American Press Club, where he met other expatriate journalists such as Bill Bird and Guy Hickock. Hemingway’s method of filing stories consisted of sending a telegram to Toronto in a condensed prose style he called “cablese.” By omitting articles, adjectives, adverbs, and understood phrases, he saved on transmission costs, and this paring of the story to its essentials influenced his fictional method. For the Star he wrote about the Paris café scene, fishing in the Rhone Canal, winter sports in Switzerland, inflation in Germany, and Spanish bullfighting. He also covered the Genoa and Lausanne peace conferences of 1922 and once interviewed Mussolini. In 1922 he even journeyed to Constantinople and witnessed the “ghastly” evacuation of Greeks from Eastern Thrace BL( 51–2). Hemingway revised some of this journalism, notably the bullfight material and his reports from the Greco-Turkish border, into vignettes for in our time. All of this journalistic and literary work in English raises the question of how well Hemingway understood French literature. He arrived in Paris knowing only the French phrases he had picked up in 1918, for his foreign language in high school had been Latin. But he had a good ear and picked up colloquial French easily, drawing out locals conversationally Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Modernist Paris and the Expatriate Literary Milieu 161 at cafés, boxing matches, bicycle races, and horse tracks. He also read sporting newspapers in French to pick up the specialized lingo of different sports and games. Desultory browsing in French journals and books finally enabled him to read Georges Simenon mystery novels, and according to the “Key West Inventory” provided by Reynolds, he owned dozens of books in French, but whether he read serious fiction in French with complete comprehension is a knotty question.7 At Beach’s bookstore, Ben Stoltzfus notes, Hemingway met novelists André Gide and Jules Romains as well as poets Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, and Valéry Larbaud.8 Elsewhere he met writers Blaise Cendrars and Henri de Montherlant. He later admired André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine (1933) but felt (cor- rectly) that his own written French was too wretched to venture a letter of congratulation (SL 420). His visits to Monnier’s bookstore, Les Amis des Livres, nevertheless cultivated an informed awareness of the French literary scene. Circulating among expatriate American and contemporary French authors was initially a heady experience, but what must have ignited Hemingway’s ambition when he returned to Paris as a fledgling writer was the city’s palpable reverence for artists of all kinds. In the United States, and especially in Oak Park, being an author still seemed a dubious occupation; in his letters home Hemingway felt a chronic need to document the hours he was working, the number of words he had written, or the total manuscript pages he had produced to date. In France, though, writers did not have to justify their métier: they were cultural heroes. Near his first apartment stood the Pantheon, where Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Emile Zola lay buried beneath an immense dome within a shrine where (in the sexism of the times) the “great men” were honored by a “grateful country.” All around Paris he saw plaques commemorating artists and writers; in the Luxembourg Gardens, he saw statues honor- ing Georges Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Henri Murger. Bookstores were everywhere – more bookstores in Paris than in the entire United States – and wherever he looked, people were reading books. In Feast Hemingway writes of his delight in visiting the bookstalls along the Seine (41–2). In Paris, he had found a culture of letters that made the hard work of literary apprenticeship an exciting test, a secret pleasure. The entire city seemed “organized” to facilitate writing, and in that “April city” he indeed “whittled a style for his time,” as MacLeish would write.9 The young Hemingway vowed to become one of the great ones, a legendary author in whose memory markers and monuments would one day be raised. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

162 Kennedy Notes 1. G Stein, Paris, France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 1, 11. 2. F. S. Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in Edmund Wilson (ed.), The Crack-Up with other Uncollected Pieces (New York: New Directions, 1945), 15. 3. J. Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4. The draft material appears in item 194, notebook I, chapter III, The Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston; see D. Moddelmog, Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 98–9. 5. G. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: The Literary Guild, 1933), 262. 6. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 13. 7. M. Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading 1910–1940: An Inventory (Princeton University Press, 1980), 44–71. 8. B. Stoltzfus, Hemingway and French Writers (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010), 5. 9. A. MacLeish, “Years of the Dog,” Act Five and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948), 53. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 16 Literary Friendships, Rivalries, and Feuds Kirk Curnutt

Affiliations and feuds among authors are often as entertaining as the literature they produce. The benefits of the former seem obvious enough. By aligning with each other, writers enhance their cultural visibility by forming cliques, launching movements, and promoting coterie aesthetics. They may even support each other financially and creatively; found journals and presses to publish each other; “puff” each other in reviews; and capitalize upon each other’s publicity to burnish their own profile. But rare is the artistic cadre that endures without dispute, and rarer still is one whose imperturbable harmony sustains public interest. For audiences, the rise and fall of a literary friendship can be captivating because the conflict usually dramatizes a veritable seven deadly sins of human failings, from pride, jealousy, and narcissism to the basic obstreperousness of agonistic personalities. As much as these weaknesses may reveal about authorial pathologies, however, it is debatable whether they reveal much at all about art. Ernest Hemingway is a test case for exploring this question. The list of modernist mentors and peers he publicly renounced is long, from Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford to F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. Nor was he shy about snapping the lash on contemporaries he knew more by reputation: T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, and even such minor figures as poet Chard Powers Smith, whom Hemingway promised to “knock . . . down a few times, or perhaps once, depending on your talent for getting up” after Smith objected to being satirized in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” (1924) (SL 242). In some instances, Hemingway made good on that promise. In 1936, he cleaned the proverbial clock of Wallace Stevens after the poet drunkenly derided him to his own sister at a Key West party. More notoriously, a year later he scuffled with critic Max Eastman over a negative review of Death in the Afternoon (1932). Such tales create the lamentable

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164 Curnutt caricature of the literary bruiser quick to throw up his dukes in person and on paper. Most critics recount Hemingway’s rivalries chronologically, highlight- ing when in his career they erupted rather than what they say about his aesthetics. A taxonomy of how he responded to competitors reveals something fairly striking, however: Hemingway’s repertoire of rival bashing is not that unique. Comparing his sparring to other famous flare-ups detailed in Myrick Land’s The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem (1983) or Anthony Arthur’s Literary Feuds (2002), one quickly realizes that writers have resorted to the same set of tactics for vanquishing foes since authorship became a public status. At their most basic, these techniques range from actual physical blows to ad hominem attacks to ostensibly wittier modes of parody and satire. Intriguingly, the failings in others whom authors single out are often those they fear committing themselves. Before exploring these strategies, it is worth noting patterns in Hemingway’s friendships. Biographers inevitably describe them as brief, intense, and conspicuously beneficial to his career. To use a contemporary term, Hemingway was adept at networking. Through a family friend, he met Sherwood Anderson in Chicago in early 1921. When Hemingway relocated to Paris a year later, the author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) provided introductions to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Pound’s connections resulted in two slim, reputation-establishing volumes, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and in our time (1924), published by fellow expatriate Robert McAlmon and journalist Bill Bird respectively. To break into New York publishing, Hemingway called upon two other colleagues, Harold Loeb and Donald Ogden Stewart, both soon fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Stewart placed an expanded version of In Our Time with Boni & Liveright, the publisher of Loeb’s Doodab (1925), whose best-selling author was . . . Sherwood Anderson. An even more prominent advocate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, soon persuaded Hemingway that Charles Scribner’s Sons was a more congenial imprimatur. The benefits of literary friendship were not limited to publication opportunities. Hemingway also demonstrated an amazing capacity to learn from mentors and peers. As Michael S. Reynolds notes, Anderson expanded his reading beyond his boyhood love for Rudyard Kipling: “For the first time Hemingway began to distinguish between popular fiction and literature,” with Anderson directing him to D. H. Lawrence, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.1 Upon arriving in Paris, the tyro imbibed Stein’s pronouncements on modern art, specifically Cézanne, whose postimpressionism inspired his treatment of landscape. Stein also Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Friendships, Rivalries, and Feuds 165 taught Hemingway the stylistic value of rhythm and repetition, while Pound’s advice to “distrust adjectives” and strive for “the one and only correct word” shaped his trademark sentence paring (MF 134). Early on, he was even open to constructive criticism – though that would change after 1926. Near the end of his apprenticeship, Stein encouraged him to delete the rambling monologue that ended “Big Two-Hearted River” (1924) with the credo, “Remarks are not literature.”2 Had Fitzgerald not read his drafts, The Sun Also Rises might have begun with two catty, digressive chapters that undermined the poignancy of the “lost generation” theme. Hemingway’s networking skills are perhaps best dramatized by Boni & Liveright’s jacket for In Our Time, which featured glowing recommendations, integrated in the artwork’s design, from Anderson, Stewart, Ford, and others, thus creating the impression of a formal anointing. Yet for Hemingway gratitude implied dependency, which impugned artistic autonomy and singularity. Eventually he broke with all who had helped him except Pound, often violating the etiquette of literary appreciation. When he dispatched Anderson with the book-length parody The Torrents of Spring (1926), a commentator noted that, if nothing else, his astonishing ingratitude demonstrated that “Hemingway does not approve of logrolling,” the practice of authors “puffing” each other through mutu- ally flattering blurbs.3 Some peers excused this habit as a “psychological fear” of being beholden. As Stewart wrote, “The minute he began to have some sort of obligation to you . . . then is when he had to kill you.”4 Others attributed it to a belligerent need to assert superiority. As Fitzgerald wryly put it, “Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.”5 Whatever the reason, the compulsion opened him to charges of opportunism that linger today. To some he remains “a careerist who cut a trail of personal disloyalty to facilitate his professional advancement.”6 Hemingway’s bluntest method of attacking rivals was to threaten physical force. In 1924 he fantasized about running Eliot, who had done nothing to provoke him, through a sausage grinder (BL 133). A decade later, he promised “to push” William Saroyan’s “puss in” after The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934) mocked him.7 Hemingway’s most publicized confrontation was the 1937 Eastman tussle, after which he insisted to the New York Times that Eastman had “jumped at me like a woman – clawing.”8 Nor was he above challenging dead men. In a notoriously unflattering 1950 New Yorker profile, he bragged of KO’ing Turgenev and de Maupassant. As much as we associate Hemingway with what Jeffrey Spec SD1 Date 26-july

166 Curnutt Meyers calls this “gladiatorial concept” of literature, he is hardly its lone combatant, with knock-downs and drag-outs between writers often making headlines.9 For many in 1937, the Eastman bout recalled a similar confrontation six years earlier when Theodore Dreiser twice slapped Sinclair Lewis for accusing him of plagiarism. Yet media coverage often seizes upon such incidents to reinforce stereotypes of literature as unmanly, with commentators mocking the very idea of belletrists’ fitness for blood sport. As the Times smirked, “Mr. Eastman got his nose in a book, where he has frequently had it before, and Mr. Hemingway was bent over a desk, a position he has often assumed in the past.”10 Only slightly more refined than the “slapping bee” is the ad hominem. As Land notes, “high-spirited name calling . . . has been a feature of literary life for centuries,” from Aristophanes deeming Euripides a “cliché anthologist” to Truman Capote dismissing Jack Kerouac as a typist, not a writer.11 Hemingway’s putdowns include deriding American bohemians in Paris as “the scum of Greenwich Village . . . ladled off and deposited in large quantities” (BL 23); ridiculing critics such as Van Wyck Brooks as “the eunuchs of literature”12; describing Malcolm Cowley’s “potato face” in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) CSS ( 49); and mocking Sinclair Lewis’s chronic skin condition in Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). In A Moveable Feast (1964), Ford is described as an “up-ended hogshead”; Dos Passos a “pilot fish”; and Wyndham Lewis “toe-jam” (MF 83, 207, and 109 respectively). As caustic as these insults are, Hemingway’s obloquy needs contextualizing. His most scabrous comments – for example, his assessment of Thomas Wolfe as “a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice” (SL 726) – were not publicly aired in his lifetime. It is debatable, too, whether his aspersions rise to what Arthur considers literature’s most memorable insult, Mary McCarthy’s litigation-inspiring jibe that Lillian Hellman’s “every word . . . is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”13 Clever ad hominem vents bile through wit; it also exaggerates some measure of truth. (Hellman’s memoirs are notoriously lax with facts – including accounts of her “friendship” with Hemingway.) Thus, when Stein described her former pupil as “ninety percent Rotarian” (216), the poke was funny because he was essentially conservative and bourgeois. Yet Hemingway’s initial retaliatory slurs (“a woman who isn’t a woman”) merely recycled stale calumny against her “mannishness.”14 Only rarely did his insults rise to the level of wit. In Green Hills of Africa (1935), for example, he dismisses New York critics as “angleworms in a bottle” who “derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle” (GHOA 21–2). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Friendships, Rivalries, and Feuds 167 Two things make this a marvelous metaphor for insularity: the originality of the image and the fact that even in its epigrammatic brevity it is intricately developed. Only slightly less personal than the ad hominem was Hemingway’s tactic of dismissing rivals’ aesthetics. One strategy was to condemn them as excessively decorous and oblivious to the world’s violence. Stein was cited repeatedly for this fault, particularly in Death in the Afternoon, where she is parodied as the “Old Lady” who objects to the relentless brutality. The Old Lady will only consent to discussing bullfighting rituals “provided [that the setting] is clean and wholesome.” Hemingway’s response is to escort her to the Café Fornos, “frequented only by people connected with the bullfights and by whores” DIA ( 64). Hemingway would elaborate on Stein’s aversion in A Moveable Feast, where her objection to “Up in Michigan” as “inaccrochable” is depicted as obtuse prudery. Stein was by no means the only rival denounced as priggish. Death also includes an interpolated short story, “A Natural History of the Dead” (DIA 133–44), that ridicules critics such as Robert Herrick, whose review of A Farewell to Arms had encouraged the novel’s suppression on grounds it was “unpleasant garbage” that “smell[ed] of the boudoir” (Critical Reception 88). Shortly thereafter, Hemingway took on columnist Westbrook Pegler for commending the late Ring Lardner for eschewing obscenity – unlike the author of Farewell. “I doubt if a day has passed in my life in which I have not heard what Mr. Pegler calls dirty words used,” Hemingway replied in Esquire. “Therefore how could a writer truly record any entire day and not use dirty words?” Prettifying profanity not only falsified reality but implied one of his favorite charges against critics: elitism. “No writer can write anything that is truly great when he feels superior to the people he is writing about,” he insisted, “no matter how much compassion he may have.”15 Another point of attack was competitors’ work ethic. Rivals whose style failed to manifest the rigorous sculpting of his prose – or who were simply more prolific than he – were deemed slovenly in craft. Such was his justification for breaking with Anderson, whom he accused of “slop- ping,” and Stein, who “since she has taken up not making sense . . . has never known a moment[’]s unhappiness with her work” (SL 27, 287). Green Hills of Africa makes a similar point about Thomas Wolfe, whom, Hemingway suggests, might receive “the necessary shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion” if he were sent to Siberia like Dostoevsky (GHOA 71). Interestingly, the rival who bore the brunt of this charge in Hemingway’s lifetime was William Faulkner. The Spec SD1 Date 26-july

168 Curnutt three-year gap between Farewell and Death coincided with the breakneck streak of The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), These 13 (1931), and Light in August (1932). Hemingway clearly felt pressured to diminish this rate of output as slapdash. “You can’t go wrong on Faulkner,” Death sarcastically insists. “He’s prolific too. By the time you get [his books] ordered there’ll be new ones out” (DIA 173). Equally off-putting was Faulkner’s scope, both thematic and stylistic, which privileged centrifugal expansiveness over Hemingway’s centripetal exactitude. When not disparaging their literary practices, Hemingway would condemn rivals for lacking the moral mettle to resist ruination. The initial version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” took a potshot at “poor F. Scott Fitzgerald” for falling under the spell of the rich, claiming that when his friend discovered they were not innately glamorous “it wrecked him just as much as anything that wrecked him.” Hemingway later replaced the reference with the fictional name “Julian” CSS( 53), but he never revised his insistence that Fitzgerald’s fixation with money bankrupted his artistry. The fantasy of a competitor selling out served to ease Hemingway’s discomfort with his own fame and success, a point substantiated by his comparable disparagement of Dos Passos. When the final installment of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, The Big Money (1936), landed its author on the cover of Time and outsold his own recent work, Hemingway concocted a fantasy that his fellow modernist pandered to the au courant interest in proletarian fiction strictly for the lucre. As A Moveable Feast bitterly insists, the “pilot fish” suffered “a latent and long denied love of money. He end[ed] up rich himself, having moved one dollar’s width to the right with every dollar that he made” (MF 208). Even more transparently defensive was Hemingway’s habit of attacking rivals’ drinking as evidence of moral weakness. As early as 1922, he distinguished himself from the sodden “loafers” who caroused in Paris’s bohemian cafés instead of working (BL 21–3). By the time of The Sun Also Rises, he turned to roman à clef to particularize the attack: among the readily identifiable expatriates is Harold Stearns (a.k.a. Harvey Stone) whose inebriated despair contrasts against Jake Barnes/Hemingway’s struggle to maintain discipline (SAR 41–2). Much later, Hemingway would virulently denounce Faulkner as a “rummy,” especially in “The Art of the Short Story,” which was written in 1959 but was so vituper- ative it remained unpublished until 1981. “For quite a while when he hits the sauce toward the end of a book, it shows bad,” Hemingway bloviates. “He gets tired and goes on and on, and that sauce writing is really hard on who has to read it.”16 Fitzgerald suffered similarly: he was Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Friendships, Rivalries, and Feuds 169 “soft” and “dissolved at the least touch of alcohol” (Conversations 151). A Moveable Feast includes a seriocomic episode illustrating the claim. On a disastrous trip to Lyon, Fitzgerald degenerates into a sloppy prima donna upon drinking Mâcon, a white wine “with a low alcohol content,” while Hemingway, the hearty connoisseur, demonstrates drinking is as “normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight” (MF 164, 166). Of Hemingway’s many strategies for staging rivalries, the most potentially artistic was satire, which “was often his initial response to pretense.”17 His friendship with Pound, for example, might have ended prematurely had mutual acquaintance Lewis Galantière not talked him out of publishing a caricature of the poet’s bohemian affectations dashed off after their first meeting. Yet his most famous parody, the Anderson-drubbing Torrents, illustrates a truth generally accepted among aficionados: when compared to say, Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) or Alice Randall’s more recent The Wind Done Gone (2001), Hemingway’s satires are often pain- fully unfunny.18 This is equally true of his 1922 dada burlesque “A Divine Gesture”; his 1924 the transatlantic review column “And to the United States,” which ridicules Galantière; “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” which is more cruel than funny; “Banal Story” (1926), which mocks the middlebrow magazine The Forum; the 1927 essay “The Real Spaniard,” a dispatching of Louis Bromfield; the Old Lady dialogues in Death; the near-libelous skewering of Dos Passos as novelist Richard Gordon in To Have and Have Not (1937); just about any Esquire column berating critics; and “The Art of the Short Story,” whose sardonicism is tedious. The most infelic- itous example may be the 1923 Stein take-off, “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers.” Recreating the seemingly meaningless repetition that characterizes Stein’s style, Hemingway lampoons her with doggerel, a comedic device atypical of her poetry. The humor is also exceedingly juvenile: “Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. / Come let us fart in the home. / There is no art in a fart. / Still a fart may not be artless. / Let us fart an artless fart in the home” (Poems 70). In fairness, however, Hemingway was capable of a lighter touch. Both the 1927 New Yorker piece “My Own Life” (which includes a section sub- titled “The True Story of My Break with Gertrude Stein”) and theEsquire column “The Sights of Whitehead Street” (1935) substitute absurdity for venom and make for delightful reading.19 And Hemingway could also prove incisively witty when mimicking competitors, as when he tweaks Faulkner by describing the “catfishlike uncatfishivity” of a Gulf Stream catch (BL 174). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

170 Curnutt If parody and satire are hallmarks of literary feuding, so, too, is the final strategy Hemingway employed, the sexual slur. Depending on one’s perspective, it is either the ne plus ultra or the reductio ad absurdum of insult. “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” mocks both Chard Powers Smith and T. S. Eliot as effeminate and infertile poets, while The Sun Also Rises snidely alludes to Henry James’s rumored groin injury, Glenway Wescott’s homosexuality, and Joseph Hergesheimer’s “garter snapp[ing]” (SAR 43). Green Hills equates writer’s block with impotence, insisting that two unnamed writers (Anderson and Fitzgerald) suffer performance anxiety because of critical adulation (GHOA 24). Meanwhile, Dos Passos’s manliness is impugned in To Have and Have Not when Richard Gordon suffers a sudden impotence bout (THHN 190). Hemingway’s two most calculated assaults occur in A Moveable Feast. First, he undermines Stein’s imperious persona by claiming he overheard a squabble between her and Alice B. Toklas that revealed not only their lesbianism but Stein’s emotional subservience to Alice (MF 115–19). Then, in the infamous “A Matter of Measurements” chapter, he portrays Fitzgerald as crippled by his wife Zelda’s criticism of his penis size. According to Land, literature’s quintessential sexual jibe is Colley Cibber’s tale of happening upon foe Alexander Pope in flagrante delicto with a prostitute: “I found this hasty little hero, like a terrible tomtit, pertly perching upon the mound of love!” (57). What makes the image funny is not only knowing Cibber was the underdog in this feud – Pope had goaded him incessantly in mock verse – but its very eighteenth-century attention to euphemism and alliteration. By contrast, Fitzgerald was long dead when Hemingway drafted A Moveable Feast, and craft-wise the anecdote never transcends its “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” mentality. In supposedly reassuring “Fitz” that his wife resorted to this tactic only out of jealousy at his writing, Hemingway lets slip an apt summation of the insult: belittling a man’s penile shortcomings is “the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business” (MF 190). If this overview seems excessively critical, it is because Hemingway’s virulence toward rivals often overshadows what truly made him a great writer: the sensitivity evident in “Indian Camp,” the precision of detail throughout “Big Two-Hearted River,” the empathy for a character’s limited options in “Hills Like White Elephants.” As much of a hotspur as he could be, Hemingway was also a romantic with a nuanced sense of poignancy. As both Land and Arthur note, however, such qualities rarely get their due in a culture that celebrates competition and dominance over collaboration and community. Yet Hemingway also emblematizes the Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Friendships, Rivalries, and Feuds 171 psychological costs of authorial sniping. A passage from “The Art of the Short Story” apologizing for The Torrents of Spring captures the wear of literary skirmishing and its aftermath of regret: “[T]he thing to do about writers is get along with them if you see them,” he insists, “and try not to see them” (12).

Notes 1. M. S. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 183. 2. For the Stein story, see G. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), 219. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. H. Hansen, “An American Parody,” in. R. O. Stephens (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 21–2; 21. Subsequent references are included in the text. 4. D. O. Stewart, “An Interview,” Hemingway/Fitzgerald Annual, 1973 (Washington DC, 1974), 83–5; 85. 5. F. S. Fitzgerald in M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 309. 6. M. Weber, Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 41. 7. E. Hemingway, “Notes on Life and Letters, or a Manuscript Found in a Bottle,” Esquire 3 (January 1935), 21, 159; 159. 8. “Hemingway Slaps Eastman in Face,” in M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 14–16; 15. Subsequent references are included in the text. 9. J. Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 465. 10. “Literary Slug-Fests,” New York Times (August 17, 1937), 18. 11. M. Land, The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem: A Lively Account of Famous Writers and their Feuds, 2nd rev. edn. (San Francisco: Lexikos, 1983), 19. Subsequent references are included in the text. 12. E. Hemingway, “And to the United States,” the transatlantic review 1.5 (May 1924), 355. 13. A. Arthur, Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels – From Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe (New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 142–3. The McCarthy line originally appeared in a Paris Metro interview in 1979 but did not become a scandal (or a lawsuit) until broadcast on The Dick Cavett Show in January 1980. 14. E. Hemingway, “The Farm,” Cahiers d’art 9.1–4 (1934), 28–9; 28. 15. E. Hemingway, “Defense of Dirty Words: A Cuban Letter,” Esquire 2.4 (September 1934), 19, 158. 16. E. Hemingway, “The Art of the Short Story,” in J. J. Benson (ed.), New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 1–13; 9. 17. M. S. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (London: Blackwell, 1989), 23. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

172 Curnutt

18. Paradoxically, Hemingway would rail whenever he was parodied – which was often. “Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon,” he supposedly sniffed in response to E. B. White’s “Across the Street and into the Grill.” “The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.” See A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (New York: Bantam, 1966), 70. 19. E. Hemingway, “My Own Life,” The New Yorker 2 (February 12, 1927), 23–4. The Stein portion is reprinted in K. Curnutt (ed.), The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 254–5. For “The Sights of Whitehead Street,” see BL 167–71. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 17 Literary Movements Carl P. Eby

In Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway declares, “all art is done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures” (99). Even if he resisted too close an identification with any one school, Hemingway could be a fierce partisan for his aesthetic values and was deeply influenced by the literary movements of his time – by turns both anxious and proud of the debts he owed to such masters of realism and naturalism as Twain, Bierce, James, Crane, London, Flaubert, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov, as well as to such masters of modernism as Conrad, Anderson, Stein, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Proust. As Alfred Kazin noted long ago, Hemingway “had the ability to assimilate the lessons of others so brilliantly that he seemed to impart a definitive modern emotion to everything he touched.”1 Indeed, Hemingway’s omnivorous assimilation of influences helped him to forge a style uniquely his own and become one of the major voices of modernism and perhaps the most influential writer of the twentieth century. Literary movements are always less unified, structurally and temporally, than casual critical usage would suggest, but modernism is so notoriously difficult to define that it has become traditional to speak of modernisms in the plural.2 Noted for its avant-garde proliferation of manifestos and – isms – cubism, futurism, imagism, vorticism, dadaism, surrealism, expressionism, and so on – modernism, in its various manifestations, was nevertheless united by its artists’ self-conscious urge to, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, “make it new.” The very term modernism implies a sense of rupture with the immediate past, predating but exacerbated by World War I and its attendant cultural changes. But the modernists’ penchant for apocalyptic proclamations – witness Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration that “on or about December 1910 human character changed”3 or Pound’s assertion that “the Christian era came definitely to an END” with the completion of James Joyce’s Ulysses4 – clearly overstates the degree of this 173 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

174 Eby rupture. As Edmund Wilson noted long ago, Hemingway’s brand of modernism – like the modernism of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats – was strongly rooted in the literary movements of his immediate past – in the uneasy fusion of two opposing currents dominating Anglo-American and French literature at the turn of the century: realism and naturalism on one hand, and the symbolist and decadent movements on the other.5 Although realism is often used as a straw man to help define what modernism was not (content-driven instead of obsessed with form, directed at mimesis rather than artistic play, etc.),6 Hemingway certainly thought of himself as both a realist and a modernist. In his classic memoir of modernist Paris, Being Geniuses Together, Robert McAlmon remembers traveling through Spain with Hemingway in 1923: [O]n the way to Madrid, our train stopped at a wayside station for a time. On the track beside us was a flatcar, upon which lay the maggot-eaten corpse of a dog. I, feeling none too hale and hearty, looked away, but Hemingway gave a dissertation on facing reality. It seemed that he had seen in the war the stacked corpses of men, maggot-eaten in a similar way. He advised a detached and scientific attitude toward the corpse of the dog. He tenderly explained that we of our generation must inure ourselves to the sight of grim reality. I recalled that Ezra Pound had talked once of Hemingway’s “self-hardening process.” At last he said, “Hell, Mac, you write like a realist. Are you going to go romantic on us?”7 The mimetic impulse is, of course, as old as representation itself, but realism as a self-conscious artistic movement began to flourish in mid-nineteenth-century France with the paintings of Gustave Courbet and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), and it became a dominant force, albeit without much theoretical coherence, in American literature in the decades after the Civil War. As Eric Sundquist, Michael Davitt Bell, and others have argued, the differences between the movement’s three most prominent American exemplars – William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain – are surely as noteworthy as their similarities.8 Yet realism’s key tenets, as preached by its most vocal American propagandist, William Dean Howells, in “The Editor’s Study” columns in Harper’s between 1886 and 1891, are fundamental to Hemingway’s work: a rejection of idealization in favor of fidelity to nature and experience; a plausibility of character, motive, and action; and a preference for the language of the common man. When Frederic Henry, in A Farewell to Arms (1929), refuses to play the hero and insists instead that he “was blown up while . . . eating cheese” (63), or when Jake Barnes tells Robert Cohn that Brett Ashley’s “own true love had . . . kicked off with the dysentery” during the war SAR( 46), we Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Movements 175 see Hemingway rejecting idealization in favor of something that feels more “authentic” and “real.” This production of verisimilitude through the bursting of romantic bubbles was central to the art of Flaubert, Howells, James, and Twain, and it is a hallmark of Hemingway’s style. An even more characteristic gesture for Hemingway is to leave his contrasting illusions nameless, relying instead upon the narrative literacy of his readers to supply the illusion or ideal to be exploded. For instance, he introduces the protagonist of A Farewell to Arms “looking out of the window of the bawdy house,” thus achieving a certain verisimilitude by dashing the romantic expectations and ideals of his readers. Conversely, such dashed expectations establish a necessary fertilizing soil that allows Hemingway to later plant the seeds of the more idealized love between Frederic and Catherine. As Robert Paul Lamb has recently argued, Hemingway was similarly a beneficiary of innovations in dialogue spurred by “Howells’s realist mandates of fidelity to experience and probability of motive.”9 The realists moved beyond the traditional use of dialogue for mere speechifying and displays of verbal wit and began to pay attention to dialect, stable patterns of characterizing speech, and the ways dialogue could be made to reveal complexities of character. From Twain, Hemingway learned an appreciation for colloquial American speech, and from Henry James, Lamb argues, Hemingway learned to write dialogue that paid attention to what Michael Reynolds calls “the white spaces between the lines” – the things characters do not say that are highlighted by their conversation. “In this manner, James’s dialogue served as a powerful model for Hemingway in its indirection, ambiguity, and portrayal of communication as veiled, partial, and difficult” (Lamb 173). But as Lamb makes clear, Hemingway not only learned from The Master, he broke new ground in a quintessentially modernist direction, compressing dialogue by removing or masking authorial guidance, forcing his readers to interpret for themselves shades of meaning resulting from indirection, repetition, omission, juxtaposition, objective correlatives, and referential ambiguity. In works like “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway blurred the genres of fiction and drama, using dialogue not simply to illustrate but to tell his stories. He was also the first writer to “write dialogue that demonstrated the rich complexities of the speech of characters who were not particularly bright, cultured, or sensitive” (Lamb 176). Hemingway’s soldiers, boxers, bullfighters, prostitutes, and rum-runners, if not his writers, painters, and wealthy expatriates, belong less to the middle-class parlors of Howells’s “smiling realism” than they Spec SD1 Date 26-july

176 Eby do to the world of the naturalists whose grittier version of realism came to prominence in American literature in the generation after Howells. In the fiction of writers like Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, American literature began to explore how “the other half” lived in an urbanizing and industrializing America. Inspired by the French founders of the naturalist movement, the Brothers Goncourt and Emile Zola, and by the biological, social, and economic determinism of thinkers like Darwin, Taine, and Marx, these writers strove to bring a scientific detachment to characters, often from the lower strata of society, whose lives were overwhelmingly determined by social, economic, and biological circumstances beyond their control. From Crane and French naturalist Guy de Maupassant Hemingway “learned understatement, brevity, careful word choice (Flaubert’s ‘le mot juste’), the effaced narrator, and the ironic reversal that drives home the story’s effect” (Lamb 16). Yet where naturalist authors often portrayed their uneducated characters as mere “brutes,” seen from a detached distance by middle-class narrators,10 Hemingway’s uneducated characters, such as the waiters and old man in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” (1933), have lives as deeply complex and rich as those of his writers or wealthy expatriates. While the free will of his characters, as with those of the naturalists, is sharply, even bleakly, delimited, it is so not so much by a philosophical determinism as it is by a deep fatalism (Lamb 18). As Hemingway writes in Death in the Afternoon, “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you” (122). Although Hemingway knew his Baudelaire well and writes nostalgically in A Moveable Feast (1964) about his workroom on the top floor of the “the hotel where Verlaine had died” (4), and although “the poetry of the symbolists and their successors was very much in the air” when he first came to Paris,11 the influence of the symbolist movement on Hemingway’s art was more indirect than direct – mostly filtered through other modernists, such as Eliot, Joyce, and Pound. Begun as a largely poetic movement inspired by Charles Baudelaire and centered around such figures as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforge, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Joris Karl Huysmans, symbolism was, above all, a reaction against the prevailing realism and naturalism of the 1880s and 1890s. Whereas realism and naturalism appealed to objectivity, the conscious, content, and direct description, the symbolists valorized subjectivity, the unconscious, form, and evocation; whereas a strand of moral and political didacticism was implicit in realism and naturalism, the decadents espoused art for art’s sake12; where realism suggested that Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Movements 177 art should imitate life, the French symbolists and their English followers, such as Oscar Wilde and a younger W. B. Yeats, were happier to see life imitate art. Where realists renounced idealism and deference to reality, the symbolists preferred to blur the real to better convey the ideal, an aim best achieved through the suggestiveness of the symbol. Hemingway was certainly no symbolist or turn-of-the-century decadent – in fact his contrast in The Sun Also Rises (1926) between the “false aesthetics” of the “decadent” bullfighter Marcial and the purity of style without “tricks” or “mystifications” of Pedro Romero (219, 223) is an important declaration of his own values – but the short vignettes of In Our Time (1925) and the opening pages of A Farewell to Arms do merge a realist aesthetic with a valorization of form and the musical aspects of language that one might expect of a Mallarmé prose poem. While it would go too far to imply that Hemingway’s work before the mid-1930s espoused art for art’s sake, his fiction before A Farewell to Arms subordi- nates politics to aesthetics. More importantly, with his theory of omission and his radical stylistic compression, Hemingway forged an aesthetics that used direct presentation of objective reality to achieve an effect for the reader of unconscious evocation and suggestiveness. His representations hinged famously upon concrete things and actions, not the misty, idiosyncratic, abstract symbols of decadent poetry (in this he was influenced by Pound’s imagist dictum that the “perfect symbol is the natural object,” and a hawk must be a hawk before it can be a symbol13), but his attempt to capture “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” (DIA 2) still aimed at a sort of evocation not entirely foreign to the goals of the symbolists. In fact, as has frequently been observed, Hemingway’s formulation here sounds remarkably like the “objective correlative” defined by that other symbolist-influenced modernist, T. S. Eliot: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”14 Whereas Mallarmé had urged the symbolists, “Paint not the thing but the effect it produces,”15 Hemingway painted the thing that produced the emotion, not to represent that thing, but to produce that emotion. In this and in other respects, Hemingway’s style is rooted in a modernist understanding of our relation to the world. While the realists of Howells’s generation tried to capture an objective external reality untainted by our misleading subjectivity, and the symbolists tried to Spec SD1 Date 26-july

178 Eby blur reality to evoke the effect that it produced, these tendencies began to merge in the impressionistic work of the later Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and early Joyce. As it became increasingly clear that we have no access to an external world but through our own perceptions, the external became internal, and “realism’s increasing turn to interiority, to throwing the drama inside, as Henry James put it, [was] almost an epistemological inevitability.”16 Modernist writers carried this direction of thought a step further. For them the external world was fragmented, incoherent, and devoid of intrinsic meaning; for them reality was not external but was, rather, produced by the human attempt to bring order and form to the world. The role of the artist, in particular, was to “give shape and significance” to what Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy” that was the modern world.17 Thus, as Lamb explains, “For Hemingway and other writers of his day, the subjective response and the objective data that produce it are two sides of the same process” (52). This vision of the world as fragmented, incoherent, and devoid of intrinsic meaning inspired modernist art that was charged with, yet reticent about, meaning and that often mirrored the external world’s fragmentation and incoherence in an attempt to compel the reader to become, as in life, a participant in the construction of order and meaning. In modernist classics such as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), we see point of view, voice, time, gender, values, selfhood, narrative, and language itself shattered. And while the radical fragmentation of a story like “Homage to Switzerland” (1933) is comparatively rare in Hemingway’s work, he was nonetheless a master of fragmentary narrative. In Our Time has been described as a fragmented “cubist” novel, with Nick as the implied author,18 and its vignettes are little shards of narrative, disembodied from implied larger stories. Hemingway stories often begin in medias res, sometimes with pages of introductory material deleted in manuscript, and stories like “The Sea Change” (1931) or “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) are mere scraps of overheard conversation without even a hint of authorial direction for the reader. Later works, such as The Garden of Eden (published posthumously in 1986), shatter gender, selfhood, and time; and throughout Hemingway’s works his characters struggle to construct meaning and values in a world in which such things are not given. Hemingway’s theory of omission – 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” (MF 75) – implies that we lack a whole and forces the reader to construct meaning from the available Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Movements 179 fragments. But whereas fragmentation in writers like Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Faulkner often contributes to an obscurity that at times baffles readers, Hemingway’s practice of omission results in what for unwary readers is a deceptive simplicity, with the omitted material showing only “as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath” (GOE 42). As Linda Wagner-Martin has shown, Hemingway was a great popularizer of modernist innovations.19 While he may have flirted with dadaism in his uncollected and little-known first publication, “A Divine Gesture” (1922), he was too interested in being published and widely read to aspire to the obscurity of a Joyce, Eliot, or Pound, however much he admired them. More importantly, his aesthetics were opposed to the use of what he would call “tricks” for their own sake. One can find in his fiction the whole bag of modernist “tricks” – Joycean stream of consciousness and shifting perspectives, Steinian repetition, Proustian concern with time and memory, Eliotonian montage, cinematic juxtaposition, mythological method, primitivism, and so forth – yet he makes these devices his own and uses them so subtly that they cease to be tricks and become almost invisible. Whereas Stein’s experiments with repetition are often unintelligible, Hemingway’s neo-Steinian repetition in the opening lines of “Cat in the Rain” is incantatory, its subtle music highlight- ing a suite of images. Hemingway may pilfer Molly Bloom’s soliloquy when Frederic Henry, exhausted, drifts off to sleep during the retreat from Caporetto, but the stream of consciousness merges seamlessly into the text because it so beautifully conveys Frederic’s exhaustion and lim- inal state. Similarly, the montage-like play between the vignettes and stories of In Our Time, the cinematic juxtaposition of memory and present in “Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), and the shifting of focalization between Wilson, Francis, Margot, and the lion in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) blend form and meaning so successfully and unobtrusively that such innovations were easily embraced, when noticed, by his wide popular audience. The thematic universe of Hemingway’s work is modernist as well. Modernism was predominantly a cosmopolitan movement, and Hemingway’s fiction, set in France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, America, Africa, and Cuba, is quintessentially cosmopolitan. It is a world haunted by violence, loss, postwar trauma, and a sense that one “must get to know the values” precisely because they are no longer given (SAR 67). It is a world where the self is no longer stable or unitary, where it is prone to both fragmentation and merger, where it is always in the process of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

180 Eby becoming, where the present self and the self of the past are inextricably entwined. It is a universe of gender and sexual fluidity and a post-Freudian awareness of unconscious forces. But whereas in the 1920s it was also a world of material plenty and comfort, by the 1930s it was increasingly a world divided between the haves and have nots. The overtly political turn in Hemingway’s productions of the late 1930s – To Have and Have Not (1937), The Fifth Column (1938), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) – was driven by Hemingway’s response to the Spanish Civil War, but needs also to be understood against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the rise of proletarian literature. As a movement, proletarian literature is better defined by its Marxist determinism and frankly propagandistic concern for the plight of the working class than it is by purely formal aesthetics, but the work of such writers as Mike Gold, Josephine Herbst, and J. T. Farrell tended to combine modernist innovations in narrative with a return to the naturalist muckraking style of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). Works like Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy (1930–6), Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Wright’s Native Son (1940), with their explorations of labor struggles, harsh agricultural and industrial conditions, and racial oppression, participate in this tradition without entirely espousing the party line, and Hemingway’s response was similar, although far less pronounced. While by the mid-1930s Hemingway respected writers like Gold, Herbst, and Farrell,20 in the figure of Richard Gordon in To Have and Have Not, he goes out of his way to satirize formulaic proletarian writing. He does this, however, to imply that his own, less formulaic, concern for the plight of the working class is more authentic. In The Fifth Column, in response to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, with its opposition between the communist-supported loyalists and the fascist-supported rebels, Hemingway flirts briefly with a Marxist-oriented position. Yet, however much For Whom the Bell Tolls sides with the Republicans, Hemingway’s attention to injustices on both sides of the lines provoked sharp attacks from Mike Gold and others for the novel’s insufficiently communist stance.21 Hemingway’s legacy to literary movements in the second half of the twentieth century was nearly as profound as his debt to the movements that came before him. Existentialist writers of the 1950s were deeply influenced by his sense that we have to struggle to live in good faith with authentic values of our own making. Beat writers, like Jack Kerouac, were inspired by his rootless lifestyle and search for meaningful experience. Modern travel writing, from James Michener to the present, is unimagin- able without his contribution, and the nonfiction novel that Hemingway Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Literary Movements 181 pioneered in Green Hills of Africa (1935) has become a major genre in the hands of such writers as Norman Mailer. Hard-boiled writers and minimalists owe an obvious debt to Hemingway’s practice of omission and his terse prose style, but, in truth, this debt is so ubiquitous, cutting across almost all subsequent literary movements in English, that it is practically in the air that we breathe. Hemingway, then, has been a pivotal figure in the history of modern literature; he is a filter through which the literary innovations of the past have been distilled and transmitted to the present.

Notes 1. A. Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), 332. 2. See, for instance, P. Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 3. V. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in V. Kolocotroni, J. Goldman, O. Taxidou (eds.), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 395–7; 396. 4. E. Pound, “Note to the Calendar,” Little Review 8.2 (1922), 40. 5. E. Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York: Scribner’s, 1931). 6. A. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) 183. 7. R. McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930, rev. with supplementary chapters and an afterword by Kay Boyle (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 160. 8. E. J. Sundquist, “Introduction: The Country of the Blue,” in American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 3–24; 4, and M. D. Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 170. 9. R. P. Lamb, Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 170. Subsequent references are included in the text. 10. J. Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 78. 11. B. Stoltzfus, Hemingway and French Writers (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010), 10. 12. While the decadent and symbolist movements in France were not identical, they were closely enough aligned in the figures of Huysmans, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and in some core tendencies (aestheticism, antirealism, and idealism), that I am treating them here as roughly synonymous. 13. E. Pound, “A Retrospect,” in V. Kolocotroni, J. Goldman, O. Taxidou (eds.), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 373–82; 377. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

182 Eby

14. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” in F. Kermode (ed.), The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 45–9; 48. 15. W. Fowlie, Mallarmé (University of Chicago Press, 1962), 125. 16. G. Levine, “Literary Realism Reconsidered: ‘The World in Its Length and Breadth,’” in M. Beaumont (ed.), Adventures in Realism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 13–32; 15. 17. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in F. Kermode (ed.), The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 175–8; 177. 18. See J. V. Brogan, “Hemingway’s In Our Time: A Cubist Anatomy,” The Hemingway Review 17.2 (1998), 31–46, and D. Moddelmog, “The Unifying Consciousness of a Divided Conscience: Nick Adams as Author of In Our Time,” American Literature 60.4 (1988), 591–610. 19. L. W. Martin, “The Romance of Desire in Hemingway’s Fiction,” in L. Broer and G. Holland (eds.), Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 54–69; 55. 20. See, for instance, Hemingway’s August 19, 1935 letter to Ivan Kashkin (SL 418). 21. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 356. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 18 Visual Arts Lisa Narbeshuber

From the start of his adult life and throughout his writing career, Ernest Hemingway’s imagination was wedded to the fine arts. Paintings shaped his thinking about literature and the world, drew him to Europe, and entered his novels as subjects. His visits to Gertrude Stein’s Parisian home to discuss art and examine her art collection left a deep impression on him. Even his later attraction to bullfighting was framed by a profound engagement with the visual arts. It is easy to see how much his life was interlaced with the world of painting. It is less easy to grasp the intercon- nection of modern art and the political and technological revolutions of the early twentieth century taking place in Europe and how these shaped Hemingway’s literary style. In 1920, Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, attended the Art Institute of Chicago’s thirty-third annual exhibition of oil paintings and sculpture. They considered purchasing paintings and made that inclination a reality once they went to Paris in 1921. Following the advice of Sherwood Anderson, who was visiting Paris in 1921 and who had attended the influential Armory Show – which exposed the United States to European styles of modernism – in New York in 1913, Hemingway decided to move to Paris to write, live, and commune with the most prominent painters, writers, and philosophers of the day. Painters were particularly important for him. They seemed to interrogate and represent the dramatic changes in the world most authentically. He befriended such artists as Jules Pascin, Juan Gris, André Masson, and Joan Miró. Hemingway often bought paintings from artists he knew; his choices mirrored the radical trends in the art world. Hemingway’s early purchases included four paintings by Masson (he would buy two more in 1931), one of which was the proto-cubist The Throw of the Dice, painted in 1922. Perhaps not coincidentally, the title of this painting is reminiscent of the title “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” (“A roll of the dice will never abolish chance”), the title of a poem by iconoclastic French 183 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

184 Narbeshuber symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé that Masson had illustrated in 1914. The border-blurring experiments of the art of the time (the mixed materials of collage, for example) influenced writers coming of age in Paris in the 1920s. Moreover, for Hemingway, the influence was not simply for- malist and aesthetic but also emotional and lifelong. In Green Hills of Africa (1935), the Pauline Pfeiffer character, P. O. M., compares the “simply beautiful” country to Masson’s paintings. In Islands in the Stream (1970), the painter protagonist, Thomas Hudson, reflects upon Masson’s forest paintings and Gris’ Man with a Guitar: “That was the great thing about pictures; you could love them with no hopelessness at all. You could love them without sorrow and the good ones made you happy because they had done what you always tried to do” (ISS 233). At the center of Hemingway’s life as an expatriate was the tower- ing figure of Gertrude Stein, whom he visited at her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. As he recalls her studio in A Moveable Feast (1964): “It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat” (MF 13–14). Her walls were infamous, decorated with the best of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings, including works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Gris, and Paul Cézanne, one of which, the portrait titled Madame Cézanne, Stein insisted determined her unique writing style, exemplified most dramatically in her early work, Three Lives (written 1905–6). Stein presumably introduced Hemingway to Picasso and other artists and encouraged him to buy the art he could afford and to visit museums as well as the actual places where the great postimpressionists Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh painted outdoors. Together Stein and Hemingway shared an unyielding admiration for the painters they strove to emulate in their writing. In a 1924 letter to Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Hemingway explained that he was “trying to do the country [in “Big Two-Hearted River”] like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit” (SL 122). The sentiment is reiterated at length in the portion of “Big Two-Hearted River” cut from the final version of the story in which “He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting” (NAS 239). Throughout his fiction, nonfiction, and interviews over his lifetime, Hemingway reinforces the significance of Paris as a vital source of modern painting. In A Moveable Feast, he recounts his frequent trips to the Musée du Luxembourg, where he studied the Cézannes, Manets, and Monets that he had first come to know about in the Art Institute of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Visual Arts 185 Chicago: “I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make stories have the dimension that I was trying to put in them” (MF 13). In a 1958 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway explained that he learned “as much from painters about how to write as from writers,”1 that painters “were a part of learning to see, to hear, to think, to feel and not feel, and to write” (76). In unpublished portions of The Garden of Eden (1986), Nick, a painter, and his wife, Barbara, who also paints, discuss painting and writing with their friend Andy, a writer, dreaming of fame and success for each of them.2 In the semiautobiographical Islands in the Stream, Hemingway nostalgically and ideally describes a community of writers and painters socializing and discussing their craft, imagining that they might produce some epic painting along the lines of Hieronymous Bosch. This book, too, draws strong parallels between Hudson, a painter, and his friend Roger Davis, a writer, although Hudson is described as the better person – the better person because he is a painter rather than a writer. The impression one often gets from his work is that Hemingway privileges paintings and painters over writing and writers. As he once said, “Since I ever saw pictures I tried to learn from them. Painters, as you know, are much better men than writers. It’s bad luck. But it is true” (SL 780). He suggests that a good writer can cheat, whereas the work of a good painter is true. The challenge for Hemingway, then, was to create just as well and just as truthfully as the painter does. According to A. E. Hotchner, he said that “artists have all those great colors, while I have to do it on the typewriter or with my pencil in black and white.”3 In Islands in the Stream, he suggests that it is “fun to paint well and hell to write well” (IIS 81). It is worth reemphasizing that Hemingway’s interest in modern art and writing demonstrates his worldly, political engagement, rather than only an interest in formal innovation. The intertwining of his life, writing, and art are nowhere more clearly dramatized than in his engagement with bullfighting and Spanish painting. Hemingway’s explorations of Spanish life are not a mere fetishization of death or a turn to a narrow existential- ism. They had a political and collective dimension along with creating literary subjects. Admittedly, he encourages the fetishistic or sensational element when he claims that bullfighting would focus his writing: “The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bullring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commenc- ing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and Spec SD1 Date 26-july

186 Narbeshuber the most fundamental is violent death” (DIA 2). This sensationalist streak surfaces as well in the Spanish art he acquired or that was used to promote his work, for example, paintings and drawings that show bullfighters in the throes of death by artists such as Francisco de Goya, Eugenio Lucas Velazquez, Luis Quintanilla, Roberto Dominigo, and Gris. Gris’ cubist painting of The Bullfighter (1913) became the frontispiece to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Dominigo’s Toros (1923) was used for the jacket. Hemingway purchased the complete set of Goya’s The Disasters of War (created 1810–20) which, according to his son Patrick Hemingway, inspired the subject matter of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).4 But the ritualistic, mythic, and frequently sensationalist focus on death is complemented by a more worldly commitment to collective human concerns and friendships with artists. For example, Hemingway befriended, sponsored, and owned paintings by avant-garde painter and sometimes political activist Antonio Gattorno, one of the founders of Cuban modernism. He also encouraged an exhibition of Spanish artist Quintanilla’s engravings, published essays in his exhibition catalogues, and wrote a total of three prefaces for All the Brave: Drawings of the Spanish War by Quintanilla (1939). To provide similar aid to Gattorno, a member of a 1920s Latin group of artists and writers, “El Grupo de Montparnasse,” Hemingway wrote an extensive foreword to a monograph of his art in 1935 and helped sponsor an exhibition of his work in New York in 1936. Hemingway’s most prized purchases were Miró’s The Farm (1921–2) in 1925 and Gris’ Man with a Guitar (1926) in 1931. He said to the major-domo at his estate in Cuba, “If there’s ever a fire at the Finca, grab The Farm and Man with a Guitar” (quoted in C. Hemingway 25). He first saw The Farm in a Montaparnasse café and, according to Miró, “Hemingway became mad for it” (quoted in C. Hemingway 22). In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway pays homage to the setting of the painting: rural Catalonia and specifically Miró’s family farm. There can be no doubt about Hemingway’s profound response to Miró’s expression of collective, Catalan identity. The Farm presents, in hyper-realistic clarity, a finely articulated, almost hieroglyphic, constellation of the Catalan farm-as-world. Each object in this visual cosmos – blades of grass, farm animals, laborers, ladders, buildings – resonates with self-contained intensity. Colette Hemingway writes that the style of The Farm “is like the language of ordinary speech that Hemingway himself relied on – hard, clear, and very real” (20). One of the most important motifs running through Hemingway’s career is a productive tension between the joyous possibilities of modern Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Visual Arts 187 art and the gloomy tentativeness of his great early writing. Both sensibilities may be explained historically. Hemingway was born into a world turned upside down by the effects and promises of modern technology and the attendant revolutions in political consciousness and artistic form. In this new era there was an emphasis on “the modern” and a heightened sense of the present. A key expression of this peculiarly modern consciousness reverberated throughout the United States when Hemingway was a teenager. Collette Hemingway proposes that he may well have attended the International Exhibition of Modern Art, the notorious Armory Show, which began at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory in 1913 and traveled through several U.S. cities, including Hemingway’s hometown, Chicago. The Armory Show was received in the United States as something of a minor trauma: shock and excitement reverberated around the country. The exhibition contained a wide variety of avant-garde ideas expressed in the paintings of Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Matisse, Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, and Picasso, among many others. Themes and formal experiments that captured urban life, sexuality, and a new sense of the possibilities of being human pervaded the new art. Moody and mysterious, Munch’s dreamily erotic Vampire (1895–1902) and Madonna (1895–1902) revealed the seeds of expressionism. Braque’s L’Affiche de Kubelick (1912) and Picasso’s Tête d’ homme (1912) introduced cubism’s sense of unity and abstraction. Most scandalously, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) depicted an abstract body rhythmically unfolding in motion, disturbing the conventional American audience’s desire for realistic figures. Around the same time, Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), a bicycle wheel with the fork inserted into a stool, challenged elitist ideas of art and its reception. Also underscoring a new sense of materialism and hybridity, in addition to their radical break with perspective, Picasso and Braque reinvented collage, bringing it into their paintings. Picasso’s Violin (1913), for example, is constructed out of pasted papers, cardboard boxes, chalk, charcoal, and gouache. Hemingway’s own art and life embrace the sensibility of modernism and the radical break with tradition, conventional social life, and linear history expressed in the figurative art that dominated American and European art of the time. Hemingway’s encounter with the modern meant accepting the exciting idea that life was not merely given, as expressed in older art forms such as realism, but that people fashioned social reality themselves. This break with the past and focus on the present moment gave rise to a wide range of experimental practices Spec SD1 Date 26-july

188 Narbeshuber such as those mentioned earlier. As a young writer developing his literary style, Hemingway was surrounded and inspired by a host of vital experimental movements devoted to rethinking the meaning of classical visual space and the sense of historical time. By the time Hemingway left for Paris in 1921 to become a writer, his first move to Europe since his World War I service as an ambulance driver in Italy, art had changed irrevocably, overthrowing once and for all traditional ways of conceptualizing experience. His own preoccupation with mobility and transience, in, for example, In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926), echo the kind of world depicted by the art, artists, and art movements of Europe, such as futurism, which flourished between 1906 and 1916, celebrating the new sense of speed, violence, and triumph made possible by new technologies. Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni’s The Street Enters the House (1911), for instance, typically celebrates the dynamic, urban landscape, looking like cubism blasted into motion. Fauvism (“les fauves” is French for “wild beasts”), heralded by a 1905 exhibition with the works of Matisse, André Derain, and Braque, was characterized by strong colors and daring brush strokes, and an attitude toward objects that went beyond impressionism (Soleil Levant [1872], by the father of impressionism, Claude Monet, challenged the conventional division between figure and ground, but maintained a pseudo objective effect of perceptual impressions). With a different accent than the futurists, artists like Matisse nevertheless threatened an older sense of historical texture and images of civilized man. While Matisse is now safely ensconced in the canons of academic art history, in 1913 he inspired uneasiness and shock; a New York Times critic judged his work at the Armory Show “repellant” for its apparent rejection of humanity, arguing that “Matisse . . . seems to have thrown psychology . . . quite over, or else to have reduced it to a purely animal significance.”5 If anything unites the diverse artistic and political movements encountered in Hemingway’s bohemian Europe, it is the dismantling of the idea of humanism and the human itself. Consider the anti-impressionist and antirealist style called expressionism, a wide-ranging movement emerging in the pre–World War I era, rejecting conventional perception by finding truth in an intensely emotional subjectivity, as found in the paintings of Oskar Kokaschka, Egon Schiele, and Kandinsky, whose paintings, such as Kandinsky’s Improvisation No. 27 (1912), with their intense colors and amorphous shapes, exemplify the expressionist desire to capture an emotional, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Visual Arts 189 preconscious reality. Or consider the anarchic inventiveness of dada, a movement crystallizing in Zurich in 1916 as a response to the horrors of World War I, with its “ready-mades” (art as found object, such as Duchamp’s urinal, titled Fountain), “cut ups” (construction of poetry by picking random words out of a hat), and humorous and disturbing “sound poetry” (emphasizing meaningless sounds) pioneered by Hugo Ball, a German author and artist and a founding dadaist. Dada split and evolved into surrealism in 1924, with the first major showing in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre in Paris of surrealist works created by an impressive lineup: Paul Klee, Hans (Jean) Arp, Man Ray, Picasso, Masson, and Miró. Surrealism privileged dreams and the mind’s suppressed thoughts and associations over reason and continued to blossom into the 1930s. It is hard to imagine that Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” was not influenced by the art world’s relentless challenges to the Enlightenment’s rational individual. Ideas of the nonrational and the unconscious were explored by diverse groups, many deeply valued by Hemingway. There were many more movements and isms giving shape to European consciousness and the landscape during the early twentieth century. Some of these movements were offshoots of the postimpressionism or proto-cubism of Cézanne, the artist Hemingway mentions most frequently when discussing the influence that painting had on his writing. Cézanne, whose own artistic processes have been described as a kind of deep immersion or “an art of grave attention” to perception,6 seemed to center Hemingway’s own perceptions and deep attention to detail. Just as significant, cubism as it developed between 1907–14 radical- ized Cézanne’s form. This is the movement most often associated with Hemingway’s work. Many critics, beginning with Paul Rosenfeld and his important review of In Our Time as a cubist text, have been eager to see in Hemingway’s early work the formal innovations developed by Cézanne and the cubists. As initiated by Picasso and Braque and later developed by Gris, cubism is recognizable for its geometric constructions, mixed media, and simultaneous presentation of multiple perspectives. Given Hemingway’s absorption in the art world and his productive literary dialogue with the painting styles of Cézanne and the cubists, it is not surprising that his writing might be seen as mimicking cubist techniques. But it is important to remember that what generated the excitement for painters and writers was not only formal innovations so much as the revolutionary vision that cubism reflected and helped construct. As John Berger shows, the formal display of interconnectedness in cubist paintings represented Spec SD1 Date 26-july

190 Narbeshuber a critical mass of political and technological progress, unifying classes of people, breaking down old hierarchies, challenging oppressive political forms, and allowing a new holistic consciousness.7 I mentioned earlier that Hemingway’s two moods of optimism and gloom could be explained historically. As Berger argues in “The Moment of Cubism,” which he locates between 1907 and 1914, the cubists saw in modernity and progress a chance for a new vision of a society where people could transparently trace their connection to larger social processes, where the multiplicity and diversity of reality was present to the senses, where oppressive institutions might be thrown over in favor of a liberating collectivity. This revolutionary, optimistic context facilitated cubism and the spirit of other radical movements. But as Berger writes, “The Cubist movement ended in France in 1914. With the war a new kind of suffering was born. Men were forced to face for the first time the full horror – not of hell, or damnation, or a lost battle, or famine, or plague – but the full horror of what stood in the way of their own progress” (78). While Hemingway was born into the historical moment of the prophetic possibilities of modern art, he came to adulthood and directly encountered the rebuke to this prophecy in the nightmare of World War I. It is not surprising, then, that Hemingway’s works often oppose, formally and thematically, the promise of transparency, connection, infinite possibility, and availability expressed in paintings like Picasso’s Violin (1913), which breaks down old unities (violin as object) and builds larger contexts from surprising materials. As a postwar writer, Hemingway, appropriately, is much more interested in the devastating effects of the Western world’s drive for domination and is much more prone to present the negative side of claims of universality. His short stories present the absence of transparency and the dangers of constructing reality, as when Krebs, from “Soldier’s Home,” confesses his postwar self-fashioning: “His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers” (IOT 70). Hemingway’s characters, like Krebs, tend to be traumatized, as are the natural and societal worlds they inhabit. Unlike the cubists’ joyous use of the diverse and ordinary materials surrounding them, Hemingway’s characters recoil from touch, as if the materials and equipment available to them – even their own eyes – to make their worlds had been contaminated, including the wreckage of old forms of social life: myths of fatherhood, masculinity, family, and modern technology as salvation. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Visual Arts 191 The speed with which the eye can traverse and hold the lines and shapes of cubist painting is formally brought to a halt in Hemingway’s In Our Time. The divide between the vignettes, with their alienating images of modern violence, and the stories proper, revolving around intimate relationships, performs a deep pause and expresses disconnection rather than juxtapositions. But if Hemingway refuses direct access to the visible world for his characters and his readers both, he equally rejects for his own vision the vibrant emotional world or psychic objects explored by Matisse or Kandinsky. In his best, early works, Hemingway insists on incompat- ibility and distance and disallows connection. For him, the elusiveness of objects is sustained rather than their availability to human touch. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” for example, Nick Adams retreats to the countryside to heal apart from the patriarchal culture of domination expressed throughout In Our Time. When he fishes, he acts with special care for the fish’s well-being: “He held the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the barb from his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream” (IOT 149). The presence of the trout, emblematic of objects and relationships, is ambiguous, partly available and partly withdrawing from perception: “As Nick’s fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream” (IOT 149). The image of the slippery fish and the various qualities of the stream – fluid, murky, clear, shallow, deep, near, remote – suggest the inherent ambiguity of matter, an ambiguity and impossibility that Hemingway accepts. In a sense, Hemingway refuses himself the cubist’s pleasures in materiality or the profound emotional and psychological objects of the expressionists or surrealists. He learns from them by working against them, attempting to depict absence and rethink relationships to otherness. If Hemingway’s relationship to modern art is profound, if Cézanne and the cubists, among others, taught him how to see and even to write, his reaction to his own historical moment also creates a productive distance between their image of revolution and his encounter with the ruins of the Western dream.

