Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory [1 ed.] 9781612775050, 9781606351413

Citation preview

Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory

Ernest Hemingway and the

Geography of Memory  Edited by Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott



The Kent State University Press kent, ohio

© 2010 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 all rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2010006386 isbn 978-1-60635-042-3 Manufactured in the United States of America Lamb, Robert Paul. “Fishing for Stories: What ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ Is Really About.” Modern Fiction Studies 37:2 (1991), 161–81. © 1991 Purdue Research Foundation. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Ernest Hemingway and the geography of memory / edited by Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott. p.

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Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-60635-042-3 (alk. paper) ∞ 1. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Memory in literature. 3. Geography in literature. I. Cirino, Mark, 1971– II. Ott, Mark P., 1966– ps3515.e37z58666 2010 813'.52—dc22 2010006386 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available. 14 13 12 11 10

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Mark P. Ott and Mark Cirino PART I: MEMORY AND COMPOSITION 1 Memory and Manhood: Troublesome Recollections in The Garden of Eden Marc Hewson 2 Reclaimed Experience: Trauma Theory and Hemingway’s Lost Paris Manuscripts Marc Seals PART II: MEMORY AND ALLUSION 3 Memory and the Sharks Sergio Perosa, translated by Mark Cirino 4 Memory and Desire: Eliotic Consciousness in Early Hemingway Matthew J. Bolton 5 Lions on the Beach: Dream, Place, and Memory in The Old Man and the Sea Larry Grimes

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PART III: MEMORY AND PLACE 6 Hemingway and Cultural Geography: The Landscape of Logging in “The End of Something” Laura Gruber Godfrey 69 7 Expatriate Lifestyle as Tourist Destination: The Sun Also Rises and Experiential Travelogues of the Twenties Allyson Nadia Field 83

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Pursuit Remembered: Experience, Memory, and Invention in Green Hills of Africa Lawrence H. Martin Alchemy, Memory, and Archetypes: Reading Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro as an African Fairy Tale Erik Nakjavani “A Moveable Feast” or “a miserable time actually”? Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle, and Modernist Memoir Verna Kale

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PART IV: MEMORY AND TRUTH 11 The Persistence of Memory and the Denial of Self in A Farewell to Arms Mark Cirino 149 12 The Currents of Memory: Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” as Metafiction Robert Paul Lamb 166 13 A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Killing: Nostalgia in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon Emily O. Wittman 186 14 Memory in The Garden of Eden Barbara Lounsberry 204 Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our contributors for sharing their work with us and also for their patience with this project as it evolved since 2005. We would also like to thank all the people at Kent State University Press, especially Joanna Craig, Joyce Harrison, and Mary Young, whose thoughtfulness, wisdom, and acumen have guided this book through various stages. Mark Cirino would like to thank Kristen and Luca for their love and understanding, Scott Volz and Carol Dibble for their editorial assistance, the University of Evansville for its financial and moral support, and Mark Ott for his kind invitation. Mark Ott would like to thank Susan Beegel, Jim Meredith, Gail Sinclair, and the Ernest Hemingway Society for their support of the panel “Hemingway and the Geography of Memory” at the 2005 meeting of the American Literature Association in Boston. It was out of the panel that this book emerged. Harvard Knowles, Sean Melvin, and Richard Raleigh offered subsequent encouragement and advice; their friendship has been essential. I would also like to thank Margarita Curtis, John Taylor, and Deerfield Academy for their support. Yet this book would never have been completed without the energy, enthusiasm, insight, and good humor of Mark Cirino, who agreed to shepherd this project with me in 2007 having no idea what he was getting into. Daniel and Patricia Ott, Joe Ott, Kathy Wehrli, Greg Ott—all have offered invaluable encouragement, but I must thank, once again, my wife, Lori, and my daughters Claire, Anne, and Olivia for their patience, support, and smiles as this book was completed. Life will be different now that this is done.

ERRATA Allyson Nadia Field’s “Expatriate Lifestyle as Tourist Destination: The Sun Also Rises and Experiential Travelogues of the Twenties” was originally published in The Hemingway Review ��.� (Spring ����): ��–��. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Laura Gruber Godfrey’s “Hemingway and Cultural Geography: The Landscape of Logging in ‘The End of Something’” was originally published in The Hemingway Review ��.� (Fall ����): ��–��. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Sergio Perosa’s essay was originally published in Italian as “La memoria e gli squali” in Hemingway e Venezia, ed. Sergio Perosa (Florence: L.S. Olschki, ����) and appears by permission of the publisher. Marc Seals’s “Reclaimed Experience: Trauma Theory and Hemingway’s Lost Paris Manuscripts” was originally published as “Trauma Theory and Hemingway’s Lost Paris Manuscripts” in The Hemingway Review ��.� (Spring ����): ��–��. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction Mark P. Ott and Mark Cirino

There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger. —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

There were some other places I wanted to see since we would be going through them; places I was sure I remembered incorrectly due to haste or stress or the distortions of vision that being under fire bring, but we would see them sooner or later and I could make my corrections of memory then. There were certain places that I liked to show to Bill for their incredibility; to show them as museum pieces of the impossible in war. But I had shown him the positions on the road above the village of Guadarrama on the way up to the pass on the high road to Avila and they had been so obviously preposterous to hold that I did not blame him for not believing me. When I saw them I could believe them myself although the original memory of them was sharper than any photograph. —Ernest Hemingway, The Dangerous Summer

Ernest Hemingway had an uneasy relationship with the present; he seemed to believe it rarely made for the best fiction. Yet his mind was always attuned to the present, to the moment as he was immersed and absorbed within it, and that hypersensitivity to what he was experiencing would move into his memory, dwell there, and later become the fuel for his fiction. As every student of Hemingway’s biography knows, Michigan, Italy, Spain, Paris, East Africa, and the Gulf Stream are some of the most distinctive places in the Hemingway oeuvre; in short fiction, novels, journalism, and correspondence, Hemingway revisited these sites, reimagining and transforming them into texts. “Memory,” to the surprise of no one, is a topic closely aligned with Hemingway’s work. Nearly all of Hemingway’s fiction exists as an extension, ix

