FAULKNER AND HEMINGWAY Biography of a Literary Rivalry JOSEPH FRUSCIONE THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2012 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fruscione, Joseph, 1974– Faulkner and Hemingway : biography of a literary rivalry / Joseph Fruscione. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1174-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1174-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9275-4 (cd-rom) 1. Literary quarrels—United States—20th century. 2. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Contemporaries. 4. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961—Contemporaries. I. Title. PS138.F78 2012 813'.5209—dc23 2011023252 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1174-8) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9275-4) Cover design by Greg Betza Type set in Adobe Minion Text design and typesetting by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments ■ vii INTRODUCTION The Anxiety of Agon: A Short Biography of a Rivalry ■ 1 CHAPTER 1 Modernism, Postwar Manhood, and the Individual Talent: Maturing in the 1920s ■ 21 CHAPTER 2 Petulant Jibes, Catfishlike Uncatfishivity, and Hemingwaves: The Rivalry Escalates in the 1930s ■ 52 CHAPTER 3 “Glad to Shoot It Out”: Ranking and Dueling in the 1940s ■ 103 CHAPTER 4 Nobel Laureates, Wolves, and Higher-Ranking Writers: Crescendo and Decrescendo in the 1950s and 1960s ■ 153 CHAPTER 5 Rivals, Matadors, and Hunters: Textual Sparring and Parallels ■ 206 Bibliography ■ 247 Index ■ 257 Acknowledgments Support comes in many forms. Joanna Hildebrand Craig deserves more credit than words can say. From the time she first expressed interest in publishing my Faulkner–Hemingway project in 2004—mid-dissertation, awkward graduate student stage—she has been enormously helpful and supportive in giving feedback, providing advice, answering questions, answering more questions, and helping me prepare and then shop the manuscript. Academic publishing has been—and, one hopes, will continue to be—better for her involvement. At The Ohio State University Press, I thank Sandy Crooms, Malcolm Litchfield, Eugene O’Connor, and Laurie Avery for their hard work, support, and helpful answers to my many questions. Ed Hatton did a superb copy- editing job at the beginning of the production stage; I used to pride myself on having a sharp eye for detail until I saw Ed’s edits. My two anonymous peer reviewers also gave excellent feedback when asked to comment on the manuscript in the spring–summer of 2010. Sandy Crooms deserves addi- tional credit for taking a chance on a manuscript where others had passed. To paraphrase an early Faulkner dedication, I hope this book will give her no reason to regret that fact. At my two institutions, many colleagues have been supportive and encouraging, among them: Maureen Corrigan, Leona Fisher, Patricia O’Connor, Ricardo Ortiz, Christine So, Dennis Todd, Norma Tilden, John Glavin, and Carole Sargent at Georgetown; and, at GW, Katherine Larsen, Derek Malone-France, Phyllis Ryder, Heather Schell, Jeffrey Cohen, and Ormond Seavey (who told me to “get it right”—hopefully I have). I’m very grateful to Derek Malone-France and the University Writing Program at GW for generous financial support to cover permissions costs. Likewise, I thank Kathryn Temple and Georgetown’s English Department for funding - vii - vi ■ ACKnowledgments related to conference travel and professional development. My schools’ departmental staff—Rebecca Wood and Najiyah Williams at GW, Donna Even-Kesef and Karen Lautman at Georgetown—have always been excel- lent. A teacher-scholar couldn’t ask for better logistical support. Among my professional colleagues, James Meredith, Suzanne Del Gizzo, Kirk Curnutt, Robert Trogdon, Susan Beegel, Scott Donaldson, Linda Wagner-Martin, Carl Eby, Linda Patterson Miller, Gail Sinclair, J. Gerald Kennedy, Jackson Bryer, Richard Kopley, David Earle, Rai Peterson, Sara Kosiba, and many others have been excellent in their continued encourage- ment, advice, and support. When I was a second-year Ph.D. student at only my second professional meeting, the late Michael Reynolds bought me a glass of wine at the Hemingway Centennial Conference in July 1999—the first of many gestures of support from my colleagues in the Hemingway Society and elsewhere. I also want to thank Alyssa Pacy, Stephen Plotkin, and Susan Wrynn of the Kennedy Library for their assistance when I researched Hemingway’s archival letters in 2003 and 2004; the Kennedy Library also generously pro- vided a research stipend in 2003. Ronald Berman gave excellent advice after reading Chapter 3 of this book in 2009. I am particularly thankful to H. R. Stoneback for graciously providing me an unpublished paper he gave on Faulkner and Hemingway at MLA in 1988—well before the idea