Notes 1. G. Plimpton (interviewer), “The Art of Fiction No. 21,” The Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958), 60–89; 74. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. E. Hemingway, “The Garden of Eden,” The Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, box 35, series 1.2, 422.7, p. 16. 3. A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway and His World (New York: The Vendome Press, 1989), 80. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

192 Narbeshuber

4. C. C. Hemingway, In His Time: Ernest Hemingway’s Collection of Paintings and the Artists He Knew (N. p.: Kilimanjaro Books, 2009), 70. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. “Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times (February 23, 1913), 59. 6. M. Schapiro, Paul Cézanne (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 9. 7. J. Berger, “The Moment of Cubism,” in G. Dyer (ed.), Selected Essays: John Berger (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 71–92. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 19 Music Hilary K. Justice

The evolution of music and related audio technologies during Hemingway’s lifetime is almost unimaginably vast. The year Hemingway was born, 1899, saw the premieres of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1; on the day he died, July 2, 1961, Gary U.S. Bonds topped the U.S. Billboard Chart with “Quarter to Three,”1 and the Beatles (then numbering five) were in the studio for the first time.2 Coeval evolution in audio technology ranged from player piano rolls and hand-cranked phonograph (cylinder) and gramophone (disc) machines to stereophonic recording, radio, cinema, and television. Hemingway’s childhood home boasted an acoustically perfect music room designed by his mother for lessons and performances; the Finca Vigía, his penultimate home in Cuba, was wired for sound. The relevance of music to Hemingway’s style, works, and life ranges from direct influence to the ineffability of the Zeitgeist. Hemingway’s works frequently reveal the traceable influence of specific composers, theorists, and works3 (e.g., respectively, J. S. Bach, Nadia Boulanger, and Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain) and always illuminate consanguineous thematic trends, stretching from the commercially sanitized, racially exploitative primitivism and burgeoning nationalism of Tin Pan Alley, American Broadway, and early Hollywood, to the Depression- and World War II-era democratic aesthetics of Aaron Copland to John Cage’s mid-century Socratic dialogues with silence. The soundtrack of Hemingway’s life is broadly comprised of three fluid genres: the Western classical tradition and its twentieth-century avant-garde off-shoots, so-called popular music, and the myriad of musical forms and styles coalescing generally under the umbrella term “jazz.” The boundaries among these genres are permeable and often gratuitous, but I will be guided herein by the generic distinction implicit in the physical organization of 1940s/’50s phonodisc collection at Hemingway’s Finca

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194 Justice Vigía, in which music from the classical tradition resides on one side of the stereo cabinet, popular/jazz on the other. Hemingway was born into a world in which music played a significant, immediate role. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a professional-caliber bel canto-style vocalist who had considered a concert stage career before choosing marriage, family, and work as a private music teacher. She insisted on instrumental lessons for her elder children – viola for Marcelline, ‘cello for Ernest – selecting instruments whose simple novice-level parts guarantee ensemble seats. Despite Hemingway’s much-later assertion that his mother “forced” him to play the ‘cello,4 her choices reveal only her upper-middle-class values regarding gender roles (the playing position of the ‘cello rendered it “unladylike” – thus Marcelline’s viola) and leisure arts; she provided opportunity without imposing unreasonable expectations. As a novice ‘cellist, Hemingway was exposed to a predictable range of classical standards, sawing dutifully away at Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” in his school orchestra; as a listener, he would have been exposed to a broad range of vocal music from his mother’s students, Protestant church music, concerts and operas in nearby Chicago,5 and the popular tunes of the day. In his formative years, popular song ranged from traditional works by mid-nineteenth-century composer Stephen Foster (e.g., “Camptown Races” [1850] and “Old Folks at Home” [1851]) to more recent marches by John Philip Sousa (including “Stars and Stripes Forever” [1896]) and, most important, songs from the musical publishing phenomenon Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley songs, or “parlor songs,” were the greatest American hits from the 1890s through World War I (its last gasp was the post-Black Tuesday “C’mon, Get Happy” [1930]). Songs were distributed as sheet music, arranged for voice with piano accompaniment, often including a barbershop-style quartet arrangement. The stars of Hemingway’s childhood and adolescence were Tin Pan Alley’s George M. Cohan and emerging composers Irving Berlin and George Gershwin; from 1899 to 1919, Tin Pan Alley’s most popular works included “Hello, Ma Baby (Hello, Ma Ragtime Gal)” (Emerson, Howard, and Sterling, 1899), “In the Good Old Summertime” (Shields and Evans, 1902), “Give My Regards to Broadway” (Cohan, 1904), “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (von Tilzer, 1908), “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” (Whitson and Friedman, 1910), “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (Berlin, 1911), “K-K-K-Katy” (O’Hara, 1918), “God Bless America” (Berlin, 1918), and “Swanee” (Gershwin, 1919).6 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Music 195 Although it is now almost impossible to consider any of these songs without imposing an intervening century’s worth of values in descriptors like “quaint,” “innocent,” and “nostalgic,” it is worth noting that these same qualities earned these songs recurring, often enduring popularity throughout Hemingway’s lifetime. Tin Pan Alley’s popularity was particularly high during the early heyday of musical cinema (smoothing the medium’s novelty via a soundtrack of comfortable “oldies”), during World War II (invoking traditional patriotic values), and throughout the mid-twentieth-century, when its melodies were used with thinly veiled subversive irony by black jazz performers whose livelihoods depended on predominantly white audiences. While Oak Park schoolchildren enjoyed the upbeat, generally lighthearted songs of Tin Pan Alley, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and late classical and Romantic concert music and opera, U.S. and Western European classical-tradition composers struggled to redefine music outside the restrictions of late Romanticism. This struggle generally took two forms – the rediscovery of vernacular paradigms or the thorough rein- scription of music’s fundamental syntax. Composers engaged in the first approach sought a less florid but still accessible sound by mining pre-classical music of a particular nation or region, exemplified in Europe by Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” (1910) and “Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’” (1934) and Ottorino Respighi’s “Ancient Airs and Dances” suites (1917–32), all of which deploy the music of the Renaissance, and in the United States by Charles Ives’s “Three Pieces in New England” (1903–10), which quotes “Yankee Doodle,” “Masa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” and American sacred music. Each of these overtly nationalist composers also endeavored to evoke specific locales (the Fen country, Rome, and the Housatonic River, respectively) in a medium not generally thought to be representational. Their rejection of the extremes of highly wrought Romanticism and their efforts to convey an immanent genius loci resonate with Hemingway’s style and treatment of setting, particularly in the Michigan and Africa works, including the elephant story in The Garden of Eden, all of which risk Romantic nostalgia as they negotiate the fine balance between accuracy and emotional impact. The second and more revolutionary effort to break with Romanticism achieved early infamy with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), which so countered expectations that its 1913 Paris premiere resulted in an audience riot. Stravinsky and others working in Spec SD1 Date 26-july

196 Justice “art music” during the early twentieth century interrogated and eventually rejected fundamental assumptions underlying Western definitions of music, including formal structure and the differences among sound, noise, and silence. By 1908, most Western composers were experimenting with free-form composition (e.g., Maurice Ravel’s early ballet Daphnis et Chloe) and atonality (e.g., the works of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók). Radical experimentation intensified after World War I; by the time Hemingway arrived in postwar Paris, composers such as American George Antheil and Austrian Arnold Schoenberg had completely up-ended received musical notions and redefined the avant-garde for the second time in a decade. Antheil, who rented the rooms above Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and was thus known personally to Hemingway,7 rejected received definitions of “instrument” in his Ballet Mécanique (1924), whose instrumentation included aircraft engines (and provoked another riot).8 More pertinent, Schoenberg’s invention of the “twelve-tone” composition method (in Opus 23, circa 1923) completely rewrote the rules of Western harmony, which since Claudio Monteverdi’s 5th Madrigal Book (1605) had relied on perfect intervals within the octave for harmonic progression.9 Schoenberg’s system placed equal emphasis on all twelve notes in the octave, rendering progression a function only of time. Although Schoenberg was not personally known to Hemingway, his system influenced Nadia Boulanger’s students, including Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein’s collaborator for Four Saints in Three Acts. Other composers who studied with Boulanger included Ravel and Copland, but not, crucially, Gershwin. Boulanger and Ravel rejected Gershwin’s application for tutelage on the grounds that they might destroy his already unique and innovative musical identity, for Gershwin, like Antheil, had already embraced the rhythmic possibilities of the machine age, but like Ives, Vaughan Williams, and Respighi, he had found freshness in the vernacular of his region: the jazz cultures of New York City and their taproots in the black experience in the American South. Although Hemingway’s mentors Sherwood Anderson and Stein thoroughly embraced analogous possibilities of avant-garde structure and stylistics in their writing, Hemingway has only one foot in that particular camp (most evident in the structure of In Our Time [1925]). Nor did Hemingway rely exclusively on the localizing thematics of his early rival, Fitzgerald (whose Great Gatsby locates Jazz Age New York as thoroughly as does Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue). Hemingway’s work synthesizes both localist and stylistic post-Romantic trends, later deploying this synthesis in his exploration of sociopolitical thematics. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Music 197 Given Hemingway’s social circle in 1920s Paris he could hardly avoid awareness of aesthetic debates, yet his taste in classical-tradition music was established in childhood and remained firmly rooted in the contra- puntal and formal achievements of the Baroque through the mid-Roman- tic eras.10 The popular music of his late adolescence and early adulthood, however, particularly that of the World War I era, proves a particularly suggestive trove for its illumination of his early writings, especially A Farewell to Arms (1929), in which protagonist Frederic Henry muses:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. . . . There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of the places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of vil- lages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers (184–5). This rumination on meaning within the lexicon of war is perfectly reflected in the lyrics, tempo, and, to a certain extent, instrumental accompaniment in World War I-era Anglophone popular song. British songs popular in the earliest years of the war relied for impact on the already archaic pronoun “thee” and capitalized abstractions such as “Glory” and “Honour” offered in homage to the equally abstract “Brittania.” The best and most popular musical example is “Land of Hope and Glory,” lifted in toto from Edward Elgar’s 1902 “Coronation Ode” for Edward VII (which includes “Pomp and Circumstance”). Americans dusted off George M. Cohan’s prewar favorite “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (1906). Although composed for peacetime, these songs’ explicitly patriotic leitmotifs proved extremely useful to wartime composers, who quoted them frequently. With the exception of the anthemic “Land of Hope and Glory,” the most popular songs from both sides of the Anglophone Atlantic were marches comprised of a vocal melody over a Cohanesque brass band. Original recordings reveal that at the outset of the war, marches were up-tempo (Britain’s most famous being “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”); as the war dragged on, British tempi slowed markedly until the United States entered the war. War fatigue is especially evident in the 1916 recording of the march “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag,” which exhorts listeners to “smile, smile, smile,” admonishing, “What’s the use of worrying? It’s never worth one’s while.”11 In the United States, tempi were quick throughout the war. “Over There,” Cohan’s 1917 answer to “Tipperary,” exhorted “Yanks” to “do your bit” and was recorded at fast tempi by everyone from America’s premier Spec SD1 Date 26-july

198 Justice vernacular war singer Billy Murray to Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, whose 1918 version presents the lyrics first in English and then Italian over sound effects of marching feet and machine gun fire. (Hemingway’s Italian soldiers debate Caruso’s merits in chapter 2 of Farewell, concluding, “He bellows” [9].) Although popular music tempi reflect the fluctuations of optimism, wartime lyricists almost immediately abandoned vestigial prewar abstractions to focus on home front place names, providing motivation via synecdoche. Only as the war drew to a close did frontline place names appear, and then only generically (e.g., “no-man’s land”), usually in the thoughts of sweethearts and mothers. References to the female experience of war are frequent, from the early-war optimism of “Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts” (1914) to the sober “Roses of Picardy” and “Somewhere in France is a Lily” (both from 1917). The latter achieve tremendous emotional impact in the stark contrast between hopeless longing in the vocal line over the still ubiquitous instrumental march. Hemingway achieved a similar contrast both thematically and linguistically in Farewell, the opening of which scans as poetry in both 2/2 (a march) and 3/4 (a waltz – a dance of love) (Justice, “Alias Grace” 231–4). For explicit mention of the “concrete village names” and “names of rivers” in which Fredric Henry locates meaning, one must turn to the popular song of embattled France and Italy. Giovanni Martinelli’s late 1918 recording of “La Leggenda del Piave” bears mention as it commemorates the Piave and the defeat at Caporetto that comprises much of Farewell, especially as the song’s release date and popularity hinge neatly with Hemingway’s own brief months in Italy. The song was released in two versions – first blaming and then absolving the units at Plezzo’s hollow, on whom the battle’s outcome depended. Whether Hemingway heard this song (probable) or understood the Italian (unlikely), its popularity in Italy and its emended versions provide a cultural touchstone for Hemingway’s depiction of the chaos and disorientation of Caporetto and its aftermath. Following World War I, popular music developed along three converg- ing lines – upbeat Tin Pan Alley-style songs (exemplified by “Ain’t We Got Fun?” [1921] and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” [1922]), instrumental popular dance pieces (for the turkey trot, foxtrot, Charleston, and others whose names reflect the era’s racist eroticization, for example, “the black bottom”), and a growing national fascination with blues and jazz. These musical strands combined with advancements in cinema’s sound playback technology (resulting in the first feature-length “talkies” in 1927) to ground the next twenty-five years of American popular music. Tin Pan Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Music 199 Alley-style songs, particularly those by “American Songbook” composers Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, were popularized by Broadway and in early film. The “new” sound of jazz in all its dizzying variety provided the soundtrack to the 1920s’ sophisticated modernist urbanism and underscored its fascination with the eroticized racial “other.” After 1929, Hollywood supplied Depression-era escapist fantasies, epitomized by films featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In Paris, where Hemingway lived for most of the 1920s, the city’s status as an artistic mecca combined with its generally laissez-faire attitude toward race to attract countless black American jazz musicians. Scores played in Paris’s theater revues, cafés, and nightclubs; the most sensational was Josephine Baker, whose scantily clad performances in La Revue Nègre (1925) and La Folie du Jour (1926) embodied the “anything goes” esprit of Jazz Age Montparnasse. Her best-known recordings include “(Jeepers, Creepers) Where’d You Get Those Eyes,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Less sensational venues, such as the working-class bal musette Hemingway depicts in The Sun Also Rises, relied on local talent and the quintessentially Parisian accordion. By the mid-1920s, a young Edith Piaf was performing as a Paris street musician; the accordion and Piaf served as leitmotifs for “Paris” for the remainder of the century. By 1930, Hemingway’s formative years were over, his musical tastes largely established. While the early 1930s saw the reorientation of American popular music toward Broadway and Hollywood in which the glamorous and exotic reigned, the latter half of the American Depression witnessed the emergence of more serious, socially conscious music that blurred generic distinctions between popular and classical. Gershwin’s Broadway musical Porgy and Bess (1938) erased the line between the classical opera tradition and popular song (“Summertime” was its breakout hit). In Gershwin’s selection of the black American vernacular as a site for the expression of social issues, he explicitly (although problemati- cally) countered the racist superficiality of white composers of previous decades. Perhaps the strongest commitment to a self-consciously American, explicitly political musical paradigm appears in the works of Aaron Copland, whose career and achievements evocatively parallel Hemingway’s. Born the year after Hemingway, Copland moved to Paris in 1921 at the advice of a friend and soon signed on to study with Boulanger, whose mentorship exerted as powerful a draw on American composers as did Stein’s on aspiring writers. In Paris, Copland developed Spec SD1 Date 26-july

200 Justice a characteristic “lean, spare texture” and “preoccupation with rigid formal discipline”12 – phrases that apply equally well to Hemingway’s early style. Both Hemingway and Copland acknowledged the influence of Bach; by the end of his Paris years, Copland’s style was established, relying on open intervals (rather than the full chords of the Romantics) and what musicol- ogist Wilfred Mellers terms “sobriety” to evoke a particularly American, particularly modern “isolation” (83). If one substitutes Stein for Boulanger and prosody for harmony, the parallels are obvious. Copland’s early studies and moderate-length works move very little and move “by linear permutation rather than by harmonic progression” (Mellers 83) – in other words, the impact of his work accrues very subtly, relying as little on harmony as Hemingway’s early works do on plot. The short in our time chapters (1924) and the longer 1920s stories “Big Two-Hearted River I” and “-II” (1925) and “Now I Lay Me” (1927) have little by way of traditional plot but achieve profound, almost subterra- nean shifts. Both men returned to the United States and by the mid-1930s had achieved their mature styles. From the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, both explored and addressed questions of national (Copland) and international (Hemingway) scope within their chosen media. In Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” (1940), Rodeo (1942), and “Appalachian Spring” (1944), he explores the concept of democracy; Hemingway’s “The Old Man at the Bridge” (1938), The Fifth Column (1938), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) examine the inhumanity of fascism. Descriptions of one’s achievements are as apt for the other’s. Mellers notes, “If [Copland’s] hardness may become at times almost savage, it is at least stringently controlled; if the tenderness cannot grow or sing, it is at least admitted to” (87); the same can be said of Hemingway’s. Copland’s own statement on his artistic aims, “I felt it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms” (qtd. in Mellers 87), antici- pates Hemingway’s “Know how complicated it is and then state it simply” (GOE 37). In terms of popular music, from the late 1930s through World War II, American airwaves were dominated by big band swing (e.g., the Dorsey Brothers’ “Lullaby of Broadway” [1935], Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” [circa 1939], and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” [1941]) and boogie woogie (also called “jump swing,” the best example of which is the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” [1941]). These two quintessentially American genres were the culmination of the separate strands that dominated popular song in the 1920s; serious jazz artists such as John Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Music 201 Coltrane distanced themselves from these white-market phenomena, moving through bebop, hard-bop, and, later, free jazz. Swing and boogie woogie permeated American culture via film, radio broadcast, and, crucially, the newly available “extended play” phonodiscs. Continued changes in recording, playback, and production technology combined with postwar prosperity to level economic barriers to phonograph ownership; music from the Hollywood Canteen and U.S.O. shows (featuring acts such as the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope) was available on demand in private homes and on overseas military bases. World War II established the popularity of crooners such as Bing Crosby, who was soon eclipsed by the younger, sexier “bad boy,” Frank Sinatra, whose career started with the big bands and whom Hemingway would later know personally as a figure in Havana’s night life. By the end of World War II, the speed at which American music reinvented itself and artists succeeded each other was accelerating. Aimed with ever more overt marketing toward youth culture, popular music probably figured only intermittently in Hemingway’s Cuba home (where he lived from 1938–60), especially during the visits of his younger sons in the 1940s and 1950s. Hemingway’s phonodisc collection provides substantial catalog and spine-wear evidence for his musical preferences.13 By 1945, these were long established and, with the exception of new releases in “cool jazz” and Latin-influenced “sweet” bandleader-style jazz which bespoke the sophistication and glamour of the Havana club scene, his taste tended toward the classical, particularly Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, whose composi- tions represent the pinnacle of their periods’ respective formal aesthetic achievements, and – to bring his “soundtrack” full circle, early modernist Spanish composer Manuel De Falla. Of all the works on the “classical” side of Hemingway’s stereo cabinet, most are present in subscription sets of the “Classical Favorites” variety. Even given their inevitable decay in the tropical environment, one can readily see “hand placement” wear marks on their spines; album covers and boxes containing several works of Bach and one by De Falla show the most wear. In multiple public interviews in the 1950s, Hemingway alludes to Bach as one of his greatest teachers and influences (Ross 50, Plimpton 118), but De Falla, whose structural influence manifests in works then in progress, receives no public mention. Spain always held pride of place in Hemingway’s imagination, travels, and works, from the earliest in our time chapters through the posthumous The Dangerous Summer and The Garden of Eden. In light of Hemingway’s insistence that good writing convey impact through the immediacy of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

202 Justice place and his lifelong desire to write Spain in a lasting way,14 the fre- quency with which De Falla’s 1915 work of Nights in the Gardens of Spain saw play on his Bell phonograph suggests he used it as an aural ticket to memory and hence to writing – especially as the acoustically “live” Finca Vigía was wired for sound, with speakers in multiple rooms, including Hemingway’s study. With even his children too old for Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (1954) and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” (1956), the aging Hemingway spent his last imaginative years traveling to a Spain of an earlier time with De Falla his accompanist. For all of Hemingway’s and De Falla’s defiantly anti-Romantic aesthetics, it is nonetheless with this nostalgic coda that the soundtrack of Hemingway’s writing life ends.

Notes 1. “Billboard’s #1 Song on This Date in History,” n.d. Web. June 14, 2011.www. joshhosler.biz/NumberOneInHistory/07/0702.htm. 2. Unless otherwise noted, all music history facts (dates, titles, names, etc.) herein are from the encyclopedia Oxford Music Online. 3. H. K. Justice, “Alias Grace: Music and the Feminine Aesthetic in Hemingway’s Early Style,” in L. Broer and G. Holland (eds.), Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 221–38. Subsequent references are included in the text. 4. G. Plimpton, “The Art of Fiction: Ernest Hemingway,” Interview, Paris Review 5 (1958): 60–89. Rpt. in M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 118. 5. For a discussion of opera’s influence on Hemingway’s works, see L. Tyler, “Opera, Maternal Influence, and Gender” in R. P. McParland (ed.), Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2009), 136–43. 6. R. Reublin, “In Search of Tin Pan Alley,” 2009. Web. June 14, 2011. www. parlorsongs.com/insearch/tinpanalley/tinpanalley.php; “Parlor Songs – Catalog,” n.d. Web. June 14, 2011. www.parlorsongs.com/catalog/a.php. 7. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York: Norton, 1989), 154–5. 8. D. H. Cope, New Directions in Music, 4th edn. (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown, 1984), 88. 9. For a more thorough explanation of harmonic versus syntactic progression, see H. K. Justice, “Alias Grace,” 223–4. 10. For an in-depth analysis of similarities between Hemingway’s writing and Baroque counterpoint, see H. K. Justice, “Alias Grace,” 224–31. For an initial examination of resonances between Hemingway’s works and those of mid- to late Romantic composers, see H. K. Justice, “Hemingway’s Music: An Assessment and Partial Catalog of the Audio Archive at the Finca Vigía,” The Hemingway Review 25.1 (2005), 96–108. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Music 203

11. These and all subsequent references to World War I music and recordings, unless specifically noted, are from the primary audio archive located online at “First World War.com – A Multimedia Archive of World War One.” www. firstworldwar.com, which includes streaming audio files for all the songs discussed herein. 12. W. Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (Oxford University Press, 1987), 82. 13. For a more complete, illustrated catalog of Hemingway’s phonodisc collection, see H. K. Justice, “Hemingway’s Music,” 96–108. 14. Hemingway discusses this desire at length in galley 79 of Death in the Afternoon; this desire is shared by his character Andy in unpublished portions of The Garden of Eden (File #422.1, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston).

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Popular, Cultural, and Historical Contexts

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Chapter 20 Ailments, Accidents, and Suicide Peter L. Hays

Ernest Hemingway, the first American to be wounded and survive on the Italian front in World War I, was portrayed as a hero in contemporary news reports.1 Boxing and big-game hunting thereafter contributed to the he-man image he cultivated, both to sell his books to a popular audience and for his own self-image, an image exploited in men’s magazines of the 1950s.2 Despite a reputation for an adventurous lifestyle and an imposing physique, Hemingway was also a klutz and unlucky. His clumsiness caused accidents, and he was unlucky enough to inherit visual disabili- ties from his mother and worse diseases from his father: diabetes and the depression that finally led to his suicide. Perhaps not surprising given this medical history, a post–World War II critic of Hemingway, Philip Young, developed a “wound theory” of the Hemingway fictional hero, a psychological approach based not only on Hemingway’s wounding in World War I but also on the stunningly long list of Hemingway’s injuries. A brief look at some of those injuries helps to establish the way in which accidents and ailments, legend and fact, have worked together over time to construct a portrait of a man who was, paradoxically, seemingly inde- structible and heroic, and at the same time, clumsy and fragile: His skull has been fractured at least once; he has sustained at least a dozen brain concussions . . . he has been in three serious automobile accidents; and a few years ago [1954] in the African jungle he was in two plane crashes in the space of two days, during which time he suffered severe internal injuries, jammed his spine and received a concussion so violent that his eyesight was impaired for some time. . . . In warfare alone he has been shot through nine parts of the body, and has sustained serious head wounds. When he was blown up in Italy at the age of eighteen . . . the doctors removed 237 steel fragments which had penetrated him that they could get at.3 The explosion of that mortar shell in 1918 may have caused what we now refer to as traumatic brain injury (TBI) and his first concussion, as well

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208 Hays as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though he showed no immediate symptoms of PTSD in the hospital. But some of the injuries Young lists, based on what Hemingway told others, such as being shot through nine parts of the body, including his scrotum – an attempt to explain his understanding of impotent Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926) – are fictitious, although they contribute to Hemingway’s heroic image. As Young points out, a safari in Africa in 1953–4 concluded with two plane crashes on successive days (bad luck again) and another head injury. After the crashes, Hemingway reported that in addition to a concussion, he had suffered a crushed vertebra, first-degree burns of the face, arms, and head, and a ruptured spleen and liver, but these last two injuries are fatal without immediate medical attention. In Uganda, however, Hemingway received only bandages for his burns and bruises. Although heavily injured from the plane crashes, he tried to help put out a brush fire and, perhaps still off balance due to the concussion, fell into the fire and was burned more severely. He received no serious medical attention until he reached Venice over two months later.4 Hemingway’s shoulder had been damaged in the first plane crash, so he butted open a jammed door on the crashed second plane with his head; doing so, he may have fractured his skull. He definitely gave himself another concussion and suffered from double vision. The dysentery he suffered on that safari was real, as it had been in 1934, during an earlier African safari. In 1928, Hemingway, probably inebriated, pulled not the chain of a toilet’s overhead tank but instead the chain on a skylight, bringing it down on himself and cutting his forehead from the broken glass. He also shot himself in both legs in 1935 while catching sharks. The gaff broke, the .22 pistol went off, and ricocheting fragments hit Hemingway in both legs. And he spent seven weeks in a Montana hospital in 1930 after seriously breaking his arm in an auto accident. This list could be expanded, and has, by Jeffrey Meyers, who includes a three-page list of injuries as an appendix in his biography of Hemingway.5 Among the most widely reported stories that may well be fictitious is that of Hemingway carrying a wounded Italian soldier over his back toward aid after his World War I wounding, until he was felled by machine gun fire. To the extent that his description of the wounding of Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms (1929) is autobiographical, he retracts the story (FTA 63). Many critics are skeptical of the story, as I am.6 The machine gun bullet entered his knee in a transverse fashion, lodging behind the kneecap without breaking it. If Hemingway were indeed moving away from enemy fire carrying a wounded man, the bullet Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Ailments, Accidents, and Suicide 209 would have hit the back of his knee and penetrated forward. More likely, he was hit by machine gun fire in the knee and the foot (Baker 46) while being carried on a stretcher, as Reynolds also believed (Young Hemingway 19). Hemingway said, “It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars: A major part of their trade is to lie or invent,”7 so we cannot always believe the extent of his injuries as told in his stories of wounds, but his hospital stays are well documented. Hemingway suffered additional concussions during World War II, one when his London driver, during a blackout – that is, driving without lights – ran into a water tower. The car’s rear view mirror broke away from the windshield and the stem went into Hemingway’s forehead, causing a wound that required fifty-seven stitches to repair; he also badly bruised both knees and had difficulty climbing onto a troop ship for the D-Day invasion (Baker 391). He received another concussion in Normandy that same year (1944), diving from a motorcycle’s sidecar to avoid an ambush; as a result of the blow, he reported a bout of impotence as well (Baker 405). He also cut his head, perhaps absorbing still another concussion, when he fell on the deck of his boat Pilar in 1950 and hit his head on deck cleats (Baker 484). A series of concussions can cause permanent brain damage, and Hemingway’s may well have contributed to his nightmares and insomnia – which followed his wounding in Italy – as well as to his depression, another cause of nightmares and insomnia. He suffered insomnia throughout the rest of his life, much like Nick Adams in “Now I Lay Me” (1927), and according to Young, he slept, when he could sleep, with the light on, just as Jake Barnes does in The Sun Also Rises (152).8 Thus while he may have exaggerated his wounds or his heroism after being wounded, the wounds themselves, whether self-caused or caused by others, were real enough. And he suffered recurrent bouts of impotence long before his health declined in his late fifties, challenging his conception of himself as a virile male (SL 79; Meyer 194–5, 252, 403, 540). Gregory Hemingway, Hemingway’s youngest son and a medical doctor, wrote in his memoir about his father:

Even in the male, the adrenal glands produce estrogen, or female hormones, which are normally broken down by the liver. But if the liver is badly damaged, there can be a high concentration of estrogen in the blood stream which will reduce the male libido. But perhaps the worst offender was the drug reserpine, the drug he was taking in large doses to control his blood pressure. This can not only cause mental depression, but has a specific paralytic effect on the parsym- pathetic nerves that control the sexual mechanism.9 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

210 Hays However, more serious than the common ailments Hemingway suffered from – colds, grippe (a term of the time for the flu), hemorrhoids – was the depressive illness he inherited from his father, as did some of his siblings. Clarence Hemingway had diabetes and what he called “a nervous condition,” the latter condition initially displayed in erratic moods (Baker 31; Reynolds, Young Hemingway 41, 71, 77ff.). Dr. Hemingway twice, in 1903 and again in 1908, left the family for short stays in New Orleans to repair his shattered nerves (Reynolds, Young Hemingway 83). Whether he sought some professional help there or just wanted peace and quiet away from the family and his medical practice is not known; he would have kept to himself the seeking of any medical aid, since he would have considered mental instability a personal weakness, and no one at the time with a mental illness would have gone to a doctor. As Reynolds states, “Insomnia, erratic blood pressure, blinding headaches, and severe depression were the genetic inheritance of Ernest Hemingway and his sisters and brothers” (Young Hemingway 85–6). His sisters Marcelline and Ursula also suffered from insomnia; Marcelline and Hemingway’s brother Leicester were diabetic; Marcelline, like Ernest, suffered severe depression. Ursula, Leicester, and possibly Marcelline, committed suicide (Reynolds, Young Hemingway 85–6), as did Ernest and his granddaughter Margaux. Hemingway was treated for depression, unsuccessfully, at the Mayo Clinic in 1960 and 1961, where he underwent electroshock therapy “at the rate of two a week through . . . December and early January” (Baker 556), at a time when electroshock therapy was not understood and was considered torture by the general public, as the shocking movie Snake Pit (1948) and Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and the subsequent movie demonstrated. (Two of Hemingway’s children, Patrick and Gregory, also underwent electroshock therapy.10) Part of the intensity of Hemingway’s depression may have resulted from the medication reserpine, prescribed for his high blood pressure prior to entering the Mayo Clinic, as Gregory Hemingway said. In high doses, reserpine can heighten depression and impotence, and both his physician, Dr. Hugh Butt, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Rome, at the Mayo Clinic felt that his “depression, agitation, and tension . . . was a consequence of an untoward reaction to the anti-hypertension medication which [he] had been given.”11 But depression, what Hemingway called “black ass,” was present long before, as indicated perhaps as early as 1933 in his short story “A Way You’ll Never Be” (1933), in which Nick Adams, Hemingway’s frequent fictional alter ego, displays obvious signs of mental instability.12 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Ailments, Accidents, and Suicide 211 Reynolds suggests that Hemingway suffered from bipolar disease, also referred to as manic depression, as early as 1924 (Paris Years 194, 218, 220, 295), and I concur.13 Bipolar disorder is characterized by swings of mood, which Hemingway frequently exhibited, but not necessarily mad, giddy, foaming-at-the mouth mania one moment and suicidal depression the next. It can present in a milder form, hypomania, defined by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) III as “a distinct period in which the predominant mood is either elevated, expansive, or irritable and there are associated symptoms of the Manic Syndrome. By definition, the disturbance is not severe enough to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning.”14 Dr. Ronald Fieve, one-time director of the New York Psychiatric Institute, writes that “many of the milder high states will be beneficial and appropriate to the individual, enabling him to achieve much of value by means of his driven, manic energy.”15 The DSM III dates the mean age at onset of mania at early twenties (220), and Fieve notes that it “is characterized by a lifetime of alternating mild-to-serious highs and lows” (117). Among the symptoms of Manic Syndrome are “decreased need for sleep, . . . increase in goal-directed activity, . . . excessive involvement in . . . activities which have a high potential for painful consequences, e.g., sexual indiscretions” (DSM III 217). As a young man, Hemingway completed eight stories for In Our Time (1925) in a three-month period in 1924 while also parenting, helping edit Ford Madox Ford’s the transatlantic review, typing Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans for that journal, and also playing tennis and boxing (Reynolds, Paris Years 167; Baker 126–7, 129). During that period he also wrote no letters (Reynolds, Paris Years 188), his letter writing occurring in inverse proportion to his fictional output. Following that outburst, his creative energies slackened: he produced only three short stories in the next seven months, one unpublished in his lifetime, and only one additional story during the next seven and a half months (Reynolds, Paris Years 267). But he did write thirty-three letters that winter of 1924–5, including one to Robert McAlmon in November in which he said: “I’m having a period of not being able to do anything worth a shit after this last story” (SL 135); that story was “The Undefeated” (1925), completed that month, after Hemingway finally revised “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925), begun in May (Smith 102, 85). Later, he wrote the first draft of The Sun Also Rises in nine weeks, then Torrents of Spring (1926) in ten days (Reynolds, Paris Years 324, 334), alternating periods of creativity and inability. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

212 Hays As noted earlier, one symptom of depression is an irritable mood, and Hemingway’s outbursts are numerous and well documented. For example, he lashed out at Harold Loeb in Pamplona, then quickly apologized (Reynolds, Paris Years 304–5), and lashed out again in the transatlantic review against his friend Lewis Galantière (Paris Years, 184–6), and in his letters against critic Van Wyck Brooks and editor Scofield ThayerSL ( 114– 15). Another symptom is significant weight change DSM( III 219). During the three months of creative outburst early in 1924, Hemingway put on weight, then lost it during later months when his creative output slackened (Hays, “Depression” 51–2, 62). His significant weight loss is apparent in the final pictures of him taken at the time of his clinical depression, when he went from over 200 pounds to possibly under 175 (Meyers, illus. 29, opposite 207). The other symptom, listed previously, is risky behavior, often of a sexual nature. We know he gambled on horse races in Paris (MF 61ff.). In 1923, he bet on Luis Ángel Firpo against Jack Dempsey in their landmark boxing match and lost (Reynolds, Paris Years 165). His immersing himself in wars and big-game hunting is also well known, leading Philip Young and others to speculate about a preoccupation with a death wish (Young, A Reconsideration 165–6). But perhaps “excessive involvement in . . . activities which have a high potential for painful consequences, e.g., sexual indiscretions,” can also be seen in his several adul- teries. With the burst of writing that included The Sun Also Rises and Torrents of Spring in 1926, he started his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, leading to his divorce from Hadley and marriage to Pauline; his affair with Martha Gellhorn began while he was finishing To Have and Have Not in 1937 and continued through his writing of The Fifth Column (1938) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), leading to a divorce from Pauline and marriage to Martha; his flirtation with Adriana Ivancich while married to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, resulted in Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). Symptoms of severe depression began to be noticed by others in the late 1950s, and perhaps the injuries he suffered during the two plane crashes in 1954 contributed to the change from cyclothymia (a mild form of bipolar disorder) to clinical depression. Friends from Ketchum, Idaho, where the Hemingways moved after leaving Castro’s Cuba, noticed a distinct change in his behavior in 1958 (Nuffer 47). In the summer of 1959, at his birthday party in Málaga, Spain, he vented an irrational outburst against Buck Lanham, the army man he had served with in World War II as a gun-toting correspondent. He was more than usually obscene in his language and was very cruel to Mary (Baker 548). That year Hemingway was Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Ailments, Accidents, and Suicide 213 following and writing about the mano a mano contest between bullfighters Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín in Spain. Life magazine, which photographed the bullfights, wanted Hemingway’s prose merely to accompany its photos. Hemingway had trouble keeping within the word limit. Unable to edit the work to closer to Life’s specifications, he called on Aaron Hotchner to help him, and together they eliminated fifty thousand words, which Life cut still further before printing Hemingway’s work in three installments in September 1960.16 He could no longer control his own writing. During this same period, he was paranoid, worrying constantly about finances, that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was after him, that the government would jail him for bringing his Irish secretary, Valerie Danby-Smith, into the country, and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was following him. Only that last fear was true: Freedom of Information requests have revealed that the FBI compiled a dossier on Hemingway after he expressed his Loyalist sympathies during the Spanish Civil War and did follow him. Hemingway wrote Mary on August 19, 1960 from Spain that he feared a “complete physical and nervous crack up from deadly overwork” (Baker 554), finally acknowledging his own difficulties. The most dangerous result of severe depression is suicide. Mary recognized the seriousness of the situation and, with the help of their local physician, Dr. George Saviers, convinced Ernest to go to the Mayo Clinic at the end of November 1960, signing in as George Saviers in order to avoid the press and public inquiry into his hospitalization. When the press did find out, they converged on the hospital, although the hospital’s press releases said that Hemingway was being treated for hypertension.17 After the electroshock therapy and after convincing psychiatrist Dr. Rome that getting back to work would be the best therapy for him, Hemingway left the hospital on January 22, 1961, after a stay of fifty-seven days. But he bluffed his way out of the hospital, with little actual difference in his condition other than the loss of memory caused by the electroshock therapy. When John F. Kennedy was elected president and noted authors were asked to contribute lines of congratulation, Hemingway sat at his desk for hours, unable to string two sentences together (Baker 559). He tried to finish his work on what became A Moveable Feast, and wrote one chapter in April 1961, according to grandson Seán Hemingway, as a possible last chapter for that memoir (MF-RE 9); it concludes, “[T]his book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist” (MF-RE 225). The mention of tampering with his memory, of course, refers to the Spec SD1 Date 26-july

214 Hays electroshock treatments he received; the comment that his heart no longer exists perhaps predicts what he will do. Hemingway tried to commit suicide that same April, but Mary talked to him until Dr. Saviers came and took the gun from him (Baker 560). At that time the doctor and Mary decided that Hemingway had to be read- mitted to the Mayo Clinic. As Reynolds writes, “To say that Hemingway was opposed to being treated as mentally ill would be an understatement. Anyone growing up in the first half of this century was loath to be labeled as ‘crazy,’ for mental illness marked that person as a liability” (Final Years 348). Not having self-control would be particularly loathsome to Hemingway both because self-control was a major theme in his fiction and because he had created a self-reliant image for himself to sell his books. But worse than the social stigma, Hemingway told friends in Ketchum that he feared that if he returned, he would be committed permanently as insane and lose his freedom (Nuffer 61, 67). Before leaving his home Hemingway tried suicide with a shotgun again (Baker 560). En route to the Mayo, while the small plane he was traveling in stopped for fuel, Hemingway tried to walk into the propeller of a taxiing plane (Baker 561). At the hospital he was again treated with electroshock therapy. Dr. Rome reported that initially “he was obsessed with the idea that he could never again meet his obligations and therefore be unable to work. The humiliation and chagrin he felt at this, all but overwhelmed him” (quoted in Nuffer 126). But Rome felt that the electroshock and talk therapy worked – once again Hemingway talked the doctor into believing that he was well enough to be discharged. As Rome says, “I came to be convinced not only of his need but also of his desire to get back to work” (quoted in Nuffer 129). But Hemingway couldn’t write. Nor could he maintain his self-image as completely competent or as a writer. Hemingway’s Idaho friend Tillie Arnold said, “But when he couldn’t remember, and he said that he couldn’t write any more, that was the end of his will to live” (quoted in Nuffer 59). Because of his poorly functioning liver, a result of his early jaundice, heavy drinking, and cirrhosis, Hemingway was on a restricted diet; he was not allowed to eat all the foods he enjoyed, and his intake of alcohol was limited in terms of amount and type (only wine). He was still sexually impotent. And he suffered from a far more devastating impotence: he couldn’t write. No rich food, no hard drinking, no sex, and most of all, no writing. His raisons d’être no longer existed, and the depression continued. On July 2, 1961, three weeks short of his sixty-second birthday and a week short of the forty-third anniversary of his wounding in Italy, he put Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Ailments, Accidents, and Suicide 215 a double-barreled shotgun against his forehead, pressed both triggers, and took his own life. Unfortunately, suicide is not rare for depressives; what is rare is what Hemingway managed to create during his lifetime while wrestling with that finally fatal disease.

Notes 1. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1969) and M. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 18. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. D. Earle, All Man!: Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazine, and the Masculine Persona (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 15–16, 29ff. 3. P. Young, Ernest Hemingway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, Number 1, 1959), 25–6. 4. P. L. Hays, “Who Removed Hemingway’s Ruptured Spleen?,” The Hemingway Review 11.1 (1991), 31–3. 5. J. Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 573– 5. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6. Cf. Reynolds, Young Hemingway 21; R. W. Lewis, “Hemingway in Italy: Making It Up,” Journal of Modern Literature 9.2 (1982), 209–36; 217–18, 222–3. 7. Quoted in F. Scafella, Introduction, in F. Scafella (ed.), Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4. 8. P. Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harbinger, Brace & World, 1966), 137. See also M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 76–7. Subsequent references are included in the text. 9. G. Hemingway, Papa: A Personal Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 15. 10. Patrick’s electroshock therapy came in 1947 (Meyer 422); Gregory’s occa- sions of electroshock therapy are documented by his third wife, Valerie Hemingway, in her memoir, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways (New York: Ballatine, 2004), 235, 241–2, 264. Thorazine, the first widely used antipsychotic drug, only came into use in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was initially used primarily for schizophrenia and as an anti-emetic. It was not widely used for depression until later in the 1960s. 11. Dr. Rome, quoted in D. Nuffer, The Best Friend I Ever Had (n.p.: Xlibris, 2008), 124. Subsequent references are included in the text. 12. See P. Smith, A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989), 273–5. Subsequent references are included in the text. 13. See P. Hays, “Hemingway’s Clinical Depression: A Speculation,” The Hemingway Review 14.2 (1995), 50–63. Subsequent references are included in the text. 14. DSM III, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed., rev. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1987), 218. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

216 Hays

15. R. Fieve, Moodswing (New York: William Morrow, 1975), 33. Subsequent references are included in the text. 16. Cf. A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway (New York: William Morrow, 1983), 292, 296. 17. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 351. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 21 Animals Ryan Hediger

Ernest Hemingway, bullfighting aficionado, big-game hunter, fisherman, writer: the name and identifying features seem to fall together in complete harmony. In the popular imagination, Hemingway has often been known as a macho animal killer. He often was. And yet what happens when cat lover, animal sympathizer, and passionate defender of plants are added to this characterization? Consider two statements from opposite ends of Hemingway’s life: in 1953, Hemingway told a reporter, “‘I don’t like to kill animals,’”1 while Hemingway’s mother wrote about the three-year-old Ernest of 1902: “He is a natural scientist, loving everything in the way of bugs, stones, shells, birds, animals, insects, and blossoms.”2 Hemingway’s first important biographer, Carlos Baker, explains of the toddler, “He loved all animals, especially wild ones. He talked to his play- things and personified each one” (5). While cultural convention might have us ascribe these feelings to Hemingway’s youth, it is clear that his passion for animals remained powerful throughout his life and affected his personal relationships, his notions of hunting and of ethics in general, and his ideas of art and writing. Hemingway kept many of these gentler feelings about animals out of the public eye, much as he tended to obscure his complex attitude toward gender, an attitude that became clearer with the 1986 publication of the gender-shifting novel The Garden of Eden. Much of what we think we know about Hemingway depends upon the context in which we view him. Today we have a different Hemingway not only because we know more about him, but also because our world is different. Our culture, every culture, enables certain kinds of knowledge and disables others. In Hemingway’s time, much as today, we observe what Erica Fudge calls the “inherent contradictions” of human relationships with other animals. Fudge remarks that “we rarely make the connection between the cat we live with and the cow we eat,” and she reminds us that “the ways in which we currently live with animals . . . are not natural”; they are historical, 217 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

218 Hediger produced by particular cultural realities.3 Hemingway’s attitude toward animals reflects such contradictions, but his sympathetic side has become more intelligible today, especially as culture has changed. An important root of Hemingway’s surprisingly complex attitude toward animals and other forms of life is found in the science of his day. Born in 1899, only forty years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species, Hemingway navigated conflicting cultural attitudes about animals and nature. One of the central issues appears through the perceived trauma of Darwinism – the shock that human beings are animals too, evolved from other forms of life. Darwin’s evolution would be embraced, vigorously rejected, misunderstood, and misapplied then, even as it is today, and in these conflicts we find crucial questions about what it means to be human, questions at the core of Hemingway’s writing. The world of Hemingway’s youth was still powered largely by draft animals but was on the cusp of great change. He took an early interest in Prince, the horse his father used to pull a buggy for transportation (Baker 4), but by 1917, when Hemingway was nearly eighteen, he would accompany his father and family on a long drive north over awkward roads in a Model T Ford automobile to the family cabin (Baker 30). Mechanical transportation – the automobile, the train, and eventually the airplane – would fundamentally shift human relationships with animals during the period of Hemingway’s early life. This Model T trip took the family from the Chicago suburb of Oak Park to northern Michigan, not only the place where Ernest’s passion for the vigorous outdoor life would be nourished, but also the state in which Henry Ford’s famous assembly line production of automobiles began in 1913, when Hemingway was thirteen years old. In their travels from the Chicago area to Michigan, the Hemingways traversed, roughly, the route taken by the very technologies that made mass-produced automobiles possible and horses less necessary. As Nicole Shukin notes in Animal Capital, Ford modeled the Michigan assembly system on “moving lines that had been operating at least since the 1850s in the vertical abattoirs [slaughterhouses] of Cincinnati and Chicago.”4 Animal disassembly in the abattoirs became automobile assembly in the Ford plants. This migration of technology, newly centered around cars rather than animals, signals the major shifts in animals’ roles in increasingly industrialized economies and evokes the tensions about what such systems of production do to human life. In Michigan, the family would hunt, fish, and generally spend time outdoors admiring nature. Roaming over the wilder terrain of the Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Animals 219 northern woods gave the Hemingways a chance to participate in the creaturely life themselves, to be good animals. Hunting had been part of that, a quintessentially masculine endeavor for Hemingway’s father. But concerns about technology encroaching upon such ostensibly natural pursuits, and upon nature itself, affected much nineteenth-century American thought, as aptly described by Leo Marx in his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden.5 Hemingway, like William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many other authors in the early twentieth century, carried these concerns forward in new form. Hemingway’s writing carves out a space for individual meaning and pleasure against the backdrop of powerful, anonymous modern systems like the assembly line. The person hunting or fishing has a direct relationship with her or his food, answering to the alienation that was the shadow of modern manufacturing efficiencies, where food animals would be treated as so much raw material for caloric production and where workers were – are – given numbingly simple tasks in order to streamline production. These human jobs were often conceived in animal terms, with the laborer as, in one formulation, an “‘intelligent gorilla’” (quoted in Shukin 88). Hemingway, though he resisted some of these cultural changes, also relied upon modern technologies in the privileges afforded to those of his social position. His reputation as a big-game hunter depends in large measure on his trips to Africa (1933–4, 1953–4), which required not only wealth but the whole network of transportation machinery – steamships, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Some of the hunting in the field was actually conducted with cars.6 And he spent a significant amount of time observing nature and hunting in Wyoming and Idaho, able to travel there comfortably because of the automobile and the ever-improving road system, a road system that Hemingway worried would, in the case of Wyoming, “destroy the hunting forever and drive all the animals into the refuge of Yellowstone Park” (Baker 231). As Glen Love remarks, Hemingway’s technology-fed passion for hunting produced a “body count” of animals during his life that is “startlingly high,” unnecessarily so, including many predators, ungulates, birds, much sea life, and a great deal more, including a whale.7 But Love was also among the first scholars to note that Hemingway’s attitude toward hunting and animals shifted later in his life. Along with these great historical shifts, many continuities exist between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The seeds of Hemingway’s attitude toward nature and animals were planted by his parents. His father, Clarence Hemingway, a physician, organized the Agassiz Club in Oak Spec SD1 Date 26-july

220 Hediger Park, a group dedicated to studying nature (Baker 6), a hobby very much in vogue at the dawn of the twentieth century in America. Dr. Hemingway also taught Ernest the outdoor skills of dressing game animals for cooking in the open; maintaining guns, fishing rods, and other gear; and much more. And Ernest learned much of his sophisticated attitude about hunting from his father, who both embraced the activity and had real “compassion for wounded animals” (Baker 9). Indeed, in a telling scene, Ernest and a boyhood friend took revenge upon a porcupine that had injured the friend’s dog. When they killed the porcupine and brought it home, they received from Ernest’s father a “lecture on the needless destruction of harmless animals.” To complete the lesson, the boys were required by Dr. Hemingway to cook and eat the animal so it would not be wasted. Apparently, it was a less than delicious meal (Baker 16). Concern about the well-being of wild animals crossed into the Hemingways’ domestic sphere as a love for pets. Ernest grew up in a house with cats, son to a mother particularly devoted to the animals, and he had cats around him for much of his life. Pet keeping, though characteristic of Hemingway’s social class, is not a timeless, universal practice. As Fudge notes, “while pets were present in Greek and Roman culture, widespread ownership of animals with . . . no utilitarian function” really began in the sixteenth century (28). It was then mostly a luxury. By the time of Hemingway’s birth, pets had become more widespread. Historian Harriet Ritvo notes about dogs that “the relation of most Victorian fanci- ers to their animals, kept purely for companionship and amusement, was rather new. . . . ”8 Of course, pet ownership often resides in a fuzzy position between utility and luxury: for example, lap dogs, which may seem like an obvious example of nonutilitarian animal companions, were understood to cure illness and even help digestion as early as the fifteenth century.9 In the case of Hemingway’s family, cats kept the mouse and rodent populations in check both in Illinois and at the family lake house in Michigan. Cats were also good company in times of loneliness and illness, particularly important in an emotionally intense life like Hemingway’s. Pet keeping followed a long evolution in thinking about animals. The development of concern for animals may seem quite new – the modern animal rights movement arguably begins with Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation published in 1975, well after Hemingway’s death. But human fascination with animals reaches into prehistory, as far back as the first known example of human pictorial art, the thirty-two-thousand-year-old cave paintings at Chauvet, France, focused almost entirely on animals.10 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Animals 221 Concern for animals appears in early history as well, in classical Greece and Rome.11 As Roderick Frazier Nash, among others, argues, the rise of Christianity produced a largely negative view of nature and animals through the medieval period. For many Christians and Christian texts, nature existed only to serve humans, while human likenesses to animals inspired dread and denial. By the late Renaissance, when René Descartes (1590–1650) famously insisted that animals were machines and therefore undeserving of serious moral attention, contrary beliefs also existed. In 1641 “the first record of a law respecting the rights of nonhuman beings, or at least human duties toward them” appeared in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Nash 18), and Nash traces a history of thinkers leading up to Darwin who believed nature and animals worthy of careful attention. These views developed special intensity in nineteenth-century Britain: a law against cruelty to cattle was adopted (1822); the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals group – later called the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or RSPCA – was founded (1824); and the British Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) was passed (Nash 25–6). Discussions of animal welfare crossed the Atlantic to be taken up in the United States, if to a less developed degree (Nash 34). Regard for animals in the nineteenth century advanced as pet keeping grew and helped to establish the world into which Hemingway was born. With animals, as in much of his life, Hemingway engaged his culture’s interests with unusual intensity. He felt genuine, if paradoxical, concern for the welfare even of the animals he hunted, and his love for companion animals was always strong and pronounced. In fact, the intimacy he and his family members shared with cats was a guiding metaphor and even an example for many of his adult intimacies. Hemingway shared a fondness for cats with nearly every one of his serious romantic partners, from nurse Agnes von Kurowsky to his final wife, Mary. (Pauline, his second wife, was less fond of cats.)12 He consistently adopted animal names, especially cat-related ones, for his wives and lovers. The adult template for this intermingling of animal names and human love was established in Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson. He called Hadley his “feather kitten,” and she reciprocated with variations of cat names for him.13 They loved deeply Wax Puppy, the dog Ernest had given Hadley, to whom he would compare future canines decades later in Cuba. Hemingway also claimed that the much-adored cat he and Hadley kept for company in Paris, Feather Puss, babysat their son Bumby (MF 197). Such intense literal and metaphorical closeness among humans and cats carried through to the end of his life. As Mary Hemingway reports, his Spec SD1 Date 26-july

222 Hediger final words to her the night before his suicide were “‘Good night, my kitten.’”14 Hemingway resisted the disposable approach to companion animals that dominated then even more than today. He regretted adopting Wax Puppy in Paris, since the dog had to be euthanized in illness, and he worried about Feather Kcat [sic] in Toronto, where the Humane Society “‘disposed’ of cats by the bagful” (Reynolds, The Paris Years 154). No-kill animal shelters would not become common until well after Hemingway’s death. In Key West, where Hemingway, his second wife, Pauline, and his children did not own a cat themselves, strays surviving by feeding on the island’s rodents were numerous and often won attention from the family.15 In Cuba, the Hemingways (Ernest, his third wife, Martha, and eventually his fourth wife, Mary) adopted numerous dogs and cats that had been abandoned or had gone feral. Their cats often had the run of the house and were permitted to mate, eventually bringing their number to fifty-seven (Brennen 145). Each of these cats was named and doted on in illness and death (Baker 511; Brennan 58–9 and passim). One of the stray cats in Cuba, adopted at the urging of Hemingway’s son Gregory and eventually named Boise, would win Hemingway’s fiercest love IIS( 206–8; Brennen 48). These feelings are clearly articulated in fictional form by Thomas Hudson, an approximate stand-in for Hemingway in Islands in the Stream: “The way he and Boise felt now, he thought, neither one wanted to outlive the other. I don’t know how many people and animals have been in love before, he thought. It probably is a very comic situation. But I don’t find it comic at all” (208). Reader responses to such passion demonstrate the wider cultural tension about our understanding of animals. Roderick Nordell, for example, in his generally favorable review of Islands in the Stream, called the depiction of Hudson’s relationship with Boise “an unbelievable bout of sentimentality.”16 But Nordell’s view is entirely inadequate to grasping Hemingway’s lifelong love of animals, which runs parallel to his fascination with killing animals while hunting and fishing. Indeed, in the novel Hudson insists all the more strongly on his stance, associating his love for the cat with his love for his son who, at this point in the book, is deceased: “No, he thought, I do not find it comic any more than it is comic for a boy’s cat to outlive him” (IIS 208). During his lifetime, Hemingway effectively kept private many of these feelings about animals. They appear in posthumously published manuscripts like Islands and A Moveable Feast, and many of Hemingway’s statements about cats and other animals that now appear in biographies were first written in letters to his children, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Animals 223 wives, and ex-wives, people for whom he reserved his most honest and intimate feelings in that private form of discourse. Scholars are still bringing such feelings to light and working out what they tell us about the author and his position within the cultural norms of his day, norms in which love for animals was still often gendered feminine and connected to the domestic sphere. Many have worried, in Hemingway’s time and today, that such love for animals depends on misrecognition of them. Generally labeled “anthropomorphism,” the hazard of projecting one’s feelings inappropriately onto another animal cannot easily be dismissed. But as many scientists have increasingly recognized, neither can human-animal likenesses be readily refused with this label “anthropomorphism.” Biologists and animal experts have shown important similarities among humans and other animals, particularly mammals. Biologist Marc Bekoff and philoso- pher Jessica Pierce, for example, in their book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (2010), argue that many social mammals such as wolves, elephants, and great apes display behaviors or actions that are “moral.”17 Many of Bekoff’s books, deliberately positioned in a line reaching back to Darwin, show other similarities such as mourning rituals, complex communication systems, parental love, and much more. Likewise, renowned primatologist Frans de Waal reminds us that the human emotional system evolved and therefore necessarily has much in common with the emotional systems of other animals like chimpanzees.18 Such scholarship complicates – enriches, really – the meaning of our emotional responses to nonhuman animals, including certainly Hemingway’s strong feelings. Hemingway’s many investigations into hunting, human and animal sympathies, and the tensions between public and private emotions come together in particularly rich and far-reaching form in his posthumous novel The Garden of Eden. At the center of the story is a boy’s intense emotional response to a wild elephant. The elephant first appears obscurely at night, and his initial sign comes to David through his dog Kibo’s senses (GOE 159). Kibo appears thus as a kind of sensory supplement for human weakness, even for human disability, as do dogs in many Hemingway texts, such as “Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog.” In Garden, David follows his father and Juma as they track the elephant back to the skull of the elephant’s friend, killed in an earlier hunt. The living elephant seems to mourn the loss of his friend. Recognizing the power of the elephants’ bond, David comes to reject the enterprise of elephant hunting altogether with a taboo piece of adult language: “Fuck elephant hunting,” he says to his father (GOE 181). David’s overwhelming sympathy for the vulnerable Spec SD1 Date 26-july

224 Hediger but manifestly intelligent, sensitive animals depends fundamentally on his (and Hemingway’s) awareness that elephants do in fact mourn, as Cynthia Moss and others later confirmed in their study of them.19 Many animal scholars join Erica Fudge in observing that people often reserve their affection for domestic animals like cats. But Hemingway, like David, long possessed a fierce sympathy for elephants and many other nondomesticated animals. He often insisted upon specific relationships to actual beings, attending to the individual and the particular first, a view characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist writers, expressed for instance by poet Ezra Pound in his well-known phrase: “Go in fear of abstractions.”20 Thinking about animals often relies on just such reductive abstractions that distance humans from other animals and that obscure great differences among and even within species, as many animal scholars have noted.21 Once Hemingway came to know the plight of a given form of life, he often sympathized with it, and those sympathies seem to have become more general later in his life. By 1953, when Hemingway returned to Africa for a second safari with his wife Mary, “Ernest’s heart was no longer in the hunt,” biographer Michael Reynolds notes. Reynolds further explains that Hemingway “had already begun to identify metaphorically with old trophy animals” and “‘preferred to drive around and look at the animals.’”22 We could probably strike the word “metaphorically” from Reynolds’s statement. Hemingway’s feelings align with his vigorous defense of elephants, his interest in the circus, where he once befriended two bears that came to Havana in 1953 (Baker 508), and with much else in his life. He even reportedly defended, with significant conviction, the right of a ceiba tree to grow unmolested outside his Cuban home.23 But we should be careful not to inscribe on Hemingway familiar contemporary identity positions, such as budding vegetarian. At the end of his life, like his father, he did not believe in wasting animals, and his pity for other animals seemed to deepen, but he did still relish eating animals. He was more attuned than most to the mortal vulnerability of creaturely life, human, animal, and otherwise, but he also often stalked and courted death, taking interest in its power and meaning. Writing for him revolved around life and death. As Reynolds reports, Hemingway felt “each book” he wrote to be “a little death” (The Final Years 23), complicating what it means for great art to be immortal. He dealt death out to animals for all his years, probably excessively, and, of course, in the end did not even spare his own animal self. What mattered most to Hemingway in the face of death was a life well lived, which meant actively participating in its profound dramas. One Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Animals 225 of his richest investigations of these dramas appears in the novella The Old Man and the Sea, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. The story centers around Santiago’s intense sympathy and even love for an enormous marlin that he is trying to catch and kill, a great old fish whose identity parallels Santiago’s. Both the fish and Santiago struggle, with as much grace as they can muster, with mortal weakness, death itself, a force that cannot be escaped. Yet Santiago finally regrets killing the fish. In such texts Hemingway understands post-Darwinian creaturely life through specifics, attending to concrete particulars, to actual realities. It seems a mark of his work’s high achievement that Hemingway managed both to represent this creaturely life, even its gruesome elements, with great fine- ness, honesty, and accuracy, and continually to affirm his love for fellow creatures and the creaturely life itself. In his life and writing, Hemingway embraced what he felt it means to be a human animal, and he sought to maintain a genuine, anything-but-automatic decency and love in the face of his times’ darker truths.

Notes 1. L. Lyons, “A Day in Town with Hemingway,” New York Post (June 26, 1953), reprinted in M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 71. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 5. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. E. Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 9–10. Subsequent references are included in the text. 4. N. Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 87. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. L. Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 6. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 161–2 and passim. 7. G. Love, “Hemingway’s Indian Virtues: An Ecological Reconsideration,” Western American Literature 22.3 (1987), 201–13. 8. H. Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 85. 9. S. McHugh, Dog (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 83. 10. L. Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 1–7. 11. R. F. Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 16–17. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

226 Hediger

12. C. F. Brennen, Hemingway’s Cats: An Illustrated Biography (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 2006), 39. Subsequent references are included in the text. 13. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 47. Subsequent references are included in the text. 14. M. W. Hemingway, How It Was (New York: Knopf, 1951), 579. 15. C. Hemingway, “907 Whitehead Street,” The Hemingway Review 23.1 (2003), 8–23; 21. 16. R. Nordell, “Hemingway’s View of Himself,” Christian Science Monitor (October 8, 1970), reprinted in R. O. Stephens (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 443–4. 17. M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 18. F. De Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton University Press, 2006). 19. C. Moss, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 73 and passim. 20. E. Pound, “A Retrospect” in T. S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1935), 5. 21. For example: J. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, M. L. Mallet (ed.), D. Wills (trans.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 22. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 268. Subsequent references are included in the text. 23. N. Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, C. E. Corwin (trans.) (Secaucus, NJ: L. Stuart, 1984), 53. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 22 Bullfighting Miriam B. Mandel

Although Ernest Hemingway often claimed that he invented out of knowledge, his first writing about the bullfight preceded his first experience of it. “The first matador got the horn” was written in mid-March 1923 and published in the spring issue of The Little Review soon after; it is a one-paragraph piece that highlights the dangers of the bullfighter’s craft and the audience’s responses to his situation. Two months later, Hemingway took the train from Paris to Madrid, arriving early on May 27, 1923 to buy a first-row barrera seat: he saw his first bullfight later in the afternoon. That seminal event unleashed a torrent of prose and a trickle of poetry, all of it soundly rooted in the expertise he acquired as, year after year, he followed the bulls and transformed himself into the bullfight eminence in the English-speaking world – a position he still holds. Hemingway was lucky to come to the bullfight when he did. In 1923, the bullfight world was commemorating the death of José Gómez Ortega (Joselito), born in 1895, promoted to full matador de toros in 1912, and killed by the bull Bailaor on May 16, 1920. Joselito had been an extraordinarily gifted bullfighter, and the six years of his rivalry cum partnership with the innovative Juan Belmonte (1892–1960) have been labeled la edad de oro (the golden age) of the bullfight. Striving to outdo each other, Joselito and Belmonte injected a grace and beauty into the muleta work that lifted that (generally) red cloth to a prominence it had not enjoyed previously, when it had been considered simply as preliminary to the cli- mactic sword thrust that had been the determining factor of a bullfighter’s reputation. The week that Hemingway arrived in Madrid, the city and indeed the entire taurine world were focused on the shocking, sudden loss of the legendary Joselito. This suited Hemingway’s temperament perfectly. Although young, he was not only sensitive to the past, but convinced that it was always being replaced by a diminished present that would, inevitably, dissolve into a grimmer future. This bleak attitude emerged from the experiences of his 227 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

228 Mandel youth, when he witnessed the loggers’ exploitation of upper Michigan and the urban development of Oak Park that gobbled up the open spaces of his boyhood. Aged eighteen, he went to war, was wounded, and lost, or so he said, his belief in his immortality. For him, change and the passage of time signified loss, and many critics have argued that nostalgia for vanished or vanquished beauty and purity dominated his life and art. Hemingway never saw Joselito perform, yet his remarks about him suggest intimacy: he describes Joselito’s physique and quotes what “he used to say.” Thus Hemingway projected himself into the recent past, the golden age he had missed. But he did even more: he expressed longing for the bullfight as it had been before Joselito and Belmonte revolutionized it. “In the old days,” writes Hemingway, bulls were bulls, “bigger than they are now . . . fiercer, more uncertain, heavier and older” DIA ( 67). And in those days, men were men, “mature men [who] knew bulls thoroughly, and faced bulls which were brought to the highest point of physical force, strength, [and] knowledge of how to use their horns” (DIA 68). But, Hemingway claims, Belmonte and Joselito changed all that. Their intricate maneuvers required a smaller, faster, more responsive bull, and this “decadent” bull brought “decadence” to the bullfight. As a result, Hemingway mourns, the bullfight “is a decadent art in every way and like most decadent things it reaches its fullest flower at its rottenest point, which is the present” (DIA 68). In this, he was both right and wrong. He was right because in the 1920s the bullfight was indeed flowering. Joselito and Belmonte had dominated the bullring so thoroughly that younger talents had been shunted aside. But with Joselito gone, his heirs and imitators flowed into the bullring, trying to outdo each other and their dead master, and the bullfight repertoire bloomed. But Hemingway was wrong in his absolutist attitude. The bullfight is a changing, evolving art that precludes absolute judgments. If the bulls were smaller and younger, the fighting was closer, more artistic, and the danger no less real. Grumbling about the bullfight is endemic among aficionados. Hemingway himself notes that “bullfighting has always been considered by contemporary chroniclers to be in a period of decadence” (DIA 240) and mocks the critics who are unable to appreciate artists until after they are dead. But it should be noted that in the 1920s, the grumbling was far from universal. Respected critics such as Tomás Orts Ramos (Uno al Sesgo) rejoiced in the artistic inventiveness and variety of contemporary muleta and cape work. Gregorio Corrochano called the 1920s la edad de Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Bullfighting 229 plata (the silver age), a worthy successor to the edad de oro. And the statistics vouch for the bullfight’s continued popularity: in 1924, Spain hosted 247 bullfights,1 and in 1925 the number climbed to 3212 before declining to 284 in 19263 and rising again to 302 in 1930.4 For all his grumbling, Hemingway followed the bulls enthusiastically from 1923 to 1931, missing only the seasons of 1928 (his son Patrick was born that summer) and of 1930 (he was busy writing Death in the Afternoon). Clearly, he enjoyed the bullfight even as he lamented the changes to it. Since the bullfight is always fluid, he witnessed further changes, such as the reshaping of the first act (the pic-ing was shortened and the cape achieved greater prominence) and the introduction of the peto or protective carapace for the horses. Consequently, the bullfights Hemingway saw in 1931, as he completed his research for Death (1932), were quite different from what he had seen in 1923. He claims to be up to date (he mentions the newest crop of bullfighters), but clearly he wants to preserve the bullfight as he first knew it, to freeze a moment of beauty “for anyone who should ever be interested in knowing what it was like.”5 The passionately elegiac chapter 20 attempts the same for Spain itself. Spain, like the bullfight, was changing even as Hemingway watched. Spain’s military involvement in the north of Africa was creating political ferment at home: the 1920s saw the fall of the monarchy and the rise of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, and by the early 1930s, when Hemingway was finishing Death, he knew that the growing demand for democracy and internationalization that had ousted that dictator was taking Spain toward violent upheaval. The elections of 1931 voted in Spain’s Second Republic, and civil war erupted in 1936. The Second Republic finally fell to Francisco Franco’s forces in 1939, and Spain entered a repressive period that ended only when Franco died in 1975. The bullfight is a place where politics and economics, like all other aspects of Spanish life, find expression. The Republicans opposed the bullfight, objecting to its close ties to the church, monarchy, and aristocracy. Those with an international outlook objected to it as folkloristic and barbaric, isolating Spain from the rest of Europe. Agrarian reformists strove to nationalize the vast tracts of land dedicated to bull breeding in the north and south of the country. Even so, the bullfight held its own, with 242 bullfights as late as 1935. But the war that broke out the next year halved that number: there were 101 bullfights in 1936, 61 in 1937, 73 in 1938, and 125 in 1939, the year the war ended.6 Hemingway went to Spain in 1937 and 1938 to report on the war, but he did not, as best as I can deter- mine, go to the bullfights (held only in Franco-controlled territories). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