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dramatization, and condensation of his actual experience, yet it is not autobiography. Thus the ambiguity of the phrase “geography of memory” taken as our title underscores its usefulness. Returning to a place inspires a celebration of memory, providing a clarification of an essential truth of human existence, a contrast between then and now. The Italy of the eighteen-year-old Hemingway is returned to, again and again, as the writer evolves from an ambulance driver into a journalist, finally becoming the artist who creates A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). The immediacy and urgency of the hunt is conveyed concisely in Green Hills of Africa in 1935. By 1955, when Hemingway is re-creating the events of his second safari in 1953, that conciseness is replaced by a free-flowing, occasionally comic account of the land and people in the manuscripts eventually published as True at First Light (1999) and Under Kilimanjaro (2005). Just as A Moveable Feast (1964) is a reinvention of the Paris depicted in The Sun Also Rises (1926), The Dangerous Summer (1960), chronicling the Spanish bullfight season of the summer of 1959, tries to recapture the authority and the vivid atmosphere of the best sections of Death in the Afternoon (1932). Stylistically, Hemingway relied on a vocabulary of imagery to convey loss and the passage of time, a contrast between a younger self and a wiser, experienced self. Composing A Moveable Feast in 1959, he uses horse chestnuts to signal forms of change and loss, evoking the textures of life in Paris for the young Hemingway in 1924. In the memoir he writes, “Do you remember when the horse chestnuts were in bloom?” (54). Indeed, the roasted nuts are a cure for hunger (11) and the trees are beautiful next to the Seine (43). As a young man writing in Parisian cafés, he carries the horse chestnut in his pocket, along with a rabbit foot for luck. Thus, to the aging memoirist, the horse chestnut evokes this time in the idealized, youthful Hemingway’s life, when he was a young father happily married to Hadley, when he was powerfully convinced that he could shape his own artistic future. How do we understand Hemingway’s use of “memory”? So much of his movement through the world was a process of continual self-exile as he sought new environments to bolster his identity as a writer and his essential self. As Donald Pizer notes, self-exile, or expatriation, through the pursuit of an alternative space is a condition in which “the world one has been bred in is perceived to suffer from intolerable inadequacies and limitations; another world seems to be free of these failings and to offer a more fruitful way of life.” For Hemingway, travel was the engine of his creative life, as the continual contrast between spaces provided him evidence of his emerging identity as a

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writer, here and there, of what he once was and what he now has become. In the case of Hemingway’s Paris, J. Gerald Kennedy writes, “One cannot compare an ‘actual’ place with its literary representation, since there is literally no ‘place’ apart from an interpreting consciousness” (5). In many ways, the essays in this book are explorations of Hemingway’s “interpreting consciousness” as his identity as a writer evolves through his travels and across the texture of his constructed images of different spaces. Hemingway’s use of memory is an element of a broader authorial strategy that allows him to separate himself from his narrative alter egos. In her groundbreaking study Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (1996), Rose Marie Burwell explores how the two narratives published as Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden were composed as part of a “serial sequence,” as Hemingway was deliberately mining his memory to compose a work modeled on Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Burwell’s work subsequently opened up the study of Hemingway’s work in light of the posthumous publications. In her 2002 article “A Lifetime of Flower Narratives: Letting the Silenced Voice Speak,” Miriam Mandel calls attention to how Hemingway “blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction as much as he blurred those between life and art” (241). Mandel examined Hemingway’s “flower narratives”—journalism for the Toronto Daily Star (10 June 1922), Green Hills of Africa (composed 1934), the African Journal (composed 1954–56), and A Moveable Feast (composed 1957–61)—in which he employs the narcissus, the blooms of a horse chestnut tree, and a flowering wisteria vine in stories on the subject of fishing, drinking, love, and marriage, noting how “original happy connotations (innocence, virtue, and young marriage) are undercut with unease, denial and guilt ridden subversion” (241). In The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels (2006), Hilary Justice notes that Hemingway distinguished between two kinds of stories, the “Personal” and “Authentic,” which allow him to distance himself from his subject and the roles he played in relation to it. Justice writes, “Personal refers to things he had done and experienced, in which he had played an actively participatory role, Authentic to things he had heard or witnessed, in which his role was that of the journalist, the observer, the voyeur . . . [in] his Personal writing, he would always represent his emotional response to his current situation by refracting it through his past, finding emotional points of contiguity between his present and his past, and using this doubled emotional intensity to make his readers ‘feel more than they understand’” (4–5). Indeed, the pervasive feature of memory in Hemingway’s work belies a

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critical view that equates it with merely romanticizing the past. In a 1980 call to arms previewing the future of Hemingway studies, Michael Reynolds implored, “Let us here declare a moratorium on nostalgia” (201). Describing one of his most maliciously created female characters, Hemingway’s preface to his play The Fifth Column (1937) explains, “There is a girl in it named Dorothy but her name might also have been Nostalgia” (vi). The moniker is not meant as a compliment. In Islands in the Stream (1970) Thomas Hudson observes, “Nostalgia hecha hombre, he thought in Spanish. People did not know that you died of it” (233). The notion that nostalgia “makes a man” is further evidence of the danger of allowing the past to interfere with the urgent necessities of the present. As Stephen Tanner puts it, “Nostalgia can be a pleasant balm for Hemingway’s wounded characters and a way of restoring their balance and confidence, but it must not distract from the task at hand” (“Hemingway’s Islands” 83). At the time nostalgia was almost a disease to be avoided, while memory provides a clarification of the present, enhancing existence. Hudson enjoys the pleasant balm of nostalgia while indulging in a gin and tonic with lime and Angostura, a drink that provides a “pleasantly bitter” taste much like the memory it induces: “It reminded him of Tanga, Mombasa, and Lamu and all that coast and he had a sudden nostalgia for Africa. Here he was, settled on the island, when he could as well be in Africa. Hell, he thought, I can always go there. You have to make it inside of yourself wherever you are. You are doing all right at that here” (21). As in Proust, food and drink have the power to conjure up the past, making it accessible in a way that is dangerous for a writer; overindulgence in memory becomes nostalgia, a form of corruption. Accompanying the indisputably nostalgic tone of A Moveable Feast is a more complex, instructive attitude toward the functioning of memory. Although much of A Moveable Feast casts a surface innocence to Hemingway’s Paris years, the workings of memory also transcend simple nostalgia. In the vignette “A False Spring,” for example, Hemingway’s first wife tells him, “Memory is hunger” (57). If as an aphorism that statement does not mean a great deal, the rest of the volume pursues “hunger” as a significant theme in Hemingway’s life during the 1920s. Hunger implies a lack, and memory also indicates the pursuit of something lost—be it time past, abandoned love, stolen manuscripts, broken relationships, the death of innocence, or the extinction of an old way of life. Later, Hemingway coaches himself on avoiding “hunger-thinking,” harebrained thoughts emanating from a hysterical, food-deprived mind. The equating of “memory” and “hunger” also reveals the inherent inadequacy of recollection. Hemingway’s memory of Paris may be a moveable feast, but Wil-

