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no • í & THE EFFECTS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S IDENTIFICATION WITH CERTAIN ASPECTS OF SPANISH THINKING ON HIS RENDERING OF CHARACTER / X Lawrence R. Broer A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1968 Approved by Doctoral Committee I a © Lawrence Richard Broer ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 11 THIS STUDY IS DEDICATED TO CESAR LUIS RIVERA, PROFESSOR OF SPANISH AT ST. PETERSBURG JUNIOR COLLEGE, WHO NOT ONLY HELPED COMPILE A BIBLIO­ GRAPHY ON THE SPANISH CHARACTER, BUT WHOSE HELP WITH MATTERS OF TRANSLATION PROVED INVALUABLE. ALSO A DEBT OF GRATITUDE GOES OUT TO MY THREE CATS WHO KEPT ME COMPANY, AND TO MY WIFE, WHO ENDURED. FINAL THANKS ARE DUE DR. RICHARD CARPENTER AND DR. FRANK BALDANZA, WHOSE COGENT CRITICISMS BOTH INSPIRED AND GAVE MEANINGFUL DIRECTION TO MUCH OF THE WRITING OF THIS DISSERTATION. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... iv I. WHY SPAIN? A LOOK AT THE EARLY HERO................................................ 1 II. INTIMATIONS OF SPAIN: THE HERO'S SEARCH FOR ANOTHER COUNTRY . .............................................................................. 14 III. THE SPIRIT OF PARTICULARISMO: A LOOK AT HEMINGWAY'S APOTHEOSIS OF THE MATADOR IN DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON ... 37 IV. HEMINGWAY THE MATADOR: THE AUTHOR'S APPARENT IDENTIFICATION WITH THE CRAFT AND CODE OF THE MATADOR................................................................................................................... 54 V. PERFORMANCE EN ROUTE TO DEATH: PART ONE THE SPANISH ELEMENT IN HEMINGWAY'S HARRY MORGAN AND ROBERT JORDAN........................................................................................... 73 VI. PERFORMANCE EN ROUTE TO DEATH: PART TWO THE SPANISH ELEMENT IN HEMINGWAY'S COLONEL CANTWELL AND SANTIAGO.......................................................................................................... 103 VII. CONCLUSION............................................................................................................... 121 BIBLIOGRAPHY 131 ! INTRODUCTION Carlos Baker has written that "For years before he won the Nobel Prize in literature at the age of fifty-five, Ernest Hemingway had been a citizen of the world." Mr. Baker was referring to the fact that Hemingway's gargantuan passion for travel and adventure had carried him on a spiritual expedition into every country of western and eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, and into the northern and southern parts of America and Africa. So, in one sense, the author had indeed earned the right to be called "world citizen." Sean O'Faolain said it was probably Hemingway's spirit of gallantry which made him rove the world in search of the flame of spirit in men and beasts.1 Whatever his motives, it was his paripatetic nature--his penchant for searching out new dangers in remote corners of the world-- that led the Nobel award spokesman to say, upon issuing the author his 1954 Nobel Prize, that "We might as well give it to him now before he kills himself in some adventure."' There were, of course, many countries of which Hemingway was especially fond. He spoke often of his infatuation for France, whose capital he saw as a continual excitation of the senses. He spoke, too, with special affection for Italy. And Africa represented to him freedom, '''Carlos Baker, "Hemingway's Ancient Mariner," Ernest Hemingway, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), p. 159. ^New York Journal-American, July 3, 1961, p. 4. V wildness and adventure. Yet there was another country that Hemingway loved above all others, whose capital was "the best city in the world," a country that fed his soul and gave sustenance to his most intimate longings: his "beloved Spain." Van Wyck Brooks once said, about the spiritual disinheritance of American writers, that "when we leave our country, we are apt to leave our roots behind us, and we fail to develop roots in any other country." This was clearly not the case with Hemingway, who might have answered Brooks in this way: "Where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's meant to go."^ Because Hemingway could not identify with the land of his birth, its social patterns or modes of existence, he had to travel 3,000 miles to a country remote from his own in time and space, but whose emotional distance could be bridged with no trouble at all. Postwar disillusionment had driven Hemingway into exile in Paris, but he chose Spain as his spiritual home. This still ancient country and the particular temperamental stress of its people struck a dramati­ cally responsive chord in Hemingway's nature. Here was a land and a people, he marveled, still enticingly primitive in character, which had remained "unspoiled" amid the overcrowding and modernization of Twentieth Century life. ^Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills Of Africa (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1935), p. 191. VI Though the author's interest in Spain centered on the