for this book. I want to give an additional note of thanks The Ernest Hemingway Foun- dation for permission to quote from unpublished letters in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library—particularly to Kirk Curnutt for guiding me through the process so smoothly, and for being a model colleague. My colleagues from the Melville Society Executive Committee—John Bryant, Chris Sten, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Samuel Otter, Tony McGowan, Wyn Kelley, and Dennis Berthold—continue to offer great professional sup- port and encouragement, at the same time giving me a worthy model of intellectual exchange and camaraderie. They also let me wear my nineteenth- century Americanist hat once in a while, a much-needed and welcome ges- ture. I’ve encountered a similar exchange and camaraderie at the confer- ences where I’ve delivered various working sections of this book, including: NEMLA (Buffalo, April 2000), the University of Mississippi (July 2000), the University of Louisville (February 2001), ALA (Cambridge, May 2003), Key West Hemingway (June 2004), and MLA (Philadelphia, December 2006). Among the earliest feedback on this book project was that of my disser- tation and defense committees in August 2005: Kim Moreland, Chris Sten, Margaret Soltan, Robert Combs, Evelyn Schreiber, and Barney Mergen at GW. Kim Moreland was a wonderfully sharp and supportive dissertation ACKnowledgments ■ vii director. James A. Miller has exemplified professionalism and support for the past thirteen years and counting as professor and colleague. Chris Sten, Margaret Soltan, and Evelyn Schreiber have been increasingly supportive and collegial as I’ve transitioned from graduate student to faculty member at GW. When this project was in its dissertation stage, my colleague Kathleen MacArthur was exceptionally helpful when I was doing archival research in the Hemingway Collection and reading Hemingway’s post-1930 letters for references to Faulkner; Kathleen flawlessly transcribed many Hemingway letters for me. On the home front, my parents and the rest of my family have given me all the support and encouragement I’ve needed, even when they didn’t realize it. A phone call here, a laugh from a niece or nephew there, a “How’s that book going?” inquiry, an “I’m going to buy your book when it comes out” promise, or a lot of other things—all of it has been most helpful and most welcome. And to my lovely wife, Kristen: she joined the process in the middle, but she’s really been here all along. Introduction THE ANXIETY OF AGON A Short Biography of a Rivalry Bullfighting is worthless without rivalry. But with two great bullfighters it becomes a deadly rivalry. Because when one does something, and can do it regularly, that no one else can do and it is not a trick but a deadly dangerous performance only made possible by perfect nerves, judgment, courage and art and this one increases its deadliness steadily, then the other, if he has any temporary failure of nerves or of judgment, will be gravely wounded or killed if he tries to equal or surpass it. He will have to resort to tricks and when the public learns to tell the tricks from the true thing he will be beaten in the rivalry and he will be very lucky if he is still alive or in the business. —Hemingway, The Dangerous Summer f we substituted “bullfighting” with “writing” and “bullfighters” with “writers” Iin the above passage, then we would begin to understand just how strongly competitiveness shaped Hemingway’s views of writing. He saw bullfighters and writers as motivated by their peers to seek greatness, to follow set codes, and to outperform their contemporaries in professions that, to his mind, were defined by rivalry. Such competitiveness held a certain creative value for him: artists’ attempting “to equal or surpass” their rivals could improve their own work. At the same time, such efforts to outwrite and -chance one’s peers could spawn a mutual psychocompetitive influence. As Hemingway traveled to Spain in 1959 to cover brothers-in-law Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín in their mano a mano series of bullfights, he was likely thinking of a rivalry between craftsmen of a different sort—that between himself and Faulkner. Since Hemingway’s “prolific” remark inDeath in the Afternoon (1932), he and Faulkner had been vying for American literary supremacy with competing-yet-complementary sensibilities. At times, each thought - 1 - 2 ■ Introduction himself the superior craftsman and spoke of the other accordingly, while also admitting a level of respect and literary camaraderie. The three-plus decade rivalry between William Faulkner (1897–1962) and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was rich, nuanced, and often vexed. It embodied various attitudes: one-upmanship, respect, criticism, and praise.