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liam James explains that all a man’s memory can provide is “a few of the crumbs that fall from the feast” (276). Just as Death in the Afternoon acknowledges the unavoidable falsity of memory, James says that memory takes an object or an emotion from the past and “either makes too little or too much of it” (276). Hemingway was always concerned with the utilization of memory, trying to understand how it can be used as an aesthetically satisfying component of his fiction. It inspired his experimentation with narrative strategies attempting to create and uncover the most authentic, the most truthful depiction of human experience. Thus, in the foreword to Green Hills of Africa he famously wrote, “The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination” (i). The artful selection of detail in narration was not, to Hemingway, a distortion of reality; rather, it heightened authenticity, making the subjectivity of his perspective ultimately—aesthetically—more objective. In Hemingway’s memory, an event, whether traumatic, painful, frightening, or tragic, could be revived and reinvented. Yet the passage of time was just as important as the artful selection of detail to the success of this method. Experience, gestating in the mind over a period of time, became more truthful as the knowledge of the essential elements of a moment were enhanced in the writer’s memory. The composition of The Old Man and the Sea illustrates how the passage of time was essential to Hemingway’s method of composition. In 1932 Hemingway heard the core of the story from Carlos Gutierrez, a Cuban fisherman, and transcribed it in a fishing log. In April 1936, in an essay for Esquire magazine, he wrote down the barest bones of a story of an old man, alone on his skiff and lost at sea, who had lost a great fish to the sharks (“On the Blue Water” 239). Yet Hemingway waited until January 1951 to write the story that would be published in Life magazine in September 1952 as The Old Man and the Sea. What Hemingway left out of the sea novella—all of Cuba, he asserted—were fishing stories not revealed in the tale and the depth of Santiago’s knowledge of the craft of fishing. For the characterization of Santiago and the dramatization of the struggle with the fish, Hemingway chose to reduce his story to the essential elements of man’s struggle with the natural world. And as Hemingway ruminated from 1932 to 1951 over the essence of the story—a valiant fisherman and an enormous marlin—his memory reshaped, reduced, and clarified the thematic tension that is so compelling to the reader. As he stated in his famous declaration of his “iceberg theory” of fiction, knowledge was essential to his method: “There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. . . . The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand

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pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the process of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, etc.” (Bruccoli 125). During the nineteen-year gestation, he was learning what to omit from the story so as to not create “hollow places” in his writing. Hemingway’s work reverberates with a continual blend of memory, geography, and lessons of life revealed through the trauma of experience. As we selected these essays, we were acutely aware that this volume would not be exhaustive and could not be “the final word” on the subject as it stands in 2010. This book originally emerged from a panel Mark Ott organized on behalf of the Ernest Hemingway Society for the annual conference of the American Literature Association in Boston in 2005. After the original broad call for papers, there was an enthralling variety of responses. What was exciting was the range of approaches to Hemingway’s work that could use the concept of memory as an interpretative tool to enhance our understanding of his creative process. We have divided the essays into four broad sections. The first, Memory and Composition, begins with Marc Hewson’s exploration of notions of gender through the theme of memory. Hewson’s reading of The Garden of Eden analyzes the protagonist David Bourne’s negotiation with his own “recollected masculine self ” and how David’s writing within the novel might teach us about Hemingway’s own fictionalizing of his experiences. Marc Seals also discusses The Garden of Eden in addition to other posthumous fiction as he unfolds the legend behind Hemingway’s lost manuscripts of 1922. Seals treats Hemingway’s memory of these manuscripts as emblematic of the author’s enactment of traumatic memory in his texts and in his life. Seals shows that an analysis of Hemingway’s fixation on this incident and his various attempts to write about it tell us much about the writer’s own memory and his understanding of the way it works. Memory and Allusion collects views of Hemingway texts spanning his entire career, critical work that suggests possible implications of Hemingway’s use of memory and place. The first examination of memory and allusion is Mark Cirino’s translation of Sergio Perosa’s international perspective on Hemingway’s entire body of work. Perosa’s remarks evidence Hemingway’s careerlong strategy to invent from reality. In this way, he pinpoints the distinction between the memory of an event and then the fictionalization of it. Perosa draws from Hemingway’s own comments in letters and writing to extract an ethic of writing that serves as a valuable guide for approaching Hemingway’s work and his treatment of memory. Focusing on In Our Time, Matthew J.

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Bolton writes a perceptive comparison of T. S. Eliot and Hemingway, giving fresh and expert perspective to these two writers whose intertextuality has never been satisfactorily mined. Bolton examines Hemingway’s knowledge of Eliot as part of his Paris education, received under Ezra Pound’s tutelage. The memory and desire that Bolton’s essay discusses cover his poetry and early stories as well as his two important novels of the decade. Physical and mental geography figure in Larry Grimes’s look at The Old Man and the Sea, which uses Santiago’s final image of dreams of lions to conjure up a distant place, recalled through the lens of memory. The constant image of the lions resides in the “territory of dream,” itself a phrase that joins the African terrain and world of the mind. Our third section, Memory and Place, investigates not only the geography of memory but also the memory of geography. Laura Gruber Godfrey’s elegant examination of the story “The End of Something” illustrates Hemingway’s tendency to link geography with realities of cultural change and human condition. Godfrey stresses that the subjective memory of a setting contributes to its meaning at least as much as objective actualities. Godfrey equates Hemingway’s narration in “The End of Something” to the tone of an oral history, contributing to its effect of recalling a place in time. To Godfrey, geography, far from a static fact, is seen in Hemingway to be “multilayered, kinetic, and constructed.” Allyson Nadia Field then provides an authoritative look at 1920s travelogues and the way we can use the geography of Paris to understand The Sun Also Rises and read Jake Barnes as a de facto tour guide. Larry Martin discusses one of Hemingway’s nonfiction texts of the 1930s, Green Hills of Africa, emphasizing its romantic lyric element, surveying the critical landscape and contemporary reception of the book, and making important deductions about distinctions between Hemingway’s memory of his experiences and the textual representation of these events. Next, Under Kilimanjaro is the subject of a characteristically thoughtful, complex reading by Erik Nakjavani, who offers a new model for reading the narrative. What he terms an “alchemy” of “lived experience and memory” leads him to draw from Jung, phenomenology, and the tradition of fairy tale to show the various meanings of Hemingway’s posthumous African text. We next include Verna Kale’s valuable parallel reading of Kay Boyle’s memoir with the 1920s and Paris, which not only provides a gloss on apprenticeship but also illuminates the city at the heart of The Sun Also Rises. In the section treating Memory and Truth, we are mindful that Hemingway once asserted that “memory, of course, is never true” (DIA 100), he also demonstrated that in its inaccuracies it can yield greater truths than any emotionless

