Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2011 Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway Patrick Blair Bonds Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Bonds, Patrick Blair, "Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway" (2011). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3304. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3304 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. TRANSATLANTIC BAGGAGE: EXPATRIATE PARIS, MODERNISM, AND THE APPRENTICESHIP OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Patrick Blair Bonds B.A., Baylor University, 1994 M.A., University, 2000 M.Phil., University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2001 May 2011 For Shannon who was always there and always believed in me And Kennedy who came along mid-way into this project and showed me what it was all about ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without the exceptional support and generosity of my dissertation director, J. Gerald Kennedy. His example has given shape to my career as a scholar and an educator. I would also like to acknowledge the expert guidance of my dissertation committee: Joseph Kronick, Michelle Masse, Katherine Henninger, and Elaine Maccio. From the beginning, they have helped me to understand how to ask the right questions. During the course of this project, I was fortunate to have been awarded two research grants that supported travel to the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. For this invaluable opportunity, I wish to thank the Ernest Hemingway Society for the Smith-Reynolds Founders Fellowship and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation for the Ernest Hemingway Research Grant. Finally, I would like to recognize my family for their unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement. To my parents and my in-laws, I thank you. I would especially like to express my gratitude to my wife, Shannon, for all of the sacrifices that you have made on my behalf. To Kennedy, thank you for understanding in your own way all the times when daddy ―gone to work.‖ iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ……………………………………………………………………….iii ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………………………v INTRODUCTION BECOMING MODERN ………………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER ONE MODERNIST PARIS, MODERN GENDER ……………………………………………………9 CHAPTER TWO MENTORS …………………...…………………………………………………………………41 CHAPTER THREE JOURNALISM …….....................................................................................................................74 CHAPTER FOUR THE MARRIAGE TALES ………………………………………………….............................105 CHAPTER FIVE THE MALE TALES ………………….. ………………………………………………………127 CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………………...161 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………………….172 VITA …….……………………………………………………………………..........................181 iv ABSTRACT ―Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway‖ argues that Hemingway‘s expatriation and apprenticeship in modernist Paris from 1921-1925 provided an important impetus for his explorations in gender alterity. The project focuses on a critical-biographical rethinking of Hemingway‘s literary development, integrating previous Hemingway biography and gender studies scholarship with new revelations from the manuscript of the forthcoming first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. An updated study of the author‘s literary formation is long overdue; Charles Fenton‘s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954), for example, has served for more than fifty years as a valuable resource for understanding Hemingway‘s early influences and sense of craft. But rather than present the arch of apprenticeship as a dynamic progression of received knowledge and job training, the following chapters foreground Hemingway‘s instruction as a gendered process, a vocational formation deeply influenced by what Joseph Boone has called the ―libidinal currents‖ of modernism as well as Hemingway‘s complicated dealings with male and female tutelary figures, themselves often engaged in unconventional gender roles or sexual practices. Through new correspondence and manuscript analysis, I trace Hemingway‘s movement from an objective, spectatorial view of modernist gender toward a more subjective, ambiguous treatment of his own hetero-masculine identity. Far from mastery, then, I show how Hemingway‘s gender apprenticeship in Paris led to a progressive disorientation. From this perspective, the landscape of Hemingway‘s apprenticeship now looks quite different from Fenton‘s study in 1954. Although all the familiar landmarks are there – family, mentors, journalism, marriage, friendships – Hemingway‘s transatlantic voyage signaled a sea change – the profound reconstitution of his views on gender and sexual identity. v INTRODUCTION BECOMING MODERN In 1915, at the age of sixteen, Ernest Hemingway made a written promise to himself, vowing to ―do pioneering or exploring work in the 3 last great frontiers Africa, central south America or the country around and north of Hudson Bay‖ (qtd. in Reynolds, Young, 29). Within a year, he revised his goal, wishing to become a writer ―whose last territory was those last great frontiers‖ (Reynolds, Young, 30). In his lifetime, Hemingway captured the public imagination and became an icon of American masculinity – world traveller, bullfight aficionado, boxer, hunter, deep-sea fisherman. But based on biographical evidence that was previously suppressed or dismissed, a more complex picture of Hemingway has emerged. For the past twenty-five years, Hemingway criticism has been dominated by a reconsideration of the complex exploration of gender issues throughout his work. In the wake of such publications as The Garden of Eden (published posthumously in 1986), Kenneth Lynn‘s biography of Hemingway (1987), Mark Spilka‘s Hemingway‘s Quarrel with Androgyny (1990), Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes‘ Hemingway‘s Genders (1994), Carl Eby‘s Hemingway‘s Fetishism (1999), and Debra Moddelmog‘s Reading Desire (1999), a more complex picture of Hemingway has had a profound impact on how we view, among other things, the heroic image he so carefully cultivated, including his seemingly uncomplicated model of heterosexual manhood. In these portrayals, his storied heterosexuality and masculinity intermingle with his fascination with sexual twinning, androgynous lovemaking, sexual metamorphosis, and male and female homosexuality. This revised portrait of the author more accurately reflects the unconventional gender and sexual experiences Hemingway sought to understand in his life and in his work. Similarly, my revisionist study involves an intense re-examination of how Hemingway‘s expatriation and apprenticeship in modernist Paris from 1921-1925 provided an important 1 impetus for his explorations in gender alterity. The project focuses on a critical-biographical rethinking of Hemingway‘s literary development, integrating previous Hemingway biography and gender studies scholarship with new revelations from the manuscript of the forthcoming first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Whereas many notable works of scholarship have focused on Hemingway‘s Paris years – Michael Reynolds‘ Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989), Peter Griffin‘s Less Than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris (1990), James R. Mellow‘s Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (1992) – an updated study of Hemingway‘s literary formation is long overdue. Charles Fenton‘s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954), for example, has served for more than fifty years as a valuable resource for understanding Hemingway‘s early influences and sense of craft. But a revised assessment, incorporating more recent theoretical and biographical knowledge as well as important archival sources not available at the time of Fenton‘s study, seems indispensible, given the new directions of inquiry and biographical perspectives that the much-awaited collected letters will provide. This project thus engages in a close reading of the 1921-1925 correspondence, especially letters never before printed or cited, paying particular attention to details that fill certain gaps in our biographical understanding of Hemingway‘s Paris years while identifying and annotating new information that may change our understanding of the young Hemingway and his emerging fiction. As much as possible, I supplement my discussion of Hemingway‘s fiction from this period with manuscript analysis; in the course of my archival research in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, I found it imperative to examine several manuscript versions of a published text, uncovering disguised or censored layers of story that reveal authorial contradictions, ambivalences, or anxieties.