230 Mandel During the terrible years of the civil war, bullfighters, bull breeders, bullfight impresarios, and others connected with the profession became soldiers and were wounded or killed. There was a hiatus in the training of the next crop of bullfighters. Bulls and cows were slaughtered in large numbers to satisfy hunger and ideology, and many strains of pedigreed stock were practically wiped out. And of course the entire population had been so impoverished that the national fiesta became a luxury few could afford. Like all of Spain’s artistic and economic life, bullfighting recovered only very slowly from the national trauma. The 125 corridas of 1939, the year the war ended, increased to only 151 (or 156; reports vary) in the following year. War was followed by drought, and the insufficiency of feed and water, combined with the lack of good stock, resulted in very few and very small bulls. In 1941, those sections of the Reglamento (taurine code) that define minimum age and weight were officially suspended so that younger, lighter bulls could be fought legally. As a result, there were 246 corridas de toros in 1942 and 239 in 1943.7 And there were not enough bullfighters. A few old maestros like Juan Belmonte, Nicanor Villalta, Luis Gómez (el Estudiante), and Domingo Ortega survived to grace the postwar carteles (posters), but many of the younger men who had been on the battlefield were now too old, too out of shape, or too dispirited to resume their profession. Those known to be Republicans were forbidden the bullring; many went into exile. In 1940, Spain had only nineteen matadores de alternativa (the highest rank), and in 1941, after a rash of promotions, twenty-nine. There were only a few new politically acceptable superstars to entice a war-bruised audience back into the bullring: Luis Miguel Dominguín (1916–96), Manuel Rodríguez (Manolete, 1917–47), the Mexican Carlos Arruza (1920–66), and Pepe Luis Vázquez (born 1921) were the new stars of the 1940s, seconded by Agustín Parra (Parrita), Pepín Martín Vázquez, Manolo González, José Mejías (Pepe Bienvenida), and Manuel Álvarez Pruaño (el Andaluz). They performed on both sides of the Atlantic, their artistry bringing credit to a country whose repressive government, tacitly allied to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, increasingly isolated it from much of Europe and the Americas. In the 1950s, Spain’s social and economic difficulties forced Franco to make overtures to the democratic world. Spain permitted the construction of American military bases on its soil; the United States extended its European Recovery Plan (the Marshall Plan) to Spain; and American and European tourists, attracted by the weak peseta, flocked to Spain. The Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Bullfighting 231 bullfight began to prosper. In the early and mid-1950s there were between 208 and 278 corridas a year, and from 1957 to 1962, the numbers were in the 300s.8 In 1959, the year Hemingway writes about in The Dangerous Summer, there were sixty-four (or sixty-seven; reports vary) active matadores de toros, and the roll grew to seventy-eight in 1960.9 As the times eased, the bulls grew in size and strength. In 1959, a new article of the Reglamento redefined the bull, almost restoring the prewar norms. But Spain had learned to like the small, postwar bulls. Manolete had fought them with elegant sobriety and circumspection, and the next generation burst onto the scene as tremendistas, showy daredev- ils like Miguel Báez Espuny (Litri, born 1930) and Julio Aparicio (born 1932) whose hair-raising maneuvers required small, strong, and spirited animals. Hemingway, who had stayed away from Spain since 1938, returned for short visits in 1953, 1954, and 1956, and for longer visits in 1959 and 1960. He met old friends and, most important, he met the new crop of taurine talent. Of course, what he saw now was different from what he had seen in the past, and his angry rejection of current styles and practices, without considering extenuating historical factors, makes The Dangerous Summer (partially published in Life, September 1960; posthumously published 1985) a strangely incomplete product. There is no reference, for example, to the drought of the 1940s, or to the Spanish boycott of Mexican bullfighters, imposed in 1936 out of national pride and withdrawn in 1944 for financial reasons. When Hemingway critiques theafeitado (the shortening or shaving of the bull’s horns), he fails to credit Antonio Mejías Jiménez (Antonio Bienvenida, 1922–75) with exposing that ugly practice in 1952, a brave move that caused Mejías Jiménez to be quietly blackballed. Whereas Death is enriched by its awareness of the bullfight’s recent and more distant past, Dangerous Summer is distorted by its narrow insistence on the immediate present. One could argue that the very aim of Dangerous Summer is to focus on a particular moment and on two particular bullfighters, Antonio Ordóñez (1932–98) and Luis Miguel Dominguín (1926–96). But that moment is distorted by Hemingway’s refusal to position his two protagonists within their profession. In 1959, Ordóñez and Dominguín were outranked in number of performances (a flawed but accepted method of evaluation); Ordóñez was ranked fifth that year and Dominguín seventh. In Dangerous Summer, they seem to dominate the bullfight landscape, but the facts belie this. Hemingway also fails to put his two main characters in the context of their own careers, so that his readers, unless they look elsewhere, cannot Spec SD1 Date 26-july

232 Mandel know that both had had excellent seasons long before 1959. Dominguín was the nation’s leading matador for three seasons (1946, 1948, 1951). Ordóñez was ranked first nationwide in 1952, his first full season as matador de toros. These important facts indicate that, except for Hemingway’s involvement, 1959 was probably no more central than any other year in the career of either bullfighter. Hemingway also glosses over the fact that these two men were at different stages in their careers: in 1959 Dominguín was thirty-three years old, with fifteen years of experience as a matador de alternativa, and emerging from several years of retirement, while Ordóñez, at twenty-seven, was in his eighth season at that top rank. They shared many carteles with other important matadors; they were not exclusively concerned with each other. Hemingway’s blatantly pro-Ordóñez bias disregarded all these facts; his barbs angered Dominguín but could not tarnish his reputation. Ordóñez was such a fine performer that he did not need this kind of distortion in order to shine. The bias hurt only Hemingway, for it diminishes his last taurine document. Throughout his career, Hemingway wrote about the bullfight in a variety of genres: experimental pieces of fiction in( our time), short and long poems, six short stories, several journalistic pieces, two novels, and, of course, the book-length nonfiction. The bullfight brought him tremendous emotional and intellectual pleasure that fuels much of his fine prose. It is important not just in itself, but as a vehicle for Hemingway’s own artistic concerns. As early as the six bullfight pieces that serve as inter- chapters in the expanded In Our Time (1925), Hemingway uses the bullfight to explore such professional and practical matters as content, length, point of view, rhythm, and relations with the audience. Bullfighting also enriches two of his important novels: The Sun Also Rises (1926) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). In Sun, the bullfight emerges as an absolute good, and the bullfighter-hero, Pedro Romero, is attractive and virtuous, true to his principles when facing beast, man, or woman. Romero also represents continuity between the present and the past: he is based partly on the very talented contemporary matador Cayetano Ordóñez (1904–61), whom Hemingway saw in 1925, and takes his name from the historical Pedro Romero (1754–1839), legendary for his strength, stamina, courage, skills, and longevity in the profession. Romero’s old-fashioned virtues and virtuosity offer a strong contrast to the novel’s other characters generally and to several contemporary bullfighters in particular. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the bullfight also serves thematic functions. Because the novel deals with the Spanish Civil War, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Bullfighting 233 the bullfight exists at a fictional and temporal remove, relegated to a story within the novel told by Pilar about the past. The bullfighter is her long-dead lover, a man who was too short to avoid the horn when he went in for the kill and whose repeated injuries doomed him to poverty and tuberculosis which, in those pre-penicillin days, proved fatal. She admires him and insists that others admire him too, but his bravery, skill, and per- severance cannot save him. He is doomed, just as the Spanish Republic is doomed. But Hemingway’s taurine masterpiece is, without doubt, Death in the Afternoon (1932). Hemingway’s respect for the bullfight is evident in his research and in the thoroughness with which he treats its economic, nationalistic, religious, historic, legal, medical, practical, personal, and artistic aspects. It is a learned treatise not only in content but also in form, modeled on Spanish vademecums on the subject, presenting illustrations, biographies, a glossary, a calendar, and a bibliography. And yet it was and remains highly accessible to the different audience for whom it is intended: English speakers attending their first bullfight. Hemingway presents the bullfight in all its facets. He defines and discusses its three tercios or acts, the equipment used (cape, banderillas, pic, muleta, sword), the different styles and passes, the shape and composition of the bullring, the functions of and types of injuries suffered by the horses, the terrains of the bull and the bullfighters, the seats and facilities available for the spectators, the work and influence of the bull breeder, the differences among regions and ranches, the process of screening, selling, and buying bulls, the arrival of the bull at the bullring, the different stages he undergoes during the bullfight – from levantado (which Hemingway translates as lofty) to parado (slowed; the literal translation is stopped) to aplomado (“made heavy . . . like lead”) – and what each stage means for the bullfighter; the function of the president of the corrida and of his assistants; the education of the bullfighter; and the difficulties, hardships, and dangers faced by each type of bullfighter: the picador, the banderi- llero, and the matador. He discusses the skills each one needs; he discusses their financial situations. He discusses medical matters, not shying away from the details of illness or wounds. He discusses individual bullfighters and dynastic families of bullfighters; he explains the function and responsibilities of the audience and the influence of the critics and of the newspapers and journals that hire them. He discusses the many opportunities for bribery and dishonesty. He presents a thorough and learned treatise, brags about his reading in a bibliographic note, and indicates that he has studied the bullfight on and off stage. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

234 Mandel Death is thus a comprehensive survey of the bullfight, colored but generally not distorted by Hemingway’s often passionate opinions about it. And it is enlivened by humor and cynicism, by details about eating, drinking, and traveling in Spain, by the insertion of dialogue, dramatized scenes, the fictional character called the Old Lady, his own and his family’s adventures, and discussions of other arts. Because Hemingway understood the bullfight as a metaphor for all art, his book on the bullfight contains comments on painting, literature, architecture, and music. It offers such generalized conclusions as “All art is done only by the individual” (99) and the first formulation of his famous iceberg theory: “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 being above water” (192). When one leans back and admires the excellences of Death, one cannot help but wonder why Dangerous Summer is so lacking in historical depth, so unbalanced in its presentation of its two protagonists and of the 1959 season. Hemingway was certainly capable of taking a particular moment or character and infusing it with history – indeed, that is part of his modus operandi. But in 1959, he was hampered by commercial pressures (deadlines imposed by Life magazine) and by the threat of censorship (the articles were to appear in Franco-dominated Spain).10 In addition, for all his partying and late night travels, Hemingway was not in good health. Arguably, his awareness of his own deterioration and shortcomings personalized his clear perception that Franco’s Spain was also bedeviled by a wide range of ills. Hemingway’s chronic nostalgia for clear, unspoiled beauty – in nature, in art, and in human relationships – clashed more sharply than ever with the flawed present. He could not criticize the dictatorship, but he could and did lash out at what he saw as its reflection in the bullring. Perhaps as an antidote to the corruption he saw everywhere – in Spain, in Cuba, in the bullfight, in his own body and relationships – Hemingway needed to attribute extreme virtue and purity to Antonio Ordóñez. Perhaps his idealization of a young artist is rooted in his own desire to return to his youth or to recapture earlier art through a literary son (Antonio was the son of Cayetano Ordóñez, one of the prototypes for Romero in Sun). Or it may be that Dangerous Summer is simply as nostalgic as any of his works, viewing Ordóñez’s classic cape as a welcome Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Bullfighting 235 expression of the past and rejecting Dominguín as a representative of the always flawed present. In Death, nostalgia for the past had been expressed as defiance in the face of change. “Pamplona is changed, of course,” he wrote only seven years after his first visit, adding, “I know things change now and I do not care. It’s all been changed for me. Let it all change” (DIA 278). In 1959, that defiance became more trenchant, as Hemingway attacked everything that could, in Franco’s Spain, be attacked in print. The “new” bullring of Las Ventas was too big and not as good as the old one. The new rules are illogical and problematic. The new style of bull is an abomination. He rails against the new (dishonest) bullfighters, their new (corrupt) styles, the new (dictatorial) type of management, and the ignorant and passive audiences that permitted all of this. He finds solace only in the classical cape work of Antonio Ordóñez and in a sad, unconvincing denial: “all the overcrowding and the modernizations of Pamplona meant nothing. In Pamplona we had our old secret places. . . . There were the same songs. . . . The eyes had not changed” TDS( 139). The bullfight is big enough to encompass all that one wants or needs to read into it. It is about death and life, about sex, about art, about conflict, politics, business, and history. Like other artists before him – Francisco Goya, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Federico García Lorca, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Georges Bizet – Hemingway recognized the bullfight as a rich subject for his own art. Its historical awareness, its intense, passionate drama, its proximity to death, and its very fragility appealed to his own world view.

Notes 1. T. Orts Ramos (Uno al Sesgo) and V. Bagüés (eds.), Toros y toreros en 1924 (Barcelona: Lux, 1924), 23. 2. T. Orts Ramos and V. Bagüés (eds.), Toros y toreros en 1925 (Barcelona: Lux, 1925), 13. 3. T. Orts Ramos and V. Bagüés (eds.), Toros y toreros en 1926 (Barcelona: Lux, 1926), 25. 4. T. Orts Ramos and V. Bagüés (eds.), Toros y toreros en 1931 (Barcelona: La Fiesta Brava, 1931), 27. 5. Item 39, unnumbered, p. 3, Hemingway Collection, JFK Library, Boston. 6. L. (don Luis) Uriarte, Toros y toreros 1936–1940 (Madrid, ca. 1941), 68. 7. D. Gutiérrez Alarcón, Los toros de la guerra y del franquismo (Barcelona: Luis de Caralt Editor, S.A., 1978). Gutiérrez Alarcón’s statistics occasionally vary slightly from the table of “Los toros en el siglo XX,” reprinted in G. Puente Carbajo (ed.), El taurino gráfico, 1976 (Madrid and Bilbao: La Prensa, S.L., 1976), n. p. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

236 Mandel

8. Exact numbers appear in “Los toros en el siglo XX,” reprinted in G. Puente Carbajo (ed.), El taurino gráfico, 1976 (Madrid and Bilbao: La Prensa, S.L., 1976), n. p. 9. Statistics for 1941 are taken from Luis Uriarte, Toros y toreros en 1943 y 1944 (Madrid: Impresa Sáez, 1945), 13, 197–8; for 1950 and 1960 from El Ruedo, December 14, 1950 and December 1, 1960. 10. Hemingway had already signed a contract and received payment from Life, and he had to be careful not to endanger the publication of these widely advertised issues of Life en español, whose largest readership was in Spain. Because any misstep he made in print could have such serious and far-reaching personal and political repercussions, Hemingway was careful to veil his criticism. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 23 The Environment Susan F. Beegel

The year of Ernest Hemingway’s birth, 1899, was an environmental tip- ping point for the United States, marking almost the exact moment when the nation’s population shifted from being predominantly rural to predominantly urban. The new century brought rapid change to the American landscape, and perhaps nowhere would this change be more sharply, even cruelly felt than in Oak Park, Illinois, where Hemingway was born and raised. When Hemingway was a boy, Oak Park was still fairly rural. The north prairie began just two blocks from his family’s home. There he and his sisters hunted for birds’ nests and wildflowers. With his father, he hunted upland game birds and ducks. The children pretended to be explorers, Indians, and couriers du bois, and liked to imagine that the prairie ran uninterrupted all the way to the Rocky Mountains, even though they knew better.1 Chicago – the second largest city in the nation with a population of 1.7 million people2 – menaced Oak Park from just nine miles away. Without regulations curbing air pollution, the city’s environment was nightmarish. Chicago’s tenements and factories burned ten thousand tons of soft coal daily, turning the air black with smoke.3 The greasy smoke and fall of ash from the rendering plants at the slaughterhouses were especially nox- ious. Chicago grew explosively during Hemingway’s childhood. By 1920, an additional one million people had packed into the city,4 and Chicago sprawled over the surrounding prairie. With improved transportation – trains, trams, trolleys, and eventually the automobile – sprawl intensified as it became easier to work in the city while living farther away from its disease, pollution, and crime. The impact on Oak Park was enormous, as village became suburb and suburb became city. The prairie fell to development at an almost unbelievable pace, and Hemingway witnessed its transformation into “a subdivision of mean houses” (BL 188). The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal project, begun in 1900, routed the city’s sewage 237 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

238 Beegel into the Des Plaines River, which flows through Oak Park, ending any possibility of swimming and fishing.5 By 1918, when Oak Park residents belatedly banded together to create a “Forest Preserve,” the only land left to save was a ribbon of woods along the Des Plaines, land no one wanted because of flooding and pollution.6 The urban environment of the early twentieth century was profoundly unhealthy for children, especially during the summer, when polio out- breaks killed and crippled thousands every year. Without refrigeration or rapid transport, the era’s unpasteurized milk and uninspected meat were dangerous and fresh vegetables hard to obtain. Dr. and Mrs. Hemingway, like legions of middle-class parents at this time, embraced the virtues of “rustication,” taking their children to summer in the country, where clean air, fresh food, and relative freedom from epidemic disease were the norm.7 When Ernest was an infant, his parents took him to camp on the shores of Walloon Lake near Petoskey, Michigan, where they oversaw construction of the cottage that would be the family’s rural escape for every summer of his youth.8 “Michigan I loved very much when I lived in it,” Hemingway recalled. “It was a country of forests, lakes and streams and small farms with hills and pastures, always with a background of woods” (Galley proofs, DIA).9 Fishing, camping, skinny dipping, canoeing, roving barefoot through the woods, dining on fried chicken, huckleberry pie, and fresh milk, Hemingway experienced Michigan as a kind of Eden, beautifully evoked in his Nick Adams stories. But it was not immune to profound, rapid, and emotionally devastating environmental change. During Hemingway’s childhood, Michigan was the scene of a forestry holocaust enabled by new forms of transport, felling, and mill technology, as well as unregulated corporate monopolies with no concern for sustainable yields. With its dense tree cover and readily available water transport via lakes and rivers, Michigan was the site of aggressive clear-cutting, peaking at 10,000 million board feet per annum in 1890. By 1907, more than 10.7 million acres of the state had been clear-cut. In 1910, the timber industry still took a staggering 4,000 million board feet per year.10 Because stumpage and slash were left behind, much of the state was periodically swept by devastating fires, such as the one that has burned over Seney and the surrounding land in “Big Two-Hearted River.”11 Cut-and-run strategies devastated local economies. “Each year,” Hemingway wrote in “Fathers and Sons,” “there was less forest and more open, hot, shadeless, weed-grown slashing” (CSS 372). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Environment 239 The coming of the automobile also affected Michigan. In 1895, there were just 300 registered cars in the United States. Ten years later, there were eighty thousand.12 In 1915, the Ford plant rolled out its one millionth automobile.13 Hemingway’s father had already traded in his horse and buggy for a Model T touring car. In 1917, the family made the trip to Michigan by car rather than lake steamer for the first time (Baker 30). By 1923, there were 13.3 million autos on the road in the United States (Urdang 303, 1923: M1). As the number of automobiles grew, so did the nation’s highway system. The automobile had a special impact on Michigan, bringing heavy industry to its cities and making rural areas accessible for tourism. “They built concrete motor roads all around the lakes,” Hemingway recalled, “the motorists caught all the fish out of the streams and, as the boys went to Flint or Detroit to work . . . they abandoned the farms” (Galleys, DIA).14 One result of all this was that Hemingway grew up in the midst of an environmental awakening as extreme as any America has experienced – the so-called back to nature movement. In 1900, Congress passed the Lacey Act, prohibiting interstate commerce in game. In 1901, the Audubon Society was founded for the protection of birds and their eggs. The newly founded Sierra Club grew in strength and political influence, able to lobby effectively at the federal level to save the Yosemite Valley.15 Across the nation, children joined organizations teaching camping and woodcraft and clubs for the study of nature, like the Agassiz Club enjoyed by the Hemingway family (Beegel, “Eye and Heart” 67–75). Nonfiction nature writers like John Muir and John Burroughs enjoyed immense popularity, as did writers of nature fiction including Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Seton Thompson, and Jack London – all vital to young Hemingway’s development as a writer. The American people, horrified at the loss of land and resources, had the political will to demand action from their leaders – and from 1901 to 1908, the right man in the White House – sportsman, naturalist, and founder of the American Museum of Natural History, Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt doubled the number of national parks, created the first federal bird and game preserves, increased national forest reserves by about 300 percent, was an architect of the Migratory Bird Act, and set aside eighteen natural wonders, including the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the Muir Woods in California.16 Roosevelt’s head of the Forestry Service, Gifford Pinchot, introduced conservation through “wise use”: the idea that “wildlife, forests, ranges, and waterpower were . . . renewable organic Spec SD1 Date 26-july

240 Beegel resources, which might last forever if they were harvested scientifically, and not faster than they reproduced.”17 Too often, though, the new laws were a case of too little, too late. In 1904, Congress passed legislation to protect the remaining 541 American bison, animals that had once numbered between 20 to 40 million (Cronon 214). In 1914, the last passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo. The original population of this species had been between three to five bil- lion birds. The Hemingways undoubtedly knew the story of the passenger pigeon well, as Petoskey, Michigan played a special role in its extinction. There, in 1878, commercial hunters set upon one of the last large nestings of passenger pigeons, smoking them out of the trees. They were able to kill fifty thousand birds a day for five months.18 In 1918, the boy who had already witnessed so much environmental destruction went to World War I, an environmental crisis in itself. The war introduced new killing technologies including chemical weapons, aerial strafing and bombardment, submarines, tanks, and long-range artillery. It also left 15 million people dead – about 9 million military and 6 million civilian casualties. Its mass movements of troops and refugees fueled the 1918 influenza pandemic, claiming another 20 million to 100 million lives globally and inspiring Hemingway’s “In Another Country” and “A Natural History of the Dead.”19 His best-regarded novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), are his most substantive work on World War I. As the burned-over clear-cuts of “Big Two-Hearted River” suggest, there was little left in America to solace the mentally and physically shattered returning veteran. The war marked the beginning of Hemingway’s almost lifelong expatriation and compulsive travel. Although his cultural sojourn in 1920s Paris and repeated trips to Spain to follow the bullfights receive most critical and biographical attention, much of his wanderlust was clearly linked to his need to experience wilderness. In Green Hills of Africa (1935), he writes: “our people went to America because that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a bloody mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else” (285). One such somewhere else was East Africa, with its still intact Great Plains – the Serengeti (which in Masai means “land that runs forever”20) – its vast herds of ungulates numbering in the thousands and even millions, and its indigenous peoples still, to some extent, able to practice their traditional lifeways, unlike the dispossessed Native Americans of the Nick Adams stories. Although Hemingway’s first African safari (1933–4) lasted less than three months, he returned not only with hunting trophies such Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Environment 241 as the skin of a black-maned lion and the horns of a greater kudu, but with literary trophies as well, Green Hills and two of his best-known short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936). Yet despite his abiding love for Africa, he was able to return just once more, for the 1953–4 safari that gave him two posthumously published works – the elephant story of The Garden of Eden and the memoir Under Kilimanjaro – as well as disastrous injuries from two plane crashes. The sea would afford a more permanent solution to Hemingway’s lifelong need for wilderness: “[T]he Gulf Stream and the other great ocean currents are the last wild country there is left. Once you are out of sight of land . . . the sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats” (BL 237). An avid deep sea fisherman (and a resident of the islands of Key West and then Cuba) from 1928 forward, Hemingway made the Gulf Stream his preferred wilderness. After his 1934 purchase of Pilar, a thirty-eight-foot wooden cabin cruiser specially modified for boating large fish, a year for him could include as many as 180 days at sea.21 Hemingway’s fishing prowess has not been exaggerated. His feats included catching sixty-four marlin in a single year, boating a 786-pound mako shark on rod and reel, and taking a record seven marlin on one day in 1938.22 In 1955, the aging author took three black marlin weighing 680, 750, and 910 pounds respectively for the filming of The Old Man and the Sea.23 Deeply versed in the natural history of the fish he hunted, Hemingway became involved in marine research. During Pilar’s first summer, scientists from Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences sought Hemingway out for a research cruise to remedy “the lack of knowledge concerning the classification, life histories, food [and] migrations . . . of the sailfish, marlin, tuna and other large game fishes [and] to secure specimens and information.”24 He also collaborated with the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Aquarium, the Lerner Marine Laboratory on Bimini, Florida’s Mote Marine Laboratory, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Beegel, “Guide” 238–9). In 1940, Hemingway became vice president of the newly formed International Game Fish Association (IGFA), an organization concerned not only with international record keeping, sportsmanlike fishing practices, and research on the biology, concentrations, and breeding grounds of game fish, but also with conservation efforts on behalf of species in decline (Beegel, “Guide” 239). By the time he sat down to write his last novel, The Old Man and the Sea, he had twenty years of experience on the Gulf waters. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

242 Beegel When the Cuban revolution threatened Hemingway’s island life, he purchased a house in Ketchum, Idaho to serve as a refuge. Again wilderness was his reference point – Idaho has more unspoiled land than any of the Lower 48 states, and Ketchum is on the threshold of two spectacular wildernesses – the Sawtooth Mountains and the River of No Return. Hemingway had enjoyed Idaho’s superb hunting for migratory waterfowl, upland game birds, and big game such as elk and pronghorn antelope for many years before purchasing his final home. Here, not long after Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs operation made returning to Cuba impossible, Hemingway would commit suicide in 1961. As we think about Hemingway and the environment, it’s important to understand what Hemingway was and was not. Hemingway was a superb naturalist – a description he chose for himself and wore as a badge of honor. His knowledge of the animals he hunted and fished was beyond compare. He was a good Roosevelt-era conservationist, steeped in the culture of the hunter-naturalists, but it’s important to recognize that his conservation values were attuned to saving resources for future exploitation rather than to preservation for its own sake. He was also an ethical and mindful sportsman, dedicated to giving the animals and fish their chance, to killing cleanly and humanely, and to not wasting lives taken, but always eating or distributing meat and fish. Hemingway was not an ecologist. During the Roosevelt era, this science of the relationships between organisms and their environment was the province of a handful of academic botanists. Conservation biology, the application of ecological science to preserving species and their habi- tats, did not yet exist. Nor was there much understanding of evolutionary biology. Although Hemingway’s knowledge as a naturalist grew exponentially over the course of his lifetime, he did not think in terms of ecological communities or webs. He had a Darwinian view of animals in competition, but little understanding of cooperative or commensal relationships among species. Some of the moments in Hemingway’s work most disturbing to a contemporary environmental sensibility – his torture of hyenas in Green Hills (36–8) or Santiago’s rage against the sharks in Old Man – reflect his Roosevelt-era mindset. There was no appreciation that healthy populations of prey species – the game animals the sportsman-conservationist hoped to conserve and exploit – are dependent on healthy populations of scavengers and apex predators. Nor was Hemingway ever an environmentalist in the sense of someone politically concerned with the ecological impact of human alterations to the environment. He did experience, as an adult, two of the Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Environment 243 watershed moments in twentieth-century environmental history, but they had little impact on his generational thinking. The first, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, arguably the worst manmade environmental disaster in American history, made it clear that unless we adopted sustainable land use practices and moderated our reliance on technology, we could inflict significant economic damage and environmental harm on humankind itself (Worster 221–53). Hemingway mentions the Dust Bowl and its causes briefly in Green Hills (284–5). His solution, though, was to go on safari. The second watershed moment in twentieth-century environmental history occurred on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexican desert, when the United States exploded the first atomic bomb. For the first time, there was a technological force with the capacity to destroy much of life on the planet. This realization – that human actions and human technologies can have impact on a planetary scale – is the underlying assumption of the modern environmental movement. In January and February 1951, as Hemingway was working on Old Man at the Finca Vigía in Cuba, radio- active snow was falling on Oak Park and other eastern cities – the results of atomic testing at the far off Nevada Proving Grounds.25 The testing sent nuclear winds blowing through the streets of Las Vegas, caused flashes visible in Los Angeles, killed flocks of sheep, and showered hot, radioac- tive debris on the citizens of Nevada and Utah (Worster 345). Yet, reading Old Man, one would never know that this was going on. Did Hemingway’s attitudes toward the environment evolve over the course of his lifetime? He would, toward the end of his life, give up trophy hunting and pledge not to shoot anything he would not eat (BL 419). In his 1953–4 safari, he participated in hunting mostly as a game warden culling problem animals. Becoming concerned about dwindling populations of billfish during their migratory run off Cuba, Hemingway began to practice catch-and-release fishing and called for a closed season to protect marlin during their spawning run.26 These changes, though, are compatible with a Roosevelt-era conservation mindset. There is just a suggestion that Hemingway’s last novel, The Old Man and the Sea, may be more than a nostalgic bit of “back to nature” escapism much needed in the anxious early years of the Cold War.27 The novella can also be read as a parable. If atomic weapons “cast doubt on the entire project of the domination of nature that had been at the heart of modern history” (Worster 342–3), so too does the destruction of Santiago’s marlin by the sharks. Nevertheless, the word “environmentalist” wasn’t coined until after Hemingway’s death. And he committed suicide before Rachel Spec SD1 Date 26-july

244 Beegel Carson published Silent Spring (1962), the book that launched the modern environmental movement. Given the breathless pace and sheer destructiveness of environmental change at the beginning of the twentieth century, in many ways, the Lost Generation was already lost before it went to war. For Hemingway, the sense of loss began in childhood and never went away. It’s in the elephant story in Garden of Eden – the helplessness of a child against the ivory-hunting father, the betrayal of the elephant to the lethal, uncaring adult world of commercialism. It’s in “The Last Good Country,” where children flee through a ruined landscape, trying to get back to a sacred but terribly threatened Eden. Littless speaks one of the saddest lines in Hemingway: “Good-bye, lake. I love you too” (CSS 512). For Hemingway, the fresh green breast of the new world was clear-cut, burned over ground. But he never lost hope that there was still something out there commensurate with what Rachel Carson would call the “sense of wonder.”28 To her, it meant the ability of a naturalist, child, or writer to look at the world with fresh eyes and immense curiosity. Maybe he would find it in Africa, maybe in the Gulf Stream, maybe in the remaining true wilderness of the American West. He would hunt for it. He knew it was there, because he had caught glimpses of it, again and again. And he saved these things for us, not through environmental politics, but by writing them down.

Notes 1. E. Hemingway, “In those days there was the North Prairie. . .,” folder 514, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. 2. C. Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1900,” table 13, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790–1990,” U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Working Paper 27, June 1998, www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/ tab13.txt. 3. W. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 11. Subsequent references are included in the text. 4. C. Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1920,” table 15, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790–1990,” U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Working Paper 27, June 1998, www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/ tab15.txt. 5. A. D. Keating, “Constructing the Sanitary and Ship Canal,” The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, 2005, www.encyclopedia. chicagohistory.org/pages/300018.html. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Environment 245

6. Indian Boundary Division Picnic Areas and Trail Map (Chicago, IL: Forest Preserve, n.d.). 7. S. F. Beegel, “Eye and Heart: Hemingway’s Education as a Naturalist,” in L. Wagner-Martin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53–92; 64–5. Subsequent references are included in the text. 8. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 1. Subsequent references are included in the text. 9. This portion of the original final chapter of Death in the Afternoon, dis- carded in galleys, has been published in S. F. Beegel, Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), 52–3. Subsequent references are included in the text. 10. M. Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 197–8, 236. 11. J. Jobst, “Hemingway Bids Goodbye to Youth: Childhood’s End in Seney,” in F. J. Svoboda and J. J. Waldmeir (eds.), Hemingway: Up in Michigan Perspectives (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 23–8; 24. 12. L. Urdang (ed.), The Timetables of American History, millennial edn. (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 275, 1905:M6. 13. Ford Motor Company Chronology, The Henry Ford Museum, 2010, www. hfmgv.org/exhibits/fmc/chrono.asp. 14. See also Beegel, Hemingway’s Craft, 53. 15. S. Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 127, 153. 16. J. A. Gable, “Theodore Roosevelt and the American Museum of Natural History,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal 8.3 (1982), n.p. 17. A. Leopold, Game Management, 1933 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 17. 18. “The Passenger Pigeon,”Encyclopedia Smithsonian, March 2001, www.si.edu/ encyclopedia_Si/nmnh/passpig.htm. 19. G. Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Virus That Caused It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 7. 20. R. M. Poole, “Heartbreak on the Serengeti,” National Geographic Interactive Edition, February 2006, ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0602/feature1/ index.html. 21. S. F. Beegel, “A Guide to the Marine Life in The Old Man and the Sea,” Resources for American Literary Study 30 (2005): 236–315; 237. Subsequent references are included in the text. 22. L. P. Miller, “The Matrix of Hemingway’s Pilar Log, 1934–35,” North Dakota Quarterly 64 (1997): 105–23; 105, and N. German, “Rehabilitating Hemingway,” Saltwater Sportsman Magazine, Time Inc., 2004, www2.selu. edu/Academics/Faculty/ngerman/SaltWater_Sports_Heming.htm. 23. S. K. Farrington, Fishing with Hemingway and Glassell (New York: McKay, 1971), 68. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

246 Beegel

24. Letter to E. Hemingway from C. M. B. Cadwalader, quoted in L. H. Martin, “Ernest Hemingway, Gulf Stream Marine Scientist: The 1934–35 Academy of Natural Sciences Correspondence,” The Hemingway Review 20.2 (2000): 5–15; 5. 25. D. Clifton (ed.), Chronicle of the Twentieth Century (Mount Kisco, NY: Chronicle Publications, 1987), 692–5. Subsequent references are included in the text. 26. E. Hemingway, “Cuban Fishing,” in B. Vesey-Fitzgerald and F. LaMonte (eds.), Game Fish of the World (New York: Harper, [1948?]), 156–60; 158. 27. See S. F. Beegel, “Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki and Hemingway’s Return to Primitivism in The Old Man and the Sea,” in L. Wagner-Martin (ed.), Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 515–51. 28. R. Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1953; New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 182. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 24 Fishing Mark P. Ott

Ernest Hemingway fished from the time he was a small boy; photos exist of a three-year-old Ernest, cane pole in hand, trying his luck off the shore of Walloon Lake near the family cabin in northern Michigan. But the transformation of that young boy into a world-class sport fisherman is a complicated narrative about sport, ecology, and the evolution of a literary style. From his father, Clarence, Hemingway inherited the intellectual under- pinnings to make sense of the natural world, a perspective that he applied to his passion for fishing. Clarence Hemingway, a doctor by profession, founded the Oak Park chapter of the Agassiz Association, which taught youths the fieldwork methods of Louis Agassiz, the great Swiss-American scientist and founder of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and the National Academy of Science. Hemingway’s father educated him to think like a scientist in the Agassiz tradition: “Train your pupils to be observers, and have them provided with the specimens about which you speak. . . . Take your texts from the brooks, not from the booksellers.”1 The mature Hemingway had absorbed much of the Agassiz method, creating an intersection of art and science as he sought to “represent the whole” in his writing, especially in To Have and Have Not (1937), The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970), his three novels in which fishing plays a dominant role. As he grew into young manhood, fishing became a dominant pastime for Hemingway. As a high school student in Oak Park, Illinois, he would sneak off to fish the Des Plaines River whenever he could. Later, the family’s cottage, “Windemere,” on Walloon Lake in the Little Traverse Bay region of Michigan became his base of operation. During the summers of 1915 and 1916, Hemingway traveled from Oak Park to the cottage, camping and fishing along the way. His favorite rivers were the Sturgeon, the Black, and the Pigeon, where he caught trout, pike, perch, and bass. After 247 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

248 Ott returning from Italy, he traveled to the Upper Peninsula from August to October 1919, passing through the dying lumber town of Seney. Along the way, he fished the swampy area between the Fox and Little Fox Rivers. Hemingway would write: “Absolutely the best trout fishing in the country. No exaggeration” (Letters I 183). That excursion later served as the basis for the short story “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925), and these experiences as a whole would provide the basis for other “fishing stories,” such as “The End of Something” (1925) and “Now I Lay Me” (1927). “Out of Season” (1923) was based on his trip to the Black Forest in 1922. In that story, Hemingway establishes a structure – which he would return to again and again – in which the health of the natural world underscores the inner life of his characters. The young gentleman unsuccessfully fishes for trout in a “brown and muddy” river, standing on the bank beside a “dump heap,” while his unhappy wife walks back to the hotel through the wind and cold rain (IOT 100). In “The End of Something,” in which “acres of saw- dust” cover “a swampy meadow by the shore of the bay,” Marjorie’s emergent skill as a fisherwoman destabilizes her relationship with Nick Adams (31–2). In “Now I Lay Me,” to keep himself awake, Nick remembers fishing trout streams as a boy, “fishing [their] whole length very carefully in his mind” (276). In “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick travels through a burnt-out landscape, passing through the town of Seney, which has also burned to the ground. Laura Gruber Godfrey notes, quoting Michael Williams: “[T]he charred landscape [is] a reminder of the ‘devastating fires’ . . . ignited from ‘the great piles of slash waste left on the forest floor after the cut-out-and-get-out’ method of the lumber industries there.”2 Like the charred grasshoppers and the land itself, Nick is altered by the reality of the environmental devastation, which also evokes his experiences in the war. Yet, as the river and fish endure and survive the fire, Hemingway hints that Nick’s inner world may, too, endure and be restored to health. If trout fishing in a postindustrial landscape served as an inspiration for the emergent Hemingway, when he arrived in Key West in 1928, big-game fishing and the Gulf Stream would invigorate his mature work. The Gulf Stream is the warm ocean current created by the flow of water from the Caribbean Sea through the Yucatan Channel between Mexico and Cuba. From there, it rushes through the Florida Keys into the 700 islands of the Bahamas, continuing along the eastern United States, dis- sipating near Newfoundland. Hemingway understood the Gulf Stream as an alternative space to the Western frontier; it was Edenic, untouched, timeless, indifferent to civilization. In April 1936, he wrote: “Because Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Fishing 249 the Gulf Stream is unexploited country, only the fringe of it ever being fished, and then only at a dozen places in thousands of miles of current, no one knows what fish live in it, or how great size sic[ ] they reach or what age, or even what kinds of fish and animals live in it at different depth” (BL 229–30). As someone deeply influenced by Teddy Roosevelt, this vocabulary was reflexive. The word “frontier” pops up consistently in Hemingway’s writing from 1929–36, most frequently in his journalism and personal letters. Fishing the Gulf Stream was to experience a garden of pleasures and plenty to share with appreciative guests. In an April 8, 1933 letter to Janet Flanner inviting her to Havana for fishing, Hemingway declared:

It is wonderful. The gulf stream sic[ ] runs almost black and comes right in to the shore. The marlin swordfish go by, swimming up the stream like cars on a highway. You go in to shore in the boat and look down to see the wrinkles in the white sand through the clear water. It looks as though you would strike bottom. They have beaches miles and miles long, hard white sand and no houses for twenty miles. (SL 386–7)

To the Paris-based Flanner, Hemingway conveys the simplicity, charm, and serenity of life on the open water; his life is the opposite of her sed- entary, urban existence. Leo Marx describes the “pastoral impulse” as: “a desire, in the face of growing power and complexity of organized society, to disengage from the dominant culture and to seek out the basis for a simpler, more satisfying mode of life in a realm ‘closer’ . . . to nature.”3 In the Gulf Stream, Hemingway found, as his writing testifies, a more satisfying life, deeply connected to the natural world. Paradoxically, although he cherished his isolation on the stream, Hemingway acted as a metaphorical pathfinder to the Gulf Stream; by publishing accounts of his fishing in Esquire magazine, more and more fishermen wanted to follow in his wake, crowding his favorite places. According to Paul Hendrickson, the rise of deep-sea fishing in the mid-1930s had to do with “the astonishing abundance of fish, but just as much, maybe more, with the attitudes of the fishermen, who understood they were doing something well and first, and were willing to share with one another what they knew. Big-game fishing wasn’t a competition so much as a passion undertaken for its own sake. The waste and depopulation of these great nomadic creatures hadn’t quite yet begun to haunt sporting consciences – the ocean was still thought illimitable.”4 Interestingly, Hemingway’s discovery of deep-sea fishing coincided with the “Melville Revival” of the late 1920s. Publication of Raymond Spec SD1 Date 26-july

250 Ott Weaver’s Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (1921), Melville’s posthumous “Billy Budd, Foretopman” (1924), and Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision (1929) sparked a reevaluation of Melville’s work by students of literature and history.5 Hemingway’s Key West library contained Jeremiah Reynolds’s Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific, which was republished in 1932, but written in 1839, twelve years before Moby Dick, as well as Moby Dick and two copies of Typee.6 By 1932, when Hemingway was fully confronting the Gulf Stream for the first time, “the vogue of Herman Melville was at its peak.”7 The great marlin Hemingway would pursue in the Gulf Stream became the metaphorical descendants of Melville’s white whale. Hemingway learned about deep-sea fishing from Carlos Gutierrez. A Cuban commercial fisherman, Gutierrez had been fishing the Gulf Stream since 1884, when he was six years old.8 Since 1912, Gutierrez had kept a record of all his catches, with dates and weights. Hemingway transcribed their first conversation onto the cover of a notebook, as Gutierrez educated him about the basic parameters of the marlin season, explained breeding habits, and described how to hook them. What Hemingway wrote down indicates what he did not know, providing the index for his subsequent education. He noted an aguja (black marlin) getting so large that it looked like a whale and may leap over a man alone in a small boat, an image that surely would have stimulated Hemingway’s Melville-fed imagination.9 Hemingway’s transcription of Gutierrez’s lecture also set the pattern for his own fishing log entries; if possible, everything about the Gulf Stream should be quantified so that he could better understand the behavior of fish: the swiftness of the wind, the depth of the water, the gasoline left in the tanks, the barometric pressure, and so forth. The idea of fishing the unknown depths of “the last frontier” was powerful enough to drive Hemingway to reorganize his life, and he would apply the lessons from his father, Agassiz, and Gutierrez to his own fishing logs, which would become a resource for his fiction. By the third week of July 1933, he had spent over 100 days fishing the Gulf Stream, catching upward of fifty marlin (Baker 243). Several entries from his fishing logs from that time would be reshaped into important scenes in To Have and Have Not (1937). In the novel, Harry Morgan narrates: “I was at the wheel and was working the edge of the stream opposite that old cement factory where it makes deep so close in to shore and where it makes a sort of eddy where there is always lots of bait. Then I saw a splash like a depth bomb, and the sword and eye, and open lower-jaw and huge purple-black Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Fishing 251 head of a black marlin” (THHN 20). In the log entry for May 13, 1933, Hemingway wrote: Out at 110 trolled to Cojimar close to shore – saw one marlin opposite cement factory and a huge covey of flying fish – made turn and Josie saw another marlin with (illegible) tail out – too far already to catch – opposite target range a (black) marlin cut across (illegible) from shorewards like a dolphin chasing fish – bit EH’s bait – slacked and hooked in second slack – at 229 jumped about 8 times – gaffed at 234.10 The location of the two moments is the same; the cement factory was a place where Hemingway caught many of his larger marlin. Hemingway tried to fish the edge where the green water met the blue, along the coastline “from the shooting range in Las Cabañas fortress at the mouth of Havana Bay to the House of the Priest (or the Pink House)” now called the “Hemingway mile.”11 Hemingway’s entry captures both the thrill of sighting a large marlin and the satisfaction of catching one. By recording the number of jumps and the precise time it took to land the marlin, Hemingway records for his own satisfaction evidence of his improved skill as a fisherman. He is trying to create an objective document, representing unadorned what he observed in a narrative that uses precise descriptive phrases in order to “see exactly” the world of the Gulf Stream, just as he learned from his father, the Agassiz-trained physician. In the fishing logs, Hemingway is learning what exists beneath the iceberg. Although Hemingway often approached the natural world as a hunter, as he matured, his commitment to conservation and marine science increased. By 1934, he owned Pilar, a thirty-eight-foot diesel-powered boat that he purchased for $7,500, $3,000 of which came as an advance on future articles for Esquire from publisher Arnold Gingrich. Charles B. Cadwalader, the director of the Academy of Natural History in Philadelphia, and Henry Fowler, head ichthyologist, joined Hemingway that summer in Cuba to conduct research. According to Cadwalader, there was a need to remedy the “lack of knowledge concerning the classification, life histories, food (and) migrations of the . . . sailfish, marlin, tuna and other large game fishes (and) to secure specimens and information in order that our knowledge of these fish may be advanced.”12 The research they conducted was invaluable to the scientists, and according to Fowler, Hemingway “revised the classification for marlin for the whole North Atlantic” (quoted in Baker 264). Fowler named a species of scor- pion fish after Hemingway, the Neomerinthe hemingwayi, stating it was “in appreciation for his assistance in my work on Gulf Stream fishes.”13 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

252 Ott Throughout the 1930s, as Cuban political unrest pushed him to fish more often in Bimini, Hemingway energetically continued his education in marine science. His personal library provides evidence of the quantity and breadth of his reading and demonstrates how much Hemingway felt he needed to know before he could begin writing about fishing the Gulf Stream. At least 155 titles relate to fishing and ecology (see Brasch and Sigman, passim). Hemingway’s informal but wide-ranging education also shows his progression from a novice saltwater fisherman to an acknowledged expert; he would contribute to authoritative texts such as American Big-Game Fishing (1935), Atlantic Game Fishing (1937), and Game Fish of the World (1949). As Hemingway spent more and more time on the Gulf Stream, he came in more intimate contact with members of the sporting class, such as Michael Lerner, S. Kip Farrington, Zane Gray, Dick Cooper, Tommy Shevlin, and Winston Guest. The rules of big-game fishing mattered to Hemingway, as he quickly distinguished himself as a world-class fisherman. In July 1933, Hemingway caught a 468-pound, twelve-foot eight-inch-long marlin, the biggest marlin ever caught off the Cuban coast with rod and line; in May 1935, he caught a world record 381-pound bluefin tuna off Bimini; in June 1935, he caught a 786-pound mako shark, the third largest ever landed in the world by rod and reel, again off the coast of Bimini.14 Competing against each other and sharing a common interest in record keeping and conservation, a small circle of big-game fishermen finally put together a governing body called the Bahamas Marlin and Tuna Club on November 23, 1936. The noteworthy rules were: “All fish must be hooked, fought, and brought to gaff by the angler, unaided.”15 As an officer of the club, which evolved into the International Game Fish Association (IGFA), Hemingway became ineligible to hold fishing records. He served as vice president of the IGFA from 1940 until his death in 1961 (IGFA), and forged the organization’s close ties to the American Museum of Natural History. Hemingway was inducted in the IGFA Hall of Fame in January 2000.16 To Hemingway, innovations in fishing tackle continually threatened the integrity of big-game fishing as a sport. In “Marlin Off Cuba” (1935), he established his definition of the sport: As I see big-game fishing with rod and reel it is a sport in which a man or woman seeks to kill or capture a fish by the means which will afford the fisherman the greatest pleasure and best demonstrate the speed, strength and leaping ability of the fish in question; at the same time killing or capturing the fish in the shortest Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Fishing 253 time possible and never for the sake of flattering the fisherman’s vanity, using tackle unsuitable to the prompt capture of the fish.17 For Hemingway, big-game fishing always had to be fair. Thus he was always concerned about the unfair advantages inexperienced fishermen could gain through too heavy line, extra stiff rods, or fishing chairs in which they harnessed themselves in and rested the socket of the fishing rod. In the introduction to Atlantic Game Fishing, Hemingway wrote: “But if big-game fishing is to remain in any manner a sport, that is, a contest of strength and endurance between a man or woman and an over- size fish, these new fool-proofing improvements in tackle should not be abused.”18 Hemingway also regretted that big-game fishing was accessible only to the privileged class, writing: “The main trouble with big game fishing has always been that it was too expensive. . . . [I]t always seemed a shame to me that such a fish as the sailfish, one of the most beautiful in the sea, should be caught, say ninety times out of a hundred, by some fat-bellied old slob who did not even know the fish was good to eat or some rich young twirp who could not hit a ball out of the infield” (“Introduction” xx). In August 1934, Hemingway estimated the cost of reels for fishing for marlin at “two hundred and fifty dollars apiece” (BL 177). Even to the relatively wealthy Hemingway, this was not an insubstan- tial sum. Hemingway owned two Hardy reels and two Hardy fishing rods, one of which is now on display in the American Museum of Fly Fishing. In To Have and Have Not, Johnson does not give a great black marlin enough slack, and the rod and reel – “the whole works” – went overboard; the ensuing conversation dramatizes how the rich man’s incompetence causes Morgan economic hardship: “The reel cost two hundred and fifty dollars. It costs more now. The rod cost me forty-five. There was a little under six hundred yards of thirty-six thread” (21). Morgan adds $295 to Johnson’s bill, which totals $825, a sum he never pays; the loss of revenue forces Morgan into running contraband to feed his family. Moreover, in The Old Man and the Sea, the simplicity of Santiago’s fishing lines, har- poon, and gaff dramatize his virtue; he is not a “rich young twirp” fishing for sport. He is fishing to survive. Sensitive to the poverty he encountered in Cuba and Bimini, Hemingway either ate or gave away the fish that he caught. In 1949 he wrote an article entitled “Cuban Fishing” for Game Fish of the World, in which he prioritized fish such as the wahoo, dolphin, and marlin according to their taste and offered guidelines for their preparation.19 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

254 Ott Moreover, Hemingway was disgusted by waste. In an article for Esquire entitled “The President Vanquishes,” he wrote: “In Havana you give the meat away or you sell it for around ten cents a pound. In Bimini it is wasted scandalously. . . . [I]t is disgusting and sickening to see edible game fish slaughtered and wasted. . . . Killing fish for no useful purpose, or allowing their meat to waste, wantonly, should be an offense punishable by law.”20 In the end, Hemingway reconciled the paradox of his pursuit of game with a very serious conservation ethic, resulting in a transformation in his creative work. The gist of this transformation can be found in a description of the Gulf Stream in The Old Man and the Sea: The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean. He saw the phos- phorescence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of the ocean that the fishermen called the great well because there was a sudden deep of seven hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl the current made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean. Here there were concentrations of shrimp and bait fish and sometimes schools of squid in the deepest holes and these rose close to the surface at night where all the wandering fish fed on them. OMS( 28–9) Hemingway’s precise language identifies the observed world of the stream, directly classifying the marine life. Like Winslow Homer’s brush strokes, each word is representational, establishing order within the natural world equal to the compositional order of the canvas. In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is aware of what lies beneath the surface of the ocean. He has studied the Gulf Stream, and he understands the organic unity that exists within nature. These observations – the result of having spent hundreds of days on the Gulf Stream from 1932 to 1952 – seemed to initiate a subtle shift in Hemingway’s writing: while still short and representational, his descriptions of fishing no longer convey the disorder and instability of modernity suggested in “Big Two-Hearted River” and the class warfare of To Have and Have Not. Instead, his prose implies a quest for the system of integration behind the chaotic surface; in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway’s Gulf Stream is a harmonious ecosystem, inter- connected from its deepest fathoms to the heights of Rigel. Indeed, that integration was, ultimately, Hemingway’s aesthetic destination. As new critical perspectives emerge, the significance of Hemingway’s transformation from the young boy fishing from the dock to the grizzled man chasing giant marlin becomes part of a broader narrative within the nexus of sport, ecology, creativity, and art. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Fishing 255

Notes 1. Qtd. in S. F. Beegel, “Eye and Heart: Hemingway’s Education as a Naturalist,” in L. Wagner-Martin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53–92; 69. 2. L.G. Godfrey, “Hemingway and Cultural Geography: The Landscape of Logging in ‘The End of Something,’” The Hemingway Review 26.1 (2006), 47–62; 50. 3. L. Marx, “Pastoralism in America,” in S. Bercovitch and M. Jehlen (eds.), Ideology and Classic American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 36–70; 54. 4. P. Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 (New York: Knopf, 2011), 230. 5. L. Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996), xv. 6. See J. D. Brasch and J. Sigman, Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 249–50, 310. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. D. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an American Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 180. 8. C. Baker, Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 228. Subsequent references are included in the text. 9. E. Hemingway, Anita Fishing Log, June 7–20, 1932, box 88, The Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. Subsequent references are included in the text. 10. E. Hemingway, Anita Fishing Log, January 25 to May 15, 1933, box 88, The Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. Subsequent references are included in the text. 11. N. Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1984), 117. 12. L. H. Martin, “Ernest Hemingway, Gulf Stream Marine Scientist: The 1934–35 Academy of Natural Sciences Correspondence,” The Hemingway Review 20.2 (2001), 5–15; 5. 13. H. Fowler, “Description of a New Scorpaenoid Fish (Neomerinthe hemingwayi) from Off New Jersey,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 87 (1935), 41–3; 41. 14. M. P. Ott, Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream, A Contextual Biography (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008), 111–13. Subsequent references are included in the text. 15. R. Trullinger, “New Big Fish Club Is Organized, But It’s Awfully Hard to Crash,” New York City World Telegram (November 23, 1936); included in P. D. Valenti (ed.), Understanding The Old Man and the Sea (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 158–9; 158. 16. A History of the IGFA (Ft. Lauderdale, FL: International Game Fishing Association, 1991), 32. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

256 Ott

17. E. Hemingway, “Marlin Off Cuba,” in E. Connett (ed.), American Big-game Fishing (Lyon, MS: Derrydale, 1993), 55–81; 70. Facsimile reprint of the 1935 edition. Subsequent references are included in the text. 18. E. Hemingway, “Introduction,” Atlantic Game Fishing, by S. K. Farrington, Jr. (Lyon, MS: Derrydale Press, 1937), xii–xxii; xviii. Subsequent references are included in the text. 19. E. Hemingway, “Cuban Fishing,” in F. LaMonte and B. Vesey-Fitzgerald (eds.), Game Fish of the World (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949), 156–60; 159. 20. E. Hemingway, “The President Vanquishes,” Esquire (July 1935), 23, 167. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 25 Food and Drink Peter Messent

Descriptions of food and drink appear everywhere in Hemingway’s work, from his earliest major fiction, In Our Time (1925), to his final works. Indeed, the title of the posthumously published A Moveable Feast (1964) forecasts the literal and metaphorical role that food will play in the story Hemingway tells of his development as an artist and man. In For Whom the Dinner Bell Tolls, Samuel J. Rogal gives a comprehensive description of the way food and drink feature in Hemingway, with an eighty-five-page index listing all such textual occurrences. Such gastronomical descriptions reflect Hemingway’s larger focus on the day-to-day details of his protagonists’ lives, the different cultures and countries through which they move, and their (related) desire for communion and connection with others in a modern world where any sense of home has become increasingly precarious. Critics who have examined food and drink in Hemingway provide some helpful explanations for his focus on this subject. Susan Beegel shows how the various gastronomic descriptions in A Moveable Feast illustrate how the author “deliberately selects and shapes such references to serve his thematic ends.” Of particular importance is the relationship between hunger and artistic discipline and the way that Hemingway’s own talent and marital happiness with his first wife, Hadley, are gradually affected by the very rich who “catch, kill and devour artists,” in part through the culinary temptations they offer.1 H. R. Stoneback ana- lyzes the representation of particular types of food in The Garden of Eden, focusing on eggs (one critic says it has to be “the ‘eggiest’ novel ever written”2) and mackerel. He makes a convincing case for seeing their use in the novel not just in terms of sensual immediacy but also for their metaphoric associations. Like Beegel, Stoneback views the references to food and drink as “crucial signs and thematic signals [both here and] throughout Hemingway’s work.”3

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258 Messent Hemingway’s career was marked by restlessness, the time spent in Europe, Africa, and Cuba (among other places), and in various parts of the United States distinguishing him from the majority of his contemporaries. His knowledge and appreciation of good food and drink across these geographies was considerable, and he took some pride in it. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, commenced a letter to him, “Precious Papa, Bull-fighter, Gourmand, ect. sic[ ]” (qtd. in Beegel 15).4 The evidence of his expertise is widespread: in his disquisitions, for instance, on cerveza (beer), manzanilla (a variety of sherry), and vino (wine) in the glossary to Death in the Afternoon (1932); in the passage in that same book on “the enjoyment and appreciation” of wine – and its toll on the body (DIA 14). But Hemingway’s cosmopolitan knowledge of fine dining is perhaps best revealed in Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) in the meal Colonel Cantwell and Renata have at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice. This starts with lobster accompanied by “Capri Bianco . . . [s]ecco and really cold” (ARIT 116), followed (for the colonel) by “scaloppine with Marsala, and the cauliflower braised with butter. Plus an artichoke vinaigrette. . . . ” (120), with Valpolicella (a red Italian wine); then cheese; then two bottles of Roederer Brut (champagne) ’42, followed by one of Pierre–Jouet (ARIT 99–124). The meal at the Gritti appears as a set of recipes in Craig Boreth’s The Hemingway Cookbook (1998). This “culinary biography” takes us through Hemingway’s life, focusing on the various regions and countries of which he writes, and giving the original details and recipes (as far as proves possible) of some of the meals and drinks that “were most important in [his] life and fiction.” Boreth argues that “the texture, taste and smells” of the food and drinks Hemingway describes “remain on the palate . . . This was the foundation of Hemingway’s art: to not only provide for his readers a description of the emotion evoked but to communicate the source of that emotion, creating for the reader that very same sensation.”5 Boreth, no doubt, has in mind here Hemingway’s well-known aim to capture in his writing “what really happened in action; . . . the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion . . . ” (DIA 6). But his remark raises interesting and crucial questions about the exact nature of the link between food and drink in Hemingway’s prose, their sensual affect, and the emotions thus indirectly revealed. Although the critics mentioned previously show something of how this works, this connection deserves further attention. Food and drink, in Hemingway’s life and in his writing, are of central importance both to his personal and artistic identity. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Food and Drink 259 Boreth comments on the way “Hemingway uses native foods and drinks to convey his characters’ insider status,” suggesting that he inspires readers “to attain a sort of world-citizenry” (xiv). Following the gastronomic itinerary of Hemingway’s fiction and nonfiction, Boreth takes us from Oak Park and Michigan to Italy (Milan and Venice), to France (especially Paris) and Austria, to Spain, Key West, Cuba, East Africa, and Idaho, among other places. Two things suggest themselves here. First, Hemingway’s focus on different types of gastronomic experience reflects the geographical and cultural variety of his work – its crossings of local and national borders and the shifting sense of personal and artistic identity this brought with it. Second, in part as a correlative of this first, a deep concern with the sense of “home,” of domestic belonging, runs through his work – and Hemingway’s representations of both food and drink and of geographical–cultural space speak directly to this last concern. In the remainder of this chapter I focus on two Hemingway stories, one not that well-known, the other perhaps his most famous, as a way of illustrating such movements and meanings. “Wine of Wyoming” (1930) thematizes the tension between Europe and America, using relative attitudes to food and drink as a way of doing so. This confirms Hemingway’s own identity as a major American writer who spent a good proportion of his life as an expatriate but defined himself in tense relationship to the values and priorities of his home nation. In this story, Hemingway rejects what he saw as the distasteful aspects of modern American cultural life. Chronology as well as geography is at issue here as he, in part, implicitly measures 1920s America against its premodern counterpart. In “Remembering Shooting-Flying: A Key West Letter” (Esquire, February 1935), Hemingway speaks of “the first snipe you ever hit walking on the [Illinois] prairie with your father.” Revisiting that boyhood place, he writes: “and where I shot that pheasant was a hot dog place and filling station and the north prairie . . . was all a subdivision of mean houses” (BL 202–3).6 Hemingway’s dislike for a modern- ized America, seen throughout his work, is signaled in the brief reference to the hot dog place and the casual and standardized mode of eating it implies. “Wine of Wyoming” covers similar thematic ground. Here, though, a barren American cultural landscape, again associated with a lack of gastronomic substance, is contrasted with European (French) customs, man- ners, and values. The narrator – an American who lives in France – is urged to miss his meal at the Wyoming hotel where he is staying so that Spec SD1 Date 26-july

260 Messent he might eat with the Fontan family, the sellers of the cold beer he is about to drink at the story’s start. The narrative is set during Prohibition in 1928, with repeated references to the Catholic and anti-Prohibition presidential candidate, Al Smith, who unsuccessfully ran against Herbert Hoover in the election that year. Throughout the story Hemingway uses food and drink as the measure of the differences between a superior European culture, represented by the French immigrant family, the Fontans, and an inferior American one. Rather than eating raw pork in his hotel, as Madame Fontan claims to have once done, or “les beans en can,” as her son’s American (Indian) wife repeatedly serves him (CSS 343), the narrator enjoys a meal that combines “the new wine” made by Fontan himself (“very light and clear and good, and still tast[ing] of the grape”) with good food: “two helpings of chicken and French fried potatoes, three ears of sweet corn, some sliced cucumbers, and two helpings of salad” (CSS 344). Most of the other Americans who visit the Fontans’ home behave in a much less civilized manner. They put moonshine in their beer, and when one group asks for “a big supper and . . . one or two bottles of wine,” they arrive already well-oiled, “put whiskey in the wine,” and the girls are “sick right at the table.” Fontan’s hesitant description of this type of people as “cochon,” and the narrator’s echo of this (“cochon. Salauds” [swine. Bastards]) does not seem too harsh. The “officers from the [local] fort,” who have been to France and are attuned to French culture, also come to drink wine, but they act quite differently: are “[v]ery nice men. Good fellas” (CSS 349–50). There is much more to the story, and the contrasts established in it are by no means as black and white as suggested earlier. Fontan is overly fond of his own wine, both he and his wife are racist (with their dislike of Poles and Italians), and the narrator himself – like Hemingway a writer back in America after time spent abroad – is careless in his failure to turn up for the “fête” the Fontans have arranged for him (351). Indeed, the narrative is one of aridity, betrayal, and loss. Wine, which Hemingway calls in Death in the Afternoon “one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things” (13), is illegal in America. Moreover, it is consumed, by Americans who have not visited Europe, in an uncivilized, animalistic way. America is legally and spiritually “dry.” The hospitality of the Fontans, centering on good food and good wine, community and communion, is contrasted with “Prohibition as closure, as hypocrisy, as denial of communion.”7 Al Smith will lose the election, in large part because of anti-Catholic sentiment, and Prohibition will continue. The Fontans provide a French enclave of (mostly) civilized value in a barbaric Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Food and Drink 261 American cultural landscape, a sign of possibility – given figurative form in the food and drink motif – to be cancelled both by Smith’s political failure and by the betrayals, frustrations, and bad faith with which the story ends. The story uses the motif of food and drink to thematize the possibility of beneficial cultural interchange – one, however, that comes to nothing. Indeed the difficulties and gains of crossing national boundaries is the subject of the text. The notion of melding French rituals of dining and attitudes to food and drink with the busy-ness and pragmatic economies of American life collapses. The dominant American culture overwhelms alternative values and resists productive change. The cultural combinations operate in a one-sided way and to damaging effect: with the Fontans jailed and fined for the selling of good wine and beer; their son’s cross-cultural marriage seen as a disaster; and the anti-Catholicism of mainstream society revealing America’s promise of equality as a sham. The similarity of the Wyoming country to Spain is mentioned (twice), but the comparison only “underlies the radical disparity, the absence in Wyoming of the rituals that made Spain and France the real old thing that Hemingway loved.” Here “all things conspire against the slaking of thirst . . . It is ‘too late’ for America, as Hemingway would explicitly assert in Green Hills of Africa, ‘too late’ even for the very land, the spoiled country that had become a ‘bloody mess’” (Stoneback 218–19). Moreover, even though the narrator finds temporary comfort and suste- nance in the Fontan home, this home has an ambivalent status. However modest the Fontans’ prices and however good their product (348), their home is also a commercial site. The narrator is, at least temporarily, rootless – just visiting his home country and staying in a hotel. If we look at the wider representations of food and drink in Hemingway, we notice how often these are tied to particular activities and locations – fishing, hunting, and the outdoors; hotels, bars, and restaurants; wartime activity – that lack any firm domestic center or sense of settled “home.” This lack links “Wine of Wyoming” to Hemingway’s larger fictional universe. It establishes, too, the way in which representations of food and drink function across his work as a crucial adjunct to his depiction of home-like (and un-home-like) spaces. A number of related themes intersect here: the – always temporary – sense of safety and security such home-like spaces sometimes bring; the geographical movements (both national and international) that mark the attempts of both Hemingway and his protagonists to establish that sense of home; and the absence of that sense elsewhere (particularly within the traditional family). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

262 Messent Right from the start of Hemingway’s fictional career, with the Nick Adams stories (and their loosely autobiographical base), the family home is represented as a place of tension and failed communication. Littless’s comment in “The Last Good Country,” that “mother’s gone to bed with a sick headache. She wrote our father” (CSS 509), perfectly suggests this situation. So Nick and other Hemingway protagonists create a series of (often temporary) “home” places, environments where they can feel protected and at ease, away from and outside the full family unit. In all such places, food and drink, the care taken in their preparation, the pleasure of their consumption, figure as the sign and symbol of that (momentary) stability and ease. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” for example, Hemingway meticulously describes Nick’s actions as he makes his camp and prepares his meal. We are reminded of the way in which such paratactic chains of description bear hidden weight. In terms of its representation of food and drink, this scene also invokes two other incidents in Hemingway’s fiction. In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederic Henry temporarily relaxes with his men in a “very good . . . warm and dry” dugout, only then to be blown up as they eat their meal of cold cooked macaroni, cheese, and canteen wine that tastes “of rusty metal” (FTA 49–50, 54). In “The Last Good Country” (1972), Nick prepares a “pretty good camp” (CSS 528) where he carefully cooks his and Littless’s meals: “Nick was cooking the trout now. The bacon was curled brown on a fresh-cut chip of wood from the piece of fallen timber they were using for the fire and they both smelled the trout cooking in the bacon fat” (533). The movement in both texts is from personal vulnerability to a provisional sense of safety and security (quasi-utopian and regressive in Nick’s case). This is measured through a series of parallels: descriptions of temporary and fragile home-like spaces, the food consumed there, and the two sets of appetites engaged (the response to metallic wine, and to bacon and trout aroma, respectively). Both stories traverse a psychological, emotional, and thematic territory that lies right at the heart of Hemingway’s fictional world. This is also the case with “Big Two-Hearted River,” one of Hemingway’s most noteworthy stories in its use of food and drink as ceremony and ritual, its focus on the (temporary) recreation of a sense of an (absent) “home.” Nick is similar to Frederic Henry in that he, too, has been sharply reminded of his vulnerability through his wounding in World War I. As Nick makes camp in this story, we get a stylistic effect typical of Hemingway as he presents his protagonist encountering his immediate Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Food and Drink 263 world through the data of the senses, “the sequence of motion and fact” that constitute Nick’s present actions. The author accordingly limits the reader’s awareness of the larger sociohistorical picture, a tactic that lies at the very heart of his prose and its meanings. So, in “Big Two-Hearted River,” what Nick sees, does, and feels is all that the reader knows. As Nick makes his camp, the details are captured in the exact sequence of their occurrence: “He smoothed the sandy soil with his hand . . . Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ridge-pole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off the ground.” Only once the practicalities of this homemaking are completed does Nick shift from described action to reflective mode: Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done . . . He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry. (CSS 167) In focusing on Nick’s basic actions and sensations (vision, touch, smell), and only then on the thoughts that follow, Hemingway carefully leads the reader to an understanding that Nick has returned to essentials (self-reliant homemaking and cooking). He is able to enjoy the experience, and to function, apparently, as an autonomous and active subject – a reading encouraged by the emphasis on action (what Nick does). But – and this is central to Hemingway’s artistic technique – if the sense of a larger defining sociohistorical context for these sharply detailed scenes is repressed, it is never quite forgotten. The agency of this individual subject is in fact bracketed (and determined) by the impress of larger historical force. This is revealed through the scene following the setting up of camp, when Nick cooks, eats, and drinks. After starting a fire, Nick sticks a wire grill over it. He has already “opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into [his] frying pan,” and now puts it “on the grill over the flames.” As he stirs and heats the beans and spaghetti, “they began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell.” Getting out “a bottle of tomato catchup” and cutting his bread, Nick then empties about half the bean and spaghetti mixture onto his tin plate: He knew [they] were still too hot. He . . . was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue . . . He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate. “Chrise,” Nick said, “Geezus Chrise,” he said happily . . . “[T]his was good.” Spec SD1 Date 26-july

264 Messent Nick then empties a can of apricots into a cup, drinks the juice, then “suck[s] the apricots down.” Next, he makes coffee “according to Hopkins,” one of his past fishing companions. The coffee is bitter: “Nick laughed. It made a good end to the story. His mind was beginning to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough” (CSS 167–9). Nick is eating simple food here, and the satisfaction of the needs of his camping trip and the return to Michigan fishing country carry largely positive connotations. The act of making the camp, the earned hunger, and the cooking and eating take on a meaningful and ritualistic quality that checks his tendency to think of other more disturbing – even traumatic – matters. (Nick’s incipient sense of anxiety, loss of authority and control is hinted at by the metaphoric presence of darkness, mist, and swamp.) Homemaking and cooking here are literal activities – fact and motion. But they also carry a figurative and emotional weight. Nick is in charge of events, knows exactly what he is doing, enjoys making a temporary home for himself, and relishes the simple and tasty food – even the coffee, despite its bitterness – as a reminder of past friendships and shared activity. Immediate factual and sensual detail works within a limited frame, with Nick as controlling presence. But the references to Nick’s mind working, to nothing being able to touch him, to the grasshoppers blackened “from living in the burned-over land” (CSS 165), to the swamp and razed town, indirectly remind us of a wider conditioning reality that he has not been able to control and that has, in fact, shattered his sense of autonomy. In this larger world, Nick has been a victim, not an agent – wounded and psychologically damaged by the impersonal power of the war in which he has taken part. Nick’s focus on the making of his camp and the eating of his food, the immediate facts of direct sensation, function as his way of beginning to make himself “strong at the broken places” (FTA 226); of alleviating to some small degree that anxious and passive relationship to the larger historical world that, as he learned in battle (and indeed through other childhood and young adult experiences), is the very condition of modernity. But even this is not the whole picture. For when Nick cooks his spaghetti and beans, the impression of homely contentment and control is not quite as celebratory as it seems. We might recall the negative connotations of the canned beans in “Wine of Wyoming” – and remember, too, its reminder of the (enforced) cultural displacement of the American Indian in the lazy consumerism of Fontan’s son’s wife. The American Indian is also recalled in the “Indian name” of this story’s setting.8 Indeed, the real Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Food and Drink 265 Two Hearted River has traces of “numerous prehistoric Indian archaeo- logical sites” beside it.9 Hemingway suggests that Nick’s attempt to get back to origins, to recapture some sense of past wholeness, can only ever be a partial success, for an all-pervasive American modernity has already altered for the worse whatever and whoever it touches. We see the sign of that earlier Illinois “hot dog place” and the “mean houses” near it in Nick’s ketchup, canned apricots, and beans, and wonder what happens to that can after he has eaten. And we recall Hemingway’s comments in Green Hills of Africa on the “high-piled scow of garbage” dumped into the clear blue waters of the Gulf Stream (GHOA 149). We remember, too, the subtext of Under Kilimanjaro (2005) on the apparatus of colonial imperialism and the product dependency it fosters (Gordon’s Gin, Campari, Bulwer’s Dry Cider, and the like). Nothing in Hemingway, then, is as simple as it seems. His references to food and drink are rarely purposeless. Rather they flesh out the sensual immediacy of his narratives and reveal much about the emotional and psychological state of his protagonists, the conditions and compromises of their lives, and the larger world they inhabit and negotiate. They provide an unexpected but powerful key to the fundamentals of the author’s fictional world.