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fact. Reading Hemingway’s other great novel of the 1920s, A Farewell to Arms, Mark Cirino uses Frederic Henry’s combative relationship with memory to explicate important scenes of the novel and employs theorists such as William James, Henri Bergson, Freud, and St. Augustine to discern Hemingway’s understanding of the complex modernist theme of memory and its function in creating depth and tension within Frederic’s character and narration. Since geography and memory are two foundational elements of “Big Two-Hearted River,” the story is an essential inclusion in this volume. Robert Paul Lamb traces the vast critical history of the story and also explicates “On Writing,” an excised fragment from the story. Ultimately, Lamb explores the self-reflexivity of the story, demonstrating how the concrete details of the fishing trip allow us to explore Nick Adams’s consciousness and his past. Lamb also convincingly demonstrates Cézanne’s status as Nick’s exemplar, both in the way he lived and the art he created. The “nostalgia strategy” in Death in the Afternoon figures in Emily Wittman’s essay, which contextualizes Hemingway’s bullfighting disquisition and shows how the text demonstrates his uneven relationship with the past and his varying efforts to portray it in literary forms. Not surprisingly, Hemingway’s posthumous works—which often look backward—are also given significant attention in this volume. Our collection concludes with Barbara Lounsberry’s close reading of memory’s function in The Garden of Eden, offering up another piece of criticism that uses Hemingway’s retrospective glance to shed light on the work that preceded it. We are proud that these essays treat so many different Hemingway texts in so many different ways. In his writing—such as his preface to A Moveable Feast as well as his framing of Green Hills of Africa—Hemingway is cagey in blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction, effectively positing the subjectivity of memoir and the actuality of imagination. As vast and various as this topic is, we hope this collection of essays takes a step toward illuminating Hemingway’s lifelong negotiation with this theme.

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Wo rk s C i t e d Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986. Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Hemingway, Ernest. The Dangerous Summer. New York: Scribner’s, 1985. ———. The Fifth Column and Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War. New York: Scribner’s, 1969. ———. The Garden of Eden. Ed. Tom Jenks. New York: Scribner’s, 1986. ———. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. ———. Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. ———. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s, 1964. ———. “On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter.” By-Line Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. 236−44. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. 1890. New York: Dover, 1950. Justice, Hilary K. The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2006. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993. Mandel, Miriam B. “A Lifetime of Flower Narratives: Letting the Silenced Voice Speak.” Ed. Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland. Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 239−55. Pizer, Donald. American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996. Reynolds, Michael. “Unexplored Territory: The Next Ten Years of Hemingway Study.” College Literature 7 (Fall 1980): 189−201. Tanner, Stephen L. “Hemingway’s Islands.” Southwest Review 61 (Winter 1976): 74–84.

PART I

Memory and Composition

1 Memory and Manhood Troublesome Recollections in The Garden of Eden Marc Hewson 

While it may be going too far to insist that the whole of Hemingway’s fictional enterprise was a remembrance of things past, a strong case can be made that the writing he did after his return from World War II is heavily influenced by the writer’s use of his life experience, whether as a creative well or for psychological self-assessment. Certainly the work he accomplished during the remaining years of his life (most of it available to readers only after his death and in more or less bowdlerized forms) evidences a man and writer looking back over a career and trying to forge from it a sense of self in ways different from his earlier work. Hemingway was careful to emphasize his new attitude toward remembering and writing after 1946. While at work on Across the River and Into the Trees, for instance, he was fond of explaining that his method of writing, his very understanding of literary composition, had changed. Though in the past he had used admittedly complicated methods to illustrate his conception of the writer’s art (whether it was by means of the “iceberg theory” or the elusive fourth dimension), his new explanations were even more difficult to understand. He described Across the River as being presented to the reader through a series of “three-cushion shots,” saying, “In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Breit 62). According to his fourth wife, Mary, he later defined his technique of exposing himself by exploring other people in A Moveable Feast as a sort of “biography by remate,” a jai-alai term denoting a complex rebound shot (“Making of a Book” 27). If both descriptions lead us to conclude that the 3

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late works revolve around reflection and reflexivity, they equally hint at a man with a fragmented or at least disjointed sense of himself and a writer hoping to use memory to regain his equilibrium. Returning from the European theater of war to Cuba in 1946, Hemingway began work on what he called at the time “the Land, Sea, and Air Book” that was to be an investigation of war’s effect on a man. (As with much of his writing, of course, it might also be fair to call his intention an investigation of manhood.) At the time of Hemingway’s death in 1961, the mammoth project had transformed, in Michael Reynolds’s words, into “a multivolume portrait of the artist/writer in the first half of the twentieth century,” a four-part vision of art’s effect on a man (138). If Joyce’s influence is to be seen lying behind those manuscripts as they metamorphosed over fifteen years, though, so too is Proust’s, given the central place that memory and reminiscence play in what would be posthumously edited and published as A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light, which became Under Kilimanjaro. Indeed, à la recherche du temps perdu seems to have been much on Hemingway’s mind as he worked on all of the intricately intertwined pieces, clearly bearing out Rose Marie Burwell’s contention that his late writing was a “search for a form and a style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist” (1). Writing like this was not simply autobiography; it was self-analysis in the same vein Proust had tapped thirty years earlier and with a similar focus on questions of gender and sexual identity. Like many others returning from the war, Hemingway felt the increased need for personal and cultural interrogation as social mores and gender roles began to change even more rapidly than they had after World War I. And the general impression from the writing of the 1940s and 1950s would seem to be that he hoped to turn to memories of his former years to perform that interrogation and to recoup or repair his gender identity. In A Moveable Feast, therefore, we meet a Hemingway character uncovering all those “facts” about his life that the writer manfully wanted to believe: the early struggle with poverty, the need of his friends for his knowledge and experience, the mistakes of his life being as much other people’s faults as his own, and the unwavering diligence to his craft in the face of all this. Equally in Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light, we glimpse a man nostalgic for his past and anxious to use that past to explain and erase his present doubts. Even the published works of the period follow this model. Across the River and Into the Trees, with its fantasy relationship of the battle-hardened, middle-aged Richard Cantwell and his beautiful (and significantly named) Italian heiress,

