I -r PRINCIPLES OF "TRUE FELT EMOTION" IN HEMINGWAY'S NOVELS <u Charles M? Oliver Jl 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 1970 Approved by Doctoral Committee lix © 1971 CHARLES MONTGOMERY OLIVER II ALL RIGHTS RESERVED il ABSTRACT Hemingway was fascinated by the writer's problem of communicating the "true felt emotion" of an action. But it is one thing to state a principle of writing and quite another to practice it, and it is yet another prob­ lem for the critic to attempt to objectify in the novels examples of this principle of truth-telling. So the purpose of this study was to determine the practicability of the principle in Hemingway's novels. In considering the question it became evident that there are two subordinate principles involved in the author's method of getting down "true felt emotion." The first involves a merger of fictional form and meaning, the way Hemingway uses the sounds of words or the repeti­ tion of words or the rhythm of a passage or the length of sentences or even the length of words in order to enhance meaning. The second involves what has become known as the "iceberg principle," the idea that it is what is not said in fiction that matters most. Most of the available Hemingway letters were read to determine whether there might be unpublished statements concerning other methods of communicating "true felt emotion" or clarification of these two; none were found. Further, a study was made of the manuscript versions of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls to determine how aware of his own principles Hemingway might have been in the initial stages of compo­ sition. Although insufficient evidence was found to support any significant awareness, the manuscript study did, nevertheless, influence conclusions. The study concluded that Hemingway's principle of communicating "true felt emotion" was made practicable through the method of merging form with meaning and through leaving out knowledge important to total meaning. The most potent examples of the merger of form and meaning were found in the four love-making scenes between Robert Jordan and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, particularly the final one, where the rhythms and sounds of the. passage merge perfectly with the rhythms and emotions of the sex 1* Ill act and where the continual repetition of the key words "now" and "one" merge with the time and love motifs of the novel. Other examples included the increased ratio of and1s and short sentences to heighten emotional im­ pact, and the concentration on details by characters desperate to forget mental and/or physical wounds. The study synthesized criticism of the iceberg principle at work in ten of the short stories and concluded that it was of major significance to an understanding of four of the novels (Jake Barnes's frustration and jealousy in The Sun Also Rises; the ending to A Farewell to Arms; "death" in For Whom the Bell Tolls; and "death" and the relationship between Renata and Barone Alvarito in Across the River and Into the Trees) and of minor sig­ nificance in the other two (Richard Gordon's mis-seeing Marie in To Have and Have Not and the strangers' objectivity at the end of The Old Man and the Sea). Some suggestions were offered for further research on related topics. IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS One particular note of thanks must be given. I appreciate the criticism, encouragement, and indepen­ dence given to me throughout this study by my advisor, Dr. J. Robert Bashore of Bowling Green State University. 7 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I: THE MERGER OF FORM AND MEANING..................... 9 A. Language as Correlative............................................... 21 B. "Form" and Sexuality.......................................................... 36 C. Concentration on Details............................................... 41 D. The Sounds of Words and Expressions .... 52 E. Miscellaneous Examples .................................................... 58 F. Organic Quality in Whole Works ................................ 73 CHAPTER II: THE "ICEBERG PRINCIPLE" ................................... 81 A. The Short Stories............................................................... 92 B. The Sun Also Rises.............................................................. 110 C. A Farewell to Arms............................................................... 124 D. To Have and Have Not.......................................................... 134 E. For Whom the Bell Tolls............................................... 139 F. Across the River and Into theT rees .... 154 G. The Old Man and the Sea............................................... 169 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................ 177 1 INTRODUCTION Ernest Hemingway said so much about the importance of writing truth in fiction that critical scholarship has accepted truth-telling as a primary Hemingway principle. But it was not just writing accurately about events which interested him; he was also fascinated by the writer's problem of getting down the "true felt emotion" of an action. Hemingway recalls in Death in the Afternoon his struggles with the craft in the early 1920's: I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, 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, was beyond me and' I was working very hard to try to get it. 1Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. 2. 2 Hemingway wanted to communicate not what a character was supposed to feel or had been taught to feel, mentally or physically in war or love, hut what he actually felt — his "true felt emotion." And there should he no mental blocks for the writer, which might interfere with this truth- telling. For example, he describes the after-feeling one might have in seeing a little girl, one cannot help, struck by a train. In such a case I suppose he £the writer^} would probably be justified in shutting his eyes as the mere fact of the child being about to be struck by the train was all that he could convey, the actual striking would be an anti-climax, so that the mo­ ment befor^ striking might be as far as he could represent. So Hemingway was studying the process by which a writer gets down the truth of emotion, not what one was supposed to feel, but what one actually felt at the moment of an action. There is a dramatic example of how this recall of emotion works as Hemingway describes seeing the wounding of a bull­ fighter, but "missing" something in the emotion. He des­ cribes his coming to awareness of the missing element: For myself, not being a bullfighter, . the problem was one of depiction and waking in the night I tried to remember what it was that seemed just out of my remembering and that was the thing that I had 2Death in the Afternoon, p. 3. 3 really seen and, finally,, remembering all around it, I got it. When he [the bullfighter] stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the dirtiness of the rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit underwear and the clean, clean, un­ bearably clean whiteness of the thigh bone that I had seen, and it was that which was important. The "true felt emotion" was recalled, in this incident, only when Hemingway was able to remember what it was that triggered the emotion. The writer spent a lifetime experimenting with the element of truth-telling, commenting on it repeatedly in nonfictional works and interviews. In his introduction to Men at War, for example, he made what is perhaps his defini­ tive statement concerning a writer's integrity: A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth.4 Certainly one reason for this lifelong passion for truth­ telling was Hemingway's obvious concern for the degradation of the language following the first world war. The author, 3Peath in the Afternoon, p. 20. ^Ernest Hemingway, "Introduction," Men at War (New York: Bramhal House, 1942), p. xiv. 4 as well as Frederick Henry, was "embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice" and all other meaningless abstractions in the political rhetoric of the times. So in his writing he refused to include anything that would, as John Peale Bishop says, "falsify the world without £orj betray the world within." Charles Fenton records that Hemingway was constantly writing down the sensations he felt in boxing matches, while working in Chicago in 1920.6 jn later discussing this experimentation for George Plimpton's Paris Review article Hemingway spoke of searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter's flat-soled gym-shoes, the gray colour of Jack Blackburn's skin when he had just come out of stir and other things I noted as a painter sketches.