Notes 1. S. F. Beegel, “Hemingway Gastronomique: A Guide to Food and Drink in A Moveable Feast (with Glossary),” The Hemingway Review 4.1 (1984), 14–26; 15 and 18. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. B. Solomon, “Ernest Hemingway’s Real Garden of Eden,” Horse-Trading and Ecstasy (New York: North Point Press, 1989), 22–31; 29. 3. H. R. Stoneback, “Memorable Eggs ‘in Danger of Getting Cold’ and Mackerel ‘Perilous with Edge-level Juice’: Eating in Hemingway’s Garden,” The Hemingway Review 8.2 (1989) 22–9; 25 and 27. 4. John Raeburn lists “arbiter of taste” as one of the nine major images of himself that Hemingway cultivated during his lifetime (Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984], 40–1). 5. C. Boreth, The Hemingway Cookbook (Chicago Review Press, 1998), xiv and xiii. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6. For a 1913 photo of the young Hemingway and his father at the Wallace Evans game farm mentioned in this letter, see http://ehfop.typepad.com/photos/ from_the_hemingway_archiv/mhs-189.html#tp. For more information, see http://www.stcmuseum.org/PDFs/CharlemagneSpring2007.pdf (both sites accessed January 12, 2011). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

266 Messent

7. H. R. Stoneback, “‘Mais Je Reste Catholique’: Communion, Betrayal and Aridity in ‘Wine of Wyoming’” in S. F. Beegel (ed.), Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), 209–23; 213. Subsequent references are included in the text. 8. P. Melling, “‘There Were Many Indians in the Story’: Hidden History in Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’” The Hemingway Review 28.2 (2009), 45–65; 48. My thanks to Phil Melling for his valuable comments on the first draft of this chapter. 9. Michigan Department of Natural Resources. 2002 [1973]. Two Hearted River Plan: Luce County. www.michigan.gov/documents/Two_Hearted_River_ Plan_22961_7.pdf, 13 (accessed January 12, 2011). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 26 Hunting Kevin Maier

Ernest Hemingway was a hunter from the earliest moments of his life. According to his mother Grace’s meticulously kept scrapbook, Hemingway learned to shoot at age two. He hunted with his father at three. He was given his own shotgun at ten. By eleven, he was already imagining himself hunting lions in Africa like Teddy Roosevelt.1 While every American boy may not have had the same access to hunting as Hemingway, it would have been difficult for any American boy to escape the pervasiveness of hunting culture in those early years of the twentieth century. By the time of Hemingway’s birth, hunting traditions were already integral to American culture. From the first accounts of the New World as a hunter’s paradise to the myth-making surrounding backwoodsmen like Daniel Boone in the early nineteenth century to the advent of the rugged individualist sportsman like Roosevelt at the turn of the twentieth century, the hunter had long been a key component of American mythol- ogy. American hunting culture, however, has always been complicated and conflicted, and the tensions inherent in the competing paradigms of the ideal hunter were especially at issue during Hemingway’s lifetime. As Daniel Herman notes in his excellent monograph, Hunting and the American Imagination, for example, “by the late nineteenth century, the hunter had become [. . .] a ‘hegemonic’ figure, a cultural hero propa- gated by powerful members of American society to serve their ideological ends.”2 Although the hunter might have appeared a hegemonic figure – or, as Herman puts it, “the human banner for imperialism, laissez-faire individualism, and patriarchy” – he was also “a symbol of the common man [. . .] and the nation’s democratic ethos” (xii). Herein lies a serious complication for those of us interested in exploring the meaning of hunting in Hemingway’s lifetime. How could the hunter be at once an elite individualist and a democratic everyman? How could the hunter be both a gentleman sportsman and a frontier backwoodsman? In Hemingway’s era, 267 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

268 Maier the hunter could appeal to overlapping discourses of nation, masculinity, and class to situate himself in relation to either or both sides of these divides. For Hemingway and his contemporaries, the meaning of hunting was never simple, fixed, or finite. Since Hemingway engages these disparate meanings in his carefully crafted public image, his journalism, and his fiction, the best way to tell the story of hunting during Hemingway’s lifetime is to elucidate the tensions at the core of hunting culture. It is not an exaggeration to say that the origins of the story of American hunting culture are found in the genesis of the national story. Indeed, as Hemingway puts it in a 1935 Esquire essay, “America has always been a country of hunters and fishermen. As many people, probably, came to North America because there was good free hunting and fishing as ever came to make their fortunes.”3 Explorers’ and colonists’ written accounts of the New World contain a virtually obligatory chapter on hunting. Describing landscapes overrun with exotic species of game animals, these chapters routinely figure the new continent as a place where anyone can hunt when and where they want, marking a key distinction from the Old World where game was reserved for the wealthy. While the nation may have almost always been one of “hunters and fishermen,” Americans have often felt conflicted about it. Under the influence of early national leaders like Thomas Jefferson, the yeoman farmer became the ideal American in the colonial era. With the ascen- dancy of this agrarian ideal, hunting came to epitomize, as Herman observes, “everything an American should not be: it seemed too Indian, too barbaric, and at the same time too English, too aristocratic” (73). In his 1782 Letters From an American Farmer, for example, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur worries that hunting will corrupt the most “perfect society now existing in the world.”4 Labeling those who give in to the “wildness” of the New World “back settlers,” Crevecoeur polemically declares hunting one of the primary threats to the nascent agrarian nation, calling hunters “ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable” (67). While settlers may have been drawn to North America by “free hunting and fishing,” it was not long before these settlers were not free to hunt. The hunter became the scapegoat for a nation stumbling toward democratic civilization, making it difficult to hunt without worry. This worry was always twofold: on one hand, hunting might signal an allegiance to Old World aristocracy; on the other, it might mark an unhealthy interest in the “savage” ways of the original inhabitants of the New World. Following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, however, the idea that hunting was a threat to American civilization lost cultural sway. As Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Hunting 269 the demands of warfare – both with the English and in Indian country – and as the necessity of precise knowledge of unsettled regions became more important, hunters like Boone were framed as heroes and patri- ots rather than scapegoats. With the help of a rapidly expanding publishing industry and an increasingly urban and literate population, the backwoodsman-hunter’s stock rose even further as the nation devoured countless tales of Boone’s forays into the unsettled wilds to hunt. Stories about Boone helped urban men working in industrial cities imagine a return to a simpler time when humans lived in harmony with nature – and this harmony meant hunting. Boone and his successors, like Davy Crockett and James Fenimore Cooper’s fictional Natty Bumppo, embodied the hunter-hero of the era. Not only did they seem to lead simpler lives, but their courage, composure, and chivalry were prized values, and they quickly became the quintessential Americans. In a generation or two, the backwoodsmen helped revive the image of the hunter in the popular American imagination, and hunting quickly became the most popular participatory sport in the nation (Herman 113). Hunting became even more deeply embedded in the ideal of national identity when, in the 1880s, a young, nearsighted asthmatic from New York packed his guns and went west. Following the popular cure for neurasthenia, the ubiquitous “nerve disease” afflicting urbanites in the late nineteenth century, Theodore Roosevelt dealt with his own health problems and the trauma of losing his wife and mother by seeking out “sturdy contest with nature,” writing about it, and ultimately transforming himself from a frail young man to a portrait of hearty masculinity.5 While influential Philadelphia doctor Silas Weir Mitchell advised the rest cure for women afflicted with similar psychological ailments – famously criticized in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” – he sent men out for fresh air and exercise. Moreover, unlike Gilman’s female protagonist, men were encouraged to write about their experience outdoors. Roosevelt obviously recovered, publishing a number of books about his experiences out West, including several specifically about hunting. These books not only advanced Roosevelt’s nascent political career, but they bolstered the status of the hunter in the American imagination, linking hunting to the nation’s military readiness and to notions of healthy masculinity. Following both Roosevelt’s and the medical establishment’s lead, upright urban Americans began to hunt in earnest in the decade immediately preceding Hemingway’s birth. Because rural Americans continued to kill wild animals as well, it was not long before game populations Spec SD1 Date 26-july

270 Maier began to rapidly decline. As the quarry disappeared, the brief egalitarian harmony between wealthy hunters (who wanted to play backwoodsmen on the weekend) and the actual rank-and-file backwoodsmen was quickly replaced with hostile exchanges. The battles over access to increasingly scarce resources escalated as wealthy hunters formed exclusive clubs to protect dwindling game populations. The backwoodsmen, meanwhile, became the much-disparaged “market” or “pot” hunter, the former killing game indiscriminately to sell and the latter to feed his family. The backwoodsman hunter once again became the scapegoat for a national problem – instead of too much wildness, this time it had to do with a scarcity of this new resource, and while issues of national and masculine identity still mattered, this time the division primarily hinged on a class distinction. Roosevelt was instrumental in transforming hunting from a way of life into a leisure sport. Not only did he advance arguments in favor of gentleman sport hunters in his written works, but he also helped establish the Boone and Crockett Club. According to its 1887 constitution, this elite hunting club’s primary objective was to “promote manly sport with rifle.”6 As the sport required game animals, its promotion required conservation. While its conservation advocacy included political activism (leading to the formation of stricter bag limits, hunting seasons, and game reserves), the Club’s most lasting legacy was perhaps the veritable library of books and essays demonstrating the proper ethical engagement with animals and advocating for the sportsman’s code of ethics as the proper way for Americans to hunt. Essentially a European aristocratic discourse adapted for a changed American situation, the sportsman’s code dictated a self-imposed contract with the quarry. This informal ethical construct – which would become a central concern of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa and Under Kilimanjaro – also mandated that the game being pursued be given a fair chance of escape. The hunter, moreover, was expected to know the habits and characteristics of the animals he hunted, as well as the history and aesthetic of his sport. The code also demanded that game should not be taken in unreasonable numbers, killed in breeding season, or sold for profit. Though championed with noble intentions, this new American code (and its manifestations in state and federal laws) effectively made hunting a pursuit for the well-to-do. Despite the backwoodsmen for whom the club was named, the Boone and Crockett Club’s efforts marginalized the true backwoodsman, rendering the hunting of poor and rural Americans not only unethical, but also illegal in many cases. This Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Hunting 271 swing away from a democratic ethos continued to characterize hunting culture for the first half of the twentieth century, as the trophy became more important than the meat. This swing toward a more elitist hunting culture dedicated to an ethical code did not mean that Hemingway and his contemporaries could not simultaneously imagine themselves participating in the tradition of the self-reliant backwoodsman who brought civilization to the frontier as well as in the tradition of the self-restrained gentleman sportsman. As the Boone and Crockett Club cataloged trophy heads, the membership also declared it imperative that animals should not be wantonly wasted. Hemingway and his father were no doubt drawn to both identities of the American hunter – for example, consistent with the gentleman’s code of ethics, Clarence famously forced Ernest to eat a porcupine the young hunter had killed, but Clarence was quick to break game laws when the opportunity presented itself, choosing the backwoodsman’s utilitarian code when it served his needs (Beegel 83). As these identities were overlapping and complicated in their contradictions, there was surely some cognitive dissonance, but this did not seem to stop Americans from hunting. Measured by sheer numbers, hunting became more central to American life in the twentieth century. Following Roosevelt’s presidency – and the safari he took immediately upon leaving the White House in 1909 – hunting continued to grow in popularity in the United States right up until Hemingway’s death. The number of hunting licenses sold doubled between 1910 and 1920 (Herman 271). This increase was bolstered by mass production techniques that enabled firearm manufacturers to sell rifles and shotguns for nearly half their pre–World War I costs. The greater mobility afforded Americans by cheap cars like the Model T also helped, as did the success of the labor movement – longer weekends, more paid vacations, and more holidays. The Hemingways were no exception, of course, spending long summers at Walloon Lake, embracing a healthy outdoor life as an antidote to their suburban Oak Park existence. Hemingway’s travel decisions throughout his life were often dictated by finding access to good hunting away from the masses. As Herman notes, “fully one-quarter of American men were sport hunters” and this number held steady through the 1950s, so it became increasingly difficult to get away from one’s fellow hunters (271). Despite this widespread popularity, the hunter’s image in the early twentieth century did not escape the highs and lows that had characterized the public perception of hunting in preceding centuries. While denuncia- tions of blood sports were certainly not new, Disney’s sentimental 1942 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

272 Maier animated filmBambi bolstered the antihunting movement. Greater access to cheap cameras also led to increasing ambivalence over hunting; when an animal could be captured on film, killing it seemed superfluous. As cameras became smaller and more affordable, hunters from Roosevelt forward championed wildlife photography as a means to mitigate the impact of hunting on game animal populations (Herman 273). Hemingway seemed to become more interested in watching and photographing animals late in life, but, like Roosevelt before him, he nevertheless continued to hunt. That is, the antihunting sentiment did not diminish the popularity of hunting, but it did force Hemingway and his fellow hunters to dedicate significant energy to image control. For Hemingway, this meant an increasing ambivalence about trophy hunting and an amplified commitment to restraint; he notes frequently in Under Kilimanjaro that he killed only for meat on his second safari. For other hunters, it meant appealing to the scientific work of collecting specimens, justifying their pursuits as knowledge acquisition. For still others, it simply meant a deeper commitment to conservation. Through organizations like the Boone and Crockett Club, hunters continued the push to maintain healthy game populations in the twentieth century. With hunting’s increasing popularity, the science argument became difficult to sustain, so conservation became the hunters’ central means of image control (as well as a necessity to ensure future access to the sport). These conservation efforts ensured that game animal populations fared well, but they also meant that Americans necessarily hunted in increasingly managed and regulated environments. The transformation of hunting into a leisure sport went hand in hand with the growth of federal and state game management regimes. Although all hunters surely appreciated healthy populations of ungulates and waterfowl, not everyone liked having limits placed on their hunting. Hemingway had a notoriously vexed relationship with game laws. While we see him actively working as an honorary game warden in Under Kilimanjaro, he also often told the story of impulsively shooting a heron on Walloon Lake, figuring the warden as foe rather than friend in the narrative (Beegel 83). Like many of his contemporaries, Hemingway was presumably unhappy with the infringe- ments on the wilderness and individualist values that remained important to hunting culture. Although these conservation measures were not universally popular, hunters continued to advance conservation legislation throughout the twentieth century. While these conservation advances were obvious boons for wild animals, they tended to privilege game animals over predators. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Hunting 273 Nongame animals like wolves, bears, and eagles, as well as vermin like rabbits, were shot as a matter of course by hunters and game managers. As Susan Beegel has noted, Hemingway no doubt shared his contemporaries’ sense that it was his duty to shoot these animals declared bad by the management regimes (85–6). This remained common practice until the second half of the century, when sentiment and science changed the values driving management decisions. The conservation efforts pushed by hunters also sparked serious social conflict, as Louis Warren’s compelling The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservations in Twentieth-Century America documents. The book opens with a chilling account of a bloody 1895 confrontation between a band of Bannock Indians pursuing elk on their cus- tomary hunting grounds in a remote corner of Wyoming and a heavily armed group of white vigilante game wardens who forcibly stopped them, killing four in the process. Like the nineteenth-century conflicts, Warren shows, the conflicts of Hemingway’s era over what constituted appropriate hunting hinged on ideologies of nation, gender, class, and race – and often led to disenfranchisement, prison, and sometimes even death.7 Both before and during Hemingway’s time, not only were battles over who, when, and where one could hunt common, but the very meaning of hunting was hotly contested. Hunting was simultaneously celebrated as a uniquely American pastime and denounced as a sinful and imperial celebration of machismo, weaponry, and death. To be sure, the history of American sport hunting is marked by periods when the hunter is celebrated as a national hero as well as periods when the hunter is scapegoated as the antithesis to the nation’s progress. More often than not, these competing ideas coexisted. Throughout his life, Hemingway was acutely aware of these shifting values and their deep history in the American imagination, using them to create compelling self-images and narratives. Not surprisingly, the hunting tradition has deeply impacted our understanding of the author and his work. Hemingway grew up at an historical moment in which Teddy Roosevelt’s notion of the “strenuous life” was very nearly impossible to escape. As Reynolds notes in The Young Hemingway, Hemingway’s formative years in the rapidly changing community of Oak Park, Illinois were saturated with Roosevelt’s rhetoric. Presented in newsreels, papers, and magazines, Roosevelt’s notion of American masculine identity shaped the young Hemingway’s notion of self. After visiting the Hall of African Mammals at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, Hemingway dreamed of hunting lions like his boyhood idol; after seeing film shorts and reading of Roosevelt’s exploits near his North Dakota ranch or while Spec SD1 Date 26-july

274 Maier on safari, Hemingway appeared in family photos donning the buckskin shirt or the safari costumes Roosevelt made famous. Like Roosevelt, Hemingway also understood the power of the word and image to create a masculine identity premised on the “strenuous life.” As Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail young boy into a healthy big-game hunter and national hero, Hemingway, too, consciously transformed himself from an unathletic boy into a self-reliant American man, by telling, first, war stories and then, later, stories of his exploits with guns. In addition to absorbing Roosevelt’s rhetoric as part of his cultural moment, Hemingway also read widely in the hunting literature tradition. In Hemingway’s Reading 1901–1940: An Inventory, Reynolds indexes almost fifty volumes under “Hunting and Fishing,” and another fifty appear under “Sports.” Reynolds suggests Hemingway read Field and Stream magazine, the bulk of the Roosevelt canon, as well as “a whole shelf of books on African hunting.”8 Hemingway no doubt shared Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for hunting – he hunted everywhere he lived and visited, from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Venice’s lagoons and from Kenya’s savannahs to Idaho’s sage country. His words and image kept hunting in the public eye. In fact, it is fair to suggest that Hemingway became the representative hunter of the era – images of Papa with dangerous African animals were the twentieth-century equivalent of the iconic image of Roosevelt in buck- skins from the late nineteenth century. But while Hemingway absorbed the sportsman’s literary and cultural output voraciously, and while he assumed the position of the sport’s figurehead in the popular imagination, he did not simply reproduce the values found at the core of sport hunting culture in his own writing and thinking. Rather, Hemingway seems uniquely tuned into the ways the hunter’s image is stretched in many directions, and his work explores the nuances of this image. As his grandson Seán notes in the introduction to his edited volume, Hemingway on Hunting, Hemingway’s writing on hunting includes “not only the process of hunting [and] the actions leading up to the kill, but as many different dimensions as possible: the country, the weather, the element of chance, the hunter’s thoughts, and, if conceivable, the perspective of the hunted.”9 I would add that, for Hemingway, telling the full story always means engaging the discourses of gender, class, race, and nation by which Americans made sense of hunting, too. Hemingway’s 1936 short stories “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” both hinge on an understanding of the highly gendered sport hunting tradition, questioning Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Hunting 275 the assumed causal link between virile masculinity and blood sports. Likewise, the obsession with the clean kill at the heart of Green Hills of Africa really only makes sense in the context of the Boone and Crockett Club’s sense of “manly sport with rifle,” where a self-imposed code of ethics defines the range of appropriate behavior.10 Hemingway’s journalism, moreover, routinely both amplifies and pokes fun at the strictures of the sportsman’s code – his Esquire essays like “Shootism versus Sport” (1934), “Notes on Dangerous Game” (1934), or “Remembering Shooting-Flying” (1935) offer accounts of how and why men hunt, making tongue-in-cheek jabs at the class of “sportsmen,” but also amplifying key sporting values like self-reliance and voluntary restraint. Hemingway’s posthumous books The Garden of Eden and Under Kilimanjaro engage the sporting tradition even more critically, calling the sporting code and its more eco- logically valenced positions into question for the imperial implications of the elitist code defining appropriate hunting. While scholars like Rose Marie Burwell suggest that Hemingway gradually gave up blood sports late in life, I argue elsewhere that it is perhaps more appropriate to think of Hemingway as moving toward a more sophisticated understanding of the implications of the transformation of hunting into a leisure sport.11 The impact of hunting on the critical reception of Hemingway’s work has also been significant, as field sports have figured prominently in the scholarly work on Hemingway since the beginning. Philip Young’s notion of the Hemingway code hero – the man who embodies honor and courage – no doubt draws on the sportsman’s code, and, in particular, a notion of gender intricately intertwined with hunting traditions. With the code hero thesis firmly entrenched in scholarly convention for more than thirty years, hunting also often served as primary evidence of Hemingway’s purportedly brutish manly nature. Ecological and feminist assessments of Hemingway’s work like Glen Love’s “Hemingway’s Indian Virtues: An Ecological Reconsideration” and Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World turn to what Love calls Hemingway’s “body count against the earth” to argue that he was tragically short sighted in his engagement both with the natural world and with women.12 As the release of the posthumous books has forced a reassessment of the code hero thesis as well as Hemingway’s hunting, the image of Hemingway as a “game hog” that Love and Westling painted is being replaced by an increasingly sophisticated picture of his engagement with hunting culture. This nuanced sense of Hemingway’s engagement must necessarily attend to the broader historical contexts in which Hemingway hunted. These are vexed and complicated histories, however, so future scholarship Spec SD1 Date 26-july

276 Maier will need to continue to tease out the particular meanings of hunting, as well as Hemingway’s complicated participation in these cultural trends.

Notes 1. See S. F. Beegel, “Eye and Heart: Hemingway’s Education as a Naturalist,” in Linda Wagner-Martin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53–92; 61. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. D. J. Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), xii. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. E. Hemingway, “He Who Gets Slap Happy: A Bimini Letter,” Esquire (August 1935), 19–20; 19. 4. J. H. Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782 (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904), 50. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. While the terms were in common usage at the time, I gather them from B. Will’s excellent essay, “The Nervous Origins of the American Western,” American Literature 70.2 (1998), 293–316. 6. J. F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd rev. and expanded ed. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001), passim. 7. L. S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), passim. 8. M. Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading 1901–1940: An Inventory (Princeton University Press, 1981), 27. 9. S. Hemingway, “Introduction,” Hemingway on Hunting (New York: Scribner, 2001), xxxiv. 10. For a discussion of Hemingway’s engagement with the safari tradition’s more transnational sportsman’s code, see L. H. Martin, “Hemingway’s Constructed Africa: Green Hills of Africa and the Conventions of Sporting Books,” in Robert E. Fleming (ed.), Hemingway and the Natural World (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1999), 87–97. 11. R. M. Burwell, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1996); K. Maier, “Hemingway’s Hunting: An Ecological Reconsideration,” Hemingway Review 25.2 (2006), 119–22; K. Maier, “Hemingway’s Ecotourism: Under Kilimanjaro and the Ethics of Travel,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.4 (2011), 717–36. 12. G. A. Love, “Hemingway’s Indian Virtues: An Ecological Reconsideration,” Western American Literature 22 (1987), 201–14; 203. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 27 Masculinity Thomas Strychacz

When Gil, the time-traveling hero of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), runs into a rakish, hard-drinking man pontificating on manly virtues in 1920s Paris, Allen’s audience scarcely needs his name. Such is the enduring power of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrity and the hypermasculine role most often associated with him. Allen’s send-up nonetheless contains some surprises. One is that it is a send-up. The tough, laconic pose Hemingway fostered and his army of readers endorsed seems to have become a victim of changing representations of manhood – one of them the angst-ridden schlemiel that catapulted Allen to fame. Another is that the he-man Hemingway of the movie bears surprisingly little resem- blance to the writer scholars have been describing since 1986, when the publication of The Garden of Eden prompted a thorough reappraisal of Hemingway’s inquiry into gender issues on the basis of that novel’s fascination with pliable gender and sexual roles. That reappraisal has not quite reversed the “man’s man” reputation Hemingway labored so hard to acquire, but it has turned his endless concern with varieties of male experience in his fiction into a virtue. What used to look like stories of men heroically modeling grace under pressure has come to seem much more complex, troubled, and troubling. In his work the idea of a “man’s man” becomes something of a challenge: what does it mean to be a man, let alone the perfect model of one? For all the amusing differences between Woody Allen and Hemingway, there is one noteworthy connection: both seem impelled by anxiety. One well-known episode in A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway’s own bit- tersweet recollection of his 1920s Paris life, has the young author examining F. Scott Fitzgerald’s male endowment to tell him that, in spite of wife Zelda’s disparagement, Fitzgerald is up to snuff. The scene promotes Hemingway’s authority as an arbiter of all things masculine. But the fact that he constructs his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), around an unspecified but serious injury to Jake Barnes’s genitals suggests that 277 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

278 Strychacz fears of not measuring up were never far from Hemingway’s sense of manhood. His contempt for the destructive Zelda – a portrait echoed in a “rich bitch” character such as Margot in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) – hints at one reason why. Many scholars have argued that the style and subject matter of male modernist writers were shaped by their anxieties about the growing social power of women in the first decades of the twentieth century; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar put a “battle of the sexes” at the very heart of male modernist writing.1 From this perspective, the elegiac phrase “You are all a Lost Generation” that Hemingway applied to his age might be interpreted as men mourning their loss of authority at a historical moment when women were beginning to disrupt the social order their roles have traditionally supported. The rise of the New Woman was not the only reason for a turn-of- the-century crisis of masculine authority. Sexologists such as Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis promoted sexuality as the key to the formation of human identities, and though they assumed that heterosexuality was normative, one effect of their work was to draw attention to alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality. In metropolitan areas, gay and lesbian identities became more visible, and other traditional bastions of male subjectivity were beginning to erode. Economic changes associated with the rise of corporate and consumer capitalism meant that ever fewer men felt that they controlled their lives: men were increasingly employed by others, and a culture of consumerism granted women new economic roles and financial clout.2 The culturally dominant role of “Marketplace Man,” in Michael Kimmel’s useful phrase, seemed to be more real as a fiction of the marketplace: Americans were suddenly awash in formulaic and unrealistic images of masculinity disseminated by an emerging mass media of film, dime novels, journalism, and, in particular, advertising.3 One response was an array of compensatory cultural roles focused on reclaim- ing the authentic masculinity men were once supposed to possess. Like Theodore Roosevelt, who publicly modeled a life of strenuous masculinity at the turn of the century, many men yearned to get back to nature, to hike and hunt; they participated in rough sports or took an intense interest in military matters.4 But the individual feats of military derring-do that Roosevelt capitalized on during the Spanish-American War seemed positively archaic by the time the slaughterhouse of the First World War came to an end in 1918. Though World War I cannot be held wholly responsible for the unraveling of the culturally dominant image of the self-possessed man, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Masculinity 279 it certainly posed the problem with nightmarish intensity: millions died anonymously in battles whose objectives no one fighting in them could grasp. The sacrifices of the war were “like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (FTA 185), Frederic Henry says, as if the war has demolished all definitions of manhood. Indeed, few novels have ever characterized their “hero” so thoroughly in the negative. Henry ends up not a soldier, not fighting for the Allies’ eventual success, wounded but not wounded in heroic action, without the girl, not married, not a father, not at home in the States or in Italy, the country he began fighting for. What then, the novel pointedly asks, is “manhood”? One possibility, scholars have argued, is that wounds and men’s responses to them actually constitute Hemingway’s sense of postwar masculinity. Wounded and traumatized male characters fill the pages of his fiction, the consequence of war injuries (Henry, Nick Adams), bullfight injuries (Manuel in “The Undefeated” [1927]), and even fishing injuries (Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea [1952]). The existential fate of men in the early twentieth century is to be fractured, riven by loss. But loss can be transcended, so this line of argument goes, by exhibiting what Hemingway called grace under pressure: conducting oneself courageously in the face of trauma, sometimes achieved by holding tight to a “Code” of behavior that bestows meaning on an absurd world. Pedro Romero in Sun, for example, erases the pain of his beating at the hands of Robert Cohn by fighting bulls with a scrupulous fidelity to the core aesthetics and ethics of bullfighting – a model for Jake Barnes’s struggle to come to terms with his own wound. Since the concept of a Code has become almost synonymous with Hemingway’s vision of manhood, it is worth emphasizing how precari- ously it answers a perceived lack of sustaining masculine roles. Men are not born with a Code; if they are to become “men,” they must acquire one and constantly renew it. Therefore a Code marks something of an existential predicament. Masculinity can no longer be whole and uncom- promised: it must be represented. And representations can be temporary. Jake Barnes is an excellent example. The self-respect he derives from appre- ciating Romero’s bullfighting crumbles when he sets Brett up with the young torero. Moreover, “lost generation” masculinity suggests a dawn- ing awareness that masculine subjectivities now must be constructed and performed. Nostalgia for a time when masculinity was undamaged and unchallenged competes with the melancholic knowledge that there never was such a time. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

280 Strychacz The perilous implications of the wounded hero/Code hypothesis also emerge in the element that many have argued represents Hemingway’s key contribution to twentieth-century literature: his laconic style emphasizing action and simple declarative statements. In an important study, Philip Young connected style to Code, arguing that Hemingway’s famous economy dramatized in linguistic terms the control men sought to exercise over their wounded bodies and psyches.5 For Young, Hemingway’s style is (at best) inherently masculine. But by the same token Hemingway’s sense of masculinity would also seem to be a style. It has to be represented in narrative form; it becomes an aesthetic. Therefore it runs the risk of exposing its shaky foundations: a self written into being because it cannot simply “be.” Hemingway is always alert to the self-contradictory aspects of a “masculine style.” “I do not want to talk about it” (FTA 332), Frederic Henry says after the death of Catherine, a tight-lipped response to pain that places him once more in the realm of the negative. Self-possession means not sharing, not speaking. But Henry does talk about it. The entire narrative stands as testimony to what Henry talks about after he has said he does not want to talk. It therefore leads to a strangely affirmative double negative: Henry does not “not . . . talk.” And by calling on others to participate – readers, interpreters, an audience – the narrative emphasizes the importance of being in relationship. When it comes to putting Hemingway’s characters in relationship to gendered, racial, and ethnic others, however, scholars have typically reached more pessimistic conclusions. Some feminists, for example, argue that the principle underpinning Hemingway’s sense of masculinity is not the male wound but misogyny.6 Hemingway’s female characters, so this argument goes, exist to define a set of conditions that benefit men. Henry in Farewell attains a tragic heroism through the death of a woman; some characters find selfhood by spurning the women who supposedly hold them back, as when Nick Adams dumps Marjorie in “The End of Something” to Bill’s later applause; and some, such as Santiago in Old Man, dispense with women entirely. Yet many scholars have argued for a more complex and nuanced approach to Hemingway’s representations of women.7 In fact his female characters participate in a turbulent historical moment when gendered roles of all sorts were pulled apart and refashioned.8 The bohemian expatriate communities of 1920s Paris made that evident to Hemingway. Though he ridiculed Gertrude Stein’s lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas in A Moveable Feast, prominent examples of non-heterosexual lifestyles (Stein, Sylvia Beach, Bryher, and others) resonate in the Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Masculinity 281 capacity of his work to imagine a variety of nontraditional roles for women.9 Certainly, Hemingway cannot be said to thrust women back into the traditional nineteenth-century roles of domestic wife and mother. There are none to speak of in Hemingway’s writing. Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls possesses a sort of backhanded wifely devotion; more frequently, mother–wife figures end up acting like the bourgeois shrew of “Soldier’s Home” (1925). Perhaps Catherine in Farewell writes the epitaph to motherhood as a bastion of social order. She wants to be a “good wife” (294) and gives birth, but is never quite a mother or a wife, for her child is stillborn and she dies still unmarried. Yet new social roles for women remain unformed. Brett Ashley in Sun tempers her free-spirited behavior with a propensity for smashing up lives. Like many of Hemingway’s sexually liberated women, she faces a crisis of anomie: freed from stereotypical female roles, she seems unable to value what she is now free to do. This centripetal definition of womanhood – female characters spin- ning away from traditional cultural roles – has many consequences for Hemingway’s construction of masculinity. One might read it as a tactical move that makes it possible to write about single solitary men facing existential crises: having no mothers obviates the need for fathers. None of Hemingway’s major male characters deals with children in any significant way. Yet the implications of his challenge to traditional social structures are often radical. He imagines sustaining heterosexual relationships outside of marriage (Jordan/Maria, Frederic/Catherine); sustaining homosocial relationships (Nick/Bill, Jake/Bill, Wilson/Macomber); and sexual relationships occurring between men (probably Ad and Bugs in “The Battler”) and women (“The Sea Change”). Most striking, the sexual role reversals and ménage à trois of Garden suggest a willingness to explore gendered roles in terms of fluid interchanges rather than exclusive categories. But Garden’s overt fascination with the transformative possibilities of gender roles was already embedded in the work Hemingway published in his lifetime. Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes trace Hemingway’s interest in polymorphous sexual experiences, lesbianism, and homosexuality through a wide range of his fiction. Others have examined his career in terms of fetishes (Eby), a relationship between masochism and machismo (Fantina), his “gender trouble” (Kennedy), homoerotic desire (Moddelmog), androgyny (Spilka), or a fascination with performances of masculinity (Strychacz).10 Some of these studies tap into compelling new biographical evidence – revelations of transgressive gendered sexual play between Hemingway and his wives, of complex affinities between Spec SD1 Date 26-july

282 Strychacz Hemingway and his transgendered son, Gregory – that his macho public role masked.11 The sheer variety of approaches contained in this list suggests something of the difficulty of pinning down just what Hemingway has to say about masculinity and sexuality. Though the period at the turn of the century witnessed the first scientific attempts to analyze human sexuality, and Hemingway like so many other modernist writers paid attention, his writings do not so much codify as deeply encode multiple expressions of sexual experience. Even Garden is elliptical about the “dark magic of the change” (GOE 28) and what sort of sexual practices or psychic urges it implies. A similar complexity emerges even in scenes where Hemingway seems most disparaging of queer lifestyles. The immaculately coiffed gay men who accompany Brett to Braddocks’s dancing club suffer much stereotypical abuse from Jake, who wants to shatter their “superior, sim- pering composure” (SAR 20). It seems a classic instance of Hemingway anxiously defending he-man heterosexuality. If the scene acknowledges that cultural codes are shifting as “queer” lifestyles become prominent – gay men who announce their presence and straight women who refuse to conform to traditions of domesticity and self-effacement – Jake’s response is nevertheless traceable to turn-of-the-century thinkers such as Freud, Havelock Ellis, Richard Krafft-Ebing, and Max Nordau, who admitted the existence of queer lifestyles but only as a pathological condition. Jake’s seeking to enhance his sense of manhood by pathologizing Brett’s queer company undeniably bears all the marks of its historical moment. Yet his attitude is explicable in terms other than mere homophobia. Jake has heterosexual desire but suffers from an unspecified wound to his genitals that has him telling the prostitute Georgette “Never mind” (SAR 15) when she touches him; the gay men dancing with Georgette and accom- panying Brett have the equipment but no heterosexual desire. Jake’s contempt for the gay men therefore makes sense in a logic of psychic displacement: they have the capacity for everything he wants but can never have. What is more, they remind him of all he lacks. Worse, they do not even want it! Reminding us that Hemingway’s lost generation emerges from multiple historical contexts, this scene reframes Jake’s contemptu- ous response as a complex psychic maneuver caused by the aftershocks of the war rippling through postwar societies. The scene, in fact, brings virtually every expectation about sexual relationships to an impasse. The gay men dance with a woman, and she spends the evening with many men who will not or cannot use her services. Brett spends her time with the same crew, snubbing the one man Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Masculinity 283 who extends an invitation of heterosexual performance (Robert Cohn). Jake, Georgette says, is a “Little girl” (SAR 14); Brett has her hair brushed back “like a boy’s” (SAR 22). Crucially, this sexual landscape of lack, displacement, and substitution does not necessarily imply a yearning for sexual normalcy to set against the queer. In fact Jake’s wound cannot be undone; he is going to have to find his way “in between” multiple, shifting sexual categories. His contempt for the troublingly queer, transgendered nightclub world of 1920s Paris therefore must be seen as a symptom of the fact that he belongs there. Jake’s most sustained effort to deal with his gender trouble comes during his time in Spain. Here, his attempts to consolidate his shaky sense of masculinity by aligning himself with Pedro Romero and the rituals of bullfighting suggest a strategy of compensatory manhood Hemingway commonly employs, as if the burden of anxious, fragmenting manhood can be alleviated by looking to other ethnicities and races that still seem solidly connected to the archaic, the earth, nature, myth – all that might be thought to predate the disruptive forces of modernity. Romero possesses “the old thing” (SAR 168), a dedication to the core principles of bullfighting that other toreros are beginning to sell out in their commer- cialized embrace of “tricks” and “faked” emotion (SAR 167, 168). Jake reads Romero as an archetype: the hero battling a monster, battling death. Other moments in Hemingway’s writings indicate his persistent interest in what premodern cultures might offer modern men. The Spanish/ Cuban peasant Santiago in Old Man, like Romero, endures an epic battle with a giant sea monster (a marlin). The title “Big Two-Hearted River” suggests that Nick’s lonely sojourn in the wilderness can be read as a sort of Native American vision quest into a still regenerative natural world out of the “burned-over country” (IOT 133) of modern civilization. Ironically, Nick’s quest stands a chance of succeeding only because there are no Native American characters actually present, which implies, as Toni Morrison argues about Hemingway (and other white American writers), that his concerns about “manhood” are really centered on white, Anglo-American masculinity while ethnic and racial “others” are reduced to representative roles; the “other” stands for what the real characters of interest have lost.12 The appearance of a black (American) drummer in Sun implies a greater cultural prominence for African Americans in the early twentieth century – African American-inspired music gives its name to the so-called Jazz Age – but Jake stereotypically describes him as “all teeth and lips” (SAR 62). More complicatedly, Bill Gorton uses the most racist-sounding language to tell Jake about his attempts to defend Spec SD1 Date 26-july

284 Strychacz an African American boxer from racist treatment. Subtly, the boxer presents some interesting parallels to other male characters. Like Jake and Romero, he is beaten by an unjust world; like Romero, he rises above it by holding true to principles. The implication here that a concept of (wounded) masculinity can be extended across racial and ethnic boundaries is perhaps dubious, since the violence wreaked on Jake is random and (arguably) not unjust, whereas the hostility shown toward the boxer is unjust and not at all random. But, importantly, Hemingway can and does analyze a man’s situation in terms of specific social injustices rather than of universal existential conditions, as Dick Boulton’s cameo in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” suggests. The doctor wants to interpret Boulton’s recalcitrance about cutting logs as a lazy refusal to work off a debt. Yet the logs that Boulton claims are “stolen” (IOT 24) reveal an alternative perspective emphasizing the theft of Ojibway land and resources by the tellingly named White and McNally company and, by extension, the doctor’s fenced property. Boulton’s refusal to close the gate upon departing is his challenge to the history of cultural domination underpinning the doctor’s assumption of superiority. Hemingway’s most mature effort to grasp the changing nature of masculinity in relationship to a political context may, however, be For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), published at the end of a decade in which the Great Depression made definitions of manhood grounded in economic achievement ever more suspect, in which socialist intellectuals called for a new commitment to collective social change, and in which the ominous rise of fascist power led to the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and thence to World War II. Unlike Farewell, For Whom the Bell Tolls defines Robert Jordan through his commitment to a military task; unlike Jake in Sun, Jordan seems unable to find in Spanish culture a source of powerful, authentic premodernism. Providing superior military tactics and firepower, Jordan in many ways introduces the cave-dwelling guerrillas to modernity. If the Republicans are to survive, he implies, they must adopt some of the same strategies that make the fascist bombers so menacing, their goals and structure of command invisible, their pilots inaccessible, their powers of surveillance god-like, their domination of individuals on the ground virtually total. The bombers represent a new sort of power: an anonymous, invisible, yet intelligently organized power that wields humans as relays within its abstract structures. Its potency had been demonstrated in the obliteration of Guernica in 1937 by German and Nationalist bombers. In Pablo Picasso’s famous painting commemorating Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Masculinity 285 that event (Guernica [1937]), a glaring electric light bulb replacing the eye of God oversees the fractured bodies beneath, while a hand clutching a broken sword suggests the futility of one man resisting this sort of total power. The destruction of El Sordo’s guerrilla group by bombers in For Whom the Bell Tolls recalls Picasso’s insight; so does the inevitable failure of the Republican advance, eviscerated by anonymous spy networks before the action of the novel even begins. But the larger dilemma Hemingway grapples with here is not so much that individual men are powerless but whether the strategies available for battling fascist power might not reen- act the same invisible webs of power. When Jordan places Nationalist forces under secret surveillance, or when he offers a tutorial in how to hide machine guns in order to set up the best killing fields, he does perhaps what is necessary. But the necessary draws him perilously close to a nightmarish twentieth-century logic of total surveillance and precision mass killing. A decade later, the heroic, humble Santiago of Old Man departs in important ways from Jordan’s complex dynamic of heroism elaborated through and by inhuman, abstract systems. The novella’s assertion that “man is not made for defeat” (OMS 103) implies a new confidence after the defeat of Nazi Germany. This is not to say that Santiago can be simply identified with postwar redefinitions of masculinity in the United States as they began to coalesce around Cold War militarism: trying to reclaim traditional sources of male authority, demonizing gays, communists, and other alternative masculinities, celebrating American cultural and military power. In fact the decidedly solitary nature of his heroism seems designed to respond to the novella’s historical moment by standing apart from it. That has allowed some to read Santiago as the quintessential Hemingway hero. More convincing, Santiago’s fighting of a mano a mano duel and looking his conquered antagonist in the eye represents a quiet withdrawal from the terrifying prospect Hemingway confronted in For Whom the Bell Tolls of men mesmerized by total power. By the time of the author’s death in 1961, that insight had come to seem all too prescient.

Notes 1. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3. 2. See C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

286 Strychacz

3. M. S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 123. 4. See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformations of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 5. P. Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harbinger, Brace & World, 1966). 6. See J. Fetterley, “A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway’s ‘Resentful Cryptogram,’” The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 46–71. 7. See R. Whitlow, Cassandra’s Daughters: The Women in Hemingway (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). 8. See L. R. Broer and G. Holland (eds.), Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 9. See S. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 10. N. R. Comley and R. Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); C. Eby, Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); R. Fantina, Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); J. G. Kennedy, “Hemingway’s Gender Trouble,” American Literature 63.2 (1991), 187–207; D. A. Moddelmog, Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); M. Spilka, Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); T. Strychacz, Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 11. See Eby, Fantina, and J. Hemingway, Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2007). 12. See T. Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); for a more sympathetic reading of the “other” in Hemingway, see A. L. Strong, Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 28 Politics Robert E. Fleming

By the time of his death in 1961, Ernest Hemingway had become a popular icon: Papa to millions, he was a hard-drinking, often-married adventurer whose sensitive but tough exemplars of individualism were known worldwide. Less recognized were Hemingway’s political views, even by six major biographers who spent years studying him. Keneth Kinnamon ably summarized their differing opinions in a 1996 essay: Hemingway was a conservative “fierce individualist” who made “only a token commitment to the class struggle.” He was politically naive and bored with politics but occasionally became a situational leftist. He was “one of the least overtly political writers of his generation.” Kinnamon’s own conclusion was that in spite of his “individualism and his distrust of politicians, Ernest Hemingway was always on the left.”1 This disagreement among experts calls for an examination of the influences that determined Hemingway’s changing views throughout his career. Born at the end of the nineteenth century (July 21, 1899), Hemingway was to live through much of a politically turbulent century that would include two world wars, a civil war in Spain, and a revolution in his longtime adopted home, Cuba. A boy during the presidency of his boyhood hero, Theodore Roosevelt, Hemingway dined with Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 and looked forward hopefully in 1961, his last year of life, to a bright future in an America led by the youthful John F. Kennedy. Hemingway experienced the major social experiment of Prohibition (1920–33) and cheered its repeal, saw the effects of the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, and scornfully watched the establishment of the second Roosevelt’s New Deal. Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, an upper-middle-class village outside the growing city of Chicago and a conservative stronghold of the Republican Party. Both of his grandfathers had served with the Union Army during the Civil War, and he wrote in a 1948 letter that his paternal grandfather had never knowingly sat at dinner with a 287 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

288 Fleming member of the Democratic Party (SL 648). But Hemingway’s boyhood enthusiasm for Republican Theodore Roosevelt had less to do with the president’s political life – he claimed in that same letter that his only participation in a presidential election had been to vote for Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs in 1920 – than with Roosevelt’s role as a hunter and amateur natural scientist who collected specimens for museums such as Chicago’s Field Museum. Neither his hometown’s Republicanism nor Roosevelt’s progressive agenda shaped Hemingway’s political orientation. He ranged from conservative resistance to big government to support for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, which is why understanding the context of his different stances is so important. Theodore Roosevelt’s attempted political comeback as a third-party candidate failed, and Woodrow Wilson became president after the 1912 election. When World War I erupted in January 1914, Wilson vowed to keep the United States out of it, a popular stance in isolationist America. Hemingway, then a student in Oak Park and River Forest High School, was too deeply involved with high school journalism and sports to feel the effects of that policy. But by April 1917, the country had been drawn into the war. Hemingway and fellow Kansas City Star reporter Ted Brumback both enlisted in the American Red Cross. By June 1918, Hemingway was in an ambulance unit in Italy, and on July 8 he was badly wounded while on canteen service at the front. After months in a Milan hospital and a course of physical therapy, he returned to Oak Park in early 1919. His personal experience of this war was complete, but its political causes and the reasons for how it was conducted were not yet apparent to him. Over the next ten years, Hemingway would study the history of the war and develop the perspective needed to turn his experience into literature. Even more important to his understanding was his work as a correspondent reporting on European postwar politics for the Toronto Star, following his move to France at the end of 1921. He covered a major economic conference in Genoa, Italy; the Greco-Turkish War during 1922 and 1923; the flight of refugees from the battle sites in Asia Minor; and the Lausanne Peace Conference set up to end that conflict. In addition to firsthand experience, he had the advantage of associating with veteran political correspondents, who furnished a more mature outlook than would have been possible to a beginner. Hemingway’s reports ranged from light feature stories such as “It’s Easy to Spend a Million Marks” (1923), treating Germany’s postwar inflation, to attempts at serious political analysis. He was still not a master of his new trade, as indicated by Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Politics 289 another 1923 article, “Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer,” in which he ridiculed and seriously underestimated the future dictator of Italy. During his years as a journalist, he was also attempting to make sense of his experience in fiction, beginning with single-page sketches incorporat- ing his own actions or summing up those of others. From these sketches, published in 1924 in the slim volume in our time, he moved on to stories that made significant political points on the human cost of war. “Soldier’s Home,” written in 1924, illustrates civilians’ inability to comprehend the reality of war and derides the wartime political propaganda that had been used to combat American isolationism. “Now I Lay Me,” written two years later, shows the psychological price paid by soldiers in the new kind of war being fought in the twentieth century. The Sun Also Rises (1926) approaches the war indirectly by showing the moral bankruptcy fostered by the war. But Hemingway was not ready to treat the war and its politics at length until ten years after his own major wound in 1918. A Farewell to Arms (1929) finally embodied what Hemingway had learned from his wartime experience and from the intervening years of living in Europe and reporting on postwar political maneuvering. From the second page of the novel, his new awareness of the war’s political background and causes is apparent. Italian infantrymen near the front are splashed with mud by passing traffic, but the worst offenders are “small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat . . . and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting beside two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King” (FTA 4). Dwarfed as he is, the king is responsible, in the infantrymen’s eyes, for the decisions that may lead to their deaths. Unfit leaders are further targeted when Frederic Henry muses on the generals who carry out the nation’s policies: there are no Napoleons leading Italian soldiers, who are commanded by “Il Generale Cadorna, fat and prosperous, and Vittorio Emmanuele, the tiny man with the long thin neck and the goat beard. Over on the right they had the Duke of Aosta . . . Lots of them would have liked him to be king. He looked like a king” (FTA 36–7). The ambulance drivers Lt. Henry commands reflect his own uneasiness with the Italian government. All are pacifists, and they question the purpose of the war, mock the more enthusiastic soldiers going into battle, and would prefer to retreat to their homes in hopes the Austrians Spec SD1 Date 26-july

290 Fleming would do the same. Later, after conflicting orders have caused the disastrous retreat from Caporetto, one of their number walks back toward the advancing Austrian troops, deliberately allowing himself to be captured. It is a sure sign of bad leadership that the only casualties suffered in actual face-to-face combat are Italians shot by other Italians, either through sheer panic or misguided attempts to reestablish discipline. Like Frederic Henry, the Hemingway who wrote the story was older and more sophisticated than the eighteen-year-old Red Cross volunteer wounded after only a few weeks of service at the front. Domestic political issues also claimed Hemingway’s attention as a journalist. While he was still living in Chicago, the United States had embarked upon a major social experiment, the prohibition of alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution forbidding the manufacture, sale, or transportation of liquor was ratified by the states in January 1919 and went into effect, enforced by the Volstead Act, in January 1920. Soon the culture of the United States changed profoundly. An initial decline in drinking gave way to evasions of the law, and organized crime set up distribution systems and fought wars against federal enforcers and members of rival gangs. In July 1921, Hemingway assessed the success of the new law in Chicago with a story, “Chicago Never Wetter Than Today” in the Toronto Star Weekly. He reported, “Anyone wanting a drink in Chicago now goes into a bar and gets it . . . if he has seventy-five cents” DLT( 75). In addition, he claimed that the city police did not enforce the law (unless a stubborn bartender refused to pay for police protection), and the federal law enforcement presence in Chicago consisted of an office staff of four and four field agents guarding a warehouse. Hemingway ended the story with the prediction that more agents would eventually be sent to Chicago, but that in mid-1921, “Liquor is one of the leading occupations” (DLT 77). The failure of Chicago’s political leadership to enforce the liquor laws spilled over into the growth of violent crime. In “Wild West Chicago” (DLT 58–9) Hemingway wrote that there was a murder every forty-eight hours in the city, and in “Ballot Bullets” (DLT 73–4) he related how political races could involve bombing of the homes of candidates for alderman or shootings by rivals. Six years later he employed a gangland slaying and the casual response of the electorate in the closing words of “The Killers”: “‘He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago . . . Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for’” CSS( 222). Clearly, by 1927, the public so readily accepted armed violence by Chicago gangs that Nick Adams’s effort to thwart the killers is seen as naive and dangerous. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Politics 291 Although Hemingway became engaged with international and domestic politics in the 1920s, he seemed to lose touch with political issues in the early 1930s. He and his second wife, Pauline, had settled in Key West, but when the Wall Street crash ushered in the Great Depression in October and November of 1929, they were traveling in Europe. At first, the Depression had little effect on Hemingway. With a wealthy wife, he had resources other than earnings from his writing, and A Farewell to Arms, published in September 1929, sold at a brisk pace, nearly eighty thousand copies by February 1930.2 However, the Depression brought changes to Hemingway’s sales, and, more important, to his literary reputation. Even as banks failed and workers were laid off all over the nation, Hemingway was immersed in a study of the bullfight. Planned as a picture book with little text, Death in the Afternoon (1932) evolved into a tome of almost 500 pages. Nearly 100 pages of illustrations made the book expensive, and the timing of its publication meant that many Americans could not afford it. Scribner’s produced a first printing of just over ten thousand copies, one-third the size of the first printing of A Farewell to Arms (Baker 411). Confirming that Hemingway had lost touch with the social and political realities of mainstream America, in 1933 he began to write for Esquire, an expensive magazine targeting wealthy consumers, and in 1935 he published Green Hills of Africa, an account of his African safari of 1933–4, largely underwritten by Pauline’s wealthy uncle, Gus Pfeiffer. Together his work in the early 1930s completely disregarded many readers’ daily struggle for survival and provoked a critical attack that was strongest from leftist critics, but spread to neutral reviewers as well. However, even though he had written in a 1934 Esquire column, “don’t let [the critics] suck you in to start writing about the proletariat . . . just to please the recently politically enlightened critics” (BL 184), Hemingway was not without sympathy for the common American. His short story “The Tradesman’s Return” (1936) documented the economic plight of the residents of Key West. Although the title of the novel that eventually grew out of “The Tradesman’s Return,” To Have and Have Not (1937), had Marxist overtones, and Hemingway negatively characterized the idle rich who moored their boats in the Key West harbor, he also satirized Richard Gordon, a writer who exploits the Depression by grinding out novels about the proletariat. Gordon’s novels are popular with his own class and with the critical establishment but are rejected by a World War I veteran, a genuine member of the proletariat. Hemingway thus supported the working class while disparaging opportunistic leftist writers. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

292 Fleming He also tackled a more specific political cause during this time: After the 1932 Bonus March on Washington in which World War I veterans demanded immediate payment of “bonuses” they were to receive in 1945, some veterans sent to southern Florida on a federal make-work project were killed in a hurricane. In “Who Murdered the Vets?” published in New Masses in 1935, Hemingway blamed the Roosevelt administration. He followed the article with a satirical portrait of a vacationing bureau- crat in To Have and Have Not (1937). But only Hemingway’s departure to cover the Spanish Civil War would redeem him from the charge that he was out of touch with political issues. In the 1930s, Spain had undergone a significant change in government after the ousting of General Primo de Rivera and the exile of King Alfonso. The constitution ratified in 1931 established the Spanish Republic, breaking the power of the monarchy and the Catholic Church. But in 1936, General Francisco Franco, with the aid of fascist Italy, invaded Spain from his base in Spanish Morocco. Because Hemingway agreed to cover the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance, he could enter the country in spite of America’s neutrality. He was in and out of Spain from February 1937 through November 1938, almost to the end of the war with the fall of Madrid in April 1939. He supported the Republic with a number of articles sympathetic to its cause such as “Shelling of Madrid” and “A New Kind of War,” both of which emphasized civilian deaths at the hands of the Falangists, the Spanish fascist forces. More significantly, he joined John Dos Passos and Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens in making a propaganda film, The Spanish Earth, in favor of the Republic. His involvement encouraged Ivens (who served the Communist Party as what one historian terms a “case officer”) to attempt to recruit Hemingway.3 The effort was unsuccessful, but led FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to classify Hemingway as a “Red” and to seek incrimi- nating evidence until Hemingway’s death. In addition to news dispatches about the conflict, Hemingway wrote a play, The Fifth Column, and a number of short stories, most of which either favored the Republican cause or emphasized the tragedies inherent in wartime. However, the final story, “Under the Ridge,” suggests that Hemingway’s enthusiasm for the communist allies of the Republic was wearing thin. Two mysterious foreigners in civilian clothes track down and execute an officer of the International Brigades (who were individual volunteers from neutral countries) for desertion after he walks away from certain death in a badly planned battle. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Politics 293 Even though Hemingway had avoided wholesale endorsement of the political left in his earlier work, the news that he had begun a novel about the Spanish Civil War awakened assumptions that he would favor the failed Republic’s defense against Franco’s forces. Instead, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was critical not merely of the International Brigades, Soviet-style “secret police and . . . propaganda agents [but also of] Communist ideology.”4 While the novel sold well and was reviewed positively by most mainstream publications, a sizeable minority of reviewers treated it as an act of treason toward the left. Even sixty years later, one political scientist has condemned both To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bells Tolls as “politically unhelpful” because of their cynicism and pessimism about politics.5 Hemingway experienced the effects of World War II on both the Pacific and Atlantic fronts. In a 1941 trip to China, he played a supporting role to his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, who was covering the war for Collier’s. He signed on with PM, a relative newcomer in American journalism. China had been attempting to repel the invading Japanese without popular support from the United States, which still harbored isolationist tendencies and objected to sending men or materiel to Europe; the American public was even less concerned about the war in Asia. Hemingway’s journalistic accounts were obviously intended to raise public awareness of the Japanese threat some six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. “Rubber Supplies in Dutch East Indies,” published in June 1941, suggested that Japan had designs on four-fifths of the rubber supply in the world, a policy that would affect every “American who drives a car, talks on a telephone, plays golf, or rides on a plane, or a train, or a bus” (BL 320). This implicit warning was followed that same month by “U. S. Aid to China,” in which he wrote that for “less than the price of a battleship” the United States could “tie up” the Japanese in China “for six to ten months” (BL 325). In “China’s Air Needs” and “Chinese Build Air Fields,” he specified exactly what the United States could do to help. While Hemingway’s perceptiveness as a political thinker was doubted by some, Pearl Harbor would prove him right about Japan. Despite his engagement with the onset of World War II, Hemingway returned to Cuba after a quiet fall in Sun Valley, Idaho. He had no new book on the horizon but produced an introduction to the anthology Men at War. However, the presence of German spies and saboteurs in Cuba and of German submarines in the waters between Cuba and Florida inspired Hemingway to propose unique counterintelligence efforts. First, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

294 Fleming with the support of the American ambassador to Cuba, he mobilized a diverse group of Cubans and displaced Spaniards to investigate the activities of an estimated thirty thousand former Falangist supporters in Cuba, who could be assumed to be sympathetic to European fascism. Then, inspired by a public service call for Florida yacht owners to lend boats or to aid military submarine spotters in the Gulf of Mexico shipping lanes, he received permission to outfit his fishing boat, the Pilar, for reconnais- sance duty in the waters north of Cuba. While the Pilar never succeeded in closing with a submarine, Hemingway’s activities reawakened J. Edgar Hoover’s suspicions. In 1943, Martha accepted an assignment in Europe as a correspondent for Collier’s and persuaded Hemingway to join her. Eventually he also signed on with Collier’s. Between July and November 1944, Hemingway filed just six dispatches, including “Voyage to Victory” about the June 6 Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy in German-occupied France. Contrary to folklore, Hemingway did not land with the troops, but he did ride to Fox Green beach in a landing craft and described the action in detail. Other dispatches described England’s defense against the V-1 “buzz bombs,” the liberation of Paris, and the invasion of Germany. One dispatch, “The G.I. and the General,” employs short story techniques to show how difficult are the burdens of commanders and how little they are understood by the troops. Though few, his dispatches treated major action. Ironically, Hemingway saw more of war as a journalist in World War II than he had seen as a participant in the front lines of World War I, but few publications resulted. The major fruit of his experience during the war was the embedded story of the protagonist of Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), Colonel Richard Cantwell, a professional soldier who, like Hemingway, had survived two world wars. Cantwell, a Brigadier General in World War II, has been demoted to colonel for losing far too many troops while attempting to follow impossible orders from the high command; Cantwell exhibits the mistrust that battle-hardened officers harbor against higher ranks who lack practical combat experience. Hemingway’s subtext seems to reveal his reservations about the leaders of the U.S. army, Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, both administra- tors lacking battlefield experience. Hemingway wrote in a 1945 letter to Maxwell Perkins that Eisenhower was a “fairly good general”; he considered Omar Bradley “a much better general” (SL 595). The Korean War (1950–3) presented another opportunity for Hemingway to study military conflict, but he made no effort to get to it. Perhaps the horrors he had seen in Europe had killed his appetite for action. Instead, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Politics 295 he and fourth wife Mary embarked on his second African safari that fall. He could not, however, ignore a conflict closer to home. By the late 1950s Cuba was embroiled in a revolution against the government of right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled Cuba since the 1930s with the tacit approval of the United States. Early in 1959, Batista fled the island and Fidel Castro became the new prime minister. In a 1960 letter to General Charles T. Lanham, Hemingway wrote he was a good American but he believed “in the historical necessity of the Cuban revolution” (SL 899). Nevertheless, he found it increasingly awkward to live in Cuba, and the letter was written from Idaho. His life in Idaho was plagued by poor health, aggravated by the suspicion that the Internal Revenue Service, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was investigating him for political reasons. Privately Hemingway had been critical of U.S. presidents: He hated the New Deal, chafed under the tax laws, saw Harry Truman as an “unsuccessful haberdasher” (SL 634), and refused a request from the editor of the New York Times Book Review to endorse Eisenhower for reelection in 1956, but he never publicly stated what he thought of a sitting president. It was, therefore, surprising that one of his final acts was to congratulate John F. Kennedy upon his inauguration (SL 916). Perhaps biographers and critics have found it difficult to classify Hemingway because his political attitudes conformed to his times and experiences, not to the promptings of any constant political philosophy. A naive, apolitical youth, he rushed off to the Great War, partly from patriotism but more from his need for adventure; when he reviewed his wartime experience, he recognized it as the result of a political situation so unstable that it could be ignited by an assassin’s bullet. While early exposure to the corrupt Chicago political machine predisposed him to mistrust politicians, his experiences with European politics confirmed his cynicism. Later he saw neighbors affected by the Depression and saw innocent civilians bombed by an invading fascist army: his individualism turned to sympathy and he put his art, and at times his life, on the line. But when the rescuers of the Republic proved as venal as their enemies, he rejected them in turn. Although Hemingway never chose politics as his primary subject, the political events of his time inevitably affected his point of view in his art as well as his private life.