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Renata, seems the work of a man reviving his youthful masculinity; and The Old Man and the Sea, with its insistent refrain that Santiago was a man who went out too far, could be viewed as Hemingway’s attempt to cast his career as a manly history of literary experiment and trial continuing into the very writing of that novella itself. Yet, to see the late fiction as an unalloyed submersion in the past and a restoration of gender stability is to overlook the troubling nature of Hemingway’s relation to his own history, not to mention the strong editorial presence behind each of the posthumously published books. Hemingway himself is certainly responsible for the constructions of masculinity in books like Across the River and Old Man that he approved for publication. However, the stable sense of male self in Feast is due in large part to Mary’s editing of the manuscript after his death and her re-creation of what Debra Moddelmog calls “the popular, commodified Hemingway and his work” (59). The effect of that editorial presence was to make the book sound more like the earlier pontificating Hemingway writer than the later, more speculative one. Those changes—and similar emendations to the other posthumous texts by their respective editors— belie the depth of ambivalence Hemingway felt toward the course his life had taken. If he comes to us in Feast in the guise of a grounded, masculine man, the truth of how Hemingway viewed the arc of his career from middle age is much less unshakeable than is apparent in that one text. Its narrator may indeed suggest a calm and collected Hemingway, but other Hemingway heroes of the late works are less sure of themselves. In fact, once we can see beyond the ego-mending done by Hemingway’s literary inheritors, the general trend of those manuscripts can be seen not as a solidifying of character and identity but as an increasingly stark realization of the near-complete fragmentation of the male self and, more importantly, of the role memory plays in destroying instead of preserving the self. Nowhere is this more visible than in The Garden of Eden (even in its heavily abridged published form), which many scholars now agree to be, in Jerry Varsava’s words, “importantly and honorably different from Hemingway’s other novels” (115). Viewed from afar, of course, this book, begun in Hemingway’s flurry of postwar writing activity, seems quite in line with the fiction he had successfully brought to completion in previous years: a tale of marital woe involving two young expatriate Americans in Europe working through the troubles of their relationship. If it is similar to the earlier writing in its plot, in its elegiac handling of that plot or even in its use of the past to evaluate the present, though, Garden (which haunted Hemingway on and off until the

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end of his life) diverges strongly in terms of the conclusions it reaches about memory and male identity. The importance of memory in the book is clear once we realize, first, the story’s autobiographical aspect (as a fictional revisiting and reworking of his second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer, in the late 1920s) and, second, its very revolution around reminiscence. In the published version, David and Catherine Bourne have recently married and are enjoying a honeymoon in Provence. As the book unfolds, Catherine asks David to engage in a series of sexual and gender inversions and then to commemorate them in a book about their life together. Most of what follows revolves around Catherine’s and David’s reasons for and responses to these experiments. She envisions them as an escape from restrictive, culturally dictated gender roles, but he worries that they jeopardize his masculinity and his professional life as a fiction writer (especially after Catherine asks him to leave aside his other work in favor of writing the autobiographical honeymoon narrative). In response, David attempts to reestablish what he considers his disintegrating manhood by rejecting that narrative—and eventually Catherine herself—and returning to stories of his youth with his father in Africa. He also begins a relationship with Marita, a recent acquaintance of the Bournes who earlier had a lesbian affair with Catherine.1 Throughout the manuscript, Hemingway explores the ways in which gender identity is premised not only on personal action but also, and perhaps more significantly, on commemoration and recollection of that action. It is, after all, his writing of the transformations and games more than his participation in them that fuels David’s self-doubt. Even though he eventually refuses to write about their inversions anymore, he is still willing to engage in them. If Hemingway was at a gender crossroads at this point in his life (which seems likely when we recall the diverse depictions of masculinity and femininity in the postwar writing and his real-life engagement with Mary in sexual experimentation that closely mirrors incidents in Garden), this book would seem to reflect his quest for a palatable and livable gendered existence. More specifically, it argues the impossibility of remembering gender to reembody it. Given that memory is almost wholly bound up in Garden with the trouble in establishing gender identity, we can conclude that in the latter stages of his career Hemingway had come to worry that conscious recollection cannot easily lead to personal reconstruction. This is made clearest through a careful examination of David’s attempts to regain his autonomy through written reminiscence after being led into the confusing world of Catherine’s sexual

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experiments. From stories of his wife he turns to stories of his childhood with the half-conscious hope that such a return will mean an end to his worries. This wished-for stability eludes him, however, as the writing David does of his experiences as a boy in Africa—particularly the long story of the elephant hunt that Hemingway writes into the novel—ultimately becomes a further obstacle to his reconstruction of a nonfragmented sense of self. Carl Eby is absolutely right in insisting that Hemingway knew what “Freud and Lacan have taught us, [namely, that] the notion of coherent subjectivity is . . . a myth.” As a result, Eby claims, “the rift in Hemingway’s ego and sense of gender identity is woven into the very fabric of The Garden of Eden” (191). Indeed, Hemingway’s recollection of the sad psychological truth of fractured identity—and his recollection of it via recollection itself no less—is the book’s warp and woof. By implication, the effect on David of Catherine’s insistence on the honeymoon account and his means of avoiding it through a remembered return to childhood uncovers Hemingway’s worry that remembering most often leads to dismembering. David’s writing of the narrative and of the African stories acts as a constant reminder of the difficulty of stable ego creation because it continually destroys his comfortable notions about gender identity. Almost from the beginning, David exhibits enormous disdain for the story he is writing in the honeymoon narrative, mainly because he is angry that he is not the story’s creator. “Symbolically,” Robert Jones attests, “the honeymoon narrative is Catherine’s text” (11). And we can further agree with Varsava that she is “the only genuine artist in the novel” since it is through her inversions that the story exists for David to transcribe (123). Catherine herself confirms the point by her telling slip of the tongue in chapter 6 when she asks him to restart their experiments “that I made up; we made up I mean” (54). Her correction is quick, but not quick enough to keep David from being reminded of her control over their life together. From the start of his work on the narrative, then, David is faced with the painful task of remembering and commemorating a self that he has not been responsible for creating; to write the story of their experiments is also to remember his loss of control. Despite the fact that he sometimes admits to himself the pleasure he too derives from their role reversals, the overwhelming emotional response to his forced recollection is dismay at the dismantling of his masculinity. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, that forced role as scribe and the resulting loss of creative masculine power—not to mention the loss of the power of self-identification—lead him to refuse to work any longer on the honeymoon story. To compensate, David begins to write about the Africa of his adolescence as if a renewed kinship with youth—a