bullfight, his knowledge of Spain drew upon a wealth of experience in that country, and it took many stories and novels and a play to express all that it meant to him as man and artist. He travelled in Spain for over forty years, getting to know the country from the inside--its people and their particular customs and sensibilities. He came to speak the Spanish language almost as a native, and genuine Spanish swear words and idioms are copiously scattered all over the pages of his books, along with Spanish gestures in intonation and manner. Philip Young has noted that “the conversation of his heroes has always a distinctly Spanish flavor-- rigid, tense, verging on bravado,and Arturo Baera remarks about Hemingway's "astonishingly real Spanish conversation," and the "primitive realism and capacity to catch every emotion that was felt by the people as a whole. - But Hemingway's interest in the Spanish people and their way of life is scarcely as simple or superficial as this. The Spanish element in Hemingway's fiction is never mere backdrop--a setting for new adventures--often it is the very lifeblood of the ideas and artistic methods he employs. He especially identified with the Spaniard's extraordinary interest in violence and death, which corresponded to his ^Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: The Penn State University Press, 1966), pp. 78, 79. ^Arturo Baera, "Not Spain But Hemingway," Hemingway And His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 203. Vil own, and which subsequently helped him to isolate and crystalize the fundamental spiritual attitude at the core of his life and work. We will observe that it was mainly in terms of the Spanish bullfight that Hemingway attempted to define his highest aspirations as man and artist. In the last act of the corrida--the moment of truth--he found a metaphor, or an objective correlative, for the heart of his work. And in the image of the matador, he found a symbol of the best a man can be in a violent and irrational world--a model of manhood and integrity after which he would pattern his major fictional heroes. It is the purpose of this work, then, to 1) investigate the reasons for Hemingway's extensive interest in the Spanish people and their way of life, 2) identify those aspects of the Spanish world which appear to have directly influenced the author's art, and 3) explain the effects of these on his interpretation of the world around him and on his rendering of character. It is this final objective which shall constitute the core of this study. That is, it will be argued that Hemingway's attachment to Spanish thinking results in a marked change in the mental disposition and behavioral patterns of his heroes. Whereas Hemingway's early heroes, those least affected by the author's Spanish enthusiasms, evince a sense of vulnerability and helplessness in the face of life's uncertainties, his later heroes-- those conceived after the author's emotional and artistic commitment to what we will come to view as the Spaniard's particularismo--are distinctly aggressive and bellicose in nature. These later heroes seem viii to derive unmistakably from Hemingway's sympathetic portraits of Pedro Romero, Juan Belmonte and Manuel Garcia Ma.era--those figures whom Hemingway apotheosizes in The Sun Also Rises and in his Spanish manifesto, Death In The Afternoon. These, Hemingway felt, were men worth emulating--men in the throes of perpetual conflict who neverthe­ less were erect and proud looking, possessing a seemingly indomitable spirit, and a sardonic carelessness. Against the confusion and helplessness of Hemingway's protago­ nists conceived before 1932, these Spaniards who serve as models for Hemingway's later heroes live in accordance with a. strict moral code that places a premium on stoical courage and perseverance, and which fosters an attitude of active rebellion in the face of inevitable defeat. These men are all faced with the same problems of fear, violence and death that produce a state of emotional paralysis in the author's earlier characters, but it is in the disdainful and recklessly aggressive manner that they try to meet them that designates, from their creator's stand­ point, their moral superiority. As a final introduction to our study, let us now examine briefly Hemingway's record of his experience as a. lover of Spain and aficionado of the bullring. Even though we know from diverse statements by Hemingway that he was familiar with many of the Spanish writers and painters, accounts of Hemingway's life in Spain and of his personal knowledge of Spanish culture are hard to come by. -And yet we know that he visited Spain extensively, got inside her soul, lived her life and IX wove his experiences into the total fabric of his work. Consequently, primary sources will be our chief means of gaining information for this study. From time to time, we shall attempt to illuminate certain aspects of the Spanish character and Spanish thinking by drawing from the works of Ortega y Gasset, Angel Ganivet and Miguel de Unamuno.

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