Notes 1. K. Kinnamon, “Hemingway and Politics,” in S. Donaldson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 149–69; 149, 168. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

296 Fleming

2. C. Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 4th edn. (Princeton University Press, 1972), 411. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. W. B. Watson, “Joris Ivens and the Communists: Bringing Hemingway into the Spanish Civil War,” The Hemingway Review 10.1 (1990), 2–18; 3. 4. W. B. Watson, “Hemingway’s Attacks on the Communists in For Whom the Bells Tolls,” North Dakota Quarterly 60.2 (1992), 103–18; 109. 5. W. Curtis, “Hemingway, Hopelessness, and Liberalism,” in L. Conklin Frederking (ed.), Hemingway in Politics and Rebellion (New York: Routledge, 2010), 50–72; 51. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 29 Publishing Industry and Scribner’s Leonard J. Leff

In The Sun Also Rises, the noble bullfighter Pedro Romero enters theplaza de toros aware of – but not in thrall to – its spectators, including Lady Ashley. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon. (SAR 220) Hemingway – occasional news stories to the contrary – never fought bulls. As an artist, though, he thought of himself as a literary Romero, uncompromising and pure, aware of the public but determined always to perform “for himself inside.” Notwithstanding these ambitions, he aspired to the status of professional writer even as (especially early in his career) he scorned the word professional for its kinship with money and commerce and its presumed opposition to serious literature. He likewise hungered for the fame he pretended to shun, the fame that he believed could cheapen his work. In short, he was enormously talented but greatly conflicted about his participation in the literary marketplace. His choice of publishers was thus crucial. “The great interest in publishing,” editor Maxwell Perkins once told Hemingway, “is to take on an author at the start, or reasonably near it, and then to publish not this book and that, but the whole author.”1 Having been on the editorial staff of Charles Scribner’s Sons since 1914, and having edited such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, Perkins spoke from experience. Nonetheless his association with Hemingway, which began with Hemingway’s first novel, required great sensitivity. Hemingway expected to rewrite and revise his own work, but he needed an editor as liaison to and (paradoxically) insulation from the marketplace. Perkins was ideal. In a dynamic period in the book trade, when “gentleman publishers” were fading away and young authors were challenging genteel tastes, Perkins communicated to Hemingway that,

297 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

298 Leff together, they were not manufacturing commodities but creating literature. This willful fiction helps explain the longevity of their relationship even as it bears witness to the entrepreneurial world of American publishing in the first half of the twentieth century. Hemingway and Perkins launched their association in the 1920s, the onset of the era of modern advertising – bold and noisy and profession- alized. Anything could be sold, even books, if only they were marketed well. The sales leader of 1925 and 1926 was Bruce Barton’sThe Man Nobody Knows, a portrait of Christ as hustler and business executive. He was Babbitt without tears, and the astounding reception accorded the book showed that, whatever else, America rewarded those who knew how to package goods – including literary works. Boni & Liveright, Hemingway’s first U.S. publisher, whose list mixed both popular and serious literature, was part of an advance guard that championed not only changing values and tastes in fiction but also recent industry practices that linked publishing to Broadway and Hollywood. That Liveright and several other prominent young publishers were Jewish made their advocacy of innovative literary – and promotional – tendencies seem even more audacious. The decade’s exceptional prosperity, increased literacy, and urban population growth encouraged publishers to seek out modernists, like Hemingway, whose in our time was published in Paris around spring 1924. Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins about the slim volume and its author. By spring 1925, however, Boni & Liveright had signed Hemingway to a contract for a story collection and at least one novel. As In Our Time (published October 5, 1925) went forward, Hemingway grew disillusioned with his publishers – their financial precariousness, their roster and support of flashy pop authors, and, from Hemingway’s point of view, their neglect of his first American book. “That you should criticize our exploiting of In Our Time is ridiculous,” Liveright responded in January 1926. “In Our Time will sell some day – after your first successful novel.”2 Fitzgerald talked to Hemingway about Scribner’s, which, like many older companies, had deep roots in the past. Scribner’s announced rather than sold books. It was the house that had published Henry James and (off and on) Edith Wharton. Though both a cultural and a for-profit enterprise – as well as the publisher of the well-received Fitzgerald novel This Side of Paradise – it seemed less a crossroads of contemporary American literature than a museum. Perkins, however, was not content to be a passive curator, and Hemingway was persuaded that he belonged with Scribner’s. Consequently, as though he had planned it (and he may have), Hemingway wrote a satire targeting Sherwood Anderson and offered Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Publishing Industry and Scribner’s 299 it to Liveright as the second book in their contract. Rather than offend Anderson, whom Liveright published, the firm declined The Torrents of Spring and freed Scribner’s to take up both the title and its author.3 When Perkins read The Sun Also Rises, which Hemingway had submitted a month before Scribner’s published Torrents (May 28, 1926), he grasped at once its achievement, from the precision of the writing to the immediacy of the characterizations and descriptions. Among his few reservations were what he saw as Hemingway’s snide allusions to his literary forebears and – more pressing – the points at which the manuscript alluded to venereal disease, promiscuity, and homosexuality. No less problematic were a first person narrator with a devastating and intimate war wound and his or others’ use of such words as balls, bitch, and (by implication) shitty. Even worse, Perkins could not assure members of Scribner’s editorial board that the author would accede to alterations and thus preserve the publisher’s historical role as a standard bearer of well-established American literary values.4 Hemingway told Perkins that certain words “used in conversation in The Sun etc. [were] justified by the tragedy of the story”SL ( 211). Perkins agreed, but the clout of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, like that of the Watch and Ward Society in Boston, though weaker after the war, had made publishers wary of the purity campaigns against cen- sorable material, especially as it touched on homosexuality. As Perkins seems to have understood, however, gossip about a neutered Sun could discourage other contemporary authors whom he might wish to attract. To the relief of Perkins and Scribner’s, Hemingway agreed to cut the more flagrant affronts to mainstream taste as well as the satiric or sneer- ing references to other writers. Production of the novel went forward. The author was meanwhile winning a wider audience for his short stories. “The Undefeated” (published originally in This Quarter) was accepted for Best Short Stories of 1926, and Jonathan Cape, one of the new wave of publishers in Great Britain, accepted In Our Time for publication. The venues lent Hemingway, respectively, prestige and visibility – even as he noted to Perkins (September 7, 1926), tongue in cheek, or maybe not, “I suppose that all [publication] becomes publicity” (SL 216). Publicity would be useful for an author whose fiction was revolutionary and whose potential readers were accustomed to seeing at least one-half of the iceberg (not one-eighth) above water. But Perkins would not allow Hemingway’s modernism to become a barrier to a broad readership. In fact, throughout the 1920s, Scribner’s would sometimes con- textualize Hemingway as a “new and improved version” of authors Spec SD1 Date 26-july

300 Leff consumers already knew and liked (Turner 170). The notion of publishers calling upon popular authors to endorse the work of their literary con- frères became commonplace among companies. Its message was clear: middlebrow readers could acquire cultural capital and take pleasure in literary fiction. If Hollywood or Broadway producers also became interested in the author or adaptations of the property, so much the better. It was another facet of the marketplace that Hemingway would gradually come to accept. Following another new trend in the industry, Perkins submitted Sun to the then-new Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). Book publishers saw the Club and its clones as price cutters and profit stealers. Authors saw them as mainstreamers. The criticism was almost fair. The BOMC, for instance, adopted Sun, then, owing to its “somewhat disagreeable” content, barred it from becoming a featured book.5 This reaction was not unique. Reviews of the novel (published October 22, 1926) ranged from positive ones that praised the style to negative ones that echoed the concerns of the BOMC. Bookstore sales were good, boosted, perhaps, by publicity that the author had himself fought bulls (Turner 154). Hemingway was ambivalent about such coverage: he canceled the clipping service that sent him newspapers’ mentions of his name or reproductions of his photographs, then, later, resubscribed. By the time Men Without Women (published October 14, 1927) reached retailers, Hemingway was an established author. His books and their sales were one indication, and an offer of $10,000 and $15,000 from Hearst publications for (respectively) the serial and movie rights to his as-yet-unwritten next novel was another. “I was pretty badly tempted,” Hemingway wrote Perkins on June 24, 1927. But the vision of that much money (early on Hemingway wanted $30,000 for the motion picture rights alone) was one reason he abandoned negotiations, thus postpon- ing the question of what impact Hollywood movies and the ballyhoo surrounding their release could have on his reputation (Bruccoli 63). It helped that his patron by marriage – Gus Pfeiffer, uncle to Pauline (Hemingway’s second wife) – gave him the wherewithal to keep his head in the new novel that Hearst and Cosmopolitan wanted, the work that became A Farewell to Arms. Reading the latter in manuscript on a visit to Key West, Perkins marveled at its directness and poignancy. As with Sun, he recommended no substantive changes. The salient points of discussion between editor and author involved, again, certain actions and words, among them balls, fucking, and cock- sucker. Perkins warned that, without changes, Farewell could be Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Publishing Industry and Scribner’s 301 suppressed. (In fact, Boston banned the second installment of the novel’s serialization because of its “salacious” content – even after Scribner’s Magazine had already made cuts.6) As the struggle to publish a far more inflammatory work, James Joyce’s Ulysses, slowly wended its controversial way through the American courts of law and public opinion, Hemingway bowed to the inevitable. Castigating himself, he was, he wrote Perkins, on October 3, 1929, “a Professional Writer now – Than which there isn’t anything lower” (Bruccoli 119).7 Perhaps so, but when what he called his “long tale of transalpine fornication”8 was published (September 27, 1929), the response was overwhelmingly positive. “Here Is Genius” read the headline atop the review of Farewell in the Chicago Daily Tribune.9 Here, too, were sales, as early as November 1929, thirty-three thousand copies, a figure that grew to over one hundred thousand. His protests to the contrary, what Hemingway wrote was increasingly linked to who Hemingway was. In addition to photographs of the author displayed alongside the Scribner’s Magazine serialization, other snapshots – furnished by Scribner’s, accenting his rugged good looks, often while fishing or skiing – appeared in newspapers. Hemingway was an exceptionally attractive subject. He was photogenic, and led the sort of life, apart from his writing, that made readers interested in him. With the discreet assistance of Scribner’s, newspapers featured him as much for his adventurous lifestyle as for his writing. Notwithstanding the horizon of expectations that a novel like Farewell created, Hemingway meanwhile began writing a nonfiction volume about Spanish bullfighting traditions. He had not abandoned fiction: he not only wrote and published short stories in 1930 and 1931 but earned further exposure in a revised reprint of In Our Time (published by Scribner’s on October 24, 1930). His attention, however, was on Death in the Afternoon. The title alluded to tauromaquia, the art of bullfighting, but the content included observations on fear and courage, and on writers and the writing life. At the center was the voice of “Papa.” Marking progress since the battle over words in Farewell, Death in the Afternoon (published September 23, 1932) appeared with fuck as f – k and shit left unchanged. Reviews of the book, generally mixed, commented on its breadth, but sales were slowed by the Depression and the $3.50 list price as well as the perception that the book shut out average readers. Then, too, as Perkins gently reminded Hemingway, the public expected or preferred fiction from its established writers of fiction. Another short story collection, Winner Take Nothing (published October 27, 1933), had unexceptional sales, and the next book, Green Hills Spec SD1 Date 26-july

302 Leff of Africa, promised no better. Cosmopolitan had contemplated serializing Green Hills (published October 25, 1935), then passed.10 Scribner’s meanwhile printed just over half as many copies as it had of Death. The press run spoke bluntly. Perkins, though, would not presume to tell Hemingway to bend to the market: he revered Hemingway as an artist and liked him as a man; neither the mixed reviews nor the falling-off sales ofGreen Hills could change that assessment. Slack sales during a decade when nonfiction was increasingly popu- lar11 frustrated both Perkins and Hemingway, and contributed to what little friction existed between them. Scribner’s, the author complained to his editor, on December 17, 1935, did nothing “to overcome the bad daily reviews [of Green Hills] by putting ads in those paper [sic] quoting from the good weekly reviews when it would have done some good” (Bruccoli 229).12 (Except for posthumous works – which Scribner’s would also publish – Green Hills was Hemingway’s last full-length nonfiction.) Perkins believed that sales drove advertising; when a book sold well, the advertising – which since the early 1930s at Scribner’s had included direct mail circulars – increased commensurately. It was hard if not impossible to move a book that the public had rejected, a fact that Hemingway would face several more times in the years ahead. Perkins could convey this belief only through veiled hints. But even as sales of Hemingway books declined, the public had ever more interest in the Hemingway persona. In the 1930s, feature stories and syndicated gossip columns catered to a desire to know the renowned. Publicity for Paramount Pictures’ adaptation of Farewell (1932) had treated the author, no less than Gary Cooper (Fredric Henry), as one of the production’s stars. In 1933 Hemingway fed that interest in essays for Esquire, which underscored his image as a man of experience and derring-do. He soon became a fit target forVanity Fair, which in 1934 offered readers a set of Hemingway paper dolls: “Ernie, the Neanderthal Man” (in loincloth and with club and rabbit in hand), “Ernie as the Lost Generation” (seated at a café surrounded by bottles), and “Ernie as Don Jose, the Toreador” (standing over a dead bull). The press attention would have pleased any publisher – except one concerned about the cost to an author whose attraction to fame was as strong as his fear of it.13 To Have and Have Not (published October 15, 1937) was not a course cor- rection to Hemingway’s literary reputation. Neither was The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (published October 14, 1938). Though their commercial reception was cheering, the 1930s were hard on his standing if not his earnings. At various times he blamed the economy, the critics, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Publishing Industry and Scribner’s 303 the publisher, and, sometimes, himself. Meanwhile, through good books and lesser ones, Perkins told him that his work was masterful. More telling, for more than a decade after 1929, Perkins brought out Hemingway books whose prospects in the marketplace – and whose sales – were weak. But the drought that might have prompted another publisher to drop Hemingway or renegotiate his royalties scale had almost no effect on his and Scribner’s relationship. Then again, as editor and publisher understood, Hemingway was – more so than almost any other author – a rare commodity: as long as Ernie the Intrepid Papa fascinated press and public, no Hemingway book, no matter its quality, would go unnoticed. In the book publishing climate of the late 1930s, press attention alone would help move the merchandise. In winter 1939 Hemingway was writing a short story that gradually – to the delight of his publisher – became the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Perkins offered small suggestions to improve the clarity of several short passages, but for once, the problem of “dirty words” was not at issue. Anticipating his editor’s fear of censorship – and wary of anything that might limit sales – Hemingway censored himself. As always, he used Perkins as sounding board. “What would you think of ending the book as it ends now without the epilogue?” Hemingway wrote to Perkins on August 26, 1940. “What do you think? Is it o.k. as it is? (I have fixed the emotion some and made it better)” (SL 514). The anxiety that Hemingway experienced as he prepared to surrender the novel to his publisher was understandable but unnecessary: For Whom the Bell Tolls (October 21, 1940) earned the best reviews since Farewell. Advertising for the novel also moved books – and the BOMC helped. Charles Scribner III had facilitated negotiations with the Club, which, in a letter to Fitzgerald, Perkins called the “stamp of bourgeois approval. [Hemingway] would hate to think of it that way, and yet [BOMC selection of the book] is a good thing, practically speaking.”14 Potentially more so was the sale of the movie rights. Hemingway had no less affection for Hollywood – and a residual fear that his commoditization threatened his authenticity. He nonetheless readily cashed the movie company checks that supported his increasingly expensive lifestyle. Managing his career and his fame, Hemingway could be volatile. “So please remember,” he wrote Perkins on April 27, 1931, “that when I am loud mouthed, bitter, rude, son of a bitching and mistrustful I am really very reasonable and have great confidence and absolute trust in you” (Bruccoli 157). The question of trust was no small matter, especially within an industry whose corporate heads treated books as consumer Spec SD1 Date 26-july

304 Leff goods. Over the years, in letters to his editor, Hemingway revealed his competitiveness and reveled in his dislike of other writers or their work. He reported his progress (or lack thereof) on current works, expressed his occasional testiness about royalty payouts, and voiced his concerns about the trajectory and integrity of his reputation as well as the role of Scribner’s in promoting it. Many of his statements would have tested a stronger man than Perkins. (Writing true, Hemingway told his editor on November 20, 1934, was “as hard to do as paint a Cézanne – and I’m the only bastard right now who can do it” [Bruccoli 216]). Perkins, however, had an unshakable admiration for Hemingway that allowed the author to speak openly and sometimes brusquely to him. In some peculiar way, even for Perkins, the candor deepened their relationship and encouraged Hemingway to remain at Scribner’s. Another key to continuity may in part have been Scribner’s reticence to embrace the excesses of free market capitalism – not the case with the more aggressive publishers after the war. More probable it was the reclu- sive personality of the “gentleman editor” Perkins. In a 1944 issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Cowley profiled him and, in the process, the state of publishing in the 1940s. Perkins never attends [Scribner’s] professional gatherings and he refuses to go to booksellers’ conventions. He never accepts invitations to other publishers’ cocktail parties or gives parties of his own to celebrate the publication of Scribner books. He doesn’t send notes to book reviewers telling them that something on his spring list is the greatest event since “Gone with the Wind.” He doesn’t invent plots for best-selling novels and call in his authors to write them. He doesn’t ask literary agents for hot tips or look through the magazines for new names. His authors say that he never talks to them about potential sales or movie rights.15 It was almost as if Perkins, also like Romero, did it “for himself inside.” That most literary of editors died on June 17, 1947. “But Charles Scribners Sons are my publishers and I intend to publish with them for the rest of my life,” Hemingway wrote to Charles Scribner III on June 28, 1947 (Bruccoli 345). Though neither the author nor Scribner’s gained much in artistic capital from Across the River and Into the Trees (published September 7, 1950), the book was widely reviewed and the sales reasonably good. Two years later the next Hemingway novel was a publishing juggernaut. The story of The Old Man and the Sea originated in Hemingway’s 1936 Esquire article about an old fisherman who struggles for days to land a large marlin. When the author returned to the piece in December 1950, the writing went well. Soon, as the cover of Publishers’ Weekly (July 19, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Publishing Industry and Scribner’s 305 1952) noted, Old Man would “burst upon the literary world.” The phenomenon of the mass market – having reached its apotheosis – was well suited for the exploitation of a larger than life author like Hemingway. Serialization in Life magazine (complete, September 1, 1952) anticipated publication one week later, and along with the BOMC and bookstore sales gave Hemingway enormous exposure both as a public figure and (purportedly more important to him) a public author. People who had never read him bought and read Old Man. In material if not artistic success, it was the high point of his professional career. Old Man, which signaled the end of the day-to-day relationship of Hemingway and Charles Scribner’s Sons, was dedicated to Perkins and Charles Scribner III, who had died February 11, 1952. The posthumous tribute was deserved. Though in darker moments Hemingway could per- suade himself that he worked for Scribner’s rather than vice versa, Perkins was under no such illusions. His chief function – from the 1920s to the early dawn of a powerful and integrated media culture born of World War II – was to publish and affirm Hemingway, to make palatable – and commercial – his “newness,” and to pretend that neither he nor Scribner’s nor the author was bound by the constraints of the marketplace. Finally, Perkins believed that an editor “does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author” (Bruccoli 28). No author was better treated – by editor or publisher – than Hemingway.

Notes 1. Perkins to Hemingway, October 14, 1930, M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), with the Assistance of R. W. Trogdon, The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence 1925–1947 (New York: Scribner, 1996), 150. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. W. Gilmer, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties (New York: D. Lewis, 1970), 124. 3. R. W. Trogdon, The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), 23. Subsequent references are included in the text. 4. C. Turner, Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 147. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. A. Silverman, Introduction, “Prologue: Ernest Hemingway: A Book-of- the-Month Club Connection,” in A. Silverman (ed.), The Book of the Month: Sixty Years of Books in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), 3–4; 3. 6. S. Donaldson, “Censorship and A Farewell to Arms,” Studies in American Fiction, 19.1 (1991): 85–93; 85. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

306 Leff

7. Though Hemingway may not have sent this letter, it seems to reflect less his posturing than his actual feelings at the time. 8. Hemingway to Guy Hickok, January 29, 1929, cited in J. R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 377. 9. F. Butcher, “Here Is Genius,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1929, 11. 10. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 198. Scribner’s Magazine serialized Green Hills. 11. J. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States: The Golden Age between Two Wars, 1920–1940 (New York: Bowker, 1978), vol. III, 427. 12. On potential earnings, advertising, and printings of Hemingway’s books, see appendix 1, Trogdon, 259–60. 13. L. Wagner-Martin, A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 103. 14. Perkins to Fitzgerald, September 19, 1940, in J. Kuehl and J. R. Bryer (eds.), Dear Scott/Dear Max: The F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (New York: Scribners, 1971), 266. 15. M. Cowley, “Unshaken Friend – 1,” The New Yorker, April 1, 1944, 32. My thanks to Robert Trogdon for constructive comments on an early draft of this chapter. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 30 Race and Ethnicity: African Americans Gary Edward Holcomb

The subject of Ernest Hemingway and African Americans, both fictional and actual, is a tangled one. Given that Hemingway famously remarked in 1935 that “All modern American literature comes from” Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (GHOA 22), it seems reasonable to assume that Hemingway sympathized with the fugitive slave Jim’s poignant situation. Hemingway was not one to comment much on the subject of race, however, and his at times problematic portrayals of black characters have raised questions about the author’s personal beliefs. Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), a study that traces an “absence” of authentic blackness in Hemingway and other white, canonical American authors, crystallizes contemporary African American studies attitudes about the author.1 For Morrison, Hemingway’s fiction reinforces racist stereotypes. Yet more recent views of Hemingway and racial representation have adjusted the focus. While relying on Morrison, Amy L. Strong’s 2008 Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction presents “a revisionist reading” that examines “how Hemingway’s fiction looks if we bring his nonwhite characters out of the background.”2 Somewhat critical of Morrison’s claims, moreover, Richard Fantina’s Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism (2005) argues that Morrison’s slim volume tends to reduce a complex topic.3 Complicating this question even further is that a number of key black writers, from the Harlem Renaissance (1919–29) to the present, have cited Hemingway as a vital influence.4 In the 1920s, when Hemingway aspired to revolutionize modern American fiction, black writers were forming into the Harlem Renaissance. During the Great Migration (1910–30), over a million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South and the epidemic of Klan violence generally for the Midwest and Northeast urban zones like Harlem, the black “Mecca.”5 Owing to anger over segregation policies in the military during the Great War (1914–18), together with the nationwide surge of black pride brought about by Marcus Garvey’s 307 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

308 Holcomb United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a feeling of cultural nationalism grew among African Americans. As a result, a new African American identity arose, one that would no longer tolerate institutional exploitation and social disenfranchisement: the New Negro. The Southern migrant dispersal of regional cultural expression, like the blues and jazz, to points north helped shape the Harlem Renaissance’s forming of a black aesthetic. Yet Harlem Renaissance cultural producers weaved disparate threads – black Southern folk culture merged with cosmopolitan art – and Hemingway’s innovative, worldly writing influenced key New Negro authors to modernize their prose creations. A crucial element of Harlem Renaissance iconoclast Claude McKay’s memoir, A Long Way From Home (1937), is an expansive tribute to Hemingway’s writing as a vital influence.6 Indeed, the novel of the 1920s that black and white readers and reviewers agreed best evoked the Harlem Renaissance, McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), unquestionably reaches into The Sun Also Rises (1926). Among other ways in which the novel echoes Sun, McKay’s disillusioned, black Great War deserter Jake Brown unmistakably reverberates with disenchanted, white war casualty Jake Barnes.7 At the same time, Hemingway draws from Harlem Renaissance imagery for characterizations of blacks in his Lost Generation novel. Hemingway’s 1926 novel offers two displaced African American characters, figures drawn immediately from New Negro society: Zelli’s “nigger drummer, . . . all teeth and lips” (SAR 69); and the “noble-looking nigger” prizefighter who is chased out of Vienna for knocking out the local great white hope (SAR 77). Though identified with a racial epithet, the “noble-looking” boxer’s dignity stands in stark contrast with former Princeton pugilist Robert Cohn’s ignoble, self-pitying belligerence, and the honorable black boxer foreshadows and parallels the principled, admirable Pedro Romero. Hemingway’s depiction of the percussionist is bluntly racist, yet Sun’s drummer is no more racial caricature than are many portraits of black characters that materialize in Harlem Renaissance fiction, including McKay’s novel. One minor character in Home to Harlem, for example, is “Strawberry Lips, a . . . burnt-cork black . . . [who] was proof that a generalization has some foundation in truth.”8 New Negro authors such as McKay, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman took up Hemingway’s groundbreaking art – particularly the theme of existential alienation narrativized through a trimmed, impassive prose – as handbooks for their own rebellious writings. At the close of the Harlem Renaissance phase, both Raymond Taylor, a character evidently based on Thurman himself, and Stephen Jorgenson, in the roman à clef Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: African Americans 309 Infants of Spring (1932) agree that “Hemingway exemplified the spirit of the twenties in America more vividly than any other contemporary American novelist.”9 This is not surprising, seeing thatSun , Hemingway’s novel-with-a-key on the Left Bank literati, rings through Thurman’s send-up of the denizens of “Niggerati Manner,” as both casts of characters spend more time partying and boozing than writing. Another “great” occurrence brought an end to the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression (1929–39), when many black and white authors united in the Popular Front struggle against right-wing hegemony. Transformed radical internationalist Langston Hughes held in high regard Hemingway’s keynote delivered at the Second Congress of American Writers at Carnegie Hall on June 4, 1937. Hughes responded ardently to Hemingway’s observation that “a writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.”10 In the same year, emerging social realist author Richard Wright published “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” his Marxist denunciation of the Harlem Renaissance as a failure, and Wright cited the cosmopolitan, modernist Hemingway as a writer whom black authors should read rather than New Negro writers.11 During the 1930s, when he turned toward writing serious fiction, former New Negro leading light Hughes also stated that the Harlem Renaissance was a failure, observing that it had accomplished nothing of value for “ordinary Negroes.”12 In terms of Hemingway’s influence as a literary artist, Hughes’s enthusiasm for the celebrated white modernist’s style is evident in the 1945 story “Saratoga Rain,” a trim narrative whose title invokes Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” (1925). The short story’s tip-of-the-iceberg, dialogue-driven conciseness unmistakably exhibits its Hemingway imprint.13 During the postwar years, Wright, now the celebrated émigré author in Paris, continued to look to Hemingway for inspiration, as did comrade expatriate authors James Baldwin and Chester Himes. In Pagan Spain (1957), Wright converses directly with Death in the Afternoon (1932) in his discussion of bullfighting, theorizing that the bull not only represents the repressed sexuality of Franco’s fascist society, but also embodies our dark fears about human existence. Ultimately, the “mutilation” of the bull, especially the amputation of his testicles, is an expression of mob violence – the same brutality that Wright had observed in “pagan” Mississippi.14 Wright persuaded his friend Chester Himes also to relocate to the City of Light. In an interview Himes granted a French journalist, the newly arrived black expatriate in Paris spells out in glowing terms his veneration for his white predecessor: “Hemingway is tremendous, especially when he describes a character’s emotions. He’s a writer Spec SD1 Date 26-july

310 Holcomb of great emotional power. He doesn’t make any judgments about man, society, or life in general.”15 Such are precisely the sort of objectives Himes aspired to in his own hard-boiled, gritty writing. As for James Baldwin, though at times he was critical of the elder white author, his esteem for Hemingway took a number of forms. In “Autobiographical Notes,” the preface to Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin remarks conclusively, “I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”16 During the 1960s and 1970s, black writers such as Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray continued to cite Hemingway’s importance. Wright’s former protégé, Ellison articulated the indispensability of Hemingway’s stimulus in the crafting of Invisible Man (1952). In Ellison’s wish to distance himself from Wright’s Native Son (1940) and other black social realist protest writing of the interwar period, he cites Hemingway as the most influential of his “ancestors.”17 Hemingway is Ellison’s foremost antecedent “because all he wrote . . . was imbued with a spirit beyond the tragic with which I could feel at home, for it was very close to the feeling of the blues” (140). In The Hero and the Blues (1973), Murray argues that, like the blues singer, the bullfighter “cooperates” with an adversary – the bull – to give violence meaning. In the ritual of the bullfight the torero becomes “the paradigm of the positive potential in all human behavior.”18 Hughes’s admiration for Hemingway continued throughout his life. After Hemingway’s death in 1961, Hughes wrote a tribute in the Mark Twain Journal, praising Hemingway’s dialogue for its ability to drive “his tales forward as if the characters were alive” and its power to convey “the immediacy of Hemingway’s reality.”19 Contemporary black writers, from womanist novelist Gayl Jones to postcolonial bard Derek Walcott, have continued to cite Hemingway’s vital presence in their own writing.20 In Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991), Jones cites Hemingway’s influence a number of times, and in her conclusion states that when writers like Hemingway “‘seized the word,’ it achieved its liberated voice and cultural independence” (178). Caribbean poet Walcott’s admiration for Hemingway reaches back to the early 1970s, when he said, “I think the person who did the most for free verse in America is Hemingway.”21 Walcott has repeatedly shown his passion for and debt to Hemingway’s writing at various public readings and lectures, most recently in his appearance at the New York Public Library in December 2010, in a lecture titled “Hemingway and the Caribbean.”22 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: African Americans 311 The textual influence, where Hemingway has inspired black authors, has not been exclusively unidirectional, however. Going back to the 1920s, the formal likeness between Jean Toomer’s hybrid short story cycle, Cane (1923), and the modification of Hemingway’s 1924 in our time into the more collage-like 1925 variant is a case in point. As Linda Wagner-Martin points out, Sherwood Anderson wrote to Gertrude Stein in 1924, encourag- ing her to read Cane. As Stein and Anderson were Hemingway’s mentors, it is a virtual certainty that Hemingway was acquainted with Toomer’s book.23 In contrast to the register of black writers who cite Hemingway’s writing as a momentous influence, in this case the black author’s work apparently preceded and inspired the white’s. Indeed, New Negro literati and Lost Generation avant-garde interacted intimately, including publishing in many of the same venues. William Bird, who published the 1924 version of in our time, and to whom Hemingway dedicated the collection of short stories, also published in the most influential black–white forum of the 1920s, the magazine Negro. As Michael North says in The Dialect of Modernism (1994), Pound and William Carlos Williams appeared alongside the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston in the pages of Negro, together with black French surrealists and African art collectors.24 Indeed, what has not been discussed enough is the question of whether Hemingway could have written The Sun Also Rises, his roman à clef about Anglo-American and British moderns seeking authentically primitive élan vital in pagan Spain, as well as a number of other works, if not for the established presence of the Harlem Renaissance. Poems like McKay’s “On a Primitive Canoe,” appearing in Harlem Shadows in 1922, played a crucial role in the deconstruction of the civilized–primitive hierarchy during the modernist period.25 When Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and other writers of the Lost Generation transmuted the high modernist angst of The Waste Land (1922) into fictions peopled with characters who embrace primal meaning as a tonic against modern alienation, did they not simultaneously proceed under the influence of the black modernism generated by writers like McKay, Hughes, and Thurman? But what of the idea that, while it obscures black presence, Hemingway’s writing simultaneously plays a significant role in reinforcing racist stereotypes? Following Kenneth Lynn, Toni Morrison identifies Bugs, the black character in “The Battler,” as one of those “dark mother” figures in Hemingway, the nurse who destroys rather than nurtures (Morrison 83).26 Morrison makes much of Bugs’s indistinct motivation, but this may be just the point. The character’s genuine purpose and nature are indetermi- nate, a lack that exemplifies Hemingway’s iceberg theory.27 An alternative Spec SD1 Date 26-july

312 Holcomb reading of the story would reason that veiled behind Bugs’s “polite nigger voice” is the menacing delight in knocking out his apparent master, Ad (CSS 103). In this way one may see “The Battler” as staging the twentieth century’s historic war against the inequitable, inherited master–slave relationship, as Bugs, a kin of Invisible Man’s grandfather, is a character who reflects the disobedient New Negro. To restate Amy Strong’s line of reasoning, it is useful to reconsider “how Hemingway’s fiction looks if we bring his nonwhite characters out of the background.” Similarly, Morrison identifies Sam, the black cook in “The Killers” (1927), as a troubling portrayal. Again relying on established critics, Morrison speaks of Sam’s withering observation that “Little boys always know what they want to do” (CSS 220) as an act of “scorning and dismissing what Nick takes on as his responsibility” and “commenting with derision on Nick’s manhood” (Morrison 82–3). The minimalism of the story nevertheless obliges the reader to presume certain expository aspects of its characters, and one is that Sam’s experience has led him to elude trouble on a regular basis. Sam’s is a rational response for a black man living in the first decade of twentieth-century America, when the story is set. Young Nick Adams may envisage acting heroically, but is it an option for Sam the cook, a disenfranchised black subaltern surviving beyond the “color-line”?28 And where has the romantic notion of taking an honorable role in the world led the traumatized older Nick in “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925)? Ultimately, it may be argued that what the diverse praises by black writers for Hemingway have in common is the affirmation that the white author’s prose rises out of the same insistence of intensely American concerns that form their own writings: the integrity of the modern human subject faced with social alienation, psychological violence, and psychic disillusionment. An understanding of this kinship ultimately sets in motion an appreciation not just of Hemingway’s presence in texts by black authors, but also a perception of an insistent negritude at the core of Hemingway’s writing. Indeed, such a critical reassessment makes it possible to begin to understand what the author of Invisible Man meant when he said that everything Hemingway wrote “was very close to the feeling of the blues.”

Notes 1. T. Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 70. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: African Americans 313

2. A. Strong, Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 12. 3. R. Fantina, Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 137. 4. For the present chapter I owe an immeasurable debt of thanks to Charles Scruggs. See our edited critical collection on this topic, Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). 5. J. Johnson, “The Making of Harlem,” Survey Graphic 6 (March 1, 1925), 635– 9; 635. 6. C. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 1937 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 249–52. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. For an extensive discussion of these two novels, see my chapter on Home to Harlem in Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007). 8. C. McKay, Home to Harlem (New York: Harper & Bros., 1928), 63. 9. W. Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Macaulay, 1932), 35. 10. A. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1, 1902–1941 (Oxford University Press, 1986), 348. Hemingway’s speech was originally published as “Fascism Is a Lie” in New Masses (June 22, 1937), and is reprinted in M. Bruccoli (ed.), Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame: Statements, Public Letters, Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and Endorsements (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 52–4. 11. R. Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge: A Literary Quarterly 2.1 (1937), 53–65; 49. 12. L. Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1940), 228. 13. L. Hughes, “Saratoga Rain,” 1945, in A. Harper (ed.), Short Stories of Langston Hughes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 168–9; 169. 14. R. Wright, Pagan Spain (New York: Harper and Bros., 1957), 152, 155–6. 15. C. Himes, “Conversation with Chester Himes,” by Annie Brièrre, in M. Fabre and R. Skinner (eds.), Conversations with Chester Himes (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 1–4; 2. 16. J. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York: Beacon, 1984), 9. 17. R. Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” inShadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 107–43; 140. Subsequent references are included in the text. 18. A. Murray, The Hero and The Blues (New York: Random House, 1973), 37–49; 43. 19. L. Hughes, “A Reader’s Writer,” Mark Twain Journal (1962), 19. 20. D. Walcott, “On Hemingway,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 107–14. Jones invokes Hemingway’s influence a number of times in Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Subsequent references are included in the text. 21. D. Walcott, “Conversation with Derek Walcott,” 1973, in W. Baer (ed.), Conversations with Derek Walcott (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 21–33; 32. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

314 Holcomb

22. D. Walcott, “Hemingway and the Caribbean,” Robert B. Silvers Lecture, New York Public Library, December 3, 2010. 23. L. Wagner-Martin, “Toomer’s Cane as Narrative Sequence,” in J. Kennedy (ed.), Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19–34; 24. 24. M. North, The Dialect of Modernism (New York: Oxford, 1994), 189. 25. C. McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922). 26. K. Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987). 27. Hemingway argued that a writer could “omit things . . . if the writer is writing truly enough,” and that therefore such silent omissions may be compared to an iceberg’s “dignity,” which “is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” (DIA 192). 28. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 43. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 31 Race and Ethnicity: Africans Nghana tamu Lewis

Among the insights Ernest Hemingway’s writing offers into his relationship to Africa and Africans, two stand high in distinction. First, his initial safari to Kenya and Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) in 1933–4 cultivated the “idea of Africa,”1 which, Hemingway scholars agree, inspired some of his most celebrated work, including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), and his second work of nonfiction, Green Hills of Africa (1935). Second, his next safari in 1953–4, which covered parts of Uganda, the Congo, Tanzania, and Kenya, engendered a desire to reconcile his “idea of Africa” with the reality of large-scale changes taking place throughout the continent. Interior dialogue that opens the posthumously published fictional memoir Under Kilimanjaro (2005) provides a lens through which to understand the evolution in Hemingway’s thoughts about the continent and its natives between these two sojourns. Unable to discern how much of the religion his Wakamban guide practiced was “snobbishness and a desire for a special ritual and how much was true belief,” Hemingway invokes a familiar adage: “there were very many things I did not know. There were more every day” (UK 1). These musings cause him to acknowledge that “things were not too simple” and “had changed very much in East Africa” (UK 2). Hemingway’s impressions of these changes are documented in Under Kilimanjaro and True at First Light (1999), an extensively edited version of the African manuscript on which both books are based. Both memoirs contain thick descriptions of the rituals and traditions that informed Hemingway’s attempts at cultural immersion in Africa and his efforts to associate with the plights of African natives, “those who kill to eat and to whom the meat belonged before the white men stole their country” (UK 129). These associations, manifested through a “decentered” white male point of view, cause Hemingway to reevaluate his racial and national constitutions in the context of native Africans’ locations and cultural 315 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

316 Lewis experiences. “The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me” (UK 116), he muses, recalling the preoccupations of his first safari. Hemingway’s changing perspective between his two African safaris thus suggests a crisis of consciousness akin to what his contemporaries Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois experienced during their various sojourns to Africa, which led to the expansion and influence of black intellectu- alism and the production of revisionist literary readings of the African Diaspora. However, little consideration has been given to contributions that Hemingway’s writings about Africa and African people make to clar- ifying similar discourses of identity, community, location, and transnational imagination, and that situate his Africa writings within the corpus of African Diasporic literature. This is not to say that Hemingway’s African writings have received inadequate scholarly attention. On the contrary, critical inquiry into Hemingway’s relationship to Africa spans roughly four decades and comprises an impressive body of research that has informed innovative thinking at the intersections of psychoanalytic, gender and sexuality, and Hemingway studies.2 Moreover, Nadine Gordimer’s observation that in his later life Hemingway developed a “broader human consciousness beyond nationalistic operatives”3 is at the heart of the recent, convincing case Ken Panda makes for engaging “in new dialogue about Hemingway’s multiculturalism.”4 However, the historical conditions, sociopolitical climates, and economic factors shaping African culture form some of the gaps in Hemingway scholarship that this chapter seeks to fill. Hemingway’s writings about Africa and African people raise questions about historic conditions of oppression, resistance, and renewal that are vital to understanding configurations of hegemonic power and counter-hegemonic struggle that defined continental Africa throughout the twentieth century. These are the very forces that created the ethos of identity and freedom that proved indispensible to the mobilization of indigenous Africans, their agitation for independence, and the reshaping of the social and political economies of many African nations and regions. This same ethos enriched and complicated Hemingway’s racial and ecological perspectives between the two safaris. In Under Kilimanjaro, observation consistently transforms into deep reflection on the meaning of African traditions, customs, rituals, and social practices. This process takes shape in mundane descriptions, such as when Hemingway reval- ues the importance of names and naming in relationship to his African guides. “Twenty years ago I had called them boys . . . and neither they nor I had any thought that I had no right to. . . . But the way things were Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Africans 317 now you did not do that. Everyone has his duties and everyone had a name. Not to know a name was both impolite and a sign of sloppiness” (UK 8). The process also unfolds in connection with developments and events that show Hemingway questioning, listening, and attending to more subtle details of colonialism’s detrimental effects on African natives. For example, a critique of the impact of alcoholism among the natives follows with Hemingway concluding that “certainly the white men had not introduced the various things the Masai used to make themselves brave. But it was not Africans who were sending north from South Africa that horrible, sweet, degrading concoction called Golden Jeep sherry which made so many Masai into drunkards” (UK 59). Three interrelated developments in African history characterize the period between Hemingway’s two African safaris and underscore the interplay between the processes of production and the historical contexts of Africa that framed – and inspired – his writings about Africa and African people: (1) the foundation of Kenya’s pastoral economy destabi- lized; (2) Kikuyu (Gikuyu) discontent and mobilization intensified; and (3) African women became (more) visible, active participants in decolonization movements. Among Kenya’s most valued and contested resources is land. Kenya’s borders span approximately 582,646 square kilometers; roughly ninety-eight percent of this vast territory is land.5 A little less than twenty percent of Kenya’s land is high potential agricultural; forests and wood- land comprise seven percent of the region; and game parks and national reserves account for another ten percent (KNBS). Kenya’s population currently totals about thirty million, eighty percent of whom live in rural areas and derive their livelihood from agriculture or agriculture-related activities (KNBS). This economic mainstay encountered major changes in the early twentieth century with the establishment of the British Crown Colony and the colonization of Kenya. Prior to becoming colonized, Kenya was, like most African nations, ruled by tribal leaders. The social structure of precolonial Kenya is best characterized as a loose association of politicized ethnic groups, including the Wakamba (Akamba), the Masai (Maasai), and Kenya’s largest indigenous population, the Kikuyu. Violence among these groups was sometimes manifested in human attacks but more frequently took the form of livestock raids, especially when, at the turn of the twentieth century, trade in agricultural, natural, and wildlife products replaced the slave trade throughout continental Africa.6 While land use among these groups was not codified, it was governed by strict customs largely adhered to Spec SD1 Date 26-july

318 Lewis across ethnic boundaries (Basset 6). We glimpse Hemingway’s knowledge of this cultural history in his observation that the “trouble between the Masai and the Wakamba was always over cattle stealing, never over the killing of game” (UK 130). “The Masai,” he continues, “were a pastoral and war-making people. They were not hunters. The Wakamba were hunters, the best hunters and trackers I had ever known. And now their game had been killed off by the white men and by themselves on their reserve, and the only place they could hunt was in the Masai reserves. Their own reserve was overcrowded and overfarmed, and when the rains failed there was no pasture for the cattle and the crops were lost” (UK 76). Although condensed, these musings rehearse the long history of African natives’ precolonial context and the disruptive transformations to their social and political economies, which the establishment of the British Crown Colony in 1920 catalyzed. After 1920, white settlement on land previously occupied and farmed by the Kikuyu increased. White expansion gave rise to a corresponding need for a large labor force to aid the cultivation of newly settled territories. It also led to the adoption of British colonial policies that regulated land acquisition. Although the Kikuyu and other native Africans could enter British colonial settlements to work, they were denied land ownership rights.7 The combined effects of displacement and denied access of ownership presented a major threat to the Kikuyu, whose social values and cultural institutions were rooted in principles of resource acquisition and land entitlement. The White Highlands of Kenya – so-called because of its fecundity, its proximity to Kenya’s railway system, and its exclusive occupation by white colonists8 – became contested territory during this historical period. In 1922, a loose band of Kikuyu organized the East African Association (EAA) to campaign for access to the White Highlands and other regions from which the Kikuyu had been displaced. A few years later, the EAA reorganized as the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA); its operation initially had as its primary goal lobbying for land acquisition and herding rights for the Kikuyu.9 Soon, however, the KCA’s mission sharply refo- cused to land reclamation in the face of the British colonial government’s intensifying opposition to the KCA’s very existence. The government’s renewed backlash was rooted in the increasingly untenable state of Kenya’s pastoral economy, which was bifurcated when white settlers brought a commercially oriented form of agriculture that had “different concerns and practices, valued livestock differently and had contrasting views of disease” from the subsistence-oriented agriculture that the Kikuyu and Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Africans 319 other native Africans historically practiced.10 Over time, these differences became more pronounced and politicized, as laws toughened to fortify existing boundaries between native African reserves and white settlements and to further restrict native African expansion (Waller 51). Hemingway alludes to this dynamic when he cynically quips that, so far as he knows, baboon hunting has: never been the Sport of Kings and I have yet to see the baboon listed as Royal Game although if enough true baboon lovers organize he may be Royal Game in time and the Africans simply be moved away from their shambas in some vast resettlement scheme. It might be simplest for the baboon lovers to have legislation put through prohibiting the African from planting mealies and then a compromise could be reached putting the baboon on the Game Department lists as a Game Animal with a fairly high license fee. (UK 156) This passage makes clear the paradox of Hemingway’s condition as game hunter and African sympathizer. It evidences as well his ongoing efforts to reconcile the paradox, through acknowledgment and reflection, particularly in light of his earlier declaration that his days of shooting “beasts for trophies” had long past. Growing hostility toward white big game hunters, such as Hemingway, and white settlers caused the KCA to enlist the support of other African natives, most notably, the Masai and the Wakamba, a Bantu ethnic group, whose roots trace back to the same region of origin as the Kikuyu. Africans of diverse origins banded together and, in some cases, agreed to resolve, or set aside, centuries-old ethnic and regional conflicts.11 The KCA again rebranded itself, becoming the Kenyan African Union (KAU) in 1944. The mission of the KAU was two-pronged: politically empowering native Africans and achieving Kenyan independence. In furthering this mission the KAU unabashedly used aggression and violence, but these methods were always strategically deployed and centrally controlled (Fredericksen 160). However, as the influence of the organization grew throughout the 1950s, nonnatives viewed the KAU primarily as a bandit operation, with the nomenclature used to refer to the group’s rising political authority – the Mau Mau rebellion – belying the substantial role the KAU played in sustaining anticolonial sentiments and organizing among native Africans long after British counterinsurgency operations ended the KAU’s military offensive in 1956. Dialogue between Hemingway and his African guides consistently directs readers away from these misinterpreta- tions with the guides repeatedly pointing out to Hemingway the range of ethnicities among the Mau Mau; reminding him that “all Mau Mau are Spec SD1 Date 26-july

320 Lewis not stupid” (UK 52); and cautioning him against unreasonable fear of a Mau Mau attack (UK 75). Despite referring to them as Mau Mau, Hemingway seems to have otherwise appreciated the complexities of the KAU’s methods and modes of invasion, even as he remains fearful of an attack: “I believed Ngui12 that the Wakamba Mau Mau were not coming our way. But I thought they were the least of our problems. It was clear that the Mau Mau had missionaries among the Masai and were organizing the Kikuyu that worked in the timber-cutting operations on Kilimanjaro. But whether there was any fighting organization we would not know” UK( 97). In contrast to the discourse of savagery conventionally used to characterize the Mau Mau, Hemingway also appears cognizant of the politics arising out of the unrest and increased mobilization of the Kikuyu, which encouraged interethnic alliance formation among the African natives. The extensive detail in which Hemingway chronicles his relationships with Masai and Wakamba women during his second safari is of particular importance. Notable among these relationships is his courtship of the African girl Debba, whom he purportedly married in a Wakamba ceremony. Hemingway’s relationships with Debba and other African women not only enabled him to achieve “insider” status among the natives (Lewis 464), they also provided windows for contemplating the evolving social roles of African women during the period of decolonization. One of the most damaging results of colonization was the diminu- tion of women’s roles across traditional African societies. In her study of the psychological effects of anticolonial conflict on African women, A. M. White maps women’s participation in militant protests, religious conversion, and black market enterprises throughout the period of decolonization as reflective of their desire both to resist subjugation and to reclaim a sense of cultural agency.13 These efforts were countered by the creation of policies and programs that either restricted women’s mobility or attempted to redirect their focus to domestic matters. C. Presley points out that “wooing” women’s loyalty was especially important to the British colonial government, because women’s early “participation in Mau Mau contributed to the rebellion’s initial psychological, if not military success.”14 African women played key roles behind the scenes, carrying messages between camps and “smuggling arms, food, clothing, and medicine” to guerrilla forces (Presley 504). Much of Hemingway’s relationship with Debba is chronicled through images of exchange – sexual and material. The sexual imagery casts Debba as complicit in Hemingway’s betrayal of his wife, as when he describes “how shy and downcast Debba’s Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Africans 321 eyes were standing before Miss Mary and how straight she stood. She had none of the impudence she had with me and she stood at attention like a soldier” (UK 242). In light of what we know about the methods of African women’s anticolonial agitation, the soldier analogy perhaps carries an important double meaning here, inviting interpretation of the clandestine nature of Debba’s affair with Hemingway as emblematic of another form of repressed desire, that which defines the manner of African women’s participation in independence movements throughout the twentieth century. Hemingway’s writings about Africa and African people thus provide insight into the sociopolitical and economic climates that fostered anti-imperialist thoughts and actions among native Africans throughout the twentieth century. His second safari clearly engendered a new commitment to understanding African peoples’ struggles against oppression as part, rather than in isolation, of changing ecological conditions throughout the continent. Recognition of this commitment paves the way for continued scholarly inquiry into interrelated discourses of location, identity, origins, and authorship in Hemingway’s Africa writings. These inquiries can provide a means to illuminate further the possibilities that lie in (re)reading Hemingway’s evolving racial consciousness as fos- tering an understanding of transnational blackness at a critical juncture in African history.

Notes 1. C. Ondaatje, Hemingway in Africa (New York: Overlook Press, 2004). 2. See, for example, R. M. Burwell, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Howell, Hemingway’s Africa Stories: The Stories, Their Sources, Their Critics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969); C. Eby, Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); D. Moddelmog, Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 91–119; J. Brogan, “True at First Light: A New Look at Hemingway and Race,” North Dakota Quarterly 68.2–3 (2001), 199–224; S. del Gizzo, “Going Home: Hemingway, Primitivism, and Identity,” Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (2003), 496–523; and N. Lewis, “Truth, Lies, and Racial Consequences in Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir,” Comparative American Studies 4.4 (2006), 459–70. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. N. Gordimer, “Hemingway’s Expatriates: A Way of Looking at the World,” Transition 80 (1999), 86–99; 93. 4. K. Panda, “Under Kilimanjaro: The Multicultural Hemingway,” The Hemingway Review 25.2 (2006), 128–31; 131. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

322 Lewis

5. E. I. Steinhart, “Hunters, Poachers, and Gamekeepers: Towards a Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya,” Journal of African History 30 (1989), 247–64; 247. 6. Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). Web. November 23, 2011. www.knbs.or Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. E. A. Brett, Colonization and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change, 1919–1939 (New York: NOK Publishers, 1973). 8. P. Mosley, The Settler Economies: Studies in the Economic History of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 10–11, 52–64. 9. B. F. Fredericksen, “Print, Newspapers, and Audiences in Colonial Kenya: African and Indian Improvements, Protest and Connections,” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 81.1 (2011), 155–72; 156. Subsequent references are included in the text. 10. R. Waller, “‘Clean’ and ‘Dirty’: Cattle Disease and Control Policy in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1940,” Journal of African History 45.1 (2004), 45–80; 47. Subsequent references are included in the text. 11. L. Cronk, “From True Dorobo to Mukogodo Maasai: Contested Ethnicity in Kenya,” Ethnology 41.1 (2002), 27–49; 33–4. 12. Ngui was one of Hemingway’s African guides; like Debba, Ngui was of Wakamban descent. 13. A. White, “All the Men Are Fighting for Freedom, All the Women Are Mourning Their Men, but Some of Us Carried Guns: A Raced-Gendered Analysis of Fanon’s Psychological Perspectives on War,” SIGNS 32.4 (2007), 857–88; 862. 14. C. Presley, “The Mau Mau Rebellion, Kikuyu Women, and Social Change,” Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies 22.3 (1988), 502–27; 504. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 32 Race and Ethnicity: American Indians Amy Strong

In 1899, the year Ernest Hemingway was born, the nation’s Indian population was at an all-time low. More than two centuries of conquest, acquisition of Indian land, and cultural programs of forced assimilation had seriously undermined the foundations of American Indian culture. At the turn of the century, most Americans quite reasonably assumed that Indian cultures would eventually become extinct.1 Fewer than forty years later, shifting public attitudes and significant changes in U.S. federal policy helped to bring about a resurgence in American Indian culture, and the drive toward forced acculturation was replaced by a push for cultural preservation. By the middle of the twentieth century, “Americans witnessed a resurgence in not only numbers, but also pride, self-awareness, and political and cultural assertiveness of Indians.”2 Hemingway’s most extended depiction of Indian culture and peoples appeared in the Nick Adams stories, and these early stories enabled him to analyze American culture during a time of profound cultural and political upheaval. To fully engage with Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, it is important to recognize the way the identities of Nick and his father are constructed in relation to the Indians’ presence, and vice versa. Indeed, one might argue that Nick – the quintessential Adamic figure – cannot be fully understood without acknowledging his experience and investment in the indigenous culture of his time and place. The period 1880–1920 is often defined as the era of forced assimilation for American Indians. At the close of the nineteenth century, policy makers had begun to embrace the idea that Indians could be transformed from “savages” into “civilized” citizens. This was motivated in part by a desire to extend equal rights to a minority group that had suffered at the hands of prior U.S. policies. It was also a reaction to continued westward expansion, rapid growth of towns and cities, the construction of a transcontinental railroad, and the inevitable collision of cultures that resulted from a newfound proximity between whites and Indians. The 323 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

324 Strong goal of assimilation was not to merge white and Indian cultures, but to alter Indian culture to fit the dominant, “civilized” white society. Reformers dismantled reservations in the hope that American Indians could conform to the larger Anglo-American culture. To that end, the Dawes Act of 1887 divided up tribally held land into allotments or individual homesteads, and the individuals or families who accepted these parcels of land were taught farming and granted U.S. citizenship. In addition, the U.S. government constructed federal schools on every Indian reservation in the country and funded numerous off-reservation boarding schools for Indian children. As Frederick Hoxie points out, these institutions were “designed to imbue [American Indians] with the habits of the majority and prepare them to participate in ‘civilized’ society.”3 By the turn of the century, however, Americans had begun to lose faith in cultural assimilation as a panacea for “the Indian question.” Reformers, social scientists, politicians, and the general public, frustrated by what they perceived as slow progress, questioned whether the three-pronged approach of private land ownership, education, and citizenship could ever succeed in “civilizing” Indians. Furthermore, initiatives such as the Dawes Act were not fulfilling their promise. The Dawes Act had two insidious loopholes that ultimately deprived American Indian families and tribes of their lands. While it is the case that Indians who lived on reservations were typically allotted eighty acres, the remaining reservation land often went unclaimed. The government sold this land, primarily to lumber companies, who would cut down all the trees and then sell the cleared land to white farmers. In these scenarios, Indians were dispossessed of their lands and, ultimately, U.S. businesses and white farmers benefited. The situation was made worse in 1912 when allotments were no longer given tax-free status. Many American Indian families lost their land when they were unable to afford the steep property taxes. As a result of these failed policies, Indian lands were opened to white farmers and businessmen, the government lowered its expectations for Indian education and emphasized manual skills, and many Indians’ citizenship rights were revoked. The rhetoric of cultural assimilation was gradually replaced by a wistful attitude toward the vanishing Indian. It was during this era of nostalgia that Hemingway developed his earliest and most profound attitudes toward American Indians, and many of his early Nick Adams stories were pervaded by a sense of sorrow and despair for a vanishing way of life. In the 1920s and 1930s, federal policies were gradually reconsidered by American Indian leaders and U.S. legislators. John Collier, commissioner Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: American Indians 325 of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, argued forcefully that allotment was destroying Indian civilization. Shifting attitudes crystallized on June 18, 1934 when Congress, led by Collier, passed the Indian Reorganization Act, informally known as the “Indian New Deal.” This New Deal not only reversed the allotment policies of the Dawes Act, it also authorized fund- ing for tribal land acquisition and allowed Indians on reservations to establish self-government.4 By the time of Hemingway’s death in 1961, American Indians had experienced a significant resurgence in American culture, including “expansion and reconsolidation of reservation land bases; the end of government suppression of religious and other cultural practices; revital- ization of Indians arts and crafts; and in some cases, establishment of tribal councils to exercise a greater degree of power over their lives” (Smith 17). From the year he was born until the year he graduated from high school (1899–1917), Hemingway spent every summer with his parents on Walloon Lake, in the woods of northern Michigan. It was here that he learned to love hunting, fishing, hiking, and camping, and he developed friendships with the Ojibway Indians who lived nearby. His interactions with these Indians served as an ideal antidote to the staid, upper-crust society of Oak Park, Illinois that he endured the rest of the year. In his early short stories, experiences in the woods of northern Michigan eclipse all other aspects of his childhood, to the point that one might never know he had lived in Oak Park were it not for the efforts of his biographers to remind us. The Indians of northern Michigan were primarily Ottawas and Chippewas, tribes of the Algonquin family. Chippewa was an English mispronunciation of Ojibway, and Hemingway always used the true Indian name – Ojibway – in his writing and conversation. The local Ojibway typically worked as sawyers at the nearby mill or peeled hem- lock bark for tanning. They picked raspberries and blackberries along the roads leading to Petoskey to sell to the whites who lived in summer cottages. On Sunday mornings, Indian women walked door to door selling baskets made of sweet grass and artifacts decorated with porcupine quills.5 Each year, a tribe of Indians came from Ontario, Canada to perform Hiawatha, a play based on Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” a long poem depicting legends of the Algonquin Indians (of which the Ojibways were the most prominent tribe). Hemingway was so taken with Longfellow’s poem that he performed his own dramatic renditions of the piece, often roping his older sister Marcelline into playing along. Both Ernest and his father, Clarence, had an unusually strong interest in Indian culture. Clarence was a physician who tended to the Indians Spec SD1 Date 26-july

326 Strong when they needed medical care. As a boy, Ernest accompanied his father on medical visits to the Indian camp. Clarence also collected Indian artifacts – arrowheads, clay bowls, spearheads, flints – and took pride in the nickname he was given by Indian friends, Ne-teck-ta-la (“Eagle Eye”). Ernest took his association with Indian culture further by suggesting that he was one-eighth Indian, descended from a Cheyenne great-great-grandmother.6 There is no evidence that Hemingway had Indian blood, and it was a rather remarkable assertion in an era when American Indians were widely perceived as culturally and intellectu- ally inferior, bound by racist stereotypes, and denied basic civil liberties. Far from distancing himself from American Indian culture, the young Hemingway deliberately aligned himself with it. Many of the Indians Hemingway knew in his youth appeared in his early writing, some multiple times, and together they formed the back- bone of his Nick Adams stories. The Indians Hemingway knew best were the sawyer Nick Boulton and his two children, Prudence (called Trudy and Prudy in the stories) and Richard; Billy Tabeshaw, also a sawyer; Billy Gilbert, a war veteran and woodcraftsman; and old Simon Green, who owned a farm on Horton’s Creek. Undoubtedly, Hemingway’s most significant (and formative) relationship was with Nick Boulton’s daughter, Prudence. Two or three years younger than Ernest, she lingered in his memory throughout his life. She was an Ojibway who, Hemingway claimed, took his virginity. Prudence, pregnant at age sixteen, committed suicide together with her lover, Richard Castle, by swallowing strychnine (it is unclear whether Hemingway ever learned of her fate). She appeared in fictional form in two stories, first as a girl who betrays Nick Adams in “Ten Indians” (1927) and later as Nick’s eager sexual partner in “Fathers and Sons” (1933). Even as late as the 1950s, Hemingway complimented his wife Mary by claiming that she had legs “just like Trudy Boulton’s,”7 and he wrote a letter to Archibald MacLeish pointing out that Debba, his African “fiancée,” was “just like Prudy Boulton” SL( 526). These sexual relationships with an American Indian and an African woman – whether real or imagined – reveal a complexity of motives (e.g., Hemingway’s fascination with love triangles, his engagement in primitivist notions about the native “other”), but they also are examples of Hemingway openly defying white anxieties over miscegenation and they underscore his desire to create a special kind of intimacy with these other cultures. Though Hemingway never challenged the status quo regarding U.S. policies toward American Indians, he nevertheless made a point of humanizing Indians through his writing. In his juvenilia, largely (and Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: American Indians 327 perhaps appropriately) ignored by most Hemingway critics, he reveals an early preoccupation with white–Indian relations and overtly challenges the entrenched stereotypes of American Indians that had flourished in popular culture. His 1917 story “Sepi Jingan” tells of how Billy Tabeshaw’s faithful dog saved his life when Billy was attacked by a fellow Indian. Hemingway characterizes Billy in a way that first draws attention to and then subverts racial stereotypes: “Bill is not the redskin of the popular magazine. He never says ‘ugh.’ I have yet to hear him grunt or speak of the Great White Father at Washington” (Montgomery 51). “Sepi Jingan” is set on the Fourth of July, a date that pinpoints the historical formation of U.S. identity and the consequent decline of American Indians, who were increasingly marginalized and victimized as whites moved westward and encroached on tribal lands. Hemingway set two more Nick Adams stories on the Fourth of July. “The Indians Moved Away” chronicles the dissolution of Indian culture in the United States. It tells the story of one particular Indian who, on the Fourth of July, got drunk in town and, on his walk back home, lay down on the railway tracks and was killed by the midnight train. The railroads represent a powerful technology that allowed whites to push westward with greater ease, an event that had the effect of pushing Indians into near extinction. The narrator says: “There were no successful Indians. Formerly there had been – old Indians who owned farms and worked them and grew old and fat with many children and grandchildren” (NAS 35). The story recognizes a time when Indians were closely tied to the land and firmly established in families that had their own history, but times have changed. The last line of the story echoes this same theme: “They lost money and were sold out. That was the way the Indians went” (36). This reads like a harsh commentary on government policies – such as the Dawes Act of 1887 – that divided up tribal lands and sold unclaimed plots to white farmers (further depriving American Indians of what had once been their territory). Hemingway returns to the Fourth of July in yet another story, “Ten Indians.” This story, originally titled “After the Fourth,” emphasizes the power dynamic between whites and Indians as Nick rides on a horse-drawn wagon with the Garners, a white family who took Nick to a Fourth of July celebration in town. On the way home, Mr. Garner is forced to climb down at intervals to drag inebriated and unconscious Indians from the road. Evidence of the Indians’ degraded status in American culture lies all about Nick’s feet, forming an important commentary on the fate of this indigenous people. All the while, the Garners Spec SD1 Date 26-july

328 Strong tease Nick about his relationship with an Indian girl, Prudie, through whispers, innuendo, and racial slurs. This teasing appears to have no effect on Nick, as he is crushed later that evening to learn from his father that Prudie has betrayed him. Nick drifts to sleep that night feeling that his heart is broken. Nick’s tender memories of Prudie linger for decades, as we see in “Fathers and Sons.” Nick Adams, now grown, responds to his son’s questions about what it was like to live with the Indians. The boy asks: “Tell me what they were like.” Nick replies, matter of factly, “They were Ojibways . . . And they were very nice” (CSS 375). Unsatisfied by his father’s dispassionate response, the boy presses him again: “But what were they like to be with?” (CSS 375). Nick struggles to express to his young son the memories of his youth in northern Michigan. He stifles the desire to share memories of Trudy:

Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well holding arms, quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, then uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended, the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight. . . . (CSS 375–6) The rush of language is unusual for Hemingway, whose spare style and iceberg principle of omitting what is known rarely allowed for such fever- ish interior monologues, especially in his early stories. Nick questions whether to discuss with his son “how [the Indians] ended. They all ended the same. Long time ago good. Now no good” (CSS 376). This phrase, another haunting commentary on the fate of Indians in the United States, comes from an encounter in Hemingway’s youth. He recalls: “One time when I was out at the Wind River reservation a very old Indian spoke to me and said, ‘You Indian Boy?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Cheyenne?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Long time ago good. Now no good’” (SL 815). The two Nick Adams stories that most overtly address white–Indian relations are “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” In these two stories, Nick cannot be fully understood without contextualizing both the U.S. history of racial domination and the personal relationship Nick and his father have with the Indians who live nearby. In the first story, Hemingway created an Indian woman whose womb was cut open by a white man with a jackknife and her skin sewed up with a fishing line; her husband slit his own throat during the procedure. In the second story, he depicted a group of Indians coming toward a white Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: American Indians 329 man’s home armed with saws and axes and issuing threats to the white doctor. The Indian woman’s womb, the Indian husband’s throat, both were sawed open like the wood that washes up on shore from the big log booms. And the logs themselves, symbols of the receding American wilderness, lie along the shore, almost buried in the sand, just as the Indian wedged in the wheel rut in “Ten Indians” lies with his face buried in the sand. The Indians are depicted in positions that connect them to the physical landscape, a landscape that has been altered, even mutilated, by the technological and physical advance of whites. Hemingway’s Indians lay face down in the sand, a bunk bed, or across railroad tracks, victims of alcoholism, suicide, and murder. These stories confront the tragic and unjust circumstances of American Indians in twentieth-century America. Nick Adams observes the rapid destruction of the Michigan wilderness he shared with the American Indians and grieves for what has been lost. Though critics have long understood that Hemingway felt passionately about American Indians, few have viewed these characters as anything more than scenery. For his part, Hemingway took pains to bring American Indians back into the critical discussion. In a conversation about his most beloved and anthologized short story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway said: “the Indians weren’t in there, just as the war wasn’t in there, but they were nevertheless an important part of the story.”8 Famously tight-lipped about his writing process, Hemingway rarely commented on his own stories and he abhorred the ways that critics picked apart his work. Yet just three years before his death, he felt compelled to emphasize the importance of American Indians in a short story he had published more than thirty years earlier. By the end of his career, Hemingway had developed an intense interest in Africans that paralleled his childhood connection to American Indian culture. In 1955, he shaved his head, dyed his clothing to match the colors worn by an African tribe, spear hunted with his African “brothers” by moonlight, tanned his skin dark enough to pass for “half-caste,” courted an African “fiancée,” and considered it an insult to be addressed as a white man. In this regard, the Nick Adams stories mark just the beginning of Hemingway’s lifelong interest in race as a defining aspect of American identity. Hemingway’s early claims to Indian blood, his late fascination and brotherhood with an African tribe, and his wariness of what he called “white taboos”9 all point to another dimension that must be factored into our final analysis of Ernest Hemingway. The two communities – American Indians and Africans – ultimately became linked in his mind through the discourse of white exploitation. In Under Kilimanjaro, Hemingway Spec SD1 Date 26-july

330 Strong notes with bitterness: “the white people always took the other people’s lands away from them and put them on a reservation where they could go to hell and be destroyed” (UK 137). In the same vein, Hemingway’s son, Patrick, recalled a conversation during which his father directly compared Africans with American Indians, saying the Africans were “just like with the Indians at home. But there are a lot more of them.”10 If we attune ourselves to the American Indian presence in the early short stories, it becomes apparent that they are indeed, as Hemingway has assured us, “an important part of the story.”