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youth significantly devoid of female contact—can shore up his ego and allow him to see himself in a positive and empowered light again. David’s efforts to start working on his stories and to forget the complexities of his marital life demonstrate just how threatened he feels by Catherine’s machinations and their implications with respect to his masculine identity: “You better get to work. You have to make sense there. You don’t make any in this other” (146). He does not make sense in the world of Catherine’s transformations because her experiments automatically call into question, if not deny, the masculine model of gender distinction by which he lives. It is only by maintaining an iron grip on his profession and its concomitant of memory that he believes he can weather the storm and regain a unified sense of himself. That David should attempt such a repair job through writing is hardly surprising given Hemingway’s belief in the power of art to determine identity. More important, though, at this stage in his life, as a man so actively mining his past for creative inspiration, the choice of story Hemingway has David turn to suggests how ambivalent he was in his ideas about the positive power of memory, Catherine’s experiments and inversions having led both her and David down a new and unmapped path. In response he returns to well-charted ground—to established forms and relationships of the past—to combat her supposed destruction of his masculine self. David’s search for his father through his childhood reminiscences in the African stories becomes an active turning back to the old, an attempt to maintain ties to his masculine roots by way of what Steven Roe dubs “a kind of combative enterprise, demanding the violent exertion of creative power” (59). Taking our cue from Thomas Strychacz’s recent assertion that in Hemingway’s work masculinity is always a performance before an audience, we can begin to realize just how important dramatizing is for David, who is forced to act out traditionally nonmasculine roles, to watch that performance as he writes the honeymoon narrative, and then to attempt to revive his masculinity by watching previous performances of the all-male troupe of his youth. Strychacz contends that “Hemingway’s male characters are constituted as men through their public relationship with an audience rather than . . . by a process of internal transformation” (8). Within such a system, which is perhaps the best explanation to date of the grounds of masculinity for Hemingway, David’s writing of the African stories holds a curious place given his role as both performer of and sole audience to his masculine posturing. David not only has to act out his manhood for it to be reified but has to witness it as well since he refuses to allow Catherine to read the African stories. It is only when he reads them himself that masculinity is theatrically acted out and visible.

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Even when he lets Marita read his work after the two have begun their affair, David questions his judgment in doing so, chastising himself (while reading over Marita’s shoulder) for violating the rules of writing and for sharing “what he had believed could not and should not be shared” (203). In an argument that forecasts Strychacz’s contention about men and audience, Nancy McCampbell Grace contends that David “writes for himself—to re-member his past, to transform his reality—but [that] he always knows there is another [person] of weighty importance in his artistic equation. The audience, the reader, is always present, standing on the periphery, waiting to be, intended to be, transformed by the experience of art” (239). However, in a book that Hemingway himself worried could not be released to the public during his lifetime because of its subject matter, such a thing as David’s wish to transform his audience seems suspect. Quite to the contrary, he seems to want only himself to be transformed, or maybe reformed, by the reading experience. Re-membering or re-creating manhood becomes a solipsistic activity for David as actor and viewer—writer and reader—are collapsed together. Counter to theories that declare the relative unimportance of the author in the process of making meaning in literature, through the African stories David and Hemingway emphasize the writer’s narcissistic importance in the creation of the meaning of the text. Roland Barthes may suggest that “the true place of writing . . . is reading” (123), which liberates the text from the author’s control and allows it almost limitless existence, and Foucault may similarly insist that writing becomes “a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears,” meaning that the text no longer fulfils its “duty of providing immortality” for the author because it is the reader’s participation that creates the text (979). But David implicitly believes in his writing of past experience as a way to relive that experience, insisting on his primary importance as writer and reader. Indeed, his subject matter in the African stories, particularly his use of them to reevaluate and then reformulate his relationship with his father, suggests both David’s inability—or lack of desire—to use writing as a means of communication with anyone other than himself and his wish to view memory as a stable definer of the masculine self. He has actually been trying for some time to make memory function this way, even before Catherine begins her campaign of gender destabilization. As early as chapter 2 we are told of his habit of tallying his earnings from his first book (which, notably, is based on his childhood experiences in East Africa), and it soon becomes clear that he, like Hemingway, prizes writing for its cultural capital as much as for its financial capital. Hemingway takes great care to describe David’s working out

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of the figures, delineating the finer points of the publishing deal to the extent of noting, down to the penny, how much money David has coming to him from his novel’s first and second printings. Given such previous hints of his desire to cash in on his masculinity, it comes as little surprise that he should revert to stories of an almost hypermasculine nature to attempt to recharge his depleted gender reserves. If, as Marita later suggests, David has been forced into his new—we might say feminized—role by her and Catherine’s actions, it is through remembering and writing about exclusively masculine rites that David believes he will regain his masculinity: “To master Catherine finally, David resorts to learned technical skills. To escape her withering attack on his values, he withdraws into the safety of his past. Through his writing, he engages in an act of double self-mythification, making of himself a traditional ‘code hero’: vicariously, through the moral praxis of his puerile alter ego, young David, and[,] in deed, through the very act of disciplined engagement that his writing constitutes from his point of view” (Varsava 126). It seems likely that David does indeed want his writing, especially the story of the hunt, to act as some form of therapy given that he begins the elephant narrative after Catherine has condemned his writing as awful and has torn up another of the African stories. Yet even in his creation of the hunt story there is an apparent indication that David—and presumably Hemingway—recognizes how narrow his view of art is in its denial of the efficacy and importance of Catherine’s transformations. As Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes point out, David admits at one point in the manuscript that the inversions have reenergized him creatively, even if he is still worried about their implications as to his sexuality (101). They view such conflation of sexual exploration and artistic inspiration as an integral element of the Hemingway text, arguing that David’s involvement in the transformations is a worthwhile risk since it offers “the possibility of breaking into new aesthetic territory, which for him, as for Hemingway, means being able to reach a deeper level of truth” (94). If we imagine that deeper truth to involve an attempt at greater self-understanding, David’s choice of literary focus at this point in the novel shows both the interest in and disdain for Catherine’s experiments. Significantly, it is after his manuscript revelation noted above and other similar admissions of his increased creative ability thanks to the couple’s transformations that David is able to write the African stories, particularly the tale of the elephant hunt. However, his writing about the elephant’s death and its result of turning him against his father tend to suggest that his ideal of memory as restorer of masculinity will not be as easily realized as he would

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like. In fact, David’s growing disgust at Juma’s and Mr. Bourne’s actions, or, more specifically, his recollection of that disgust while writing the story, might lead us to see Garden as Hemingway’s training ground for a new conception of the artist’s approach to memory, art, and gender, what Robert Gajdusek calls “an attempt to remodel the soul and technique of modern man and artist into that of a sharer” (17). Thus, while David begins the story with the semiconscious intent of breaking Catherine’s hold over him and ending his exile from masculinity, the overall outcome of his childhood reminiscence is a confrontation with and alienation from the male identity he hopes to regain by writing the story in the first place, as if writing it is an unconscious act of atonement for his rejection of Catherine’s inversions and refusal to continue the honeymoon narrative. Given the eventual impact on him of rejecting his father, we might be right in the end to side with Ann Putnam in her assessment that David’s “elephant tale is itself a feminine tale” (129). Superficially, of course, the story of the hunt does appear to have all the markings of a male search for self. To gain favor with his violently masculine father, young David proudly relates his nighttime tracking of the elephant and joins Juma and Mr. Bourne on their subsequent trip to kill it (ostensibly because of its previous rampages through local native villages, but really to plunder its ivory, as even Davey himself recognizes). On the way, he tries to please his father further when he provides food by killing a few partridges with his sling and is rewarded by being offered Juma’s gun to carry. After what seems an endless trek for the tired boy as they trail the elephant from the bones of its companion bull whom Juma had earlier killed (and to which it has returned, Davey imagines, to mourn), the trio finally catches up to the animal. Having first wounded it and brought it down, Juma then promptly dispatches the great elephant by jamming his phallic shotgun into its ear and repeatedly pulling the trigger. Seen in this way, the story is almost a caricature of masculine pursuits. Yet such a synopsis leaves out the important detail of David’s growing disdain for his father and simultaneously increasing emotional sympathy for the soonto-be-annihilated elephant. As he continues to track the animal with the two men, the young boy comes to realize the immorality of killing such a majestic creature for the sake of its tusks. He cynically realizes that the money they might bring would be wasted: “My father doesn’t need to kill elephants to live. . . . If they kill him Juma will drink his share of the ivory or just buy himself another god damn wife” (181). There is an interesting correlation in Davey’s thoughts here between the men’s commodification of the elephant and their

