The Influence of Cezanne on the Development of Hemingway's Sty
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W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1990 Make it According to Cezanne: The Influence of Cezanne on the Development of Hemingway's Sty Randal Carson Hamilton College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hamilton, Randal Carson, "Make it According to Cezanne: The Influence of Cezanne on the Development of Hemingway's Sty" (1990). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625594. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-wjzz-jw20 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MAKE IT ACCORDING TO CEZANNE The Influence of Cezanne on the Development of Hemingway’s Style A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Randal C. Ham ilton 1990 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Randal C. Hamilton A pproved, A ugust 1990 Scott Donaldson Christopher MacGowan To Betty . who might have been one, too, if she had known. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people contribute to a project like this along the way, especially when it is dragged out over so many years. The most deserving of thanks is Professor Scott Donaldson, who shared his expertise both in the subject matter and in the craft of writing and who was always still ready and willing after every period of prodigal procrastination. Professor William Davis helped in the early years with timely letters of reminder and encouragement. Dean Robert Scholnick graciously allowed the extensions of deadline upon the requests of Professor Peter Wiggins and Professor Christopher MacGowan. Along with Professor Donaldson and Professor MacGowan, Professor Richard Lowry consented to sit on the Examination Committee when all would surely rather have been enjoying an inter session break. No academic department survives without good administrative assistance, and Bonnie Chandler took all the pain out of the mechanics of finishing up. Professor Michael Reynolds, of North Carolina State University, encouraged this project from its sophomoric beginnings and provided help upon any request, giving access to his extensive files even before the books came out. Professor Deborah Wyrick taught me to love literature and first helped me find keys to the lock. If you are lucky enough to have a good one, spouses provide the greatest help of all. My wife, Betty, gave encouragement and exhibited patience beyond the call of duty, and her stake in this is bigger than my own. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustration Page 1. La Dame a VEventail (Portrait de Mme. Cezanne, 1881) This picture was the only Cezanne left to Gertrude Stein after her brother, Leo, moved out of 27 rue de Fleurus. It was hanging in her salon when Hemingway visited for the first time.................................frontispiece 2. Cour de Village, Auvers, dit Cour d'une Ferme (1879-82) This picture, like the next one, was exhibited at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris when Hemingway lived there during the 1920's. Also like the next one, it is probably one of "the two good ones" of which he writes in A Moveable Feast............................................follows page 1 3. Le Golfe de Marseille, Vu de VEstaque (1883-85) . follows page 25 Almost all of the information about these pictures, as well as others in Paris during the period which this thesis explores, comes from Leonello Venturi's catalogue of Cezanne's paintings, Cezanne: Son A rt—Son Oeuvre (Paris: Paul Rosenberg, 1936). Although it is not nearly a complete record and has been found to contain many errors, it is a very useful source for tracking the ownership and exhibition of most of Cezanne's work up to the time of its publication. Meyly Chin Hagemann first pointed this out in an article cited elsewhere in this paper. v ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of the French post- impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne, on the style of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway talked or wrote about this influence enough times to warrant an investigation, and the connection between the two artists has been explored by numerous critics in the past. In most instances, however, these analyses have been somewhat superficial (probably due in part to the difficulties of comparing visual and verbal art), and they have failed to discover how far Hemingway went in developing certain aspects of his style after what he learned from Cezanne. This thesis analyzes three of Hemingway’s works as exemplary of the three stages of incorporating into his writing the lessons he learned from Cezanne. The first stage, only partly successful, is represented by his first attempt to render landscape scenes after the style of the paintings he had seen. The second stage is represented by the nearly complete success at creating Cezannesque landscapes in his first novel. The final stage finds Hemingway moving beyond landscape passages to integrate the important lessons from Cezanne into the broader goals he set for his fiction. MAKE IT ACCORDING TO CEZANNE I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cezanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cezanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times ... -1 Although Hemingway made this statement in 1949, to Lillian Ross in the well-known New Yorker interview, he refers to the Paris years of the 1920's when he was forging his style. He always had a penchant for talking about his craft, so we have many testaments from the author himself about his experimental style, even some others about the influence of Cezanne, but none quite so blunt as this one in regard to the painter's effect on his work. Without these statements, his contemporary audience might nevertheless have had some notion of what he was up to, because from the beginning it was obvious to reviewers that painters had an impact on his writing. Edmund Wilson may have been the first to recognize Hemingway's painterliness. When he reviewed "Mr. Hemingway's Dry-Points" in October of 1924, he saw a connection with Goya as he read the vignettes of in our time and posited that their pictorial quality was an essential element of Hemingway's art. Shortly afterwards, a reviewer for his former employer, the Kansas City Star, was struck by the same quality: Hemingway’s real power in description [is] in picking out the essentials of an object or a person or an action in much the same way that contemporary painters are endeavoring to do; 2 3 add also the spare inevitableness of his characters, and you have fiction which arouses the definitely esthetic emotions as much as does good music or good painting. With the appearance of In Our Time , Paul Rosenfeld wrote in 1925 that "Hemingway's short stories belong with Cubist painting," and late the following year, Allen Tate described his method in that collection as " pointillist e."2 Given these early reviews and Hemingway's own statements about the importance of Cezanne to his work, it is remarkable that scholars have yet to explore fully Hemingway's connections with the progenitor of modern painting. During the past thirty years, many have at least acknowledged this connection but have usually analyzed it only in the most general way, as for example, Sheldon Grebstein's Hemingway's Craft and Raymond Nelson's Hemingway: Expressionist Artist. Nelson's book exemplifies the pitfalls of such general analysis; working from a too broad definition of Expressionism, he also fails to apply his ideas adequately in a close examination of the fiction. Since Hemingway was so explicit (in letters, in conversation, and even in his fiction) about the degree of Cezanne's influence, a closer analysis is called for. Although her examination is also rather general, Emily Stipes Watts's examination is more satisfying for its closer look at the various aspects of Cezanne's style that come to bear on Hemingway. Meyly Chin Hagemann's study illuminates by discussing the specific works to which Hemingway had access during the Paris years, and she goes on to examine three early stories in detail; however, her arguments for a rather complex influence do not seem plausible, especially since two of the stories she analyzes were written before Hemingway even began to apply the techniques he was learning from 4 Cezanne. Kenneth Johnston adds to our base of knowledge by bringing to our attention that paintings in addition to those indicated by Hagemann were also available to Hemingway during the Paris years. However, Johnston's study centers on watercolors that are often incomplete works, and he equates the "patches of white" (bare canvas) in them with Hemingway’s practice of omission. While there is an equation between Hemingway's omissions and Cezanne's pictures, it is not to be found in the blank areas of Cezanne's unfinished paintings. Still others analyze the connection with varying degrees of success, but all fall short of showing how integral Cezanne's influence was with Hemingway's development during those formative years he spent in Paris. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the connection with Cezanne and to show the impact not only upon Hemingway’s treatment of landscape but also upon the whole of his early fiction.