Notes 1. B. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes & U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 11. 2. S. L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880– 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. F. E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880– 1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 54. 4. In 1939, John Collier reported that “the Indian race is no longer vanishing. It is neither dying out nor is it rapidly merging into the white society. Indians as Indians will apparently continue as a part of American life for many years” (“Office of Indian Affairs,” Annual Report to the Secretary of the Interior [Washington, DC, 1939], 65). 5. J. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 29. The Indian baskets of Hemingway’s childhood reappear in For Whom the Bell Tolls, when Robert Jordan recalls the smells he loves best, including the “sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets” (260). 6. Hemingway claimed in a letter to Charles Scribner that he had “a Cheyenne great-great-grandmother” (SL 659). He made a similar claim in a letter to his friend, Robert M. Brown, saying he was “1/8th Indian.” Letter to Robert M. Brown (July 22, 1956). Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. 7. C. C. Montgomery, Hemingway in Michigan (New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1966), 100. Subsequent references are included in the text. 8. E. Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction XXI: Ernest Hemingway,” Interview by George Plimpton, Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958), 61–89; 88. 9. In the manuscript version of The Garden of Eden, Hemingway uses the phrase when David Bourne attempts to write truly about his experiences in Africa. He writes: “You must not let [“white taboos” – crossed out in manuscript] things you must not say or write because you are white and will go back there affect you at all and you must not deny or forget all the tribal things that are as important. The tribal things are more important really” (JFK, 422.1–23, 9–10). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: American Indians 331

10. P. Hemingway, “An Evening with Patrick Hemingway,” The Hemingway Review 19.1 (1999), 8–16; 11. Patrick’s full story reads as follows: “I remember being in Nairobi with [my father] when we were crossing the street and somehow he got the impression that I had acquired some of the habits of the white colonialist in Africa, which was very well-defined by a white South African observing a little boy in an airport, when he said that the boy was ‘already the little white master of everything but himself.’ And my dad caught a little bit of this from me, and after we crossed the street he turned to me and said, ‘Pat, it’s just like with the Indians at home.’ ‘But,’ he said, ‘there are a lot more of them.’” Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 33 Race and Ethnicity: Cubans Ann Putnam

Cuba is ninety miles from the United States, a fact anybody knows who remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. And every Cuban tour guide will tell you how to follow the “Hemingway Trail,” that is, if you can get to Cuba legally. And that’s part of the story of Hemingway and Cuba – this wrenching drama between Cuba and the United States that has made those ninety infamous miles between Key West and Cuba so close and so impossibly far. The armadas; the planes shot down; Elian Gonzalez, the little boy rescued, kidnapped, rescued again; the men in tractor tires linked together floating on shark-infested waters toward Key West. But however you manage to get to Cuba, no one in Cuba will ask how you got there. They won’t even stamp your passport. It isn’t Cuban Customs when visiting there that is the trouble. It’s U.S. Customs when coming back. After being cursed and blessed by a restlessness that kept him on the move all over Europe during the 1920s, then Key West during the 1930s, Hemingway established headquarters at the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana in 1939 to finish For Whom the Bell Tolls. The following year, Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn, who had run out of patience with that tiny, fifth-floor hotel room, found an old farmhouse in San Francisco de Paula, just outside Havana. Once she refurbished it, they moved into what would be Hemingway’s only permanent home, Finca Vigía, where he lived for the next twenty-two years. It was there he wrote Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), The Old Man and the Sea (1952), A Moveable Feast (1964; restored edition 2009), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986), True at First Light (1999), reedited as Under Kilimanjaro (2005), and the Pilar logs. “However, those are the least known years of his life, not only because they were the most intimate, but because his biographers have all glossed over them with suspicious haste,” says Gabriel García Márquez.1

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Race and Ethnicity: Cubans 333 Indeed, if you’d read about Hemingway and Cuba from Carlos Baker and other biographers, you’d think Cuba was exotica and little more, and wonder why Hemingway was living in Cuba at all. He was just the famous Americano with the dangerous politics (American critics) or no politics at all (Cuban critics), living in the big white house on the hill and fueling resentments, jealousy, and suspicion. Hemingway’s long FBI file testifies to that. But there’s been secrecy and suspicion for so long between Cuba and the United States, it’s no wonder that Hemingway’s life in Cuba remains something of a mystery. His birth was nearly concurrent with that mysterious explosion aboard the USS Maine in Havana Harbor that began the Spanish-American War of 1898. Five years later, the Platt Amendment was passed, giving the United States meddling rights for thirty more years, while the mob began turning Havana into the “brothel” of America. The mob rubbed elbows with Cuba’s President Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s president from 1940–4 and 1952–9, while the United States supplied him with arms to resist Castro’s revolution against Batista’s excesses and corruption (1953–9). Now over fifty years later, the United States embargo still holds its stranglehold on Cuba. But scholars are finally beginning to unravel the contexts of Hemingway’s time and writing in Cuba. In her groundbreaking work on the posthumous novels, Rose Marie Burwell traces all Hemingway’s later works to a single ur-text coming out of his Cuban days.2 Michael Reynolds suggests a similar unity: “When younger, it was one book at a time: write, revise, and publish. These later books were being written under far different circumstances . . . [and] were linked in ways that made their endings interdependent.”3 But only Cuban scholar Mary Cruz articulates the belief that it was his life in Cuba that compelled Hemingway’s ever widening and deepening vision. “After very careful study of his work, I dare to divide it into two different stages, separated by his connection to the Gulf Stream of Mexico and his assimilation of lessons which, particularly in Cuba, added depth to his intellectual viewpoint.”4 Clearly this expansiveness, this immersion, came out of his love affair with Cuba, though to truly understand this you’d have to see it for yourself. Then you’d know why he gave his Nobel Prize medal to the people of Cuba. Of course you could book yourself right into Havana through Canada or Mexico, if you knew what you were doing. You could drink your way over the Hemingway Trail – Papa Doble daiquiris at the Floridita, moji- tos at the Bodegita del Medio, another in the bar at the Ambos Mundos Spec SD1 Date 26-july

334 Putnam Hotel, then check out 511, his old corner room, then back for daiquiris at La Terraza in Cojimar, where Santiago of Old Man lived. But if you were in search of the Hemingway that changed your heart, you’d go to San Francisco de Paula, that sad, sleepy little village on the edge of Havana, then turn up the dirt road to Hemingway’s Finca Vigía. It belongs to Castro now. You’d pay that cabbie to wait while you walked up the driveway and looked around. He wouldn’t mind. He could be a doctor or a lawyer, moonlighting to feed his family. But then you’d have to understand what the U.S. embargo has done to the people of Cuba. Hemingway stayed away from Cuban politics as much as he could, but you wouldn’t be able to once you’d made some Cuban friends and they invited you home for dinner but could only serve you rice and beans. But the gate opens and suddenly there it is, splendid and white against the palm trees and the deep blue of the afternoon sky. That last house in Ketchum, Idaho was a house of the dead. But this house! This house is full of spirits, this great white house surrounded by palm trees and bou- gainvillea and banyans, where the breeze floats through the unshuttered windows over those sharp, dark eyes full of knowing, spirits held forever on those walls – kudu, gazelle, sable, buffalo, antelope, exotic and oth- erworldly. And totems full of incantations and spells, magic tucked into every drawer, spirits circling the house, heavy with desire. You drift down the long stairway leading through the grounds to the pool. The ferns and palms are washed over with afternoon sun, a golden light struck with green. And you listen for the original stillness before the need for words. Here’s the pool where Ava Gardner swam naked – or so the story goes. Why would you have to wear any clothes here at all? With that innocent eroticism coming at you every minute out of this light, this heat, this sky. You shut your eyes and listen to the whispery secret of the wind in the trees, the creaking of the bamboo, and the silvery, premoni- tory cry of some exotic bird awakened out of the cool, dusky shadows for that rush into light, leaving behind a strange and thrilling taste of man- goes and avocates, flamboyantes, hibiscus, frangipani, oleander. The names dissolve on your tongue before you can say them. Such a lush and forbidden fruit, this fury of light. No Garden of Eden without this. You look to the left and there under the sturdy roof and bamboo trees is the Pilar, dry-docked but beautiful still, mahogany and brass glinting in the sun. You can imagine that boat soaring over those waters, Gregorio, the Pilar’s first mate, at the helm, Hemingway’s teenaged son Gigi (Gregory) beside him, those sweet, wild summers long gone, or patrolling Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Cubans 335 the Cuban coastline hunting for German submarines. No Islands in the Stream without this. Hemingway had tried to explain it often enough: “People ask you why you live in Cuba and . . . you tell them the biggest reason . . . is the great, deep blue river . . . that has, when the river is right, the finest fishing I have ever known” (BL 403–4). But it’s far more than good fishing and a boat at full throttle. “The Gulf Stream and the other great ocean currents are the last wild country there is left . . . there is great pleasure in being on the sea, in the unknown wild suddenness of a great fish; in his life and death which he lives for you . . . while your strength is harnessed to his” (BL 243–4). No Old Man and the Sea without this. And Santiago himself? In 1939, Hemingway moved to Cuba for good, and for the next twenty years gave his heart to the fishermen of Cojimar. So perhaps Santiago did not come from any particular man, but, as Cruz suggests, from the tradition of daily struggle of the poor fisherman on the north coast of Cuba.5 And if you travel to Cojimar, that little town with ramshackle houses along the harbor, you can see the sculpture of Hemingway made from bronze propellers donated by Cuban fisherman. But you came here mostly to see the house, so you make your way up the long stairs to the veranda. You hear “Moonlight Serenade” playing on a phonograph set up in the library as you climb the stairs. You want to see this above all else – Ernest’s bedroom, the typewriter on top of the bookshelf, the impala overhead, watching over the room as he stood on that kudu skin in his bare feet and placed those words edge on edge, making such light and surprise you were always coming home to places you’d never been. On your way up the stairs, you’d glanced at the tower Mary had built for Ernest to write in, though he preferred the bedroom. It was too lonely and quiet on the fourth floor. In his bedroom, he could be solitary but not alone, which tells you something profound: how susceptible he was to loneliness. And in the corner the shoe rack, and the shoes, all of them but the wing tips worn down at the heel, always a size too big, the most intimate, mournful detail of all, like nail clippings or locks of hair. When he left this place he never knew it was for good. In the end, to understand what Cuba meant to him you’d have to understand what it cost him to lose it. The proverbial handwriting was on the wall the night Batista’s troops stormed the gate looking for Fidelista revolutionaries, and killed Black Dog, half blind, standing his ground, defending Papa to the end. Of course anything would be better than Batista, with his ties to the mob and the way he had bankrupted the Cuban people, just Spec SD1 Date 26-july

336 Putnam like Gerardo Machado, the fifth president of Cuba (1925–33), did in the 1930s – with executions on both sides of the argument, and bodies in the ditch, just the same. The only time Hemingway and Fidel met was at the Hemingway fishing tournament in 1960 when Hemingway presented the trophy to the winner, Fidel himself. In that famous photo, the only one of them together, Hemingway is grinning ear to ear. He’d wanted to make a good impression, of course. Fidel had already begun confiscating the property of foreigners and executing counterrevolutionaries. Still, what if Hemingway had been able to come back to Finca Vigía after those electroshock sessions at the Mayo Clinic instead of to that spare dark house overlooking the Big Wood River? Imagine having to leave this place, the library, the paintings, the relics of his vigorous life, the green and violet lavender lushness, the boat, the sea, the manuscripts he’d left behind. You make your way quickly now to the library, although every room in the house is a library. “Many writers who have homes in different places are often asked which is their principal residence,” Márquez writes, “and almost all of them answer that it’s the one where they keep their books” (quoted in Fuentes 12). In Finca Vigía Hemingway had nine thousand of them, imperiled today by the tropical humidity and sun. Cubans have watched the sea and skies for an American invasion for fifty years. So when the United States invaded Iraq for the second time in 2003, many Cubans thought their country was next. In 1997, the mayor of Havana said that when our two countries finally come together, “Hemingway will be the bridge.” Five years later, representatives from both countries signed a historic agreement of collaboration to help restore the Finca and document and preserve the books and papers, previously forbidden to American scholars. The ceremony took place at the Finca, and the document was signed by, among others, Castro himself – thus was born The Hemingway Project: Restoration of the Finca Vigía Papers and Museo Hemingway. The sun has risen over the corner of the house, and the dining room suddenly fills with a tender light. The sunlight through the glass doors, the table set for six – they were one thing. This bathroom is another. There on the wall next to the scales Hemingway recorded five years of diminishing weight. On the bookshelf edged in between the toilet and the vanity the spine of Houdini in black and white catches your eye. What had this life of miraculous escape told him as he stood there in this bathroom with the sun coming in, pencil in hand, reading those numbers that were a sad dark narrative of their own? Hemingway was in love with magic of many kinds. After all, he’d made escapes all his life. Nobody Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Cubans 337 would forget those two African plane crashes he walked away from in 1954, though as it turned out, he probably used up the last of his nine lives with that second one. In Cuba he encountered the magic of Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion that syncretizes Catholicism with the Yoruba religion, brought to Cuba by African slaves during the Atlantic slave trade. Scholars are only beginning to understand the enormous influence of Afro-Cuban religion on Hemingway’s works, just as in the 1930s, Hemingway was only beginning his fascination with both Cuban and African cultures. As early as 1939, in “Nobody Ever Dies,” Hemingway worked with Afro-Cuban material in the description of a woman’s “possession” by a spiritual presence that syncretizes Catholicism (Jeanne d’Arc) and African orishas (spirits or deities). But if you knew all this, you wouldn’t go looking for his Nobel Prize on his desk or on a mantle with all the other relics and talismans of his life. You’d find it instead just outside the city of Santiago in the shrine to the Virgin of Cobre, patron saint of Cuba, the goddess Oshun in Santeria. Once you know to look for it, you can see how Oshun, and her color, yellow, is evoked throughout Old Man. And so you think back on other relics you may not have noticed before – the Wakamba death mask, the kudu skin for standing while writing, the walking stick, the voodoo doll placed on top of his bookshelves, cowrie shells, stones and amulets, canes made from the regla tree, a mystical tree associated with Chango, the Santeria god of thunder, a branch from the 100-year-old ceiba, or silk- wood tree, that stood guard outside Hemingway’s bedroom window – and then you’d remember the stories of Ernest’s wild protectiveness of that sacred tree. According to Norberto Fuentes, Hemingway “often said he would like to be buried at the foot of that tree, between its roots” (105–6). Eventually the old ceiba tree had to be cut down, so you settle for touching its young replacement. You walk toward what used to be the garage and encounter a student from Camaguey, here for a conference. He’s sweating and pale; it’s more than the tropical midday heat. “I am very sick,” he says. You learn there is no medicine in Camaguey, no medicine here in San Francisco de Paula, hardly any medicine in Havana itself. “We are students coming for Ernest Hemingway.” There are dark circles under his dark eyes. “I have written a paper on Hemingway’s humanism.” His fledgling moustache glistens with sweat. “This book gives me courage,” he says, holding tightly to the well-worn, hardbound copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. “It is the only one in all of Camaguey. I have received Spec SD1 Date 26-july

338 Putnam special permission to bring it here. It is out of love that we go on as well as we can.” His eyes flash with a brightness that is more than the residue of illness. So many things for which there is no translation yet ease the way between you under this vast, tremulous sky. So you stick around and sit in the back to hear this student present his paper. He squares his shoulders and begins what you expect will be a vigorous defense of Hemingway’s bravery and manhood. Instead you hear, “Hemingway makes me weep. He makes me weep for those caught in war, for fathers who do not understand their sons, for those pushed aside through homosexualism and other races, for those who are poorly-treated, for those going without understanding, for all those who are on the outside of life. Hemingway was compassionate for all of these.” When it is over, he sits down and does not raise his eyes as the applause washes over him. You hope his life will not wear down before he has any chance to be what he was meant to be. Why did Hemingway live in Cuba? He worked “as well there in those cool early mornings as . . . anywhere in the world” (BL 404). Perhaps it satisfied his need to be in a place elsewhere, a place at once strange and familiar, giving him solitude and immersion. Cuba took him as far from Oak Park as he could go and surrounded him by the sea from which came, the ur-text of his last, most abundant years.

Notes 1. G. G. Marquez, “Hemingway – Our Own,” in N. Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1984), 7–16; 12. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. R. M. Burwell, Hemingway: The Posthumous Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 319. 4. M. Cruz, “HEMINGWAY and NEGATION OF NEGATION,” excerpted in N. Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1984), 132–3; 132. 5. M. Cruz, paraphrased by G. de Cortanze, Hemingway in Cuba (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1997), 160. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 34 Race and Ethnicity: Jews Jeremy Kaye

In the fall of 1922, at around the time that Hemingway moved to Paris, Henry Ford published the last of his four-volume tract, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Originally serialized over ninety-one consecutive weeks in Ford’s personal newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, Ford sought each week to uncover a “Jewish-inspired evil,” from blaming Jewish financiers for the outbreak of World War I to seeing the swarm of recent Jewish immigrants as undermining America’s moral fabric. Approximately ten million copies of The International Jew were sold in America between 1920 and 1922.1 Adolf Hitler was so taken with Ford’s theories that a life-sized portrait of him hung next to Hitler’s desk at Nazi Party Headquarters in Munich (Lee 45). In the year that Hemingway published In Our Time (1925), Hitler published Mein Kampf and F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby with its portrait of Meyer Wolfsheim, the Jewish bootlegger and gambler with cufflinks made of human molars. The following year, Hemingway created one of the most vilified Jewish characters of the era: The Sun Also Rises’s Robert Cohn. The 1920s was the peak of anti-Semitism in America. As approximately twenty-three million European immigrants entered the United States from 1880 to 1920, a virulent strain of racism-cum-nativism was ignited against Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants.2 More specifically, Jews suffered employment discrimination, education quotas, housing covenants, and punitive immigration laws. In 1920, the Congressional Committee on Immigration and Naturalization wrote H.R. 14461, a bill requiring the temporary suspension of immigration, reporting that “by far the largest percentage of immigrants [are] peoples of Jewish extrac- tion,” Jews “of the usual ghetto type . . . filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.”3 In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act was passed, virtually grinding immigration from southern and eastern Europe to a halt. 339 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

340 Kaye While we think of Jewishness today predominantly as a religious or cultural identity, in the early part of the twentieth century it took on an ethno-racial character as well. In the 1920s, Jews were not considered “white”; rather, they were of an inferior race, looked upon as “oriental,” “mongrel,” or “off white” (Brodkin 1–52). The “first and fundamental lie” of the Jew, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, was to “make people believe that Jewry is not a nation but a religion.”4 For when Jews convince nations that they are only a “religious community,” they become “parasitic,” poisoning the blood of the master race and weakening the German national fiber (Hitler 173). Hitler’s views were far from extreme. Strategies for distinguishing “the Jew” from the white American were deployed across the era’s scientific discourses. Race scientists (a burgeoning field in the era) theorized how the Jewish male’s physiognomy – his flat feet, uneven gait, circum- cised penis, stinking flesh, and hook nose – “set him apart as . . . dis- eased” and revealed his interior nature as amoral.5 Anthropologist and eugenicist Madison Grant, in his influential bookThe Passing of the Great Race (1916), warned of “the swarms of Polish Jews” overtaking America’s major cities, “whose dwarf status, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.”6 Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World-Supremacy (1920), the book that Tom Buchanan rhapsodizes about in The Great Gatsby, is similarly pessimistic: “Our country, originally settled almost exclusively by Nordics, was toward the close of the nineteenth century invaded by hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and Jews.”7 For the Anglo-American modernist writers who formed Hemingway’s milieu, the Jew was a figure of revilement, obsession, instability, and even adoration. Ezra Pound’s maniacal crusade against the Jews animated his entire oeuvre, from his early breakthrough Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (where he proselytized Jewish usury as a cause of World War I) to the almost incessant incantations of “chew[s],” “damned jews,” “yitts,” and “big jews” in The Cantos.8 Jason Compson, the cynical brother in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), sounds eerily like Henry Ford: “dam eastern jews . . . They follow the pioneers into a new country and sell them clothes.”9 Even Gertrude Stein, a Jew herself, would write of a “stranger” entering her house: “She did not like the stranger’s looks. . . . He looks like a Jew, said Gertrude Stein[.]”10 Anti-Semitic imagery found its way into the work of most of the era’s major writers: T. S. Eliot, Edith Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Jews 341 Wharton, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, e. e. cummings, Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, Henry Adams, Henry James, and H. L. Mencken. But not everyone joined the chorus of Jew baiting. James Joyce, for example, identified with and even idealized the Jew’s marginality. In Ulysses’s Leopold Bloom, Joyce not only created the most sympathetic portrait of a Jew by any writer in Hemingway’s circle, but he elevated a Jew to the “status of a modern Odysseus[.]”11 In Jews Without Money (1930), Michael Gold celebrated the Jewish New York of the Lower East Side. Four years later, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep blended Gold’s emphasis on proletarian experience with Joyce’s stream of consciousness to create a Yiddish-English street dialect. At first glance, Hemingway might appear the perfect embodiment of modernist anti-Semitism. Derogatory references to Jews appear frequently in his letters (SL 114, 120, 206, 240), and he was prone to “occasional anti-Semitic outbursts.”12 Yet anti-Semitism was never an obsession for Hemingway the way it was for Pound; Jews play a role in only four of his published works: The Sun Also Rises (1926), and marginally in “The Killers” (1927), “Fifty Grand” (1927), and “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” (1933). Throughout Hemingway’s work there are significantly fewer demeaning references to Jews than to Spaniards, Italians, Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, or the English.13 Although it is true that his Oak Park, Illinois upbringing instilled in him a “casual racist, anti-immigrant, [and] anti-Semitic” world view,14 Hemingway’s feelings about and experiences with Jews in his early life were varied. He was fond of Jewish jokes, and his favorite nickname was “Hemingstein,” a name he would use until his death.15 In high school, he had a few dates with Irene Goldstein, an attractive Jewish girl (Lynn 113). When he moved to Kansas City in 1917 to write for the Star, Hemingway displayed compassion for pogrom victims in his profile of “Kerensky, the Fightin Flea,” about a short boxer who fled from “Old Russia” with his family after workmen in Kiev rioted against Jewish shopkeepers.16 Nonetheless, he developed negative feelings for some Jews during summers in Michigan. As Bill Smith, Hemingway’s boyhood friend and real-life model for The Sun Also Rises’s Bill Gorton, tells us: “It is true that Hem and I both disliked some of the very well-heeled Jewish people who summered at Charlevoix, Michigan.”17 When Hemingway moved to Paris in 1922, his anti-Semitism intensified (Meyers 72). At the same time that he “found it easy to revile Jewish acquaintances with anti-Semitic epithets” (Lynn 236), he also had Spec SD1 Date 26-july

342 Kaye many Jewish acquaintances and friends. (Biographer Jeffrey Meyers lists twenty-three of Hemingway’s Jewish “friends” [72, 586].) Harold Loeb was one of the better-known Jews in Hemingway’s circle. The descendant of two of the most prominent Jewish families in New York, the Loebs and the Guggenheims, Loeb was a substantial figure on the Paris literary scene, having already published the novel Doodab (1925) and run the journal Broom. Loeb took an instant liking to Hemingway: they played tennis together, and Loeb even set up a meeting for Hemingway with his publisher, Leon Fleischman of Boni & Liveright. Hemingway left that meeting dispirited, however, convinced that publishing had more to do with connections than artistic merit. “That damned kike,” Hemingway exploded in front of Loeb. When Loeb’s friend, Kitty Cannell, who had also witnessed Hemingway’s outburst, warned Loeb of Hemingway’s growing anti-Semitism, Loeb defended Hemingway: “‘Nonsense,’ [Loeb] said. ‘He used the word as I might say mick or dago. It doesn’t mean a thing.’”18 As it turned out, Cannell’s suspicions were correct. Even though Hemingway had seemed to genuinely like Loeb, Loeb’s affair with Lady Duff Twysden caught Hemingway by surprise, and he “was secretly furious that a Jew had muscled his way into Duff’s Gentile affections” (Lynn 292). A few months later, Cannell saw Hemingway at a farewell dinner she threw for Bill Smith and Loeb. “‘Hey Kitty,’ said Ernest. ‘I’m taking your advice. I’m writing a novel full of plot and drama. . . . I’m putting everyone in it and that kike Loeb is the villain’” (quoted in Baker 154). That novel, of course, would become The Sun Also Rises, and its characters Frances Clyne and Robert Cohn would be based in part on Cannell and Loeb respectively. It is Hemingway’s portrait of Cohn upon which debates surrounding his anti-Semitism predominantly hinge. The Sun Also Rises is unsparing in its treatment of Cohn. Virtually every character takes a potshot at Cohn’s Jewishness. While the novel’s anti-Semitic slurs cannot be defended, Hemingway’s portrait of Cohn is too complicated to be labeled an open-and-shut case of anti-Semitic stereotype. One difficulty with labeling Cohn a Jewish stereotype is that he does not have the classic anti-Semitic “Jew’s body.” Rather, Cohn has the athletic body of a tennis player and boxer. Jake enviously observes: “He was nice to watch on the tennis-court, he had a good body, and he kept it in shape” (SAR 45). In fact, if Jake did not repeatedly call Cohn a “Jew” or a “kike,” readers would not know that Cohn is Jewish. While The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim is a figure straight out of the era’s race science – with his “large head,” “tiny eyes,” and “luxurious” nostrils19 – Cohn often Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Jews 343 embodies the white masculine ideal better than Hemingway’s protagonist, Jake Barnes, does. Jake’s narration is obsessed with Cohn. Cohn has an affair with Lady Brett, boxes his way through Jake and Pedro Romero, and possesses the penis that Jake lacks.20 In this context, Cohn is perhaps the most complicated Jewish character written by a Gentile modernist. Such analysis notwithstanding, the novel’s publication in fall 1926 left those savaged by it in a state of disbelief. “The book hit like an upper-cut,” wrote Harold Loeb (126). A rumor started that Loeb was searching the Latin Quarter’s bars for Hemingway with a gun (Baker 181). Several of the book’s earliest reviewers commented on Cohn’s Jewishness. In the Nation, Allen Tate called Cohn a “most offensive cad,” a “puppet,” and a “Jewish bounder.”21 In the New Republic, Edmund Wilson noted the novel’s “brutal persecution of the Jew.”22 Hemingway felt compelled to defend his portrait of Cohn against charges of anti-Semitism, defiantly asking, “And why not make a Jew a bounder in literature as well as in life? Do jews [sic] always have to be so splendid in writing?” (SL 240). Compared to Cohn, Hemingway’s references to Jews in the rest of his work are minor. In the late 1920s, Hemingway drew upon his fascination with organized crime – in particular, the Jewish gambler Arnold Rothstein and the Black Sox scandal (Lynn 121) – to write two stories with Jewish characters. In “The Killers,” two gangsters, Al and Max, enter Henry’s Lunch-Room, looking for a former heavyweight prizefighter, Ole Andreson, who “must have got mixed up in something in Chicago” (CSS 222). The references to Al’s Jewishness are subtle and easily missed. Dressed conspicuously in a derby hat, black overcoat, silk muffler, and gloves, Al and Max look like a “vaudeville team,” and Max jokes that Al was in a “kosher convent” (CSS 219, 218). Al’s Jewishness is perhaps further illumi- nated by the fact that he is the most vicious character in the story: he ties up Nick and Sammy in the kitchen, aims a sawed-off shotgun at them, calls the cook “nigger” more than anyone else in the story, and wants to kill all three men because it’s “sloppy” to leave witnesses (CSS 218, 219). In “Fifty Grand,” Hemingway again enters the world of boxing, gambling, and organized crime. An Irish boxer, Jack Brennan, makes an arrangement with two shady pool room owners, Happy Steinfelt and Lew Morgan (presumably, Jewish gamblers), and decides to throw his last fight before retiring. Jack’s bigotry is a central part of the story. When his trainer mentions a previous opponent, Kid Lewis, the story explodes with references to “kike.” “‘Kid Lewis,’ Jack said. ‘That kike!’” CSS( 231). On the first page alone, the word “kike” is uttered eight times. Kenneth Lynn suggests that Jack’s slurs “measure the intensity of [Hemingway’s] Spec SD1 Date 26-july

344 Kaye anti-Semitic rage” at his publisher, Horace Liveright (308). Hemingway blamed his publisher for In Our Time’s failure and desperately wanted to break free of their “semitic clutches” (Lynn 307). In 1926, Hemingway would leave Boni & Liveright for Scribner’s. In the 1930s, Hemingway’s anti-Semitism “had begun to soften slightly” (Baker 237). His 1933 story “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” features the last significant Jewish character he wrote, who is also the most sympathetic. When confronted with an overly religious patient who castrates himself because of the shame he feels at his lust, the Jewish Doc Fischer is competent and compassionate, urging the boy to view sexuality as a “natural thing” (CSS 300). His Christian counterpart, Doctor Wilcox, is humiliated by his own incompetence and resorts to an anti-Semitic slur: “‘Our Saviour? Ain’t you a Jew?’ Doctor Wilcox said” (CSS 301). The story represents such a significant shift in attitude about Jews that one critic suggests it “may have been Hemingway’s attempt to apologize for his treatment of Harold Loeb.”23 After World War II, Hemingway revisited debates surrounding The Sun Also Rises’s anti-Semitism. In a 1949 Bantam edition of the novel, editors expunged the slur “kike” and most of the references to “Jew” and “Jewish.” When Hemingway found out, he was defiant: “If you think the book is anti-Semitic you must be out of your mind or at least not in full possession of your critical faculties.”24 In 1951, Edmund Wilson sought permission from Hemingway to reprint some of their early correspondence. Fully aware of the post-Holocaust sensitivity toward anti-Semi- tism, Hemingway asked Wilson to “change ‘Jews’ to ‘New York people,’ . . . [because] I did not mean to give any derogatory or anti-Semitic meaning as it would read today” (SL 732). A few years later, when Pound was on trial for his fascist broadcasts on Rome Radio, Hemingway distanced himself from the poet, writing that Pound “can so disgust me sometimes with his anti-semitism and childish fascism that I cannot write to him” (SL 848). Whereas thirty-one years previously, the slur “kike” was a mere triviality in a letter to Pound, toward the end of his life Hemingway had already begun the reconciliation with modernism’s long shadow of race. We can only follow Hemingway’s lead by looking back with a simultaneous awareness of the context that shaped him and with a regret characteristic of the context in which he died.

Notes 1. A. Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 14. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Race and Ethnicity: Jews 345

2. K. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 27–35. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. “Temporary Suspension of Immigration,” 66th Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, Report No. 1109, December 6, 1920, in M. Selzer (ed.), “Kike!” A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America (New York: World Publishing, 1972), 115–24; 117, 120. 4. A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Hurst and Blackett, 2000), 174. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. S. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 43. 6. M. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner’s, 1921), 91, 16. 7. L. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 165. 8. E. Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957), 61–64; and E. Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 105, 176, 257. 9. W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1990), 191. 10. G. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990), 11. 11. I. B. Nadel, Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1989), 13. 12. C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 133. Subsequent references are included in the text. 13. R. E. Meyerson, “Why Robert Cohn? An Analysis of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises,” in J. Nagel (ed.), Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), 95–105; 99. 14. E. Rovit, “On Psychic Retrenchment in Hemingway,” in H. Bloom (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005), 171–7; 176–7. 15. K. Lynn, Hemingway (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 59. Subsequent references are included in the text. 16. J. Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1985), 72. Subsequent references are included in the text. 17. D. St. John, “Interview with Hemingway’s ‘Bill Gorton,’” in B. D. Sarason (ed.), Hemingway and The Sun Set (Washington, DC: NCR Microcard Editions, 1972), 151–88; 182. 18. H. Loeb, “Hemingway’s Bitterness,” in B. D. Sarason (ed.), Hemingway and The Sun Set (Washington, DC: NCR Microcard Editions, 1972), 111–35; 117. Subsequent references are included in the text. 19. F. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 64–5. 20. J. Kaye, “The ‘Whine’ of Jewish Manhood: Rereading Hemingway’s Anti-Semitism, Reimagining Robert Cohn,” The Hemingway Review 25.2 (2006), 44–60; 46. 21. A. Tate, “Hard Boiled,” in J. Nagel (ed.), Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), 42–3; 43. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

346 Kaye

22. E. Wilson, “The Sportsman’s Tragedy,” in J. Nagel (ed.), Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), 46–9; 48. 23. R. P. Lamb, “Hemingway’s Critique of Anti-Semitism: Semiotic Confusion in ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,’” Studies in Short Fiction 33.1 (1996), 25–34; 32. 24. Quoted in A. L. Scott, “In Defense of Robert Cohn,” College English 18.6 (March 1957), 309–14; 310. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 35 Religion Matthew Nickel

A close reading of the life and writing of Ernest Hemingway reveals a significant and dynamic spiritual consciousness throughout both. In many ways he was a profoundly religious writer, although he was not conventionally so and did not want to be categorized as one who wrote primarily for a religious audience. A thorough understanding of Hemingway’s religious beliefs in the context of his time offers a more exact portrait of the writer and his fiction. Early critics often struggled to define the Christian and specifically Catholic impulse throughout Hemingway’s stories and novels, but scholarship within the last few decades has revealed a writer deeply concerned with and cognizant of a spiritual dimension to the world. H. R. Stoneback has been at the forefront of unearthing biographical, contextual, and fictional elements revealing a profoundly Catholic foundation and sensibility in Hemingway’s fiction. In particular, two important religious themes emerge consistently in his writing: the human affinity for sin or darkness and a deep yearning for the discipline and aesthetics of tradition and ritual. These two patterns are foundational to the religious structure of Hemingway’s writing and can be traced to his experiences with religion during his life. Hemingway was raised in the Congregational Church in Oak Park, Illinois, in the presence of Reverend William E. Barton, who found “Christ compatible with free enterprise,” whose sermons were often published, and whose “common-sense books of piety sold well.”1 The spirit of Oak Park Congregationalism introduced the young Hemingway to what Larry Grimes calls “religious liberalism”: “a blend of liberal theology, sentimental piety, and Victorian morality, situated in a conservative, upper middle class community.”2 His parents also exhibited various aspects of this “sentimental piety.” For instance, after his baptism, his mother wrote that Ernest was “as an offering unto the Lord, to receive his name and hence forth be counted as one of God’s little lambs.”3 For his part, 347 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

348 Nickel Hemingway’s father stressed the importance of “Self-control, self-denial, caution, Christian precepts, moral growth” (Reynolds 110). Though Hemingway eventually rebelled against Oak Park values and the religion he associated with them, he was formed by some of its principles, particularly the muscular Christianity movement, which encouraged Protestant men to “embrace manliness as a crucial way of nurturing godli- ness, equipping [them] to meet the challenges of modernity.”4 Hemingway learned how to be both a Christian and a man, and his lifelong fascination with physical contest points to one of the ways the muscularity of Protestant Christian principles always remained with him. Hemingway’s later repudiation of both his childhood religion and his parents’ authority is evident in a January 16, 1918 letter he wrote to his mother from Kansas City before he went to World War I. Hemingway, then eighteen years old, attempts to alleviate his mother’s anxiety about the condition of his soul: “Don’t worry or cry or fret about my not being a good Christian. I am just as much as ever and pray every night and believe just as hard so cheer up!” He then asserts his own independence, his ability to have friends that also “believe in God and Jesus Christ and have hopes for a hereafter,” and his desire to have “deep sincere Christian” friends as opposed to those who “drool at the mouth . . . with religion.” Finally, he points out that he has “never asked Bill what church he goes to,” because “creeds don’t matter” (SL 3–4). It is worth pausing to consider Hemingway’s perspective six months before he witnessed the horrors of war. He expresses a rebellion from his parents’ piety, and he establishes a unique perspective on what it means to be Christian. Hemingway did not reject Christianity itself; he rejected his parents’ version and the Oak Park brand of Congregationalism, a version particularly sentimental and very theologically liberal. Congregationalism was originally Calvinistic, and local Congregational churches governed themselves independently so that “each of these particular churches [was] the Church in the full sense of the term and [was] not subject to any outside jurisdiction.”5 Grimes points out a division here between “the gloom of Calvin” (2) and liberal theology – more closely related to Emersonian optimism – and he indicates a prevalent shift in America from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Some of the Protestant churches in America were turning toward an optimism that emphasized “the social gospel, the perfectibility of human life” (Grimes 2). When Hemingway arrived at the front during World War I, Oak Park optimism – an overall “denial of evil” and an “all-too-easy redemption” – would not measure up to the horror he would experience.6 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Religion 349 Hemingway’s experience of World War I, in particular his wounding on July 8, 1918, likely confirmed for him how Oak Park liberal theology and his mother’s sentimental expectations of a Christian man would not suffice in the face of mechanized warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Hemingway’s most significant epiphany after the trench mortar exploded near him was the recognition of the existence of his soul. A few years later in the short story “Now I Lay Me” (1927) and in A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway created characters who experience a very similar moment, feeling their souls “go out” and “go off and then come back” CSS( 276). As he waited for medical attention, a Roman Catholic priest performed what must have seemed like a mysterious ritual. The wounding experience, the feeling that he temporarily lost his soul, and the ritual performed by the priest were life-changing events for Hemingway. He referred to the “extreme unction” administered by the priest in a January 2, 1926 letter to Ernest Walsh: “If I am anything I am a Catholic. Had extreme unction administered to me as such in July 1918 and recovered. . . . Am not what is called a ‘good’ catholic. . . . But cannot imagine taking any other religion seriously.”7 When he returned from Italy, Hemingway was changed. He had lived and been wounded in a foreign country in a strange language. He had been witness to the presence of Catholic mystery in the rituals of the priest. He had lived with men who saw drinking as an acceptable form of communion and community. He had felt the burden of history and tradition reflected in the stained glass of Notre Dame in Paris and the Duomo in Milan. In America, the restrictive atmosphere of Oak Park represented a striking contrast to the Old World Hemingway had experienced. Prohibition was becoming standard across the land; villagers demonstrated their dislike of smoking by imposing a $100 six-month charge for a cigarette license; and “The Censorship Committee of ministers and club women drew up a movie code so stringent that not one movie in ten could have played in Oak Park” (Reynolds, The Young Hemingway 42). Oak Park was simply a microcosm of a nationwide progressive impulse to abolish societal sin under the assumption that it was possible to perfect human life with the right amount of tenderness and governing, and the Prohibition movement commenced in part through the more liberal pie- tistic Protestant sects, whereas Roman Catholics (and Episcopalians) were more vocal in their opposition. In this stifling atmosphere, experiencing a general postwar malaise, Hemingway soon sought out the mystery of the Church, which he hoped might provide some answers to the existential nothingness pervasive after Spec SD1 Date 26-july

350 Nickel the war. At least if the Church did not provide answers, it offered a system that acknowledged original sin, human imperfection, and the sanctity of the flesh, food, art, and especially wine. On September 30, 1920, he wrote to his sister-like friend Grace Quinlan about entering, lighting candles, and praying in a Catholic church in Petoskey, Michigan, with Kate Smith, one of the girls Hemingway knew and spent time with in Northern Michigan (Letters I, 244–5). On another occasion, when he was courting Hadley Richardson, Hemingway asked her if she might “pray with him at the Milan cathedral.”8 Shortly after marrying in September 1921, Hemingway and Hadley sailed to Paris. It has long been documented that Hemingway was influenced there by certain avant-garde writers of the Left Bank and that he quickly became friends with figures like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. What is not as frequently noted is that Hemingway lived in Paris at a time that saw a profound Catholic revival among Parisian and English intellectuals. At the center of this revival were writers like Jacques Maritain, Paul Claudel, and G. K. Chesterton – those who, through a revival of St. Thomas Aquinas’s theological methodology, formed a large part of the Catholic renouveau (renewal). The intellectual Catholicism of the 1920s grew out of an earlier revolution during the turn of the twentieth century in Paris. Largely in reaction to several factors, Catholics felt under attack. One source for the conflict grew out of the Dreyfus Affair;9 another cause was the 1901 “Law of Associations,” which “expelled all religious orders from France except those granted special authorization.” Both the Dreyfus Affair and “Law of Associations” were catalysts for the 1905 “Act of Separation of Church and State,” which resulted in the state’s confiscation of church property.10 All of these factors contributed not only to many Catholics’ sense of persecution but also to the beginning of a movement through which a multitude of writers like Charles Péguy, Claudel, Maritain, and others would identify a common enemy in nineteenth-century Naturalistic Determinism and Scientific Positivism – philosophies that supported an “optimistic hope that men, through science, could remake the world” (quoted in Schloesser 26). After World War I left France a bloody mess, it was not difficult for the average individual to see the dangers of science, and it seemed natural for many to seek some return to the mysteries and traditions of the Church. As an astute observer, Hemingway could not have lived in Paris without hearing about and reading the writers of the Catholic revival. Stoneback has made a convincing case for Hemingway’s knowledge of many of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Religion 351 them, especially during the composition of The Sun Also Rises (1926).11 Two very important tenets of the religious revival included a recognition of humankind’s fallenness and the presence of antiquity and mystery in the modern postwar world. Hemingway’s rejection of the Oak Park religious and social sensibility would have led him straight to the type of classicism and the doctrine of original sin espoused by many of these Catholic writers. For instance, T. E. Hulme, an early Imagist poet and acquaintance of Ezra Pound, identified the classical view as the opposite of the Romantic, explaining how “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal,” and “it is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.”12 Furthermore, Hulme points out how the Church has, since the fifth century Pelagian Heresy, accepted what he describes as “the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin” (117). Thus, for Hulme (and others of the time), optimistic Romanticism (especially that derived from writers and thinkers like Rousseau) rejects the doctrine of original sin. Hulme sees the only redemption from nineteenth-century Romanticism and Scientific Positivism (what he characterizes as the offspring of Romanticism) in the classicism that accepts original sin. After World War I, Hemingway understood humankind’s proclivity toward sin. The result is evident in his fiction centered on atonement. The fact that many of his characters seek expiation and redemption is a testimony to the imperfect- ability of mankind and the need for amazing grace. Harry in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a classic example of a character coming to the recognition of his own faults, and yearning for, during the moment of death, an atonement from those past deeds. Writers identified with the renouveau during the 1920s also explored mysticism. In Jazz-Age Catholicism, Stephen Schloesser describes the World War I French Catholic generation as a “realist generation” with “a twist, in this case, a synthesis of realism and ‘mysticism’ – a catch-all term that included supernaturalism, miracles, and the mysterious, as well as personal spirituality and orthodox religion” (117). These mysteries would have appealed to Hemingway – it was the kind of thing he hungered for in America after returning home from the war. For instance, when Hemingway sat in the shadow of the cathedral of Chartres, in late September 1925, to revise the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises, he would have felt the European sensibility called pietas for the Virgin. He was moved by this experience to write a brief essay about it, concluding that a good cathedral does not need to be talked about; simply by existing it says all that needs to be said.13 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

352 Nickel When he visited the south of France in 1924, 1927, and throughout the 1950s, Hemingway was captivated by the symbolic landscape of Provence. He often wrote enthusiastically about Saint-Louis gathering knights for the seventh and eighth crusade, and his honeymoon with Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927 occurred in the Port of the King, le Grau-du-Roi, during the famous Provencal religious festival of Les-Saintes-Maries.14 At the crossing of the Pyrenees, Hemingway thought about the last sin of Roland and Charlemagne’s lament – the line Hemingway quoted often – “ah que ce cor a longe haleine” (“ah that horn has a long breath”).15 Then in Pamplona, he celebrated the sanctity of life and death through toreo, that art form he would come to love for decades. As Stoneback has pointed out, the con- fluence of Hemingway’s medieval sensibility, his allusive aesthetic, and the religious symbolic landscape of his fiction all factor into a profoundly complex religious and mystical vision. Hemingway never wanted to be known as a religious writer, though. He was conscious of his own sins, and he consistently remarked that his work was not worthy of being a part of the Church. Hemingway’s sense of sin is reflected through his characters who also exhibit unworthiness and a yearning toward some kind of salvation in the dark night. For instance, The Sun Also Rises tells the story of the Catholic Jake Barnes navigating the sacred and profane landscapes and character-scapes between Paris and Pamplona, reconciling his feelings for the unattainable Lady Brett Ashley while simultaneously learning to live passionately “the values” Count Mippipopolous espouses early in the novel (SAR 60). Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms is blown up in World War I, discovers his soul, becomes close friends with a priest, learns about the dark night and love, and feels toward the end that he may get “very devout” (263). Stories in Men Without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933) similarly portray characters struggling through what may be called the dark night of the soul. Nick in “Now I Lay Me” prays at night to keep from remembering the horror of losing his soul in the night; the older waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” feels a special communion with the old man, a struggle to keep a light through the darkness. The night, the darkness, would haunt Hemingway’s life and writing. Acknowledgment of its existence for the writer was a prerequisite to belief: it seems in many stories like “Today is Friday,” “Now I Lay Me,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “The Gambler, The Nun, and the Radio,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” that a character needs to acknowledge the darkness before that character can accept the possibility of grace. This was both existential and mystical, and two mystics who wrote extensively Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Religion 353 about darkness and belief were Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, religious figures Hemingway had read, alluded to, and felt he would have been friends with had he been their contemporaries (SL 811). The “nada” praying of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” might thus be seen as echoing the nada prayer from Saint John of the Cross’ Ascent to Mount Carmel, in which the penitent suffering the dark night of the soul must journey through nothing before he or she can reach the all of God. It is a path of purgation, and many of Hemingway’s characters seem about to enter or well under way along that path. There were certainly other factors that affected Hemingway’s feelings about religion. One was his marriage in 1927 to Pauline Pfeiffer, who was a devout Catholic and who formalized his deepening engagement with Catholicism. He also journeyed on more pilgrimages to places like Zaragoza, Spain (1926), Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France (1927), and Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1927, 1929, 1931). When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hemingway, like many Catholics, found it difficult to reconcile the Church’s alleged support of the fascists. He and many others believed that the Church should support the people of Spain first and stay out of politics completely. Subsequently, Hemingway distanced himself from the Church during this time. This move coincided with his budding relationship with Martha Gellhorn and his separation from Pauline. In the end, he dealt with his doubts and disillusions in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel less about revolution than it is about the revelation of Robert Jordan, who discovers a special communion with the Spanish people and the Spanish earth; central to that communion is his love for a Spanish woman, a story as profound as the oldest Spanish mysteries. The years between the Spanish Civil War and World War II seemed unstable for Hemingway, but his return to France during World War II brought him back to the magic of his formative years, and it revived that mixture of the sacred and the profane that existed always at the still point of Hemingway’s religious sensibility as he experienced some of the more horrific and violent battles at Operation COBRA and in the Hurtgen Forest and celebrated victory at the sacred places of le Mont-Saint-Michel and Villedieu-les-Poêles. This mixture of sacred places and the profane horror of the war, the murder of thousands, was the core image for Hemingway’s novel Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), an experimental novel about the wounded Colonel Cantwell who suffers for his past sins and seeks salvation from the dark night. The young woman, Renata, with whom he is very much Spec SD1 Date 26-july

354 Nickel in love, offers the Colonel the opportunity to “purge” his “bitterness” and anger (ARIT 240). Her love for him enables Cantwell to talk – an action he terms “confessing” (ARIT 222) – about his harrowing experience of war, and after Cantwell confesses his war sins, he thinks to himself how he might get “Christian toward the end” (ARIT 291). During his last decade, Hemingway’s writing continued to yearn toward a Christian vision both mystical and redemptive, evident especially in one novel about an old fisherman, Santiago, out at sea struggling to bring in a giant marlin. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is a story of endurance, of the indomitable human spirit. Santiago’s tale is often considered one of Hemingway’s more explicit Christian stories, and it certainly exhibits Christian forms and images. The fish itself calls to mind the Greek acrostic Ichthys, and the moment of communion between the old fisherman and the marlin might be considered a manifestation of God in the form of a fish, an ichthiomorphic theophany.16 There are numerous places throughout the novel where Santiago exhibits Christ-likeness and crucifixion imagery: when he carries the mast across his shoulders; when he sits down five times; and then when he sleeps “with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up” (121–2). Hemingway’s writing during the 1950s, both in the fiction and in his letters to friends like Bernard Berenson, Adriana Ivancich, and Robert Morgan Brown,17 reveal a deeply sensible and active Catholic toward the end of his life. His letters also point to religious subjects found in his 1950s writing: contemplation of death and the soul; details about ortho- doxy; discussion of saints and religious writing; thoughts about pilgrimage; and descriptions of the Crusades. Hemingway was still drawn to the mystery, the ritual, and some form of resolution regarding the conflicts of the human heart. For instance, he offered his Nobel Prize medal to the Virgin of Cobre, the patroness of Cuba whose basilica is situated in the village El Cobre, near Santiago de Cuba, as a ritualistic and mystical act of devotion (Stoneback, “Pilgrimage Variations” 55). Though his writing after The Old Man and the Sea remained largely unfinished, he continued to explore similar concepts in new places. The Garden of Eden is set in the symbolic pilgrimage landscape of Provence; it is largely about “the happiness of the Garden that a man must lose” (Baker 460), and it presents the possibility of salvation through an act of telling – a narrative – of confession. Throughout A Moveable Feast, the writer remembers his Paris years with an impending need – like that felt by Cantwell – to confess past sins. In Under Kilimanjaro, Hemingway exhibits a syncretic drive to merge his own Christian rituals with local Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Religion 355 African beliefs. Hemingway had a lifelong fascination with mystical dimensions, rituals, and celebrations, and Under Kilimanjaro exemplifies his intrigue and interest explicitly. Though he entertains a variety of religious traditions and beliefs throughout the narrative, the story still contains tenets of Catholicism.18 Hemingway aimed to write as truly as he could with the knowledge he had gained about the world and its mysteries. “Mysticism implies a mystery,” he wrote in Death in the Afternoon, “and there are many mysteries” (54). Thus, for Hemingway, religion was not always an either–or dichotomy: either African tribal lore or Christianity; either Mithraism or Catholicism. He lived always with a mystical sensibility, taking from many tribes and cultures a sense of the sacred. And, for most of his adult life, the rituals and theological sensibility he framed his life within and lived according to remained Catholic and followed the patterns of the Church.

Notes 1. M. S. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Norton, 1998), 11. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. L. Grimes, The Religious Design of Hemingway’s Early Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 1. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. Quoted in C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 3. Subsequent references are included in the text. 4. P. C. Kemeny, Review of Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920, The American Historical Review 107.4 (2003), 1233–4; 1234. 5. J. Loughlin, “Congregationalism,” The Catholic Encyclopedia 4 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908), www.newadvent.org/cathen/04239a.htm. 6. H. R. Stoneback, “In the Nominal Country of the Bogus: Hemingway’s Catholicism and the Biographies” in Frank Scafella (ed.), Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 105–40; 112. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. Quoted in M. S. Reynolds, The Paris Years (New York: Norton, 1999), 345. 8. P. Griffin, Along With Youth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 170. 9. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was convicted of treason by anti-Semitic forces; writers like Emile Zola, Anatole France, and Marcel Proust rallied behind Dreyfus. 10. S. Schloesser, Jazz-Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris 1919– 1933 (University of Toronto Press, 2005), 52–3. Subsequent references are included in the text. 11. H. R. Stoneback, Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), 305–10. Subsequent references are included in the text. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

356 Nickel

12. T. E. Hulme, Speculations (London: Routledge, 1924), 116. Subsequent references are included in the text. 13. E. Hemingway, “On Cathedrals,” unpublished manuscript, item 630, Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library. 14. SL 683; H. R. Stoneback, “Hemingway and the Camargue: Van Gogh’s Bedroom, the ‘Gypsy’ Pilgrimage, Saint-Louis, the Holy Marys, Mirèio, Mistral, Mithra, and Montherlant,” North Dakota Quarterly: Hemingway Centennial Issue 66.2 (1999), 164–95; 172–87. 15. This is a line from Le Chanson de Roland that Hemingway repeated numerous times (SL 870); Stoneback, Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (191). 16. M. M. Hassett, “Symbolism of the Fish,” The Catholic Encyclopedia 6 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), www.newadvent.org/cathen/06083a. htm. 17. Stoneback, “In the Nominal Country,” 121, 130. 18. M. Nickel, “Lighthearted Sinners and Pious Puritans, Followers, and Believers: Hemingway’s ‘Holy War Meat Eaters and Beer Drinkers Happy Hunting Ground and Mountain Religion’ in Under Kilimanjaro,” North Dakota Quarterly 76.1–2 (2009), 106–20. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 36 Sex, Sexuality, and Marriage Debra A. Moddelmog

Born in 1899, Ernest Hemingway came of age during a sexual revolution. The early twentieth century was a time when “the dominant conservative Victorian sexual definitions and codes no longer made sense to many people, and new forms of consciousness and identity developed.”1 Dating, companionate marriage, free love, social hygiene, sexual inversion, erotic symbolism, primitivism – all of these were concepts about human relationships, desire, sexual health, and identity that were introduced or given new meaning in the early part of the twentieth century when Hemingway was growing up and entering adulthood. Like many writers of his generation, he was fascinated by this new sexual terrain and the theories developed to establish and explain it. As a result, neither Hemingway’s own sexuality nor that of his characters can be understood without a clear sense of some of the radical ideas about sex that transformed the sexual lives of American men and women in the first half of the twentieth century. One must first remember that this was also a time of gender revolution. This was the age of the New Woman who valued self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice, although the New Negro woman typically tied her self-fulfillment to racial uplift, and of the first wave of femi- nism, which succeeded in giving U.S. women the vote in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. Women were no longer seen as passionless or helpless, and were asserting their independence and right to smoke, drink, get an education, hold important jobs, and even, in some cases, engage in premarital sex. It was also a time of changing gender identities for white middle-class men like Hemingway, as the idea of self-restrained moral manliness was replaced by that of aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Between 1880 and 1910, working-class, immigrant, and African American men as well as middle-class white women challenged middle-class white men’s belief that they should control the nation’s destiny. To reassert their superiority and authority, white men were given 357 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

358 Moddelmog new models of muscular masculinity to emulate, models that advocated strenuous exercise, such as boxing, and playing team sports as a path to a powerful, virile masculinity.2 These new gender roles for men and women demanded new forms of courtship, for example, dating, a striking departure from the nineteenth-century practice of a young man “calling on” a young woman in the parlor or on the front porch of her family home while being chap- eroned. Twentieth-century dating was less formal, unsupervised, more expensive (for the man, who was expected to pay), less tied to expectations that a serious relationship might result, and more favorably disposed to physical intimacy, including “petting.” As Beth Bailey notes, dating “moved courtship into the public world,” such as “restaurants, theaters, and dance halls.”3 In addition, women’s clothing became less restrictive and heavy as hemlines and sleeve lengths shortened, representing the shift from sexual restraint to sexual expression. A related shift that restructured male–female relationships was the societal promotion of “companionate marriage,” especially in the 1920s and 1930s, a controversial movement that endeavored to reconstitute marriage as a partnership in which mutual sexual pleasure was the ideal, and that advocated birth control and the easy opportunity for divorce if the marriage was childless. This was different from the sentimental model of the nineteenth century in which men and women were seen as opposites who completed each other, but the essential “purity” of women was to be upheld and men, too, were expected to control their passion. This model limited intimacy, and it was not unusual for both sexes to find their greatest emotional and romantic bonds with a member of the same sex or for men to seek liaisons with prostitutes.4 In contrast, companionate marriage capitalized on new science that presented women as having desires just as strong as men’s. With proper training in the erotic arts, men and women could attain mutual pleasure and cement the marital bond; the ultimate goal became the simultaneous orgasm, which symbolized the complete union of two beings. Marriage manuals explained that “The difference between the sexes was a specifically erotic difference, and its essence lay in sexual - tim ing.”5 One of the most successful manuals was Marie Stopes’s Married Love, first published in March 1918 in Great Britain but also popular in America and many foreign countries. Stopes proposed that every “normal” woman has a “profound, fundamental rhythm of sex desire,” which has been “covered over or masked by the more superficial and temporary influences due to a great variety of stimuli or inhibitions in modern life.”6 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Sex, Sexuality, and Marriage 359 Married women were encouraged to chart their own sex rhythms but, even more, to reject the assumption that they lacked or should suppress sexual desire. Husbands were urged to study their wives, adjusting their sexual demands so as to be “in harmony with her nature” (Stopes 47). Companionate marriage revisionists such as Ben Lindsey and Wainwright Evans also advocated for birth control and trouble-free divorce. This position recognized women’s greater social equality – and thus their interest in pursuing an education and even a career before starting a family – as well as the time it might take for a young couple to establish financial security and companionable partnership. Lindsey and Evans’s work was part of a larger effort to make birth control legal as well as socially acceptable. The Comstock Act of 1873 had made it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the U.S. mail, including contraceptive devices and information. One of the major leaders in the fight against this law and its state counterparts was Margaret Sanger, who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn, New York, on October 16, 1916. Although she was arrested nine days later, the ensuing trial and appeal generated enormous support for her cause. The more radical sex enthusiasts also supported “free love” and non-monogamy. As Christina Simmons notes, “free lovers” “critiqued the legal rigidities of marriage and its restriction of individual freedom, especially for women; some called for divorce and others for the freedom to have multiple relationships” (8). Although the free love position never took hold with the majority of Americans, when Hemingway moved to Paris in the 1920s, he encountered a number of individuals living in unconventional relationships. As Michael Reynolds notes, “It was easy to be confused in Paris where seemingly responsible adults did not behave as they did in Oak Park, where gender and sexual preferences were not always obvious, and where the rules Hemingway inherited had little bearing on the games being played in the cafés and salons.”7 Later, in The Garden of Eden, Hemingway wrote his own story of complex gender and sexual preferences involving one man and two women, and an overlapping subplot (cut from the published version) involving one woman and two men. On the more conservative side of the sexual revolution were the social hygienists who were usually “middle- or upper-class white Protestants who sought to ameliorate the social problems of industrial society” (Simmons 19). Often these social problems were “vices,” such as gambling, drinking, and prostitution, which the social hygienists connected to health Spec SD1 Date 26-july

360 Moddelmog problems such as venereal disease and sexual difficulties. The Bureau of Social Hygiene was founded in 1911 for “the study, amelioration, and prevention of those social conditions, crimes, and diseases which adversely affect the well being of society.”8 Its approaches and solutions were often eugenic in nature. One of the major activities it funded was “social scientific investigations of sexual problems” (Simmons 25). In 1913 the influential American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) was formed, which published the journal Social Hygiene. The ASHA spread information about “their vision of proper sexual life through books, public exhibits, pamphlets, posters, lectures, university courses, and films in the period through World War I” (Simmons 26). Social hygienists believed constructive sex education would counter some of the sexual freedoms and new ideas about sex that were enticing young people and guide them to self-governing their desires within the bonds of reproductive marriage. When the United States prepared to enter World War I, the ASHA was a prominent force in lobbying to cleanse military camps, perceived as breeding grounds for vice, illicit sex, drinking, and venereal disease. The federal government responded by forming the Commission on Training Camp Activities charged with keeping U.S. troops “physically healthy and morally pure.”9 The influence of the social hygiene movement surfaced throughout Hemingway’s youth in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. In 1911, the Chicago Vice Commission “referred to homosexuality as among the worst social ills afflicting the city.”10 In 1915, Hemingway’s physician father, who was also deeply religious, gave a short “sex talk” to fifty members of the Boy’s High School Club.11 A hint of the content of this talk – and its connection to the moral perspective of the ASHA – might be revealed in Nick Adams’s memories in “Fathers and Sons” (1932): “[Nick’s] father had summed up the whole matter [of sex] by stating that masturbation produced blindness, insanity, and death, while a man who went with prostitutes would contract hideous venereal diseases and that the thing to do was to keep your hands off of people” CCS( 371). We can also see Hemingway’s resistance to social hygiene morality in A Farewell to Arms, where his protagonist Frederic Henry finds pleasure with prostitutes, despite contracting gonorrhea, and where a field brothel is an accepted staple of his regiment’s camp. Sex between races was another prominent social concern in the twentieth century. Although white slave masters had often crossed the racial line by raping their black female slaves, miscegenation was considered taboo long after slavery ended. From 1887 to 1948, thirty states enforced Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Sex, Sexuality, and Marriage 361 anti-miscegenation laws, and in 1912–13 and 1928, unsuccessful attempts were made to pass a federal anti-miscegenation law.12 White anxiety about racial mixing was evident in the horrific lynchings of blacks, especially black men, by white mobs in the early twentieth century; whites sometimes justified these lynchings by falsely accusing the black men of raping white women. Nonetheless, interracial desire acquired a certain appeal within some circles, especially as the discourse of primitivism became popular as an antidote to the repression, fast pace, and over-civilization of the Western world. Thanks in part to Sigmund Freud, who proposed that civilization imposes significant costs on the direct expression of human sexuality, non-Western cultures were viewed as more in touch with their primal, sexually uninhibited selves; in the United States, this perception fed into stereotypes about African Americans. Whites, including Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline, went to Harlem to sway to the rhythms of the new freestyle African American music called jazz.13 Primitivism became a prominent trope in modernist writing and art, whereby contact with the “primitive or exotic other” was viewed as a means of returning to a more natural, uninhibited state. Hemingway’s work and life up to the time he died are filled with primitivist notions. InThe Garden of Eden (which he worked on in the 1940s and 1950s), Catherine Bourne asks her husband, David, “Is it true that Somali women have ways of holding a man so he can never leave them?”14 She answers her own question by trying to tan “so dark [that David] won’t be able to stand it” (GOE 31). When Hemingway took his second safari to Africa in 1953–4, he pursued an African woman, Debba, and grew so enamored with the Wakamba people that he wanted to join their tribe. So strong was his urge to go native that his wife, Mary, had to write him a letter (October 4, 1955) reminding him that he could never be anyone other than “a wise, thoughtful, realistic adult white American male.”15 Fueling the sexual revolution of the early twentieth century was the field of sexology, a “science” that had as its goal “the study and classification of sexual behaviours, identities and relations.”16 The sexologists, Freud included, were a varied group, but they joined in the purpose of delineating “normal” and “abnormal” sexual desires and behaviors. As Havelock Ellis, a British sexologist whose works were influential in many countries including the United States, put it, “[F]rom the investigation of the facts we want to ascertain what is normal and what is abnormal, from the point of view of physiology and of psychology.”17 In regard to “normal sexuality,” sexologists advanced the argument that women were sexual beings and that the male–female sexual relationship should involve Spec SD1 Date 26-july

362 Moddelmog multiple methods and positions to exact or increase the sexual pleasure of both men and women. They thus provided scientific support for the companionate marriage model. Sexologists also sought to move authority for making decisions about “sexual abnormality” from the realm of the courts and the church to that of medicine. To justify that transfer, they developed a scientific taxonomy organized around identities more than acts. Fetishist, sexual invert, homosexual, masochist, pedophile, transves- tite – all these words were coined by the sexologists to refer to “types” of people who through a congenital (inborn) anomaly or a perverted psycho- sexual development were locked into a particular form of abnormal sexual desire. Importantly, sexologists such as Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld viewed their theories as creating more tolerance for sexual minorities, such as the homosexual, whose sexual instinct was, they argued, “turned by inborn constitutional abnormality towards persons of the same sex”;18 if such a desire was congenital, there was no reason to imprison, punish, or even try to cure the homosexual. Like many modernists, Hemingway was fascinated by sexology, Ellis’s works in particular. In the early 1920s, Hemingway urged his close friends as well as Hadley Richardson, whom he was courting, to read Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. By April 1921, he had sent Hadley three volumes of Ellis’s work (Reynolds 184–5). His fascination with sexology appears to have informed not only his fiction but also his understanding of his own gender and sexual identity; and if his library is any indication, he continued to consult the sexologists even late in life, with copies of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Gordon Westwood’s [pseudonym for Michael George Schofield] Society and the Homosexual (1953) on his shelves.19 Some of his later interest in sexology may have been due to concerns about his youngest son, Gregory, who was transsexual. But his writing also indicates that it was even more personal. Biographers have pointed out that Hemingway’s mother raised Ernest and his older sister, Marcelline, as twins for the first seven or so years of their lives.20 They had similar haircuts, Marcelline was kept back a year in school so that they could be in the same grade, and Hemingway, at least until he was five years old, was sometimes dressed in girl’s clothes. Some biographers and scholars have speculated that this unusual parenting practice created a lifelong gender complexity for Hemingway, instilling in him both a desire to adopt a female persona with some of his wives (who took on a male role) and a fetish involving hair. An entry he made on December 20, 1953, in wife Mary Hemingway’s diary reveals the gender-switching desire: “She loves me to be her girl, which I love Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Sex, Sexuality, and Marriage 363 to be, not being absolutely stupid.”21 In the “Secret Pleasures” chapter in the “restored” edition of A Moveable Feast, he and Hadley talk about the pleasures of growing their hair the same length. Whatever the source of his desire, this chapter also provides an example of Hemingway’s resistance to the sexological formulation of it as “perverse” or “pathological.” Instead, he determines that he and Hadley “lived as savages and kept our own tribal rules and had our own customs and our own standards, secrets, taboos and delights” (MF-RE 184–5). Although Hemingway may have learned some of the secrets of lovemaking from Ellis, he also learned that confessing to certain desires could be humiliating and restricting. Rather than adopt a sexological classification, such as fetishist, he transfers his and Hadley’s desire into the more acceptable language of primitivism. The suggestion is that he is not perverse but sexually inventive, a view more in line with the sexological argument about the infinite variety of human sexuality, an argument that became a centerpiece of Alfred Kinsey’s studies of male and female sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s a tactic Hemingway assigns to some of his characters. In a scene cut from Garden, Marita tells David that she can do what Catherine did without causing him remorse because their sexual and gender experiments are “not perversion . . .[but] variety,” “infinite variety” (422.1–36, pp. 5, 6). Similarly, in “The Sea Change” (1931), Hemingway’s female protagonist resists the efforts of her male companion, Phil, to label her desire for another woman as a “vice” or a “perversion.” “You don’t have to put any name to it,” she tells him, “We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve known that” (CCS 304). There are other signs that Hemingway was deeply affected by the sexual and gender revolution that reshaped the early twentieth-century world. His hypermasculinity can be viewed as the effect of his unconscious, or conscious, fear that his cross-gendering made him feminine or homosexual, but it was also the expectation of the time that young white American boys would grow into a powerful masculinity. Moreover, even his earliest fiction reveals he was absorbed by the latest theories about men and women’s sexuality. “Up in Michigan” (1923) portrays Liz Coates, a young woman of upper Michigan, as having sexual desire, but also, sadly, as being uneducated about the mechanics of sexual intercourse and naive about Jim Gilmore’s intentions. Indeed, the woman with a healthy sexual appetite has a prominent place throughout Hemingway’s work. Brett Ashley of The Sun Also Rises (1926) is a New Woman who engages in sex simply because “it’s the way she’s made.” Others who enjoy sex – most of them outside the bonds of Spec SD1 Date 26-july

364 Moddelmog legal marriage – include Catherine Barkley of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Maria of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Marie Morgan of To Have and Have Not (1937), Renata of Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and Catherine Bourne and Marita of The Garden of Eden (1986). Not only do many of Hemingway’s female characters find sex pleasurable, but they are also sexually adventurous. To have sex with the wounded Frederic Henry, Catherine must assume the position on top; when Maria and Robert Jordan make love, they experience a simultaneous orgasm so strong the earth moves for both (FWTBT 174–5); Marie in To Have and Have Not finds the disability of her husband Harry sexually exciting; and Catherine Bourne initiates “devil” transformations that involve not only gender switching but sodomy. Hemingway’s couples thus operate on the presumption of mutual sexual pleasure, which was the foundation of companionate marriage and also of many sexual encounters outside of marriage, given the modern view that women’s sexual pleasure was just as important as men’s. Further, Hemingway did not turn away from some of the less pleasant realities of a more sexually expressive culture. In “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), a young man encourages his pregnant female partner to get an abortion. In “Cat in the Rain,” the troubled marriage is revealed not only through the American woman’s expressions of unhappiness and lack but also by the fact that the bed has become a place for her husband to read rather than a site of mutual pleasure. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes’s particular kind of impotence poses an impossible obstacle as he is able to feel sexual desire but not act on it. Homosexuality was also a frequent subject in Hemingway’s writing, and while some of his portrayals have been read as homophobic stereotypes, a closer look reveals a more varied, complex, and often sympathetic perspective. When his male protagonists express homophobia, they often reflect their own gender and sexual anxiety, as when Jake resents the homosexual men who accompany Brett to the bal musette. Moreover, in the homosocial world enjoyed by many of Hemingway’s men, the line between affection and desire often seems about to implode. Frederic Henry’s private moments with both the priest and Rinaldi are often erot- ically charged, and “A Simple Enquiry” is structured around an ambiguous question (“are you corrupt?”), which could be an invitation for sex between men or an effort to “out” and punish a queer subordinate. Similarly, same-sex desire among women is prevalent in Hemingway’s work. The young woman in “The Sea Change” tells Phil that she “[has] to” pursue her desire for another woman (CCS 302–3). In Farewell, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Sex, Sexuality, and Marriage 365 Catherine recognizes that her friend Helen Ferguson is in love with her and “wants” what Frederic wants from her (FTA 257). Similarly, Pilar tells Maria that even though she is no tortillera [lesbian], she wants Maria but does not “make perversions” (FWTBT 169). Finally, after sleeping with Marita, Catherine tells David, “It was what I wanted to do all my life and now I’ve done it and I loved it” (GOE 120). In the subplot cut from the published version of Garden, Barbara Sheldon finds Catherine so attractive that she has the equivalent of a male erection (422.1–5, chap. 5, p. 7). By situating Hemingway’s work historically within the sexual and gender revolutions of his time, we find ample evidence that he immersed himself in contemporary scientific writings and societal discourse about the sexual impulse, sexual pleasure, sexual differences, and new sexual formations such as homosexuality, transsexuality, and lesbianism. He was fascinated by the complications and opportunities that the new rules, definitions, and identities brought for both men and women. He was not only a student and a participant, but also a sensitive recorder of the changing sexual and gender mores of his time. Recognizing this history helps us to appreciate the complexities of both his male and female characters – as well as the gender and sexual complexities of Hemingway himself.