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(at least Juma’s) commodification of women, one that suggests his developing gender sensibility. Though he is naive enough not to comprehend fully the gender-inflected motivations behind Juma’s and his father’s attitudes, it is clear by the time the three track down the elephant that young David wants to distance himself emotionally from the men. Even if he is too small still to grasp the true source of his anxiety, his description of them as “god damned friend killers” (198) and his decision that he will “never tell [his father] or anybody anything again never anything again” (182) betoken his discomfort with the patriarchal social codes of behavior that accept and even endorse ivory hunting and all its attendant evils. What David learns during the elephant hunt in his youth, and the attitude that is revitalized by his writing and reliving of it years later, is a sense of the brutality and emotional poverty attached to his father’s masculine attitude toward life. Admittedly, Hemingway and David’s writing of the elephant story does not seem a conscious reworking of gender roles and social identities in the same way as Catherine’s inversions. But it does serve to demonstrate Hemingway’s growing unease with memory as a provider of stable gender identity. Following Hélène Cixous, we can suggest that for men in Western society a reminiscence of childhood is often an attempt to co-opt history for their own purposes; that is, men revisit and rewrite their youth in order to annul the debt of life that Freud says children automatically owe their parents: Freud, in deciphering the latent antagonisms between parents and children, shows very well the extent to which the family is founded, as far as the little boy is concerned, on a fearful debt. The child owes his parents his life and his problem is exactly to repay them: nothing is more dangerous than obligation. Obligation is submission to the enormous weight of the other’s generosity, is being threatened by a blessing . . . and a blessing is always an evil when it comes from someone else. For the moment you receive something you are effectively “open” to the other, and if you are a man you have only one wish, and that is hastily to return the gift, to break the circuit of an exchange that could have no end . . . to be nobody’s child, to owe no one a thing. (48 [ellipses in original]) This would seem to make the elephant hunt story a case of David discharging old debts and reinventing himself without the cumbersome reminder of obligation. And, in certain ways, he does accomplish this, dismissing his father as a murderer and nullifying any maternal influence by omitting his mother

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from the story altogether. However, the division of the male child from his familial duty, and his consequent individuation and movement into the adult world by rejection of his father’s values, does not function in this story to assure David of his adherence to cultural masculinity. Rather, his childhood revelation forces him first to doubt his patrimony of a masculine gender identity and all it encompasses (anger, violence, lack of emotion) and then to reject it. A combination of the elephant’s metaphorical femininity and David’s renunciation of the men who kill it is indicated in the death scene in which, as David remembers it, Juma “had taken the rifle from [him] without speaking and pushed the muzzle almost into the ear hole and fired twice jerking the bolt and driving it forward angrily” (199). The impact on David of this violent sexual parody is immediate. The image of the animal’s life-blood pouring out of its ear remains fixed in his memory: “It was a different colored blood and David had thought I must remember that and he had but it had never been of any use to him” (199). Yet we might speculate that David has, in fact, made use of the memory by his very writing of the story and thus his remembrance of the division from his father. The dried piece of blood he scrapes from the elephant’s tusk and pockets shortly after Juma kills the animal would therefore symbolize his faithfulness to a principle of friendship rather than one of antagonism, just as his writing of the story years later surely indicates his continuing need for kinship with the creature and all that it stands for. Ultimately David’s rejection of his father and observance of a new set of behaviors function in concert with Catherine’s experiments rather than counter to them, as Hemingway implies that memory is not so simple a means of regaining gender stability as David would like to believe. Just as her inversions jumble gender categories, so too does David’s return to his childhood through memory disallow easy self-identification or permanence, since the hoped-for reestablishment of his masculine identity and ego is not to be found in a story like the elephant hunt. Though the writing of such a story is meant to be his means to tracking down and (re)securing masculinity, it fails in its purpose because, like the elephant itself, David’s attempt to connect with his father is dead at the end of the story. We might be inclined to credit David with coming to such a conclusion himself, in fact, if we take his words to his father about the hunt to be equally a challenge of Mr. Bourne and Juma. “Fuck elephant hunting,” Davey says as they trail the beast he has inadvertently set on a course toward brutal death (182). As he looks back on his early days, we can perhaps even hear the adult David using those words to dismiss the search for remembered masculinity. Mr. Bourne’s response to his son is, “be careful

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you don’t fuck it up,” a clear warning not to interfere with the men’s successful killing of the elephant. The admonition resonates further for David, though, if we consider that he may take it as a warning to himself in the present day of writing the story not to let the memory of the effect of the elephant’s death on him be forgotten—he must guard against ruining the proper memory of the story as a time of dissention from his father’s ways. Thus, while his original intention was to use the story to restore his masculine self, as he writes it, David appears to realize the futility of such an action and the perversion it makes of the truth of memory. Of course, this is hardly the conclusion we find in “the sanitized [published] version” (Comley and Scholes 89) of Garden edited for Scribner’s by Tom Jenks. There the story of David, Catherine, and Marita ends with David’s “recover[ing], correct[ing] and improv[ing]” all of the African stories after Catherine has burned the originals in a fit of madness and jealousy and abandoned him to a relationship with Marita (247). The necessary inference by readers will be that David reconstructs a stable sense of self through Catherine’s disappearance and the consequent end of their inversions, as well as through his remembrance of his father and “the small things [in the new versions of the stories] which [make] his father more tactile and to have more dimensions than he had in the story before” (247). David’s recovery of the stories of his youth and particularly his renewed sense of kinship with his father in this “fairytale . . . ending” intimate that Hemingway had reached the conclusion that a man’s unalloyed masculinity is crucial to his identity as a man and is salvageable via memory (Raeburn 120). As David works at recapturing the essence of his lost stories on the last page of the novel, he begins to feel a new closeness to his father and to his previously stolen/rejected masculinity: “He found he knew much more about his father than when he had first written this story. . . He was fortunate, just now, that his father was not a simple man” (247). The implication of this newfound understanding, evident in Jenks’s choice for the book’s last sentence, is that David has recovered not simply his father and his stories but also his male identity: “There was no sign that any of [David’s memories] would ever cease returning to him intact.” Such an arbitrary ending point reinstates masculine identity through memory much the same way the published version of A Moveable Feast does. Yet we cannot lose sight of the fact that Hemingway was not satisfied enough with such a view to allow it precedence in The Garden of Eden; nor should we forget that it is at this point in the manuscript, after she has destroyed his childhood recollections but before she has left him, that