Notes 1. C. Simmons, Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (Oxford University Press, 2009), 11. Subsequent references are included in the text. 2. G. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15. 3. B. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 13. 4. S. Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2005), 184–5, 189. 5. J. B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 91. 6. M. Stopes, Married Love (1918; Oxford University Press, 2004), 41–2. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 33. 8. Quoted in “Sources in the Study of Eugenics #2: The Bureau of Social Hygiene Papers,” The Mendel Newsletter 16 (September 1978); accessed November 27, 2011, www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/othersrv/isar/archives2/sources/bsh.htm. 9. N. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering During the Great War (New York University Press, 1997), 7. 10. J. Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 118. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

366 Moddelmog

11. M. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 119. Subsequent references are included in the text. 12. E. Stein, “Past and Present Proposed Amendments to the United States Constitution Regarding Marriage,” Washington University Law Quarterly 82.3 (2004), 611–85; 628, 630. 13. In an October 5, 1926 letter to Hemingway, Pauline writes that she, John Dos Passos, and Gerald and Sara Murphy are going to see the blacks in Harlem that evening (John F. Kennedy Library, Hemingway Collection). 14. “The Garden of Eden” manuscripts,” 422.1–17, p. 25; Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. Subsequent references are included in the text. 15. Quoted in C. Eby, Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 178–9. 16. L. Bland and L. Doan, “General Introduction,” in L. Bland and L. Doan (eds.), Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–7; 1. 17. H. Ellis, “General Preface (July 1897),” Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York: Random House, 1936), vol. I, xxvii–xxx; xxx. 18. H. Ellis and J. Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, I. Crozier (ed.) (1897; Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 96. 19. See J. D. Brasch and J. Sigman, Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record (New York: Garland, 1981), items 3557 and 5884. 20. R. M. Burwell, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20–1. 21. M. Hemingway, How It Was (New York: Knopf, 1976), 426. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 37 Travel Russ Pottle

Ernest Hemingway lived and worked amid a flowering of modern business and leisure travel.1 Revitalized by twentieth-century mechanization, rail and sea transport attained unprecedented levels of efficiency, luxury, and reach. Automotive travel was so new at the time of Hemingway’s birth that one biographer sketches a timeline between 1899 and 1914 by means of the increase in automobile ownership and use in Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois.2 Yet by the time Hemingway became an adult, automobile travel in the United States had gained a patriotic image, purpose, and scope formerly associated with the iconic Iron Horse. Powered and controlled human flight, first and haltingly achieved when Hemingway was four years old, was a profitable, globe-spanning business by the time he committed suicide at age sixty-one. These modes of travel were vital to supporting Hemingway’s self-fashioned writer’s lifestyle, and so blithely did Hemingway incorporate them into his life and work that it is easy to forget they hadn’t been there all along, rather than advancing or developing around him. Take the train, for example. During Hemingway’s time, rail was ubiquitous. By the end of the nineteenth century, all continents save Antarctica had regular, serviceable passenger rail, thanks to steady commercial and technological development, first in Europe and then in the United States, and amplified by colonialist export. During the twentieth century, with only slight pauses – in Europe, where tracks and services were often casualties on the killing fields of the two World Wars, and in the United States, where the Great Depression produced a few years’ worth of manufacturing slowdown – the only question was how to improve the enterprise. Perhaps to the surprise of today’s traveler, improving rail travel during Hemingway’s life and career had less to do with accelerating its pace than with making it more dependable. In discussing the cultural place of rail travel in the 1920s and 1930s, Paul Fussell cites the old saw about 367 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

368 Pottle “Mussolini at least [having] ‘made the trains run on time.’”3 Importantly, the identified achievement is punctuality, not speed. But timeliness was perhaps easier in Europe, where distances within regions were shorter and where there was no steady demand for “the long distance ‘Great Trains’” of the United States, Russia and the Soviet Union, and other large national spaces.4 Great distances notwithstanding, rail companies regularized their operations in the first half of the twentieth century by standardizing track gauge, replacing flammable wood with durable steel in passenger car construction, and calibrating their lines’ round-the-clock schedules and routes. These measures ensured that rail became the most widely available and regular mode of mechanized travel. Hemingway’s postwar dashing about France, Switzerland, Greece, and Turkey as a correspondent for the Toronto Star; his Austrian skiing vacations in the mid-1920s with his first wife, Hadley Richardson; his ability to travel from Miami to his publishers in New York in forty-eight hours during the time he lived in Key West; his commutes late in life from the American West to his Cuban property: none of it could have been accomplished dependably at the time except by rail. When Hemingway’s most famous discretionary traveler, Jake Barnes, is called by Brett Ashley to travel 280 miles south from San Sebastian to Madrid, he confidently wires back “ARRIVING SUD EXPRESS TOMORROW” (SAR 239). And he does. A similar advance in travel occurred at sea. Like rail companies, major steamship lines had established basic technologies and routes – trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, and via the Suez Canal rather than around Africa’s Cape Peninsula – by the end of the nineteenth century. The first half of the twentieth century saw progressive improvements in hull, engine, and propulsion materials and design, allowing the large liners strikingly represented in art deco posters to make trans-Atlantic crossings in four- to seven-day windows, an acme mark for combining art and engineering afloat. While the dominant image from Hemingway’s time is of the Blue Riband-route steam liners, swift development of diesel engines from the mid-1920s forward ensured efficient service along tropical and Oriental routes, motor ships being more economical to operate in regions less rife with coal.5 Factoring out rare disasters like the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 or the loss of passenger ships repurposed during the World Wars as troop transport or hospital facilities and thereby made vulnerable to military ordnance, sea travel rivaled rail in dependability, although very rough seas could still compromise travelers’ comfort. Hemingway’s first Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel 369 trans-Atlantic trip was in 1918, toward the Italian front and his traumatic wounding in World War I, aboard the liner-turned-troopship Chicago;6 one of his last occurred in 1959, toward home after the “Dangerous Summer” in Spain, aboard the liner-turned-troopship-turned-liner-again Liberté, known formerly as the Europa:7 both vessels were operated by the durable French Line, a peer of the White Star and Cunard shipping companies. Between these trips, ocean travel made possible Hemingway’s African safaris in 1933–4 and 1953–4, and therefore made possible Green Hills of Africa and a stack of posthumously published works, not the least because ocean liners allowed travelers to carry a stunningly heavy weight of luggage. Between safaris, an ocean liner carried Hemingway and his then-wife Martha Gellhorn along the first leg of their journalistic journey to China in 1941. Rail and ocean travel in the first half of the twentieth century were versions of each other. Railroad companies and shipping lines began their operations as cargo carriers, but as passenger travel became more lucrative shortly before and during Hemingway’s lifetime, both adapted to accom- modating simultaneously the rich and the poor, and eventually the middle classes. Coaches and liners boasted luxurious accommodations and privileged pursuits in first class and something less – often much less – in the classes below. Aesthetically, the bodies of trains underwent modernization in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming “streamlined,” in keeping with the “‘form follows function’” principle of the industrial design movement (Riley 25–8). Ships were the forerunner in this change, with their exterior and interior spaces reworked by modernist ideas a decade earlier, particularly by the “functional attractiveness” associated with the art deco style (Dawson 83–95, 101–7). Yet this heyday passed all too soon. The popularity and profitability of rail and ocean travel suffered greatly in the decade following Hemingway’s death, hit hard by the advent of the jet airliner, with its superior speed. If rail and sea travel in Hemingway’s time saw a large increase in passenger traffic, the roads saw a sharp rise in automobile travel, especially in the United States. Automobile touring began as a leisure activity for the wealthy in the United States and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1902, Henry Adams wrote that “My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.”8 However, by Hemingway’s late teenage years, the automobile became entwined with American nationalism, more as a means to inculcate patriotism than as a symbol of industrial power. From 1910 to 1940, the “See America First” movement (“See Europe if you Spec SD1 Date 26-july

370 Pottle will, but see America first!”) urged Easterners to travel to the magnificent American West by auto rather than rail, predicting that experiencing the national landscape and its people where the rubber met the road would dissolve regional and class chauvinisms more effectively than staring out carriage windows during cross-country train trips. Even without a deliberate push away from rail, the increased availability and affordability of automobiles in the United States, along with civic and commercial competition to surpass European road building, transferred the preferred “See America First” mode of travel to the car.9 Reinforced by an early twentieth-century media blitz, and privileged by its association with Hemingway’s hero, Theodore Roosevelt, the message of “See America First” galvanized transcontinental auto travel. Hemingway internalized that message, and while he may have revised its terms to apply to a spread of landscapes and peoples, his and the nation’s affection for the automobile can be traced to the idealistic image of highway travel promoted before World War II.10 In “Fathers and Sons,” the thirty-eight-year-old Nick Adams, driving with his son in the upper Midwest, views the passing vistas as if through one of the many articles or books devoted to American automotive travel between 1910 and 1940.11 “It was not his country,” the narrative relates, “but it was the middle of fall and all this country was good to drive through and see” (CSS 369). Widespread auto travel tailed off during the gasoline- and metal-conscious war years, but old touring habits died hard. In “The Strange Country,” the narrator complains, “You shouldn’t have to waste country” by driving through it too fast (CSS 633). One account of a cross-country drive with fourth wife Mary Welsh in 1948 shows Hemingway at the wheel of a car jammed with travel accessories, Mary ready with “the maps and guidebooks to answer questions about the passing topography” (Reynolds, Final Years 166). But the really breathtaking progress was in flight. Milestones in powered and controlled human flight were set in the popular historical record by individual “firsts”: the first successful flight of the Wright brothers in 1903, the trans-Atlantic solo by Charles Lindbergh in 1927, the initial circumnavigations of the globe in the mid- to late 1920s, Charles “Chuck” Yeager’s sound barrier-breaking flight in 1947, and so on. Air travel, while not as heroic as air pioneering, followed swiftly on the pioneers’ heels. Although records are incomplete, the first passenger airline in the United States appears to have incorporated as early as 1913,12 and air travel made a significant mark in Europe immediately after World War I, while the rail companies were racing to repair miles of bombed-out track. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel 371 Hemingway’s 1922 description of a short flight he and Hadley took from Paris to Strasbourg is a fine précis of early passenger travel: crammed in a small and noisy cabin, subject to the vicissitudes of weather and strange flight patterns, finishing in “a fine long swoop that brought our hearts up in our mouths like falling in an elevator” (BL 42–4). In defense of Hemingway’s pilot, mailbags had been the airlines’ first and initially most profitable cargo. As in the earlier days of rail and sea travel, it took time for the enterprise to adjust to travelers’ needs. As these adjustments were made, however, regional and international air routes designed for businessmen proliferated in Europe and the United States, and eventually included leisure travelers. Air travel around southern Florida provides an instructive example. The Key West-to-Havana mail run developed as one of the earliest and most profitable international routes. By 1920, it had become a passenger flight also. In 1927, it formed the founding route of Pan American Airways (Bilstein 55–6, 78–9). In the 1930s, Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, often took a short air hop to avoid the mind-numbing drive between Key West and Miami. Hemingway flew readily between Key West and New York, arriving much faster than by train.13 Toward the end of his life, when he hadn’t the health or the time to skipper his boat the Pilar over long distances, Hemingway traveled regularly with Mary between Cuba and the American mainland on the Havana-to-Miami flight (e.g., Reynolds, Final Years 339). In 1956, Hemingway appeared in a magazine advertisement for Pan Am (Figure 37.1) that mentions “‘the old Key West-Miami-Havana-Bahamas . . . days’” and has him announce that “‘Pan American and I are old friends.’”14 Long-haul routes soon followed the success of regional flights. Transcontinental passenger flight in the United States began in 1927, although not with nonstop routes, and trans-Atlantic service debuted in 1939 (Bilstein 56, 93). During their 1941 China trip, Hemingway and Martha flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong along a string of island stops aboard the China Clipper, one of the giant seaplanes that made trans-Pacific travel – again a triumph of Pan Am – almost as luxurious as travel aboard the grand ocean liners.15 Hemingway’s last round-trip travel to Europe – to Spain in 1960 in a desperate attempt to finish The Dangerous Summer – was aboard Trans-World Airlines (Reynolds, Final Years 345, 347). During Hemingway’s life, one chapter in air travel opened and closed. Known as dirigibles, Zeppelins, or semi-rigid airships, lighter-than-air craft provided passenger travel over a thirty-five-year stretch on a scale impossible for rigid airplanes. Long before Hemingway and Hadley took Spec SD1 Date 26-july

372 Pottle

Figure 37.1. Endorsement for Pan American Airlines, 1956. their disquieting airplane flight from Paris to Strasbourg, Zeppelins “carried a total of 34,028 passengers and crew safely”16 around Germany. In their heyday, semi-rigid airships such as the Graf Zeppelin crossed oceans with relative ease, carrying passengers in a type of luxury that often matched the gold-standard comfort of ocean liners or railroads.17 But accidents in lighter-than-air craft killed nearly everyone on board nearly all the time, and the move from highly flammable hydrogen to safer helium did not prevent conflagrations. The lighter-than-air passenger age disappeared after the Hindenburg fire in 1937. It is easy to think of this vast expansion in the scope and reach of travel as “democratizing,” making leisure travel available to a wider population. This idea is true to an extent, but even in the modern age wealth made all the difference. Occasionally, there were bargains: that Paris-to-Strasbourg flight cost less than the same trip by rail,18 and increased affordability allowed American passenger vehicle registrations to rise from 1,711,399 to 7,558,848 between 1914 and 1919 alone.19 Nevertheless, most travel arrangements were expensive. It cost the Toronto Star more than two weeks of correspondent’s pay to send Hemingway round trip by train from Paris to Constantinople in 1922 (Reynolds, Paris Years 73). The African safaris Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel 373 were horrendously expensive. The $25,000 that Pauline’s Uncle Gus laid out in 1933 to finance the first one is roughly equivalent to $400,000 in current value. Twenty years later, Look magazine fronted $15,000 in expenses for the second one (Reynolds, Final Years 263), a contribution of roughly $125,000 in current value. The bill for a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong in 1941, paid for by Colliers Weekly, fell between one to three times the annual salary of the average American worker.20 Thus, when Hemingway griped from Spain in 1934 that “People are travelling who never travelled before,” his complaint was partly about governmental corruption spreading around illicit cash (BL 146). Some economic level- ing did occur over time, particularly for Americans abroad on a strong dollar before and after the World Wars, but in Hemingway’s time business and leisure travel were mostly the provinces of corporations or the well to do. Still, the net effect was that more people were indeed traveling more easily, and the whole experience lost its cachet once the middle class began tagging along. Alongside Hemingway’s deploring of Spanish political corruption is his reflexive deploring of tourists, who were clogging up the bullfights and the beaches, the Paris boulevards, the Florida sea- coast, the African savanna, the Western resorts, the Cuban ports, and pretty much any other place he went, led by a publishing industry that happily churned out guides to everywhere. All eras despise their tourists, but in privileging high art and culture, modernism predisposed its prac- titioners “to preserve the individuality of the traveller against the tourist hordes and to mark the superior cultural tastes of the former.”21 In 1930, Evelyn Waugh ranted about “‘pitiable droves of Middle West schoolteach- ers’” taking up space and staring at sights they would never understand.22 In 1939, Graham Greene chastised himself in The Lawless Roads for suc- cumbing to “‘the danger of the quick tour’” (Youngs 275). Hemingway hated appearing too much the outsider abroad (Mandel 93–4; Reynolds, Paris Years 134), although as late as the 1950s his library included (but for what purpose or by whose hand?) How to Travel for Fun,23 by Helen Eva Yates, who wrote equally about traveling and shopping. Having his house in Key West listed as a tourist attraction produced a scathing 1935 piece for Esquire entitled “The Sights of Whitehead Street: A Key West Letter.”24 Perhaps considering the Prince of Wales too much a follower of touts, Hemingway “pointedly avoid[ed]” the prince’s former campsite during the first African safari.25 Indeed, Hemingway’s concern for authenticity carried his feelings for tourism beyond the usual modernist reaction. As his life demonstrated, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

374 Pottle chance and danger are always the traveler’s companions, even in the modern age. Early twentieth-century driving was “a serious test of endurance,”26 and Hemingway – and his passengers – suffered serious injuries from automobile accidents in 1930 and 1945. Lurking disease, like the amoebic dysentery he suffered during the first African safari, was still a fact of life. The two punishing airplane crashes he and Mary suffered during the second African safari show the romantic dream of traveling in search of the unspoiled wild to have posed significant challenges to experienced and skilled bush pilots. Even his famous war wound is arguably a travel scar. After all, Hemingway had journeyed to Fossalta di Piave by choice, unlike the Italian conscripts around him. Being poor or dispossessed only made things worse. Hitching a ride on a freight train, Nick Adams is whacked in the face by a vengeful brakeman (CSS 97–8). Hemingway’s early war and journalistic experience revealed the depredations of forced travel, created incessantly by the conflicts that wracked Europe through and beyond World War II. His 1922 reporting on the Greco-Turkish War describes “A Silent, Ghastly Procession” of refugees, their “staggering march” punctuated by the labor pains of a woman carried in a rude cart: “Her little daughter looks at her in horror and starts to cry. And the procession keeps moving” (BL 51). In the late 1930s, while Hemingway was working on To Have and Have Not, with its portrait of Key West’s economic desperation amid the recreational travels of the rich, John Steinbeck was documenting and transfiguring the painful flight of farmers from the Midwest’s Dust Bowl desolation. Perhaps Hemingway’s personal awareness of the grueling truth that lay beneath the conveniences of modern travel explains why, when there is real work to be done in Hemingway’s fiction, the characters often travel by foot or by a similarly painstaking mode. Nick Adams arrives by train in Seney in “Big Two-Hearted River,” but he walks for hours with a heavy pack to his campsite, struggling with his wartime memories (CSS 164–6). Jake Barnes drives and rides through France and Spain, but when he and Bill Gorton go fishing in the Fábrica valley, arguably the point in Jake’s travels where he sorts out his relationship with Brett Ashley,27 the two are in for a fatiguing hike (SAR 118). Robert Jordan takes first measure of his guerrilla companion Anselmo through Anselmo’s ability to travel the terrain: “Robert Jordan could walk well enough himself and he knew since following [Anselmo] since before daylight that the old man could walk him to death” (FWBT 4). In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago lives in a time when “the younger fishermen . . . had motorboats” (29) and, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel 375 when feared lost, people can be searched for “‘with coast guard and with planes’” (124), but he sticks to his oars and sails. Still, the ease of modern travel was central to Hemingway’s life as a writer. Hemingway can be seen as one of many rootless writers shipping out for foreign lands, transforming his experiences into literary success – one whose travel motto seemed deliberately to reverse the imperative of the “See America First” Movement: “See America if you will, but see Europe – or Africa, or Asia, for that matter – first!” But from a professional standpoint, Hemingway pursued a migratory, not simply a peri- patetic, existence that locates him firmly in American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Hemingway’s declaration that “I have only one life to live and by Jesus I want to live it where it interests me” (SL 409) is partly an American manifesto on working conditions, echoing in an age that opened to a highly mobile “‘wageworker’s frontier’” in the Plains, the Northwest, and the Upper Tier between the late 1800s and the mid-1920s28; that saw over a million African Americans migrate out of the American South between 1915 and 1930 in search of economic opportunity and safer lives29; that witnessed a regular south-to-west labor migration pattern that predated, postdated, and ran concurrently with the Great Depression, providing poor, middle class, and wealthy alike hope for a better start or a glorious ending in California.30 For all his differences, his talents, and his privileges, Hemingway was in the end like many American workers of the early and mid-twentieth century: traveling restlessly in search of a better view, a better place, a better life.

Notes 1. A. Bullock, “The Double Image” in M. Bradbury and J. MacFarlane (eds.), Modernism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 58–70; passim. 2. M. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Norton, 1986), 5–6. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. P. Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 63. 4. C. J. Riley, The Golden Age of the Passenger Train (New York: Friedman/ Fairfax, 1997), 127. Subsequent references are included in the text. 5. P. Dawson, The Liner: Retrospective and Renaissance (New York: Norton, 2005), 78–82. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6. C. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1954), 55–6. 7. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: Norton, 1999), 335. Subsequent references are included in the text. See also Dawson, 156. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

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8. J. C. Levenson et al. (eds.), The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume V: 1899–1905 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 387. 9. M. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001), 130–68. 10. M. Mandel, “Configuring There as Here: Hemingway’s Travels and the ‘See America First’ Movement,” The Hemingway Review 19.1 (1999), 93–105; passim. Subsequent references are included in the text. 11. See, for example, Shaffer, 147–8 and 225–60. 12. R. Bilstein, Flight in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts, 4th edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 26–8. Subsequent references are included in the text. 13. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s (New York: Norton, 1997), 259, 289. 14. R. Trogdon (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002), 311–12. 15. P. Moreira, Hemingway on the China Front (Dulles: Potomac, 2006), 24–5. See also Bilstein, 92–3. 16. “The Zeppelin,” Centennial of Flight: 1903–2003 (Washington, DC: U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission), http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/ Lighter_than_air/zeppelin/LTA8.htm. 17. J. Rumerman, “The Era of the Dirigible,” Centennial of Flight: 1903–2003 (Washington, DC: U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission), http://www. centennialofflight.gov/essay/-Lighter_than_air/dirigibles/LTA9.htm. 18. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York: Norton, 1989), 67–8. Subsequent references are included in the text. 19. Facts and Figures of the Automobile Industry: 1920 (New York: National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, 1920), 30. 20. See Moreira, 25, and C. Safina, Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 246. 21. T. Youngs, “Traveling Modernists” in P. Brooker et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford University Press, 2010), 267–80; 275. Subsequent references are included in the text. 22. H. Carr, “Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)” in P. Hulme and T. Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70–86; 83. 23. J. D. Brasch and J. Sigman, Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 229 (New York: Garland, 1981), 384. 24. E. S. Shiflet and K. Curnutt, “Letters and Literary Tourism: Hemingway as Your Key West Correspondent in ‘The Sights of Whitehead Street’” in K. Curnutt and G. D. Sinclair (eds.), Key West Hemingway: A Reassessment (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 220–40; passim. 25. E. O. Wittman, “A Circuit of Ordeals: Nostalgia and the Romance of Hardship in Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps and Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa,” Prose Studies 33 (2011), 44–61; 49. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

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26. M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The American Homecoming (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 187. 27. H. R. Stoneback, Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Glossary and Commentary, Reading Hemingway Series 1 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), 210–12. 28. T. Depastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 62–71 and 175–94. 29. E. Arnesen, Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents, The Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 1–37. 30. J. N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 15. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 38 Travel Writing Emily O. Wittman

In The Sun Also Rises, rugged bullfight veteran aficionado Jake Barnes performs a rule-based practice called travel. An emblematic traveler, Barnes speaks idiomatic Spanish and stays at humble pensions. He dines with locals at modest eateries, romanticizing the poverty that preceded the Spanish Civil War. He despises tourists, especially fellow Americans, and laments past fiestas. Although he travels in an expatriate posse, he alone understands Spanish culture and the fiesta. Barnes’s philosophy of travel resonates throughout the two travel books Ernest Hemingway published during his lifetime, Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935). Nostalgically referred to as the time “when the going was good” by Evelyn Waugh, the interwar period in which both books were written was an extraordinary period for the genre, which competed with fiction for popularity.1 For the most part, interwar travel writers chose irony as the best cor- rective for a spent rhetoric of discovery and offered highly personalized perspectives on diverse destinations. Celebrated writers including D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Fleming, Isak Dinesen, George Orwell, Ezra Pound, and Robert Byron seized narrative authority through their reputations and personalities; their publications featured themselves as much as foreign cultures. Their travel writing, characterized by spontane- ity, innovation, and formal experimentation, was ultimately organized by unspoken narrative rules: the search for hardship, digressions into ostensibly unrelated material, a nostalgic tone, and descriptions of putatively primitive cultures. Indeed, the search for authenticity in supposedly purer and simpler cultures was central to interwar travel writing. World War I strongly informed this search even when it was not explicitly addressed as it is in both Green Hills and Death. Many of the male travel writers of this period had fought in the war. The elation of survival is palpable, for instance, in Alec Waugh’s travel writing. Those who missed the great “test” were often as bitter as those who had not. Most 378 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel Writing 379 of these writers blamed the elder generation for the previous war and for the war clearly looming on the horizon. Their former idols were no longer cultivated patriarchs to honor, but destroyers of young bodies and ideals. In Death, Hemingway registers this struggle with a vitriolic rejection of the New Humanist philosophy. The 1920s and 1930s were also periods of transition for travel writing as colonial practices and technological advances facilitated travel and brought distant countries closer. Travel writers competed with popular and official representations of foreign countries and cultures. This, as well as advances in photography, checked the hyperbole characteristic of nineteenth-century travel writing. Interwar travel writers typically adopted a demotic idiom, one that incorporated several popular linguistic registers, including slang, regional dialect, and profanity. The genre had no special claims on foregrounded narrators, yet the era saw the evolution of a familiar traveler persona, a one-man show that overshadowed testaments to human diversity. Certainly Hemingway capitalized on his well-known personality, whether as “the author” in Death or as the self-consciously literary hunter in Green Hills. He presumed readers’ interest; like travel books by Graham Greene, Byron, and the Waugh brothers, Hemingway’s travel books were issued in the context of active publicity campaigns. Prewar Spain and East Africa promised a welcome series of tests that would fill books and magazine articles. Hemingway, like his contemporaries, saw the difficulties of travel as a fair trade-off for the anticipated reward: a productive and curative experience that would lead to self-knowledge, captivating material, and interest in the author himself. When Charles Scribner’s Sons published Death, a 500-plus-page introduction to Spain and Spanish bullfighting, the thirty-three-year-old Hemingway was already known as “Papa.” This epithet for a young man suited a public well aware of Hemingway’s strong personality and dangerous hobbies. It also complemented the elegiac tone that pervades much of his writing, implying that he had experienced enough to be nostalgic about better days. In the first chapter, Hemingway makes explicit his hope that Death would make him a better writer by teaching him how to write about death. But his primary goal was to provide the English-speaking world with a serious book on bullfighting. Outlining his narrative technique, Hemingway, or “the author,” as he refers to himself, envisions uninitiated apprentices whom he will entice to read with personal anecdotes. What he terms the “outside” denotes lively descriptions of the bullfight, whereas Spec SD1 Date 26-july

380 Wittman the “inside” offers practical information, such as the rules of the fight, or the difference between gambas and langostinos. If the reader follows Hemingway’s own journey from layman to expert, “the author” suggests, he or she will obtain an advanced understanding of bullfighting. Yet, as the book progresses, the author’s experience serves instead to distinguish the knowledgeable narrator from the uninformed reader and to establish the bullfight as a dying spectacle. When Death was published, few critics understood why a commercially successful fiction writer would devote so much time to a lengthy exposition of a cultural practice widely considered immoral by his Anglo-American readership. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, anticipated this confusion; he feared the book’s violent subject matter and expository style would alienate readers. The familiar elements of Hemingway’s prose were there: the understatement; the declarative sentences; the repetition of simple, understated adjectives; the homey and conversational parataxis. But reviewers objected to the overwrought style, the gory subject matter, and Hemingway’s tendency to take on anticipated detractors with bold invective and swaggering challenges. Death was a critical and commercial failure. Hemingway, however, had long believed that the Spanish bullfight was an ideal subject for his interests and ambitions. In 1923, during his first trip to Spain, Hemingway rhapsodized to William Horne: “It [bullfighting] isn’t just brutal like they always told us. It’s a great tragedy – and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and takes more guts and skills and guts again than anything possibly could. It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you” (SL 88). By the time he finished Death, Hemingway had witnessed the death of hundreds of bulls. From his current position of knowledge and experience, he would explain the sport to an uninitiated audience, without recourse to the euphemistic trappings of the period’s high-minded idiom. The “Bibliographical Notes” at the end of Death describe it as an attempt to “explain that spectacle [the modern Spanish bullfight] both emotionally and practically” (DIA 487). This dual approach is already apparent in chapter 1, when Hemingway describes his first bullfight. He recollects the goring of the horses, one of the most controversial aspects of the spectacle, to “establish the fact that the reactions were instant and unexpected” (DIA 8). He returns frequently, and often polemically, to the book’s origins in these initial experiences. The “Bibliographical Notes” claim the use of 2,077 works about bullfighting yet request the indulgence Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel Writing 381 of “competent aficionados” for his recourse to personal understanding (DIA 487). Death, he implies, offers a new approach. Originating in the ethnographic writing of Franz Boaz (1858–1942) and Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), the notion that a person must mix with foreign cultures in order to understand them was a recent one in 1932. Death catalogues Hemingway’s intimacy with Spanish culture as he finds scalped tickets, locates the best bullfights, and wins the friendship of local Spaniards. However, like Jake Barnes, Hemingway is ambivalent about sharing his knowledge. He suggests that afición, the ability to appreciate bullfighting, is a matter of election, not training. Although Death includes an extensive glossary of Spanish words, directions to restaurants, bars, and hotels, and a list of festival dates, the author insists that he hates tourists, especially the sophisticated, educated ones. In an elegiac tone, he heralds the end of “a country you love very much,” doomed, like Italy and France before it, to lose its fragile charm through the destructive effects of a growing number of Anglophone visitors (DIA 277). Hemingway rejects his anticipated readership for its inability to understand the stakes of the bullfight. The lengthy glossary, in which he showcases his mastery of Spanish, complements this proprietary description of Spain. The glossary’s extensive narrative entries suggest that translation is not merely a question of finding English substitutes. Because every Spanish word is tied to broader cultural contexts, word-for-word definitions give way to personal anecdotes and sociological analysis. For instance, the glossary explains that a matador should have punador (valor), although the contemporary matador might not have it. The glossary entry for tacones (heels), describes the corrupt practices of a Catalan heel thief whom the reader will recognize by the scar Hemingway left on his cheek. The glossary’s heterogeneous form embodies Hemingway’s paradoxical goal of both initiating and rejecting the reader. Hemingway resents the bullfight’s transformation into a tourist spectacle, yet Death easily functions as a guidebook for the visitor to the fiesta with its directions to cafés selling last-minute tickets and its detailed inventory of menus at local restaurants. At the same time, he instructs the reader to go to Spain and “see a bullfight” before reading the rest of the book, arguably evincing a lack of faith in the power of writing to effectively capture experience DIA( 63). The tension between talking about the fight and guarding the secret is apparent in the author’s resentful exposition of the very information he promises. In chapter 7, Hemingway introduces an imaginary reader, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

382 Wittman the Old Lady, who will ask questions about the bullfight. Although the Old Lady remains in the book for nine chapters, the author reveals only that she is American, unaccompanied, and an avid consumer of popular fiction. She delights in the fight, especially the goring of the horsesDIA ( 33). Ultimately, the Old Lady retains only misunderstandings and irrelevant details about the bullfight. She is tossed away in chapter 16, having been instructed on topics such as whores, venereal diseases, sodomy, and the sexual behavior of seed bulls. Pitted against the masculine world of afición and cojones, she is cast as a pious and hypocritical Victorian matri- arch, drawn to the salacious aspects of the bullfight, yet hiding her pruri- ent interest behind false outrage and humanistic homilies. The Old Lady’s rejection begins in the brief section entitled “A Natural History of the Dead” that ends chapter 12. This much-anthologized section is presented as a work in progress that will replace the dialogue with which the author is bored. He will write as she reads. He offers a harrowing account of World War I in which he ridicules humanistic philosophy, bitterly proposing war as a field for natural history. With its gruesome description of corpses rotting on an abandoned battlefield, this chapter polemically suggests that traumatic experience creates irreducible gulfs between people. The acrimony exhibited in “A Natural History of the Dead” is also directed at critics and several contemporary writers. The subsequent five chapters mingle lessons with various forms of score settling. They also offer criteria for good writing that echo the standards for good bullfighting. In both realms Hemingway privileges general excellence over formal innovation. As in good bullfighting, aesthetic concerns should not deter- mine a work of writing: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over” (DIA 191). In his view, specialization has ruined literature, much as specialization has ruined the corrida. In Hemingway’s decidedly agonal view of literary inheritance and originality, only experience and knowledge permit a writer to transcend his precursors and understand what he must “take his departure from” (DIA 192). Chapter 16 contains the frequently cited “ice-berg [sic] theory” of literature that casts the writer’s project in mythic terms: “A good writer should know as near everything as possible,” Hemingway writes, but he should only show a part of what he knows (DIA 191). The “ice-berg” protrudes gracefully because seven-eighths of it remains under water. Although a good writer will omit things, he must still know them. However, in the final chapter of Death, the rest of the “ice-berg” is on display as Hemingway identifies and apologizes for omissions. In his Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel Writing 383 view, his lengthy but much-edited book is a reduced version. The con- tradiction manifest in this chapter’s over-inclusion highlights the overall tension between exclusion and inclusion, between concealing and revealing. The book ends “outside,” with a reiteration of Hemingway’s - com mitment to sharing knowledge. Now it is the reader’s failure if he or she does not get it: “No. It is not enough of a book, but still there were a few things to be said. There were a few practical things to be said” DIA( 278). Death is thus an exemplary interwar travel narrative with its heterogeneous composition and reluctant exposition of specialized knowledge. It initiates readers into a community spectacle while using a rhetoric that rejects both readers and future travelers. Like Death, Green Hills, which recounts Hemingway’s safari to Africa in 1933–4, follows a recipe that privileges unique experiences and expertise and foregrounds the narrator. Hemingway had dreamed of a big game safari since his youth. Visiting Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History as a child, he was entranced by the elephants that explorer Carl Akeley brought back from Africa. He devoured African Game Trails (1910), Theodore Roosevelt’s safari book. Although Hemingway claimed that “Nothing I’ve ever read has given any idea of what this country is like,”2 he shared his passion with this past generation, which produced a record number of books about travel in Africa, as well as literary works situated in Africa. It was the concept of Africa, often conforming to no specific geographical region, that attracted so many American and English interwar travel writers. For these writers, writing about Africa necessarily meant engaging with a literary tradition. Like their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors, interwar writers in Africa truculently dramatize crucibles. The motifs of hardship, danger, and loneliness are present in travel literature from all ages, but Africa served these writers, much as it served their predecessors, as a paradigmatically difficult destination where one could go beyond “handouts and sightseeing” (GHOA 193). Trials created the opportunity for a unique and presumably unrepeatable African story. As with Death, Hemingway thoroughly researched his topic for Green Hills; a stack of books on big-game hunting crowded his desk in Key West alongside photos and notes taken during the safari. When Scribner’s published his book in 1935, Hemingway was in New York, anticipating rave reviews. As with Death, he found himself excoriated by critics who objected to his overbearing presence and literary diatribes. Green Hills narrates Hemingway’s elaborate safari in colonized East Africa, an adventure underwritten by Esquire and his wife Pauline’s Spec SD1 Date 26-july

384 Wittman wealthy uncle. In the foreword, he pledges to “write an absolutely true book” and to recount a “month’s action” that he hopes will “compete with a work of the imagination.” However, even as he sought to write a new kind of book, Hemingway’s African travel narrative is replete with the conventions of interwar writing so prevalent in Death: emphasis on hardship, digressions into seemingly unrelated material, a nostalgic tone, and an interest in depicting an ostensibly primitive culture. Like his fellow modernist travel writers, he also offers readers “Africa,” an idée fixe much larger than any specific region, country, or cluster of countries. Hemingway justifies hunting game by means of his experiences during World War I: “I did nothing that had not been done to me” (GHOA 148). As in Death, the experience of war creates and justifies a thirst for witnessing and administering death. Hemingway also claims that combat grants narrative authority: “I thought about Tolstoi and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer” (GHOA 70). Although he never engaged in active combat, Hemingway links his pleasure in marks- manship to the war. As in Death, the performer of ordeals needs an audience to ratify and affirm.3 In Green Hills, that audience is “Pop” (Philip Percival), the virile “white hunter” who serves as both expert evaluator and ideal audience.4 Hemingway pays homage to the near-death experiences of early African explorers like Mungo Park (1771–1806) and David Livingstone (1813–73) and unwittingly echoes the “muck about danger” that he deplores in other safari writing (GHOA 194). Cementing the role of potentially grave illness in the centuries-old African plot, he showcases the “discomforts that you paid to make it real,” battling fleas and a severe case of amoebic dysentery (GHOA 73). In the final chapter, dysentery, like combat, confirms the quality of his safari. His casually graphic account foregrounds the gravity of his illness as well as his stoic endurance: “Already I had had one of the diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an unnumbered amount of times a day” (GHOA 283). His illness yields a heightened sense of Africa; “it was well worth going through for what I had seen and where I had been” (GHOA 283). Hemingway distinguishes his safari in part by means of the untrans- lated Swahili dialogue peppered throughout Green Hills. This dialogue subjects the reader to the incomprehension that the narrator himself experienced at the beginning of his trek. However, this approach changes during the trek, as Hemingway’s own Swahili improves, leaving his wife “afraid to ask about those words every one uses” (GHOA 17). Gradually, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel Writing 385 Swahili comes to signify Hemingway’s expertise, much like the final handshake he shares with his trackers: a physical gesture he reports is “on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal” (GHOA 293). Speaking English the way a native speaks English is one of “the techniques practiced by anti-tourists anxious to assert their difference.”5 After an important kill, Hemingway embraces his Masai guide, who says, “Wanderloo-Masai wonderful guide,” to which Hemingway responds: “Wanderobo-Masai wonderful Masai.” Later he declares: “Me plenty Simba” (GHOA 240). Occasionally Hemingway speaks English or French to native trackers who will not understand what he says but must pretend to (GHOA 240). Here we can clearly see the footprint of colonialism in the way that languages are learned, to whom they are spoken, and for what end. Like Death, Green Hills is replete with meditations on literature and craft. The Austrian farmer Kandinsky (Hans Koritschoner), with his blunt questions, permits Hemingway to expose his views on the pretext of a demand. In his 1935 review of Green Hills, Bernard De Voto quipped: “The literary discussion, though it contains some precious plums, is mostly bad; the exhibitionism is unfailingly good.”6 Hemingway also makes use of the travel narrative’s porous structure to include ostensibly unrelated erotic material. This widening of acceptable topics, much like the vernacular tone, is a legacy of World War I, which “left its imprint on the language and the literature” of interwar travel writers (Fussell 57). Hemingway’s bawdy anecdotes and references signal one of the major tropes of interwar travel writing – the association of Africa with pleasure sites outside of Africa. He recalls a tableau of offshore garbage in the Gulf Stream, describing “the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset” (149). This inclusion of risqué subject matter adheres to more general conventions of interwar travel writing about Africa in which the continent is seen to present a raw view of humankind and to strip away the masks of European customs and mores. Green Hills reproduces Anglo-American clichés about what the West suppresses and Africa does not. As in Death, many of the ostensible digressions in Green Hills foreground the nostalgia that dominates the book, an extreme form of nostalgia that precedes departure. During the safari, Hemingway muses, “All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already” (72). Nostalgia is an essential component of the one-upmanship Spec SD1 Date 26-july

386 Wittman he displays in both Death and Green Hills, a solution to the tension between revealing and concealing, between his “evening braggies,” and his reluctance to “share this life with any one who was not there” (GHOA 240, 55). In Green Hills, Hemingway claims that a “continent ages quickly once we come,” implying that Africa will soon meet the same fate (GHOA 284). His shifting pronouns – often he moves from “I” to “you” to “we” in the space of a paragraph – compound his complicated stance toward future readers and expose tensions between revealing and concealing, between identification and distancing. He does not explicitly connect “spoiled” with colonized, yet he acknowledges his role in this aging process (GHOA 284). Writing with the self-conferred insight of an American from a “bloody mess” of a country, now entering the fifth year of the Depression, he describes this inevitable process: “We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are” (GHOA 284–5). Hemingway laments the lost world Africa represents as well as the changing Africa he is faced with. Throughout Green Hills, Hemingway’s anecdotes frequently represent Africans as incapable of ordinary cerebration and lead into meditations on native character. Driving through the interior, he speculates that the automotive klaxon creates such “utter rapture and ecstasy” amongst the Masai that his driver “could have had any woman in the tribe” (GHOA 287). Like many of his contemporary travel writers, Hemingway makes use of what Albert Memmi calls “the mark of the plural,” in which the behavior of a specific African is generalized, and individuals “drown in an anonymous collectivity” (85).7 Overall, Hemingway overshadows the combustible politics and afflic- tions of interwar East Africa with personal and aesthetic concerns. He leaves out the starvation and resulting migration that shadows his safari, referring obliquely to the “famine” (GHOA 150). The upcoming rains signal the end of the hunting season as much as they signify danger for the dispossessed. For Hemingway, as for so many interwar travel writers, Africa is ultimately less a political reality and a vibrant but threatened culture than an inherited literary tradition. Both Green Hills and Death demonstrate that Hemingway’s travel writing is self-conscious and thematically restricted with its chronicles of hardship, thematic eclecticism, and frequently unflattering portrayals of indigenous peoples. His commitment to telling a “true” story entails a body of assumptions about the kinds of experience and narrative that constitute a true story. The mélange of cultural speculation, braggadocio, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Travel Writing 387 and self-exposure unmistakably marks both Death and Green Hills as interwar travel writing. Travel alone is still group travel; Hemingway shared his whims and his rules, his aspirations and his assumptions, with a generation of traveling writers whose determined search for authority and authenticity entailed tacit commitment to contradictory notions about masculinity, empire, and intercultural contact. He follows his contemporaries in dodging complicated ethical and epistemological questions. In Green Hills, as in Death, his interwar “pursuit” follows a well-traveled path. We can lament, however, that he never completed his posthumously published travel works from the 1950s, Under Kilimanjaro (2005) and the heavily edited The Dangerous Summer (1997), which document, respectively, his return to East Africa and Spain. In both books he rectifies flawed elements of his earlier travel writing; in his fictional memoir Under Kilimanjaro in particular, he explores the deleterious effects of colonialism, and examines the Mau Mau resistance to colonial rule. Hemingway does not abandon masculine contests or shed the expert mantle in either book, but he does acknowledge the limitations of his cultural knowledge as well as the instability of his position in a quickly changing world. Both The Dangerous Summer and Under Kilimanjaro involve a return to the sites of Hemingway’s youthful adventures yet, for the most part, they abandon nostalgia in favor of the complexities of the present.

Notes 1. E. Waugh, When the Going Was Good (London: Duckworth, 1946). 2. Quoted in M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s (New York: Norton, 1997), 156. 3. See T. Strychacz, Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 1–13. 4. Philip Percival plays a significant role in other safari literature of the period, including works by Beryl Markham, Isak Dinesen, and Theodore Roosevelt. 5. P. Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 47. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6. Quoted in J. Meyers (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 160. 7. A. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965), 85. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 39 War: World War I Alex Vernon

Many people, even those who haven’t read any of his works, know that Ernest Hemingway was seriously wounded during World War I and that his hospital romance with a nurse became the foundation for his canonical American novel of that war, A Farewell to Arms (1929). That Farewell has become canonical, and thus reflexively “representative” of the American experience of the war, is puzzling, as Hemingway and the novel’s protagonist, Frederic Henry, were both – and differently – atypical doughboys, the war’s slang term for American soldiers. Neither were, in fact, doughboys at all, but ambulance drivers: Hemingway with the Red Cross, and Henry with the Italian army. Indeed, Hemingway’s name appears on the Scoville Park monument in Oak Park, Illinois, dedicated to the town’s citizens “who took part in” the war, including noncombatants. When the United States declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary in April 1917, the war had been raging for nearly three years. By 1914, mainland Europe had been in crisis for some time, beset by smaller conflicts, economic challenges, ethnic divisions, historical feuds, and increasing pressures for some form of democracy as well as international cooperation at the expense of empire. The catalyst for war was the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand by supporters of Serbian nationalism. Austria-Hungary felt compelled to go to war. After Germany agreed to support its ally against Serbia, the Allied nations of France, Russia, and Great Britain went on alert for a general European war, and the situation spiraled out of control. Italy, technically allied with Austria-Hungary and Germany, initially declined to get involved; but the possibility of acquiring territory from Austria motivated its fight against its former strategic partners. The United States had no desire to enter the fray. It was a bloody mess over there, in which the nation had no clear interest. The United States did support the Allies with material resources, however. And the mood began to shift aggressively after Americans aboard the British Lusitania 388 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: World War I 389 (1915) and the French Sussex (1916) lost their lives when German submarines attacked the ships. Then, in January 1917, the British intercepted a telegram from Germany offering support to Mexico if it attempted to regain, militarily, land lost to the United States in the 1840s. In February, Germany announced its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against all traffic to and from its enemies, and on March 18, U-boats sank three U.S. ships. At that point President Woodrow Wilson had no trouble convincing Congress to declare war. That April, Hemingway was about to graduate from high school. In the fall he moved to Kansas City to work for the Kansas City Star, where he also served with the 7th Missouri Infantry, a “Home Guard” unit that replaced the state’s deployed National Guard. He was too young to enlist, though a congenitally weakened eye disqualified him from military service anyway. Eager to take part in the defining global event of his generation, Hemingway volunteered several months later to serve as a Red Cross ambulance driver. Still mobilizing and preparing its divisions for combat, the United States rushed Red Cross help to Italy to augment its overwhelmed medical efforts and as a show of commitment to encourage Italy to hang on1 (a purpose belittled by Nick Adams in the Hemingway story “A Way You’ll Never Be”). Hemingway, unable to enlist with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) that would join the fight on the western front, could at least beat that contingent, which would total about two million soldiers, to the war. The volunteer Red Cross ambulance drivers, many of them students from Ivy League universities, held the honorary rank of second lieutenant though they commanded no troops. Lieutenant Hemingway arrived in Paris the first week of June 1918, as the Germans began shelling the city with Big Bertha long-range artillery. His first day in Milan, he was sent to help the injured and clear the dead from an exploded munitions factory. The horrific scene was especially shocking to the young man because the dead were women, as he tells us in “Natural History of the Dead.” After two weeks driving ambulances in the rather dull Schio post with Section 4, Hemingway volunteered for temporary duty with the field kitchen service at Fossalta di Piave, a modest, war-worn village on the river close to the action in the mountains above. The seventeen field kitchen outfits supplied troops with hot coffee, chocolate, and other refreshments, and a short respite for listening to music while writing a letter home. Canteen No. 14 – Hemingway’s “rolling canteen” – was a mobile trailer that could function even closer to the front lines. Because of their location near the front and on roads (often at intersections), these operations were fairly Spec SD1 Date 26-july

390 Vernon dangerous. The first American killed in Italy manned just such a station on the Piave. A few weeks later, on July 8, almost a week into his new assignment, Hemingway was delivering goodies to the line when an Austrian trench mortar exploded three feet away. The soldier next to him died instantly. Some 230 shrapnel fragments riddled Hemingway’s body, mostly in his legs. According to some Hemingway scholars (the record remains uncertain), despite his injuries he managed to carry another wounded man toward help until machine gun fire struck him down. Hemingway spent several days in a field hospital before being transported by train to the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan. He underwent several operations there, followed by daily physical therapy at the Ospedale Maggiore. He also fell in love with one of the nurses, Agnes von Kurowsky, from Washington, DC. She returned his affection, but not his dedication. In late October, Hemingway went back to the front to work during the Italian offensive in the mountains – the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, a victory that ended the war in Italy – only to leave the battle to return to the hospital with jaundice. A couple of weeks later, the war ended. By the end of January 1919, he was home in Oak Park. Harold Krebs from “Soldier’s Home,” a story from Hemingway’s 1925 book In Our Time (his first effort to deal with the war), is actually a doughboy. Still, even Krebs’s experience driving the Germans out of France with the 2nd Marine Division from Belleau Wood through the Argonne (June to November 1918) fails to match the dominant story of the Great War. As Samuel Hynes puts it: For most of us, the soldiers’ tale of the First World War is the story of four years of fighting along a narrow band of earth that stretched across northern France from the Channel to the Swiss border. Along that band two lines of trenches faced each other across a dead space that was called no-man’s-land. From time to time through those long years men rose out of one trench or the other to attack across that dead space and were cut down by artillery and machine gun fire, in battles whose names for us are weighted with pointless death: Ypres, Loos, Arras, Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele. Eventually, the story goes, the Germans were forced by hunger and attrition to retreat, and the war ended.2 Thus for many the story of World War I is a story without Americans, Passchendaele having concluded several months before the AEF’s first taste of battle. The United States participated only in the final phase of the war, a phase of months rather than years and marked more by maneuver and lighter casualties. Hemingway’s most famous World War I work is A Farewell to Arms, and its genius lies in its abandonment of Hemingway’s personal Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: World War I 391 story – or, rather, in its adaptation of the personal. One prominent creative chronicler of the Vietnam War, novelist Tim O’Brien, has said that “Too many [novels] fail for the very reason that they should have been nonfiction; they should have been cast as war memoirs. They don’t do what novels ought to do, which is to let your imagination add to the memories.”3 Frederic Henry is decidedly not Ernest Hemingway. Henry served for several years commanding an ambulance section in the Italian army, at least as far back as the summer of 1915, before being wounded in the spring of 1917, falling in love with English nurse Catherine Barkley, participating in the Italian retreat after German and Austro-Hungarian forces broke through the lines at Caporetto that fall, and deserting with his lover by rowboat to Switzerland only to watch helplessly as she and their baby die in childbirth. When Henry walks offstage alone in the rain in April 1918, Hemingway had not yet left the United States for the war. Typical American narratives from the war, memoirs or fiction, focus (as we would expect) on the U.S. military’s months of preparation and combat. Farewell smartly restores the war to its European context. The novel’s opinion of the Italian front’s paltriness relative to the western front’s bloodbath obliquely comments on the United States’ unfamiliarity with the real war. Whereas America suffered fewer than 400,000 total wartime casualties,4 at the Battle of the Somme alone, where Catherine’s fiancé was killed, the British suffered 419,654 casualties, the French 194,451, and the Germans around 600,000: “The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.”5 Catherine certainly never recovers from her loss in the battle, despite her necessary if sad attachment to the confused and unheroic Henry. The brevity of the American experience meant, according to Hynes, that “American soldiers don’t seem to have lost their recruiting-office feeling that this war would be an American adventure, to be entered into for the goodwill of the thing, because Europe needed help. It didn’t generate disillusionment among the American troops, or any change of national feelings about leaders and values; it was moral at the beginning and moral at the end” (96). By the spring of 1917, the war’s and the novel’s Italian soldiers are a demoralized, dispirited lot. One aggravates his hernia, then bloodies his forehead and skins his nose to try to avoid returning to the lines. Farewell suggests that the Italian army does not perform particularly admirably, and shows Lt. Henry and his cohort murdering an Italian sergeant. Such a mood is a far cry from young Hemingway’s regard for his Italian comrades on the eve of the war’s end, if we can trust his letters home: “And the Italians have shown the world what they could do. They Spec SD1 Date 26-july

392 Vernon are the bravest troops in the Allied Armies! . . . Italy has been fighting her own war all along and deserves all the credit in the world!” (Letters I, 149). Politically, the novel juxtaposes references to Italy’s royalty with the class unrest that manifested in much of Europe’s attraction to socialism and communism. The Italian soldiers’ ridiculing of the priest potentially speaks to the rejection of the Catholic Church by progressive European political ideologies as well as to its aggressively nonmodernizing position. In that era when industrialization brought severe challenges to monarchic organization – and in 1914 continental Europe only France and Switzerland weren’t still monarchies – capitalism held no proprietary claim to modernization and democracy; socialism and communism, and then fascism in the 1930s, promised their own routes to a technological, equitable future. Spain, which sat out the war, only delayed the crisis between old power structures and various new visions of statehood until it erupted in its civil war of 1936–9, the war of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Henry’s is an uncertain soul, with his nationality, his reason for being in the Italian army, and his very name serving as points of confusion throughout the novel. While we can understand his confusion on an individual level, we might also consider it as reflecting America’s own befuddled relationship with Europe during and after World War I. Henry can’t articulate why he joined Italy’s cause, and he comes to reject a presumably European nationalist rhetoric. Ten years after the war, as Michael Reynolds writes, “when America was no longer interested in war-heroes or trench adventures, Hemingway modified his experience to fit what the age demanded” for his second novel, Farewell.6 American readers on the cusp of the 1930s and the Great Depression not only were accustomed to (European) stories of postwar disillusion, but also were, on the whole, deeply inclined toward isolationism. It is too easy to regard Henry’s quit- ting of the war as a straightforward antiwar message. Henry is neither an Italian deserting the Italian army nor an American deserting the AEF, but an American giving up on Europe’s ongoing war with itself. Placing the novel more squarely in its historic context reveals it to be just as invested in the political as is For Whom the Bell Tolls. That a decade later Henry revisits the war in this retelling correlates with Hemingway’s continual rewriting of his relationship with the war that, according to his mother, wounded him into manhood (Reynolds 33). This process had begun with Nick Adams, a Hemingway avatar in a series of short stories beginning with In Our Time and continuing over the course of Hemingway’s career. The early book touched on a bit of the Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: World War I 393 same political landscape as Farewell, with communist revolutionaries, a king and queen under house arrest, and the temptation for some American veterans to withdraw from the world. However, the entire body of Nick Adams stories provides what neither of those books of the 1920s could: a periodic snapshot of Nick’s evolving personal relationship with his war as he ages, and becomes a husband, writer, and father, alongside his creator. Like Nick (and in part proven by the existence of Nick), the emotional trauma of the war continually reasserted itself through Hemingway’s life. In addition, his legs provided a consistent physical reminder; over thirty years afterward, extreme pain sent him to the doctor, whose x-ray showed seven shell fragments and bits of bullet casings in his calves.7 The intensity of Henry’s dismissal of his stillborn child at the end of Farewell betrays his inability to wash his hands of his part in the fates of lover, child, fellow soldiers, and European friends. In a novel about World War II, Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway has the washed-up and dying Colonel Robert Cantwell return to the site of his and Hemingway’s wounding in World War I, the Piave River, in a gesture reminding us that the source of World War II is found in the wounds and unsettled affairs of the earlier war. Many critics have judged Across the River inferior, partly in comparison to other American novels from World War II. For Americans, the second war was the epic one, and its heralded novels aspire to an epic scope: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, the several novels of James Jones, Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, eventually Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and even slender epics like John Hersey’s nonfictional Hiroshima. Cantwell was out of step with his times, wedded in memory to the very different first war – a war fought mostly in the countryside, that did not carry out aerial campaigns of urban destruction, and a war that did not inflict “on the civilian populations .. . the deliberate disruption and atrocity that was to be a feature of the Second (Keegan 8).” The Great War was “a curiously civilised war” (Keegan 8) and a curiously waged war, with its mix of nineteenth- and twentieth-century methods – horses and tanks, and lancers and mustard gas – corresponding to the political and social clash of the old and new worlds. The Garden of Eden, the unfinished novel published posthumously and incompletely in 1986, is rarely read as a war book. Yet David Bourne is a veteran and a novelist of World War I. Like the war monument outside the young couple’s apartment in the In Our Time story “Cat in the Rain,” destroyers on training maneuvers off the coast outside the Bournes’ hotel provide an informing backdrop (and the question of a baby informs both stories). It is a wartime comrade, a colonel, who intuits the gender Spec SD1 Date 26-july

394 Vernon games Catherine Bourne plays with her husband. Some scenes in Farewell between Catherine Barkley and Frederic read like dress rehearsals for scenes between Catherine and David in Garden, such as when Catherine Barkley suggests they have their hair cut the same length: “Then we’d both be alike. Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too.” “You are. We’re the same one.” “I know it. At night we are.” “The nights are grand.” “I want us to be all mixed up.” (FTA 299–300) In Garden, the identical haircuts and mixing up of selves leads to David’s becoming “Catherine” to Catherine’s “Peter” in bed – at night, when Hemingway’s other wounded veterans, like Nick Adams and Jake Barnes, are most vulnerable to the memories and fears. For such Hemingway veterans, the vulnerability induced by wartime trauma becomes associated with emasculation (psychological or literal) by a power outside their control. One can overstate the presence of World War I in Hemingway’s life and art, and unproductively allow it to eclipse or preclude equally vital analytical perspectives, just as emphasizing the war’s profound impact on the arts also risks neglecting other critically influential aesthetic and social trends. Yet oddly enough, it seems easier for historians to imagine the United States and even Europe avoiding the war than it is for literary scholars to imagine Hemingway or modernism without it.

Notes 1. H. S. Villard and J. Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes Von Kurowsky (New York: Hyperion, 1989), 16. 2. S. Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen Lane, 1997), 74. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. Quoted in E. J. Schroeder, “Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O’Brien and Robert Stone,” Modern Fiction Studies 20 (1984), 135–51; 148. 4. J. S. D. Eisenhower with J. T. Eisenhower, Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 288. 5. J. Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1998), 298–9. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6. M. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Norton, 1986), 21. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. Hemingway letter to Archibald MacLeish, November 15, 1950. Archibald MacLeish Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box 10, folder “Hemingway.” Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 40 War: Spanish Civil War Stacey Guill

In a 1923 article for the Kansas City Star, foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway commented on the precarious situation of the Spanish monarchy: “Alphonso is another king whose throne rests on a volcano. But it doesn’t seem to worry him much. He is an excellent polo player and the best amateur motor car driver in Spain” (BL 81). As Hemingway predicted, a crushing military defeat in Morocco, paralyzing general strikes, inflation, and economic and social inequities eventually forced King Alphonso XIII to abdicate his throne on April 14, 1931. The collapse of the monarchy was followed by a democratic election ushering in the Second Republic of Spain. The newly elected government, comprised of republicans, social- ists, communists, and anarchists, made efforts to modernize and reform Spain. These included granting regional autonomy to Catalonia and the Basque Provinces; separating church and state; reducing Spain’s top-heavy officer corps; enacting land and labor reforms and gender-specific legislation such as women’s suffrage. But the fledgling government faced withering opposition to these progressive changes by the ultra-conservative right, which included the aristocracy, the Catholic Church, military elite, monarchists, and the Falange (Spain’s fascist party). On July 18, 1936, a fascist wing of the Spanish military led by General Francisco Franco and backed by factions on the right revolted against the Republican government. Although the insurgents included a majority of the military and the Army of Africa (Spanish troops, the Spanish Foreign Legion, and Moroccan mercenaries), Franco and his forces experienced critical defeats in several important Spanish cities by an unexpected force: a citizen militia who, with makeshift arms and street barricades, mobilized in support of the Republic. The defiant rallying slogan ¡No Pasarán! (“They Shall Not Pass!”) exhorted by communist leader and orator Dolores Ibárruri (also known as La Pasionaria, meaning “Passion Flower”) along with the iconic clenched fist salute came to symbolize not only the defense of Madrid but also Republican Spain’s fight to retain 395 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

396 Guill its democratically elected government. This popular armed resistance by the Spanish people transformed a military insurrection into a disastrous three-year civil war that would have ominous international consequences and eventually claim over half a million lives. Up until this point in his career, Hemingway had been adamantly opposed to publicly taking sides in political conflicts. Yet, the alarm- ing rise of fascist dictators in Europe and the looming catastrophe that threatened Spain compelled him to declare his allegiance. His first efforts on behalf of the Spanish Republic involved paying passage to Spain for two American volunteers and helping to raise money for badly needed ambulances. Then, in February 1937, Hemingway sailed for Spain on the first of four trips he made there over the next year and a half. During this period he reported on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) and helped with the production and filming of the pro-Republican propaganda film, The Spanish Earth (1937). A central divisive issue fueling the civil war was economic and agricultural. As Pilar puts it in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940): “[Spain] is a country where the bourgeoisie over-eat . . . and the poor are hungry from their birth till the day they die . . . ” (184). Decades before the establishment of the Second Republic, most of Spain’s rich farmland (latifundia), particularly in the provinces of Andalusia and Estremadura, was controlled by wealthy, often absentee landowners. The life of the two to three million landless peasants, however, was characterized by primitive working conditions, poverty, malnutrition, and fear. Hemingway’s distaste for the agricultural economics in Spain is evident in a letter dated February 5, 1937:

It’s none of my business and I’m not makeing [sic] it mine but my sympathies are always for exploited working people against absentee landlords even if I drink around with the landlords and shoot pigeons with them. I would as soon shoot them as the pigeons. (SL 456) Among the reforms initiated by the Republican government was the Agrarian Reform Law of 1932 that resulted in the transfer of nearly a third of Spain’s arable soil to about three hundred thousand peasants.1 Once the war began, the necessity for the peasants of Spain to defend their newly acquired land became an important issue. The connecting themes of working the land and fighting for the land emerged as a major motif in pro-Republican artwork. A peasant holding a weapon or brandishing a pitchfork or sickle appeared in many of the pro-Republican war posters produced during the conflict and is also exemplified in Joan Miró’s “Catalan Peasant in Revolt” (1937). Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: Spanish Civil War 397 The tensions created by the social and economic burdens placed upon Spain’s lower classes involved more than agricultural issues. The opening scenes of The Spanish Earth were shot in the fields near a small village in Estremadura. Hemingway, the narrator of the film, states: “For fifty years we’ve wanted to irrigate but they [Hemingway’s emphasis] held us back.”2 Hemingway’s choice of the amorphous “they,” rather than naming the landowners specifically, alludes to the broader and long-simmering under- current of tension between those who held power and the powerless. For example, the peasants and working classes of Spain harbored a deep-seated hostility toward the Catholic Church. They viewed the Church hierarchy as hypocritical, greedy, and corrupt and resented it for enforcing regressive social conventions, including traditional gender roles. The Church, which controlled public education in Spain, believed that education of the masses was unnecessary. Consequently, widespread illiteracy plagued the country. In addition, the Church’s alignment with the monarchy, landowners, bankers, and industrialists only increased the distrust and animosity. In the first months of the war, this hatred for the Church exploded into anticlerical violence resulting in the desecra- tion and burning of churches and convents and the killing of scores of Catholic clergy. It is estimated that over one thousand clerical person- nel were killed over the course of the conflict. Although Hemingway had converted to Catholicism when he married Pauline Pfeiffer, he was highly critical of the Church’s public support of Franco: “I know they’ve [Republicans] shot priests and bishops,” he conceded, “but why was the church in politics on the side of the oppressors instead of for the people – or instead of not being in politics at all?” (SL 456). In the Republican zone, sectors of the population considered responsible for economic repression and exploitation were also the target of reprisals, especially in the first months of the civil war. Termed the “Red Terror,” this violence inspired the massacre scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The victims murdered by the peasants in Pilar’s town include the proprietor of a mill and feed store; a landowner and his son; a grain buyer; a money lender; a horse dealer; and finally the priest whom Pablo hated “even worse than he hated fascists” (127). While the Republicans’ motives for killing were socioeconomically oriented and driven mostly by fear and repressed anger, a different pattern of violence emerged in the territories captured by Franco’s Nationalist forces. Reflecting on Maria’s story of her rape and the killing of her parents and other citizens of her town, Robert Jordan remarks: “I know that we did dreadful things to them too. But it was because we were uneducated and Spec SD1 Date 26-july

398 Guill knew no better. But they did that on purpose and deliberately” (FWTBT 354). Jordan refers here to an essential part of the Nationalist strategy known as the “White Terror” or limpieza (“cleansing”). In scores of vil- lages, mass public killings and the shaving of the heads and raping of women were carried out with the intention of terrorizing the vanquished population into submission. Limpieza also included eliminating anyone who might support political or social change. As a result, thousands of Spain’s intellectuals, teachers, politicians, and members of trade unions perished. The struggle for gender equality within Spain was another important social subtext to the Spanish Civil War. In her autobiography, Ibárruri describes the conditions of life for generations of Spanish women prior to the establishment of the Second Republic: “In the home, she was stripped of her social identity; she was committed to sacrifice, to priva- tion, to all manner of service by which her husband’s and her children’s lives were made more bearable.”3 But under the Second Republic women were emancipated from their traditional roles of invisibility and subservience: they were granted the right to vote, divorce and abortion were legalized, and information on birth control was freely distributed. Many women, like Ibárruri, also began taking an active role in public affairs. Once the war began, the defense of the Republic gave fresh focus to this emerging female empowerment, often referred to as the “New Woman” of Spain. In the Republican zone, women became even more visible in public spaces as they replaced men in factories, held positions in labor unions, and served in relief agencies. Women’s participation in the war even extended into what had previously been an all-male sphere – the battlefield. George Orwell observes: “In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course.”4 While the Spanish Civil War was a national struggle brought on by internal conflicts, it also quickly took on international dimensions. Within days following the insurrection, both sides appealed for military and mon- etary assistance. Fearing that involvement in the Spanish conflict would lead to another world war, France called for a meeting of all European countries to discuss a nonintervention policy. The Non-Intervention Committee met in London on September 9, 1936, and agreed not to sell military armaments to either side. The Non-Intervention Agreement was eventually signed by twenty-seven countries including Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Portugal, Sweden, and Italy. Despite these efforts to contain the war, the conflict quickly escalated as Hitler and Mussolini, in exchange for access to Spain’s industrial resources Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: Spanish Civil War 399 to supply their growing war arsenals, ignored the Non-Intervention Agreement and secretly provided the Nationalists with substantial military aid in the form of naval power, ground troops, and aviation. In turn, Stalin, fearing that a victory for Franco would strengthen the Axis powers, sided with the Republicans, supplying advisors, technicians, and material assistance in exchange for massive amounts of Spain’s gold reserves. The United States and other Western democracies, with the exception of Mexico, maintained a policy of strict neutrality, a decision Hemingway regarded as “criminal stupidity.”5 Hitler’s and Mussolini’s forces also introduced a new killing technology to the world – the mass bombing of civilian populations from the air. Both Hitler and Mussolini viewed Spain as a testing ground for what would soon be termed “total war.” This strategy was first proposed by Italian general Giulio Douhet in his book Command of the Air (1921). “By bombing the most vital civilian centers it could spread terror through the nation and quickly break down [the enemy’s] material and moral resistance.”6 Beginning with Madrid and Barcelona in the fall of 1936 and lasting until the war ended, the aerial bombing of Spanish civilians engendered public outrage throughout Europe and the United States. Shocking images of the smoldering ruins of Spain’s cities, of women and children killed in bombing raids, and of lines of fleeing refugees were brought to the world’s attention by journalists, war photographers, and filmmakers, causing the war to be dubbed “the first media war.” Commenting on the barbarity of the bombing, Franklin Roosevelt asserted: “Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the sky.”7 The material and psychological impact of the total war strategy on the Spanish people permeates artistic representations of the war. The image of terrified citizens who have, as Hemingway tersely observes in The Spanish Earth, “no place to run, no place to hide,” is repeated in Robert Capa’s photo of a mother and child gazing fearfully at the sky as they run for safety down a Madrid street. The enemy aircraft described as “mechanized doom” in For Whom the Bell Tolls (87) become “A flock of death birds / Whose wings are steel bars” in Langston Hughes’s “Air Raid-Barcelona”8 and are rendered into grotesque futuristic black flying shapes against an ominous greenish-blue sky in surrealist artist René Magritte’s Le Drapeau Noir (1937). The predatory shark-like silhouettes of the enemy bombers in their V-shaped formations so accurately depicted in drawings by Spanish children in refugee camps are described in Hemingway’s dispatch of April Spec SD1 Date 26-july

400 Guill 15, 1937 as swinging “round and round in a slow circle, like vultures wait- ing for an animal to die” (BL 284). Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were touring the Republican front in the Guadarrama Mountains when the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 27, 1937 was reported by George Steer of The Times: Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raid- ers. The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes consisting of three German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers and Heinkel fighters, did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1,000 lb. . . . The fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre of the town to machine-gun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields.9 On May 1, 1937, vivid photos of the ruined city and the bodies of victims appeared in Le Monde, shocking Paris resident Pablo Picasso, who had been commissioned in January by the Republican government to contribute to the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. With half of Spain now under Franco’s control, it was hoped that the pavilion would provide a platform for a direct appeal for aid from the international community. On the opening day of the pavilion, July 12, 1937, Picasso’s mon- umental painting Guernica, now one of the most celebrated depictions of the horrors of war, greeted visitors as they entered. It was exhibited alongside a vast assembly of paintings, photography, sculpture, and documentary film contributed by such artists as Alexander Calder, Luis Buñuel, René Magritte, Julio González, and Alberto Sanchez. Together this work represented a collective testimony summed up in large words above the entrance: “We are fighting for the right of the Spanish people to deter- mine their own destiny.” In a letter from “a little Spanish Town,” dated May 16, 1937, American Harry Meloff wrote: “I still haven’t the slightest idea as to when we’ll see and experience the fright of being under fire. . . . [but the] ‘Tom Mooney’ Battalion we feel will play a decisive role in this great crusade to end fascism.”10 Meloff was one of forty thousand men and women foreign volunteers from fifty-two countries who defied the nonintervention policy and traveled to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans. Most members of these International Brigades saw the conflict in Spain as “The Last Great Cause” or “The Good Fight,” and were willing to risk their lives to defend democracy and halt the spread of European fascism. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States led by Robert Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: Spanish Civil War 401 Merriman, said to be the inspiration for Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, numbered twenty-eight hundred. Ultimately the enormous military advantage afforded the Nationalist forces by Hitler and Mussolini coupled with the debilitating disputes within the Republican forces resulted in the unconditional surrender of the Republican army on April 1, 1939. The defeat of the Republic was immediately followed by the brutal and repressive forty-year authoritar- ian dictatorship of Franco that ended with his death in 1975. Two years after the war, in a tribute dedicated to the fallen members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Hemingway’s emotional commitment to the struggle for democratic freedom in Spain had not diminished: “Our dead live in the hearts and minds of the Spanish peasants, of the Spanish workers, of all the good simple honest people who believed in and fought for the Spanish Republic.”11

Notes 1. H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 537. 2. E. Hemingway, narr. The Spanish Earth, dir. J. Ivens, photo. J. Ferno, Music arrang. M. Blitzstein and V. Thomson, Contemporary Historians, 1937. 3. D. Ibárruri, They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria, trans. from El Unico Camino by D. Ibárurri (New York: International, 1966), 60. 4. G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt, 1952), 7. 5. E. Hemingway, “Dying, Well or Badly,” Ken Magazine 2 (April 21, 1938), 68. 6. G. Douhet, Command of the Air, trans. D. Ferrari (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1942, 1921), 57. 7. F. D. Roosevelt, “Quarantine” Speech, Chicago, October 5, 1937, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 406–11; 407. 8. L. Hughes, “Air Raid-Barcelona,” in C. Nelson (ed.), The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems About the Spanish Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 121. 9. G. Steer, “Historic Basque Town Wiped Out: Rebel Fliers Machine-Gun Civilians,” Special Cable to the New York Times (April 28, 1937), ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 10. H. Meloff, “In a Little Spanish Town,” May 16, 1937, in C. Nelson and J. Hendricks (eds.), Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade From the Spanish Civil War (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 147–8. 11. E. Hemingway, “On the American Dead in Spain,” New Masses 30 (February 14, 1939), 3. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 41 War: World War II James H. Meredith

World War II marked a major turning point in Ernest Hemingway’s life and career. This war certainly was not Hemingway’s first; he had already participated in World War I as a Red Cross ambulance driver and in the Spanish Civil War as an international war correspondent. While Hemingway’s roles in these earlier wars have been widely discussed and celebrated by scholars, his World War II experiences have been less understood and appreciated. Yet they were arguably his most intense and involved war experiences. In Hemingway: The Post War Years and the Posthumous Novels, Rose Marie Burwell asserts that the last major phase in Hemingway’s career rests upon the question: What happened to Hemingway after World War II?1 This question can be refined further: What happened to Hemingway during World War II? The fact that questions about his World War II experiences should even be asked in the first place stems from two mitigating factors. First, Hemingway’s World War II activities and experiences were complicated by his status as a famous novelist. In the 1940s, he was one of the most watched celebrities in the world, which meant that his conduct in the war was closely scrutinized and critiqued by the press and literary rivals. Because Hemingway, as a noncombatant, was directly and therefore ille- gally, involved in combat, this extra scrutiny subsequently led him to obfuscate or conceal his activities after the war, primarily because he was afraid to write overtly about them. Second, his post–World War II writings were, as a consequence, neither as critically well received nor as popu- larly accepted as his efforts in the wake of the other wars. In his final war, Hemingway’s lifetime of competing urges to participate and to cover the story may have gotten the best of him, enflaming his already pronounced tendency for paranoia and further damaging him psychologically. In brief, Hemingway’s intense involvement in the war effort, which spanned almost a decade, harmed him severely, both professionally and personally.

402 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: World War II 403 At the beginning of the war, Hemingway was already in the midst of a major personal transition stemming from his divorce from his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, his recent marriage to Martha Gellhorn, and his relocation from Key West to Cuba. Mirroring this personal transition, Hemingway was in the middle of what became a radical transformation of his writing style. Although he did not know it at the time, the 1940 publication of his epic novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, would be the last major publication of what in hindsight might be considered Hemingway’s conventional writing period. Expecting more of the old Hemingway, readers greeted his World War II novel, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), with critical disapproval. The novel proved not only to be too experimental, but its characterization of Richard Cantwell, the protagonist, seemed too entangled in the author’s own ego for critics to accept. Except for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Hemingway’s writing in the post–World War II period aimed for a radically different form, style, and characterization than in his previous work. Much of this literary transformation should be considered a by-product of his intense experiences during the war since his goal in writing about the war was to create his heroic magnum opus. Across the River was to be the first part of an epic trilogy about how the conflict was fought on the land, in the sea, and in the air, reflecting his own experiences fighting in Europe, searching for submarines in the Caribbean, and flying with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in England (Burwell 51). However, as Hemingway started to delve into this tripartite formulation, the narrative continued to divide into smaller and smaller parts until finally the writing became a calculus of radical narrative form that could not be brought into a unified whole in his lifetime and has proven very difficult to reformulate decades after his death. As a close observer of world events throughout his adult life, Hemingway had sensed the possibility of American involvement in the Second World War as early as 1935. For example, in a departure from his usual sportsman’s perspective in his Esquire columns, Hemingway writes in “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter” (1935): [Y]ou have this year to do in what you like. . . . So you can fish that summer and shoot that fall or do whatever you do, go home at night to sleep with your wife, go to the ball game, make a bet, take a drink when you want to, or enjoy whatever liberties are left for anyone who has a dollar or a dime. But the year after that or the year after that they will fight. BL( 205) Spec SD1 Date 26-july

404 Meredith As with all the letters he wrote for Esquire in the 1930s, Hemingway was writing to a primarily American, male audience. Although the fighting had already begun in Asia and northern Africa, the reality of the war for his American audience was still several years away. Six years after his Esquire forecast, on December 7, 1941, a day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed would “live in infamy,” the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted a successful surprise attack against the U.S. navy’s Pacific fleet moored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The -sur prise attack at Pearl Harbor provoked the United States and Great Britain into declaring war against Japan the next day. Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy declared war against the United States on December 10 in support of their Axis ally. The actual fighting of the war, however, had begun a decade earlier in Asia when the Japanese Imperial army invaded Manchuria in September 1931. The war then spread to Africa when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1937. The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 sparked a full-scale shooting war in Europe. After the invasion of Poland, France and Great Britain declared war against Nazi Germany. The Wehrmacht, Adolf Hitler’s German army, used the revolutionary new Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, strategy to dominate the antiquated Polish army. The Wehrmacht followed this success with the invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, and subsequently launched a major offensive on May 10 against the forces of France, and Great Britain mobilized against the Wehrmacht in Western Europe. On June 22, France fell to the overwhelming German offensive military power. With the fall of France, Hitler controlled almost the entire land mass of Western Europe.2 The Soviet Union, the only other military force in Europe not yet engaged in the fighting, had signed a pact of neutrality with Germany and stayed out of the war until Hitler invaded it in June 1941 (Meredith 28). The June 1941 German offensive against the Soviet Union did not go as planned. While the German army did make major advances into Russia following its invasion, its strategy to conquer the Soviet Union contained major flaws. By December of that year, the Wehrmacht had advanced to within 175 miles of Moscow before the harsh Russian winter set in and stopped the German war machinery (Meredith 43). However, instead of retreating until the severe Russian winter was over, Hitler ordered his army forward. The fighting on the eastern front between Germany and the Soviet Union continued throughout the war, but it ended when the Soviets captured Berlin. The German defeat by the Soviets marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s attempt to build Germany as an empire Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: World War II 405 and, along with the entry of the United States into the fight against first Japan and then Germany, meant the war’s momentum soon turned in favor of the Axis powers. In the Pacific theater, the United States quickly recovered from its disastrous defeats at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and in the Philippines in 1942. Led by Army General Douglas MacArthur and Navy Admiral Chester Nimitz, the U.S. Pacific forces began systematically regaining the territory lost to the Japanese. On June 4, 1942, the Japanese lost a disastrous naval battle to the United States at Midway, which became the turning point in the Pacific war. Following this success at Midway, the U.S. ground forces began a campaign of island hopping that took away one Japanese stronghold after another. This global war created horrors both on the battlefield and on the home front. The Jewish Holocaust is a well-documented historical event when an estimated six million European Jews lost their lives due to Hitler’s policies of racial extermination. The Nazis started practicing Jewish extermination in Germany but quickly expanded their brutality throughout Europe as they occupied more and more of the continent. The Japanese also practiced brutality on occupied populations, especially in Manchuria, as they conquered territories in the Pacific. In America, Japanese civilians experienced internment after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. The fear of a subsequent Japanese invasion of the U.S. mainland fueled a lingering anti-Japanese resentment by the American people, which led to this irrational public policy. On February 19, 1945, the United States successfully landed Marines on the beaches of Iwo Jima and by April 1 invaded Okinawa, an island only 360 miles away from the mainland of Japan. Once Americans took Okinawa, U.S. bombers were able to drop large amounts of explosives onto the people of Japan with even more efficiency. Japan eventually surrendered on August 9, 1945 after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, U.S. and Allied forces assigned to Europe had begun their own offensives to destroy the Axis powers of Germany and Italy. The first major initiative was Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of northern Africa, which eventually ended with the total surrender of German forces in Africa on May 13, 1942. Following that success, Allied forces then invaded Sicily and Italy. While the Sicilian campaign was an overwhelming success, the invasion of Italy was far more difficult than had originally been anticipated. Although the invasion of Italy by the Allied forces corresponded with the overthrow of Mussolini, the German army Spec SD1 Date 26-july

406 Meredith remained behind and fought a defensive campaign so successful that it was still engaged in fighting when Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945 (Meredith 32). In retrospect, Hemingway spent almost a whole decade somehow involved in this war. He devoted large amounts of time in 1937 and 1938 covering the fascist suppression of democratic forces in Spain for the North American Newspaper Alliance. There, he learned firsthand how correct he had been in his 1935 assessment of the next world war and how fascism would not and could not be stopped without a decisive global effort by democratic nations. The civil war in Spain, lasting from 1936 to 1939, turned out to be an important battle testing ground that pitted the evolving war technologies of the major powers against each other at the expense of the Spanish people. In 1940, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife and a well-known international journalist in her own right, received an assignment from Collier’s to cover the nationalist Chinese war effort, led by Chiang Khi-shek who was fighting the invading Japanese army. Hemingway made the arduous trip with her. Although his trip to China never inspired him to write fiction about that part of the world, it reinvigorated his moral resolve that fascist or imperialist powers were going have to be destroyed rather than capitulate, and convinced him that the Chinese nationalists were not up to the challenge. Soon after news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor reached Hemingway, he returned to his primary residence at the Finca Vigía in Cuba near Havana. There, Hemingway began organizing an operation aimed at keeping tabs on possible German and fascist Spanish operatives residing in neutral Cuba. Despite his well-known affiliation with Loyalist Spain, Hemingway also had friends in Cuba aligned with fascist Spain. The Crook Factory, as it became known, consisted of local amateur operatives Hemingway recruited, and reported to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent assigned to Cuba. This spy operation, however, proved fruitless, especially since J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was less than enthusiastic about Hemingway’s reliability. Hemingway began another amateur operation focused on searching for German submarines patrolling the Caribbean Sea and along the Atlantic coast of the United States. While his service in this capacity has often been derisively dismissed, especially by Martha, it was a serious operation organized by the U.S. navy and coast guard meant to serve as a quick fix until military vessels could be procured to handle the mission. The goal was for the owners of private yachts to patrol vulnerable coastal positions, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

War: World War II 407 as did Hemingway on his boat, Pilar. His experiences on these patrolling missions are reflected in his posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream (1970), intended as the sea portion of his trilogy. During the final buildup to the Allied “Operation Overlord,” the D-Day invasion of Europe at Normandy, Hemingway negotiated war correspondent credentials from Collier’s. He spent most of his time wait- ing for the pending invasion flying air missions with the RAF and nursing a serious head injury stemming from an automobile accident. On June 6, 1944, the combined Allied forces, under the command of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, launched a massive invasion on the Normandy beaches of France. This began the major campaign to destroy Hitler’s Nazi German army that had been occupying the European continent for four years. Off the Normandy coast, war correspondent Hemingway observed the major conflagration that was occurring on Omaha Beach, the military code name for that part of the amphibious invasion. On Omaha, the U.S. military forces faced a life or death struggle to survive. After the D-Day invasion, Allied forces moved toward the interior of France and its capital city of Paris, occupied by German forces since the French capitulation in 1940. As the German army retreated from the coastline, Hemingway moved out front of the main Allied forces along with bands of free French guerrillas. In the town of Ramboullet, on the outskirts of Paris, German resistance stiffened, and Hemingway and his band became embroiled in pitched battles with the enemy from August 22–4. Apparently armed, which was illegal for war correspondents, Hemingway drew the notice of fellow noncombatant correspondents with his reckless activities; they subsequently turned him into the U.S. military authorities. Forced to respond to the charges, the 3rd Army inspector general interviewed Hemingway on October 6, 1944 in Nancy, France; however, formal charges were never made, and he returned to action with the 22nd Infantry Regiment in the fall of 1944. Besides his clandestine and illegal efforts with roaming bands of irregular troops, Hemingway served as an embedded correspondent assigned to the U.S. 22nd Infantry Regiment. During November 1944, the 22nd Regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles Trueman Lanham, was given the perilous mission to enter the Huertgen Forest in an effort to disengage the Germans from heavily fortified positions. Despite its greatly diminished military strength, the German army proved itself a deadly defensive force. The 22nd Regiment’s casualty rates reached astronomical numbers during the battle, and Hemingway became so involved in the fighting in Spec SD1 Date 26-july

408 Meredith the densely packed evergreen forest that he felt compelled to take up arms and fight his way out of the danger. There is no question that Hemingway participated in the killing. Major portions of his 1950 novel about the war, Across the River and Into the Trees, are based on his experiences with the 22nd Regiment, and the depiction of the novel’s protagonist, Colonel Richard Cantwell, is inspired by Lanham. Hemingway did get what he had come for in the fight in Europe: he gathered material for his writing and fought in the war. However, being so close to the action, engaging in life or death circumstances, and experiencing the death and suffering of soldiers, proved psychologically costly for Hemingway, which explains why the characterization of Cantwell comes partially from the author’s own ego. Hemingway was traumatized not just by all the death and destruction he witnessed, but also by the fact that he became directly involved in the killing. In his January 1945 Life article, William Walton writes that “time after time the 22nd pushed forward, stumbled, took cover. . . . The line regrouped to try again. But too many men were falling. The plague of shells grew even thicker.”3 The point here is that Hemingway, the forty-six-year-old world-famous novelist, who had no business being there, was there among this vast amount of killing and suffering. In many ways, the war haunted Hemingway throughout the rest of his life, permeating his writing even beyond the grave in the posthumous publications that have followed decades after his death, including A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986), and Under Kilimanjaro (2005; first published as True at First Light [1999]). Somewhere buried within the icebergs of all these posthumous works is the trauma of his World War II experiences from the deaths he witnessed and the deaths in which he was personally involved, from the irreducible conflict of being both a participant and observer of the war.

Notes 1. R. M. Burwell, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52–3. 2. J. H. Meredith, Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 23. Subsequent references are included in the text. 3. W. Walton, “The Battle of Huertgen Forest,” Life, January 1, 1945, 33. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 42 Women Nancy R. Comley

Ernest Hemingway had many women in his life, from his days as a child growing up in a household of women through his four marriages. He also lived during a time of changing sexual politics and expectations for women’s roles at home and in the marketplace, so it is not surprising that the women in his fiction reflect not only his personal experiences with women, but also the new political and social contexts that reshaped the way women viewed themselves and the opportunities available to them. The world of women as Hemingway first knew it revolved around his mother and the home. Oak Park, Illinois, the suburb of Chicago where he was born and grew up, was a safe, stable Christian place as described in the memoirs of two of Hemingway’s three sisters, Marcelline and Madeleine, or “Sunny” as she was called. Both sisters write of a happy home life though, as Sunny points out, their mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, “had very high standards of conduct and achievement that she wanted us to live up to [though] it sometimes seemed as if we could never satisfy her. Her criticisms and disappointments could show unex- pectedly – and sometimes we thought unfairly.”1 If Grace felt she was losing an argument, she would retire to her bedroom with a sick headache, a form of passive aggressiveness we also find in Hemingway’s story “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” Yet there was another side to Grace: the artistic side. Prior to her marriage, Grace Hall, a talented contralto, had been offered a contract by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City. But because the stage lighting bothered her weak eyes, she had to refuse it. After her marriage to Clarence Hemingway, she gave music lessons, and eventually earned more than her husband, a doctor. She encouraged musical talent in her children and provided a home filled with music. The mother that we find in Hemingway’s fiction is presented as a champion of God and the Protestant work ethic. That she is modeled on the real thing is amply demonstrated in a letter Grace wrote to her son 409 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

410 Comley on his twenty-first birthday after he had behaved foolishly, staying too long at his mother’s cottage in Michigan and arranging an evening picnic that went on to 3:00 AM. She informed him that Mother’s love is like a bank and that he had overdrawn his account. Unless he changed his ways and stopped “neglecting [his] duties to God,” he faced bankruptcy.2 Some of her suggestions for “good-sized” deposits sound like she wished to be treated as his sweetheart: “A desire to favor any of Mother’s peculiar prejudices, on no account to outrage her ideal. Flowers, fruit, candy, or something to wear, brought home to Mother with a kiss and a squeeze.”3 Hemingway’s repayment to his mother appeared a few years later in his first collection of stories, In Our Time (1925), some of which feature a pious, controlling mother. In “Soldier’s Home,” for example, Mrs. Krebs subjects her son, Harold, recently returned from World War I, to emotional blackmail by tearfully reminding him, “I’m your mother . . . I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby” (IOT 76). With the cost of staying home much too high, Krebs decides to leave for Kansas City. In a later story, “Now I Lay Me” (1927), Nick Adams remembers his mother burning specimens and arrowheads his father had collected: artifacts from a more primitive world that she does not respect. Hemingway and his sisters came of age in the era of the New Woman (1890–1920), a period that “defined women as independent, physically adept, and mentally acute; and able to work, study and socialize on a par with men.”4 Women’s suffrage was a national issue during Hemingway’s early youth; Grace Hall Hemingway was an active member of the Suburban Civics and Equal Suffrage Club in Oak Park.5 The women’s suffrage movement of 1890–1920 was the inheritor of the movement of the 1840s and 1850s, whose leaders were also prominent abolitionists. The leaders of this second stage “were more conservative, and in methods more systematic.”6 In the years before World War I, the movement, composed of white, native-born, middle-class women, “cultivated a rap- port with working women and foreign-born voters” in cities like Chicago and New York (Kraditor xv). Women’s labor unions “did not simply want the vote; they found they needed it” to improve their working conditions (Kraditor 261). However, World War I cooled the suffrage fervor, and in 1920, when women finally won the vote, they were appalled to find that the male politicians for whom they had to vote had no interest in social reforms. A number of female college graduates went on to pursue graduate work in the early part of the century; however, moving into professional careers traditionally held by men was still not easy. But when America Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Women 411 entered World War I, new opportunities opened up for women. At home, women took over men’s work on railroads, farms, and in factories, where their male employers were favorably impressed with their ability to do “men’s work.”7 Over thirty thousand women were recruited by the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard, where they served at home and abroad as yeomen, doctors, nurses, or clerical workers. One of these women was Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway’s first love. Once the war broke out in 1914, she applied to Bellevue Hospital’s nursing program in New York. She later noted, “[her] taste ran to something more exciting”8 than her previous job as a library cataloger. In July 1918, she arrived in Milan, Italy at the American Red Cross Hospital, where less than a week later, a wounded Hemingway arrived. They fell in love, though she was seven years older than he. For Hemingway, she fulfilled the fantasy, common in many male patients, of the attractive nurse as both lover and mother. After Hemingway returned home, she broke off the relationship, having met an attractive and sophisticated Italian major. Her “Dear John” letter contained the statement that she was still very fond of him, albeit “more as a mother than a sweetheart” (Villard and Nagel 163). These words were all too close to the letter from his mother the year before telling him that he was too young to marry and that “any girl who is worthwhile . . . would wait until you are a man.”9 After the war, Hemingway joined friends in Chicago, where he met Hadley Richardson, who was also visiting and whom he would marry in 1921. Hadley was from St. Louis, where her mother and her older sister Fonnie had started the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League and were active in the movement. Hadley was not an activist, and she claimed that both her mother and her sister “hated men” and “blamed sex for the subjugation of women.”10 Born in 1891, Hadley was regarded by her mother as frail because of a childhood accident, though she actually was not. Because she was treated as a semi-invalid, music became the center of her world, and she spent hours each day at her piano. Eventually, she was allowed to attend Bryn Mawr, and she enjoyed college, worked hard, and made friends. Hadley also joined one of her classmates and her mother on vacations, until Hadley’s mother, fearful of Hadley falling into a lesbian relationship, made her leave college.11 In 1917, Hadley was back in St. Louis sorting books for soldiers, but was not allowed to take a job, and in addition, her mother made a point of discouraging suitors (Diliberto 32). Release for Hadley came in 1920 with the death of her mother, following which she took a trip to Chicago to visit her friend, Katy Smith, and it was there that she met Ernest Hemingway. The active, adventurous Spec SD1 Date 26-july

412 Comley life she enjoyed with him left her enforced invalidism far behind; Hadley would live to be ninety. After their marriage, Hemingway and Hadley moved to Paris, which had become “the place to be” for many Americans. It was the center of literature and art, it was cheaper to live there than in America because of the favorable exchange rate, and it was a delightful retreat from American Puritanism and the Volstead Act, which enforced Prohibition. For lesbi- ans such as Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, it was a place where they were accepted and could take lovers; for African American entertainers like Josephine Baker and writers like Jessie Fauset, Paris provided an environment where they could escape the racism of the United States and be appreciated for themselves and their talents. Hemingway’s acquaintance with Gertrude Stein furthered his education in literature, art, and varieties of sexual preference. She was an astute critic of his work, and through editorial work, he became very familiar with hers. Stein represented the cultural life of Paris, but Hemingway chose to chronicle the empty lives of expatriates in Paris in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). His central female figure, Lady Brett Ashley, is a multidi- mensional character that has been excoriated by many (mostly male) critics as a “bitch” because her behavior does not fit conventional gender expectations. She has many lovers – a trait that’s acceptable for men, but not for women, they think. However, Brett chooses carefully, not promiscuously, and like Hemingway’s heroes, she too tries to live by a code, and that is to decide “not to be a bitch . . . It’s sort of what we have instead of God” (245). She takes lovers because the man she truly loves, Jake Barnes, has been unmanned in the war, and Brett is fixated on the phallus, personified in the text by Pedro Romero, the young bullfighter. Moreover, in a reversal of traditional gender roles, the emasculated Jake is always there for Brett after her affairs end. Jake understands what many critics have not, namely that Brett has been damaged by the war as well: her first love has been killed, and the man to whom she’s married has been mentally scarred in the war and is abusive. Brett is a richly drawn character that demonstrates not only the social freedom accruing to women12 in postwar Paris, where she moves easily about in public places, such as bars, as well as in relationships but also the pressures and difficulties of women in the postwar period. Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was born in 1895 into an affluent family. Aided by this solid financial backing, a clear sense of personal freedom, and the ambition to pursue a career, Pauline in many ways exemplified the period’s idea of the “new woman.” She attended a Catholic school in St. Louis, and after a move to Piggott, Arkansas, where Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Women 413 her father was developing sixty thousand acres for crops, she returned to St. Louis to become a major at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. After graduation, she worked briefly at the night desk of the Cleveland Star and then went to New York, where her aunt and uncle resided, took another newspaper job, and then became a fashion reporter and publicist at Vanity Fair. Soon after, she accepted an offer to be an assistant to the Paris editor of Vogue. She and her sister Jinny set off for Paris, leaving Pauline’s fiancé behind (Kert 171–2). In Paris, Pauline befriended the Hemingways, and eventually Hemingway would divorce Hadley to marry Pauline. The “new” Hemingways left Paris for Key West, where Hemingway was introduced to moneyed Americans of leisure and a life that centered largely on the social scene as well as on sport fishing. During this period, Hemingway experienced some anxiety about the effect of his new, comfortable lifestyle on his artistic ability, and this anxiety frequently surfaced in portrayals of aggressive, wealthy women whose independence both attracts and threatens the men in their lives. These characters, including Helene Bradley from To Have and Have Not (1937), Margot Macomber of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), and the rich wife in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), whose money, her dying husband claims, has been a bad influence on his work, were categorized simply as “rich bitches” by early critics, but more recently scholars have seen these women as finely drawn figures, frustrated and limited by their social roles and one-dimensional relationship to the men in their lives. Though the figure of the rich wife might have been inspired by Pauline, the fact is that Pauline did provide a comfortable environment in which Hemingway produced much of his best work. In December 1936, Hemingway first met Martha Gellhorn, a writer who had recently published The Trouble I’ve Seen, a highly praised group of stories based on the lives of people who had suffered greatly during the Depression. Like Hemingway, she was strongly affected by the civil war in Spain, and both of them wanted to report on it. In 1937, they became lovers in Madrid. Hemingway’s play, The Fifth Column (1938), features a female correspondent partially based on Gellhorn – at least physically – whose physical attractions might deter writer Philip Rawlings from his serious work. Biographer James Mellow points out that, in fact, “Martha was the most intelligent and professionally alert of Hemingway’s wives, the least willing to be submissive to the Great Man” (523). During the Depression of the 1930s, women workers generally fared better than their male counterparts in that not as many women lost their Spec SD1 Date 26-july

414 Comley jobs. This was largely because most women held jobs that were considered women’s work, such as typists, nurses, and housekeepers, occupations that declined less and later than the manufacturing jobs, held mostly by men.13 Many women worked, however, because they had to, not because they wanted to. At the same time, movies, which became the great escape for the American public, “concealed the reality of the Depression, and later of the war in Europe from the American people.”14 Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire swirled gracefully and happily through films of the 1930s. Other glamorous stars such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis beamed from the covers of movie magazines like Modern Screen and Photoplay, setting the standards for glamour, fashion, and beauty that seemed far away from the reality of most women. More important, during this time, Hemingway’s work moved away from stories with rich characters and turned toward political realities, most notably in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) about the Spanish Civil War, which appeared just as World War II was breaking out. The novel features two women, Pilar, a resistance fighter and one of Hemingway’s strongest female characters, and Maria, the docile love interest. Pilar says of herself, “I would have made a good man, but I am all woman and all ugly. Yet many men have loved me and I have loved many men” (97). Physically she resembles Gertrude Stein, and like Stein, she is described as a figure of ambiguous gender who combines a masculine size with feminine qualities. Indeed, Pilar is bisexual, and her tender treatment of Maria, referred to as “rabbit,” and her statement that when young, she “would have been able to ‘take the rabbit from thee and thee from the rabbit’” (156), is a declaration of erotic power that unnerves Robert Jordan, the American protagonist of the story. The start of World War II signaled an economic change for women, many of whom were now assuming men’s jobs in defense factories and other industries as men volunteered or were drafted into the armed services. “Rosie the Riveter” became an iconic image of these working women, best known through a famous cover on The Saturday Evening Post (May 29, 1943), illustrated by Norman Rockwell, that was later used by the U.S. Treasury for bond drives.15 Women also joined the armed forces but were not allowed to serve in combat, and many women served as nurses. By 1944, thirty-seven percent of all adult women were employed, but while many were employed in jobs formerly held by men, their weekly wages averaged only $31.21 as compared with $54.65 earned by skilled male workers.16 On the fashion front, with European fashion centers cut off, American designers created a distinctive American style, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Women 415 one that tended to be sportier than the European style. Skirts became shorter than they had been in the 1930s as fabric was commissioned for military uniforms. Silk stockings were virtually impossible to find because silk was in demand for parachutes. No longer did the Real Silk sales- man come to your door with his sample case of stockings, socks, ties, and handkerchiefs. When the war ended, many married women returned to being house- wives, yet polls taken between 1943 and 1945 showed that forty-seven percent to sixty-eight percent of married women and sixty-one percent to eighty-five percent of unmarried women wanted to keep their jobs after the war (“Women and World War II”). Martha Gellhorn, who had been in Europe writing about the Normandy invasion and the postwar period, was in no hurry to return to married life despite Hemingway’s complaints about her not being in his bed. But Gellhorn was a well-known professional writer, dedicated to her work, and by now she was fed up with Hemingway’s bullying. During this period of empty-bed complaints, Hemingway met Mary Welsh, a feature writer for Time magazine in London. Though she was happy to fill Hemingway’s empty bed, she refused to take any of his tirades or drunken foolishness, and had no compunctions about telling him off. When she decided to take a chance on marrying Hemingway, she gave up her job with Time and went to Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s home in Cuba, to set the house in order. During the postwar period, Hemingway published his weakest novel, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), inspired in part by his infatuation with a young Venetian woman, Adriana Ivancich, whom he fiction- alizes as the love interest of an aging army colonel. Renata is a sweet and compliant foil to the gruffness of the old warhorse, Colonel Cantwell. Hemingway’s next book, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) does not include any female characters, and if it were not for Hemingway’s posthumously published work, readers might think that Hemingway had lost the ability to create the strong, complex female characters that had been a staple of his work up to the 1950s. When he died, Hemingway left a substantial amount of unfinished material, including a manuscript titled “The Garden of Eden,” posthumously published in significantly edited form in 1986. Garden features Catherine Bourne, widely regarded as one of Hemingway’s most interesting and complex female characters. She and her writer husband, David Bourne, are honeymooning on the Riviera and are engaging in bisexual experiments inspired by a Rodin statue they’d seen in Paris. Called “devil” by her husband, Catherine is witty and also a bit mad. Unable to find a Spec SD1 Date 26-july

416 Comley satisfactory artistic outlet that will allow her to capture her attempts at personal gender and sexual transformation, Catherine relies on David to write their story. When he stops to write of his boyhood experiences with his father in Africa, she feels betrayed and disgusted, so she burns these stories, and then leaves for Paris to find artists to illustrate their marriage narrative. David is then soothed by the third party in this ménage, Marita, who has dropped her lesbian lover and is referred to as “Heiress” because not only is she wealthy but she has also been designated by Catherine to take over the role as wife. The manuscript is unfinished; it dribbles off with David and Marita discussing their reading habits and establishing a nonthreatening domestic and sexual routine. However, Hemingway also left another ending in which Catherine returns, and there’s no sign of Marita. Scribner’s chose the Marita ending for the stripped-down version published in 1986, probably because Marita appeared to be the more willing helpmeet to David the writer. They ignored this handwritten nota- tion on the manuscript of the provisional ending: “Written when thought something might happen before book could be finished. EH.”17 Thus, the manuscript version of the novel contains additional complexities related to gender roles and sexual desires that the published version closed off. When some of Hemingway’s posthumous manuscripts became available in the late 1970s, literary criticism was changing in the wake of reader response and feminist criticism with its emphasis on sexuality and gender. The Garden of Eden in particular encouraged critics to reevaluate not only Hemingway’s ideas about gender and sexuality, but also the female characters throughout his oeuvre. Earlier Hemingway criticism had been largely the province of male critics with overly simplistic views of Hemingway’s female characters. For example, Catherine Barkley of A Farewell to Arms was praised for being an utterly compliant woman, while her strengths and departures from conventional gender roles were completely ignored. Brett Ashley of Sun was excoriated for being just the opposite, while her trauma as an abused wife was glossed over by critics. In the wake of Garden, more attention has been paid not only to the complexity of Hemingway’s female characters, but also to Hemingway as a more complex and interesting writer capable of registering subtleties about gender and sexuality that defy easy or simple categorization.

Notes 1. M. Hemingway Miller, Ernie (New York: Crown Publishers, 1975), 16. 2. John F. Kennedy Library K24, July 1920. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Women 417

3. Ibid. 4. L. Rudnick, “New Woman,” in C. Davidson and L. Wagner-Martin (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 630–1. 5. M. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 106. 6. A. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), xv. Subsequent references are included in the text. 7. “Women in WWI,” depts.washington.edu/labhist/strike/kim.shtml and frank.mtsu.edu/~kmiddlet/history/women/wh-wwi.html. 8. H. S. Villard and J. Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky (New York: Hyperion, 1989), 28. Subsequent references are included in the text. 9. John F. Kennedy Library, K16, May 1918. 10. G. Diliberto, Hadley (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992), 14, 15. 11. B. Kert, The Hemingway Women (New York: Norton, 1983), 171. Subsequent references are included in the text. 12. See W. Martin, “Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises,” in L. Wagner-Martin (ed.), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: Oxford University Press), 47–62. 13. R. Milkman, “Women’s Work and the Economic Crisis: Some Lessons from the Great Depression,” in N. F. Cott and E. H. Fleck (eds.), A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 507–41; 511–14. 14. D. A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981), 307. 15. D. Weatherford, American Women During World War II: An Encyclopedia (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2009), 399. 16. “Women and World War II,” www.mscd.edu/-history/camphale/_0001html. Subsequent references are included in the text. 17. John F. Kennedy Library, K 422.2, p. 1.

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Resources

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Chapter 43 Manuscripts and Collections Susan Wrynn

Since 1975, researchers and students have visited the Ernest Hemingway Collection located at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (JFK Library) in Boston, Massachusetts, to view Hemingway’s personal papers and supporting collections. It is the primary research center for Hemingway. Those who visit the collection are usually most drawn to the letters and manuscripts written in the author’s own hand. To see each word, edit, and deletion is to witness a master craftsman at work. There are additional archival collections of Hemingway’s throughout the United States and Cuba. A selective list of collections is included at the end of this chapter. All of these collections provide researchers and students with the opportunity not only to deepen their understanding of Hemingway’s artistry but also to reassess his life and work.

The Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library The Ernest Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library is known for its breadth and uniqueness. Over ninety percent of Hemingway’s manuscripts, ranging from one-line fragments to thousand-page works, are contained in the collection. It also boasts the largest single accumula- tion of Hemingway’s letters. Over twenty-five hundred letters written by Hemingway from every stage of his life are stored here as are over seventy-five hundred pieces of correspondence written to Hemingway from family members, wives, business associates, fans, and contemporaries including Sherwood Anderson, Carlos Baker, Marlene Dietrich, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Maxwell Perkins, Charles Scribner III and IV, Toots Shor, and Gertrude Stein; more surprising correspondents include J. D. Salinger and Ingrid Bergman. The collection is strengthened by personal notes, objects, ephemera, and memorabilia. There are notebooks of every size and shape, some containing ideas or phrases to which Hemingway could refer as well

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422 Wrynn as the household accounts maintained by Martha Gellhorn and Mary Hemingway. Hemingway’s extensive bullfighting material, for example, includes programs, posters, and a box of postcards filled with pictures of matadors and bulls. While Hemingway’s home at the Finca Vigía in Cuba houses the largest collection of the author’s books, the JFK Library has a unique sampling of his collecting and reading choices. The library collection includes many books with Hemingway’s marginalia, such as a copy of The Old Man and the Sea that Hemingway annotated during the production of the movie. Hemingway’s collection of books also includes rare volumes such as Francisco Goya’s Los Proverbios, a signed copy of A Draft of XVI Cantos by Ezra Pound, a press copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses with Hemingway’s signature, and Portrait of Mabel Dodge by Gertrude Stein. In addition to Hemingway’s papers, researchers who visit the Hemingway room can access other primary source supporting collections that provide background about and insight into Hemingway and his works. These include the papers of friends and contemporaries, such as Agnes von Kurowsky, Mary Welsh Hemingway, Jane Mason, and William Walton, as well as the papers of authors and researchers of Hemingway’s life and works. Some of the most famous photographers of the twentieth century are represented in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, which contains over ten thousand images. Man Ray created portraits of Hemingway and his young son John (Bumby) in the 1920s; Robert Capa photographed Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s; and Yousuf Karsh produced one of the most poignant and enduring images of Hemingway in Cuba in the 1950s. The collection also includes photographs of Hemingway by Earl Theisen, the noted photojournalist for Look magazine, and Larry Burrows of Life magazine. In addition, photographs by family and friends chronicle Hemingway’s life from his childhood in Oak Park, Illinois, to his time as an ambulance driver in World War I, an expatriate in France, and a reporter during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The collection contains scores of candid images of Hemingway at work and at play, alone or surrounded by friends, family, and contemporaries. The Kennedy Library Web site provides a gallery with some images.

Beginnings of the Hemingway Collection Hemingway stored papers in a variety of locations during his lifetime, but the bulk of his papers were housed in Cuba at the time of his death. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Manuscripts and Collections 423 The papers made their way to the JFK Library through William Walton, a friend of Ernest and Mary as well as of John and Jacqueline Kennedy. A former journalist, Walton met Hemingway at the end of World War II when they were both covering the Battle of the Bulge. Walton was later the Kennedys’ neighbor in Georgetown (Washington, DC); he also worked on Kennedy’s campaign, was an unofficial advisor to Mrs. Kennedy on the arts, and was eventually appointed by President Kennedy as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. Walton called the president and apprised him of a predicament with Mary Hemingway’s travel visa to Cuba. The president then called his brother Robert, the attorney general, to ask him to resolve the problem, which he did. In the summer of 1961, Mary gathered the majority of the papers in Cuba and brought them back to the United States via a shrimp boat. The Hemingways’ home in Cuba was not the only source of materials. As far back as 1956, Mary and Ernest had retrieved a trunk of papers from the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and in 1962, Mary gathered a stash of papers Ernest had left in a storeroom behind Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West. All of these materials were brought to New York and stored in a bank vault and warehouse (these papers were later the subject of Charles Mann and Philip Young’s groundbreaking inventory) while Mary decided what to do with them. After meeting Jackie Kennedy’s secretary at a party in 1964, she offered the collection to the Kennedy Library. By the early 1970s, the Hemingway Collection started to receive materials from the vault and warehouse in New York. Material also came from other places including Mary’s New York apartment, her home in Ketchum, Idaho, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the files of biographer Carlos Baker at Princeton. In “The Journey to the John F. Kennedy Library,” former Hemingway Curator Megan Desnoyers describes the arrival of the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library:

The donation was settled in 1968, and four years later Hemingway materials began arriving at the library in Bonwit Teller shopping bags, cardboard boxes, and dented trunks with French and Cuban labels. The Hemingway papers were first opened for research at the library’s temporary facility in 1975. In 1980 Patrick Hemingway and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dedicated the Hemingway Room in the newly opened Kennedy Library at Columbia Point.1 Although Hemingway and President Kennedy never met, Kennedy more than once expressed his admiration for Hemingway and his work. In the opening sentence of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, Kennedy cited Hemingway’s description of courage, writing, “This is a book about the most admirable of human virtues – courage. ‘Grace under Spec SD1 Date 26-july

424 Wrynn pressure,’ Ernest Hemingway defined it.”2 Hemingway was also among the American artists, writers, and musicians invited to the presidential inauguration. Although he was unable to attend due to illness, a draft of the cable that Hemingway sent to President Kennedy from the Mayo Clinic shows his admiration: Watching on the screen I was sure our President could stand any of the heat to come as he had taken the cold of that day. Each day since I have renewed my faith and tried to understand the practical difficulties of governing he must face as they arrive and admire the true courage he brings as our President in times as tough as these are for our country and the world.3 In a statement released by the White House when Hemingway died, Kennedy noted: “Few Americans have had a greater impact on the emotions and attitudes of the American people than Ernest Hemingway. . . . He almost single-handedly transformed the literature and the ways of thought of men and women in every country in the world.”4

The Setting of the Collection Today, those who wish to access the Hemingway materials can do so in a comfortable room on the fifth floor of the JFK Library. Any person interested in visiting the room may set up an appointment by contact- ing the Hemingway curator at [email protected]. As elevator doors open, visitors are welcomed by three Hemingway photographs – the first, during his “Huck Finn” stage at age eight; the second, an adult Hemingway in shorts leaning against a balcony ledge at the Finca Vigía; and the third, Hemingway as an older man strolling in Ketchum, Idaho. Just outside the Hemingway Collection research room, facsimiles of artwork from Hemingway’s private collection adorn the walls. Hemingway collected art throughout his life, and his art collection was at one point valued at many millions of dollars. The facsimiles include Paul Klee’s Monument Under Construction (Monument in Arbeit) (1929), Joan Miró’s The Farm (Le ferme) (1921–2), and Juan Gris’s Man with a Guitar (1926) and The Bullfighter (Le torero) (August 1913). An open-mouthed lion skin rug greets visitors and researchers as they enter the research room. The vintage, mounted skin is part of designer John McGregor’s arrangement of the room so as to suggest the Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s home and haven during the height of his career. On one wall hangs a portrait of a young Hemingway, entitled Kid Balzac, painted by his friend, artist and illustrator Waldo Peirce. Paired with it is The Throw of the Dice (1922) by French Modernist André Masson. On Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Manuscripts and Collections 425

Figure 43.1. The Hemingway Room at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, MA. Used with permission of the JFK Library Foundation and Tom Fitzsimmons.

the opposite wall hang three more Masson paintings, known as the Forest series (1922–3). A wall of bookshelves filled with a reference collection of Hemingway scholarship is flanked by display cases showcasing cherished objects that Hemingway carried with him, including a ring made from World War I shrapnel, his briefcase, war medals, World War II dog tags and press pass, and fishing logs. Rows of foreign editions of Hemingway’s works line the top shelves of the room. The room’s large windows offer a panoramic view of the Boston Harbor, inviting researchers and other visitors to contemplate Hemingway’s writing and life (Figure 43.1).

Other collections of Hemingway materials Researchers can find distinct collections about Hemingway at other institutions. This selected list is arranged alphabetically by institution.

Colby College, Collection of Waldo Peirce Materials The materials of the Maine artist contain over forty letters and telegrams between Hemingway and Peirce. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

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Library of Congress, A. E. Hotchner/Ernest Hemingway collection The collection includes letters from Hemingway to A. E. Hotchner as well as other materials such as drafts of two versions of The Dangerous Summer; issues of Life magazine (1960s) featuring installments of Dangerous Summer; a draft of “The Sea,” published posthumously as Islands in the Stream; and typescripts and copies of unpublished works.

University of Delaware Library Special Collections Department, Ernest Hemingway Manuscripts This collection contains drafts of six of Hemingway’s literary works: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Fathers and Sons,” The Fifth Column, “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” Green Hills of Africa, and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University, Ernest Hemingway letters to Harvey Breit The collection consists of ninety-three letters from Hemingway to Breit (1950–61) with a copy of “Fragments from Ernst von Hemingstein’s Journal.” Hemingway’s letters contain discussions of writers and their books, baseball, and boxing. The Houghton Library also holds a manuscript of “After the Storm” and a typescript of “The Killers.”

Indiana University, Lilly Library Small collections related to Hemingway include writings and letters and Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway’s correspondence to the Hemingway family at Oak Park, Illinois.

Museo Ernest Hemingway, [Finca Vigía] San Francisco de Paula, Cuba Hemingway’s former Cuban home is now a museum containing many of his papers, manuscripts, books, and personal possessions. Although Mary Hemingway removed many items from the house, she left his extensive library of over nine thousand books, draft manuscripts, and letters written and received by Ernest. Original documents are located in the Museo Ernest Hemingway; copies are available at the JFK Library. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Manuscripts and Collections 427

The Newberry Library The library has several collections related to Hemingway including the papers of Clara Spiegel, big game hunter and author; Frederick Spiegel, World War I ambulance driver with Hemingway; and William Horne, World War I ambulance driver and lifetime friend of Hemingway.

Pennsylvania State University, Special Collections Library The collection contains over 100 unpublished letters, notes, and telegrams written by Hemingway primarily to his parents and favorite sister Madelaine (“Sunny”) Hemingway. The collection is not yet available to researchers.

Princeton University Library Manuscripts Division, Patrick Hemingway Papers The collection consists of photographs featuring Patrick and Ernest Hemingway. It also contains a selection of family correspondence among Ernest, Patrick, Gregory, and Pauline. Included are letters from Pauline’s parents and sister as well as from Martha Gellhorn, Mary Welsh Hemingway, Hadley Richardson, and Winston Guest.

Princeton University Library Manuscripts Division, Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1786–2003 (bulk 1880s–1970s) Users can view professional and personal correspondence between Hemingway and his editors. The collection also contains a number of Hemingway photographs and manuscript fragments. Other collections at Princeton contain correspondence between Hemingway and others, such as Sylvia Beach and Sherwood Anderson.

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources, Charles D. Field Collection of Ernest Hemingway The collection contains correspondence between Hemingway and his first biographer Carlos Baker as well as letters Hemingway wrote to his World War I friend Eric Edward “Chink” Dorman-Smith. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

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University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Ernest Hemingway Collection This collection mainly consists of holograms and typescripts of Hemingway’s works and personal correspondence. Additional collections contain photographs, newspaper clippings, information on the Hemingway family, and published works.

University of Virginia, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature The collection includes the manuscript of Green Hills of Africa, the typescript of The Sun Also Rises (including the unpublished first chapter), and an annotated typescript of the film script for Sun with Hemingway’s personal comments. The collection also holds a selection of some of Hemingway’s earliest letters.

Conclusion Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s sole surviving son, and his wife, Carol, are among the greatest supporters of the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library. While all agree that the primary mission of the collection is to support research on the life and work of the Nobel Laureate, it is also the intention of both the Hemingway and Kennedy families to use the collection as a springboard for programming that promotes literature writ large. The library partners with PEN/New England to sponsor the annual PEN/Hemingway Award (which honors a first book of fiction), and other events related to literature and writing are offered throughout the year. The Hemingway Collection is a true American treasure.

Notes 1. M. F. Desnoyers, “The Journey to the John F. Kennedy Library,” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives 24 (1992), 334–50 or www.jfklibrary.org/ Research/The-Ernest-Hemingway-Collection.aspx. 2. J. F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, memorial edn. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1964), 21. 3. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Outgoing Correspondence, January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA. 4. J. F. Kennedy, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, John F. Kennedy, 1961, United States Government Printing Office, 1962. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Chapter 44 The Hemingway Review and The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society Charles M. Oliver

The history of publications devoted solely to Ernest Hemingway scholarship begins in 1971 with the launching of Hemingway notes, co-edited by Taylor Alderman of Youngstown State University and Kenneth Rosen of Dickinson College. The editors paid for the first issue, and income from forthcoming subscriptions paid for subsequent publication costs; their seventh and final issue was published in spring 1974. Beginning in fall 1979, Charles M. Oliver revived Hemingway notes at Ohio Northern University, publishing four issues before he changed the journal name to The Hemingway Review in fall 1981. The name change was introduced upon the recommendation of one of the attendees at a Hemingway conference on Thompson Island in Boston Bay in July 1980, the conference that signaled the beginning of what would become the Hemingway Society. The Hemingway Society became an “official” organization five months later, on December 28, 1980, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Houston. Paul Smith of Trinity College in Connecticut, who had done most of the preliminary work of organizing the Society, was elected its first president. The name change of Hemingway notes to the more scholarly Review as well as the emergence of an official society marked an important turn in Hemingway studies. From here on, a cadre of scholars would be devoted to advancing understanding of Hemingway’s life and writing, and the increasingly respected Hemingway Review would play a primary role in that project. The Hemingway Society has been extremely active since its formation. Although the first “official” Hemingway conference was held in May 1981, bringing seventy-five Hemingway and film enthusiasts to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston to discuss “A Moving Picture Feast: The Filmgoer’s Hemingway,” the Society has subsequently taken up the task of sponsoring biennial conferences that now often draw more than 300 people. The Society sponsors international conferences in even-numbered years in various locations in Europe (Spain, Austria, 429 Spec SD1 Date 26-july

430 Oliver France, Italy, Switzerland), the United States (Boston, Sun Valley, Key West, Kansas City, Petoskey), and Bimini Island, all connected in some way to Hemingway’s life and work. Thanks to a continuing memorial gift from the James Hinkle family, the Society can award fellowships to graduate students for travel to these conferences. James Hinkle (San Diego State University) was, until his death in December 1990, active in Hemingway studies. The Society also sponsors other awards each year, including the Smith/Reynolds and Corrigan Fellowships, to encourage research by graduate students and junior faculty on the life and works of Hemingway. The Society has thrived, in part, due to excellent leadership; to date there have been eight presidents, some of whom have served multiple terms: Paul Smith (Trinity College), James Nagel (Northeastern University), Robert W. Lewis (University of North Dakota), Linda Wagner-Martin (University of North Carolina), Allen Josephs (University of West Florida), Michael S. Reynolds (Independent), Scott Donaldson (Independent), and James H. Meredith (Air Force Academy, retired). The Ernest Hemingway Foundation, the legal arm of the Society since 1987, helps to fund the PEN/Hemingway Award, an award for the best first work of fiction by an American author. PEN/Hemingway Award winners have included Bobbie Ann Mason, Marilynne Robinson, Chang Rae-Lee, and Edward P. Jones. Another of the Society’s current projects is publication by Cambridge University Press of Hemingway’s more than six thousand letters. Sandra Spanier (Penn State University), general editor of the Letters Project, estimates that “at least” sixteen volumes will be published. The letters are organized according to time periods, beginning with Hemingway’s earliest letters as a young boy and ending with the last letters of his life. If the Society has come a long way since it was formed in 1980, the Review has developed at a similar pace. Charles Oliver edited the Review until his retirement from Ohio Northern in May 1992. The journal won the 1989 Ohioana Award, cited “for editorial excellence” by the Ohio Library Association. Ohio Northern also sponsored two Soviet Union-American conferences while Oliver was editor, one on Hemingway, the other on Hemingway and Faulkner. In 1992, Susan F. Beegel became editor of the Review, working from her home on Nantucket Island, while also an adjunct assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts/ Boston. Her first two issues were published at the University of West Florida in fall 1992 and spring 1993. The University of Idaho Press became the Review’s publisher in fall 1993 with professional artist Caroline Hagen as the journal’s designer, followed by Amy Grey (2000–10) and Julene Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Hemingway Review and Society 431 Ewert (2010–present). Beegel currently holds the position of adjunct associate professor of English at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. The English department at Idaho sponsors the Review, and each year its MFA program in creative writing invites the PEN/Hemingway Award winner to campus as a distinguished visiting writer. The university also holds an annual Hemingway festival. Author-anonymous peer review has enlarged the field of contributors to the Review far beyond members of the Society. Scholars from the mainstream of American literary studies, as well as contributors from other fields such as comparative literature and linguistics, regularly publish their research and criticism in The Hemingway Review. Beegel has encouraged all critical approaches, from the traditional to the cutting edge. She selects scholars from all sorts of backgrounds, not just the editorial board, to review submissions; as many as seventy scholars have read manuscripts. These readers are encouraged to base their critical judgments on the excellence of the work and not its ideology. Beegel added in an e-mail interview that “people seem a lot more comfortable with diversity these days, and our submissions are at an all-time high. We are not a closed shop.”1 The Society’s Web site notes that The Hemingway Review has a larger circulation than any other single-author journal. Print copies of the Review are mailed to approximately 650 individuals and 300 college and university libraries in twenty-seven countries. Beegel states, however, that the number of hard copies mailed to libraries is dropping, but that the journal enjoys unlimited circulation to libraries via online subscription databases, including Project Muse, Proquest, EBSCO, and Gale Infotrac. The journal is, in other words, available to anyone who uses a college or university library, a public library, or public school library. Bibliography is an important section of each Review issue. William White of Wayne State University was the Hemingway bibliographer for seventeen years. The lead item in the first issue ofHemingway notes (spring 1971) was White’s supplement to Audre Hanneman’s Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Princeton 1967). White’s bibliography is a ten-page list of articles about Hemingway published between 1966 and 1970. Beginning with the fall 1988 issue of the Review, Albert J. DeFazio III, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia and later a faculty member with the George Mason High School and University, took over as bibliographer. His tenure ended in 2006 when Kelli A. Larson, University of St. Thomas, assumed the task. Along with the many scholarly articles, book reviews, notes, photographs, and drawings published in The Hemingway Review, there have Spec SD1 Date 26-july

432 Oliver been several “special issues” devoted entirely or in part to single topics about Hemingway and/or his works.

1. Special British Issue, spring 1982 (1.2). Included is the Review’s only multicolor front cover. The artist has Hemingway posing as Britannia when Britain ruled the seas. The issue includes an essay by guest editor Moira Monteith, Sheffield City Polytechnic, on the past twenty-five years of British scholarship in Hemingway studies, and a bibliography by Graham Clarke, University of Kent, that lists English publications, reviews, and criticism. 2. Special The Sun Also Rises Issue, fall 1986 (6.1). There are nine essays on Sun. The issue is in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the novel’s publication (1926). 3. Spanish Civil War Issue, spring 1988 (7.2). This issue includes all thirty dispatches Hemingway wrote during 1937–8 while covering the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), the only time all dispatches have been published together. There are editorial notes on each dispatch, written by guest editor William Braasch Watson, professor of history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Watson also furnished fourteen maps from the war and a “variorum edition” of Dispatch 19, titled “Flight of Refugees.” 4. Special A Farewell to Arms Issue, fall 1989 (9.1). Included are seven essays on Farewell, in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the novel’s publication (1929). 5. Two New Short Stories, spring 1990 (9.2). The stories, published for the first time, are [Philip Haines Was a Writer . . .] and “A Lack of Passion.” Each story is accompanied by manuscript material from which the stories evolved and critical commentary, the Philip Haines work edited and discussed by Donald Junkins, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, and the manuscripts of the “Passion” story edited and discussed by Susan Beegel, University of Idaho. 6. Special For Whom the Bell Tolls Issue, fall 1990 (10.1). Included are three essays in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and an essay by Beegel on “Hemingway and Hemochromatosis,” which details the probability of the disease, a problem with iron metabolism, in Hemingway and the impact it had on his life. 7. Special European Issue, summer 1992. Guest edited by French literary scholar Roger Asselineau (University of Paris/Sorbonne), this issue was published in honor of the birth in 1992 of the European Community of Nations. The issue includes essays from scholars in England, Italy, Spec SD1 Date 26-july

Hemingway Review and Society 433 Norway, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, France, and Yugoslavia, each essay reflecting that nation’s scholarship on Hemingway and his current reputation. 8. Centennial Issue, spring 1999 (18.2). This issue celebrates the one hun- dredth anniversary of Hemingway’s birth (July 21, 1899). It includes short stories by Grace Hall and medical essays by Clarence Hemingway, Ernest’s parents, as well as an article by Valerie Hemingway about her experiences as Hemingway’s secretary during the summer of 1959, as he was writing The Garden of Eden. There are also interviews with writers Russell Banks, E. Annie Proulx, Bob Shacochis, Charles Johnson, and Terry Tempest Williams, concerning Hemingway’s influence on contemporary fiction. 9. True at First Light Issue, fall 1999 (19.1). Included are several items about Hemingway’s fictional memoir, published in July 1999. Among these are remarks by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s second son and the editor of True, remarks he delivered at the Oak Park, IL centennial conference in July 1999; and “first perspectives” by ten Hemingway scholars on their first reading of the book. 10. Safari Issue, spring 2002 (21.2). This includes the first publication of a three-act play by Jane Kendall Mason, titled Safari. Mason, an experienced big game hunter, was a close friend of both Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, during the 1930s. The issue also includes “first perspectives” on Mason’s play by four Hemingway scholars. 11. Carol Hemingway Gardner Issue, fall 2004 (24.1). Carol Gardner was the last surviving of the six Hemingway children; she died on October 27, 2002 at age ninety-one, and this issue was published in her honor. Included are three “recollections” about her Hemingway family by Gardner, a separate interview with her, and an “afterword” by her daughter, all items amounting to reflections upon her life as Ernest’s youngest sister. 12. Under Kilimanjaro Issue, spring 2006 (25.2). Included are twelve articles on several aspects of Hemingway’s unabridged “African book,” edited by Robert W. Lewis (University of North Dakota) and Robert E. Fleming (University of New Mexico) and published by the Hemingway Foundation in 2005 as a prearranged follow-up to the edited version of the original manuscript of True at First Light. This issue contains explanations of publication and editing history, plus “first impressions” by ten Hemingway scholars. 13. Teaching The Garden of Eden Issue, fall 2010 (30.1). In this thirtieth anniversary issue, six Hemingway scholars write of their experiences in teaching Hemingway’s Garden, perhaps his most controversial novel, published posthumously in 1986. Spec SD1 Date 26-july

434 Oliver A companion publication to the Review is The Hemingway Newsletter, first published at Ohio Northern in January 1981 and edited by Oliver. The inaugural issue included a history of the Society’s “beginnings” on Thompson Island and also featured a photograph of forty-two people present (for the picture) and “sweltering under a large oak tree.” The first fifty issues of the newsletter were edited by Oliver and published first at Ohio Northern University and then, following Oliver’s retirement in 1992, from his home in Charlottesville, VA. DeFazio became newsletter editor in the fall of 2005 and continues to publish winter and summer issues. The newsletter began publishing online at the Society’s Web site with the winter issue 2010. Together, the Society and the Review have had a significant influence on the perception of Hemingway’s contribution to American and world literature. During a session entitled “Ernest Hemingway’s Literary Heritage” at the 1981 meeting of MLA, Robert Lewis summed up Hemingway criticism to that point and offered suggestions for the future. In particular, he discussed the trend toward psychoanalytical criticism of Hemingway’s work, including attempts to make the work autobiographical. Lewis indicated hope that the Society would create a better environment for future Hemingway studies. The next generations have, in fact, used the Review and the Society’s conferences and publications to help revive and extend the range of Hemingway scholarship. Sparked by the posthumous publications, particularly The Garden of Eden (1986) and True at First Light (1999; republished in a scholarly edition as Under Kilimanjaro [2005]), scholars have reevalu- ated Hemingway’s relationship to some of the hallmark traits of his iconic masculine identity. Using varied critical approaches from gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and ecological criticism – just to name a few – these critics have revised ideas about Hemingway’s relationship to masculinity, sexuality, and gender identity as well as to animals, the environment, travel, racial and ethnic others, and even his public persona and literary reputation. The Hemingway that has emerged from their work is often a complex, compassionate, and sensitive figure that adds depth and resonance to earlier theories about his adventurous, he-man persona, and trademark concise style.

Note 1. E-mail from S. Beegel to C. Oliver, June 10, 2011. Subsequent references to Beegel’s statements about the Review come from this e-mail. Spec SD1 Date 26-july