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Catherine redoubles her efforts to convince David to complete and publish the honeymoon narrative. Her renewed enthusiasm would seem to suggest Hemingway’s suspicion of reenacting the past as monolithic rehearsal for the present, and manuscript evidence eloquently illustrates how hard Hemingway was struggling to bring the book to an honest and satisfactory conclusion. In the first of two potential endings Hemingway scripted (neither of them the conclusion presented in the published novel), Catherine comes back to David after a stint in a Swiss sanitarium and they reminisce over their past, sharing memories that prompt her to ask him to agree to a suicide pact if her madness should return. David complies. In the other scenario Marita renews Catherine’s inversions with David after Catherine’s departure from their lives, saying she knows that David is still fascinated by her experiments. In combination, these possible conclusions present Hemingway as a writer no longer certain that past stability can create present stability and suggest he has moved forward significantly from his earlier beliefs about masculine and feminine identity. While I agree with Eby that “the tentative double-suicide pact between Catherine and David holds out the possibility of merger in mutual obliteration” and nothing else and is thus a bleak forecast by Hemingway (257–58), it is important that Catherine’s forward-looking and creative gender experiments undo David’s backwardlooking and re-creative fictional ones. They do so not because memory fails to affect the present but because remembered gender cannot reconstitute gender. The suicide pact, as Eby goes on to assert, “signifies a recognition on Hemingway’s part that he couldn’t establish a stable masculinity by killing off feminine elements in himself ” as David tried to do (258). Ultimately, the effect of David’s writing of the elephant hunt story in The Garden of Eden and of Hemingway’s creation of the novel in the first place is to combat the too-easy conclusions he seemed prone to earlier in life. As he was changing his approach to fiction through calculus and remate, then, so too was Hemingway trying—if never wholly successfully—to cast off his recollected masculine self in favor of a less narcissistic and static version of manhood. He was remembering how to invent and not merely to mimic.

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Not e 1. The version of the novel edited for publication by Tom Jenks reduces Hemingway’s incomplete manuscript of The Garden of Eden by more than 80 percent, cutting out much of the Bournes’ story and excising completely a mirroring plot about Nick and Barbara Sheldon, an artistic couple who perform similar sexual and gender experiments and whom Hemingway was using to further probe the difficulties of gendered existence in the twentieth century. K. J. Peters makes the assertion that the “result [of these editorial choices] is a tale of self-abuse, betrayal, and guilt without any real motive, explanation, or justification” (18). While it might be unfair to blame Jenks for all the incoherence in the story, we must recognize that the currently available edition of the book does mask a lot of the indecisiveness of Hemingway’s later years and thus many of the changes in attitude that he was undergoing as he worked on it.

Wo rk s C i t e d Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Twentieth Century Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. K. M. Newton. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 120–23. Breit, Harvey. “Talk with Mr. Hemingway.” Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1986. 60–62. Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation?” Trans. Annette Kuhn. Signs 7 (1981): 36–55. Comley, Nancy R., and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994. Eby, Carl P. Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Trans. Josué Harari. The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. 978–88. Gajdusek, Robert. “Elephant Hunt in Eden: A Study of New and Old Myths and Other Strange Beasts in Hemingway’s Garden.” Hemingway Review 7.1 (1987): 15–19. Grace, Nancy McCampbell. The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Hemingway, Ernest. The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner’s, 1986. ———. The Garden of Eden manuscript. Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. Hemingway, Mary. “The Making of a Book: A Chronicle and a Memoir.” New York Times Book Review, 10 May 1964. 26–27. Jones, Robert B. “Mimesis and Metafiction in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.” Hemingway Review 7.1 (1987): 2–13. Moddelmog, Debra A. Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. Peters, K. J. “The Thematic Integrity of The Garden of Eden.” Hemingway Review 10.2 (1991): 17–29. Putnam, Ann. “On Defiling Eden: The Search for Eve in the Garden of Sorrows.” Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Ed. Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 109–30.

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Raeburn, John. “Sex and Art in The Garden of Eden.” Michigan Quarterly Review 29.3 (1990): 111–22. Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Roe, Steven C. “Opening Bluebeard’s Closet: Writing and Aggression in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden Manuscript.” Hemingway Review 12.1 (1992): 52–66. Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2003. Varsava, Jerry A. “En-Gendered Problems: Characteral Conflict in Hemingway’s Garden.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 3.2 (1991): 115–35.

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2 Reclaimed Experience Trauma Theory and Hemingway’s Lost Paris Manuscripts Marc Seals 

In a 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway advised, “We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it” (SL 408). Hemingway often made use of his own painful and traumatic memories in his fiction. A. E. Hotchner relates a conversation in which Ava Gardner asked Hemingway if he had ever had an analyst, to which Hemingway replied, “Sure I have. Portable Corona number three. That’s been my analyst” (139). For Hemingway, writing and traumatic memory were inextricably linked; trauma provided material for his writing, and writing provided a therapeutic outlet for trauma. Hemingway repeatedly wrote about the memory of one particular traumatic experience: his wife Hadley’s loss of his early Paris manuscripts in 1922. He wrote about this incident in the manuscript of each of the major works published after his death—A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light/Under Kilimanjaro—although Hemingway’s editors have not always chosen to include the episode in the published versions of these works.1 Accounts of traumatic memory in literature present the reader with a rather peculiar economy of truth. Hemingway’s posthumously published writing reveals aspects of his psyche that he was unable or unwilling to share publicly. His repeated writing about the loss of his Paris manuscripts served as a sort of creative flashback, allowing him to face and deal with the trauma of this memory.

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In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth defines trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (91). This definition certainly fits the disastrous events of December 1922 when Hemingway was in Switzerland covering the Lausanne Conference. Investigative journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens, whom Hemingway had met in Genoa, was also there. Steffens was impressed with Hemingway’s writing and expressed a desire to see more (Diliberto 131). At Hemingway’s request, Hadley packed up all of his papers in a suitcase and boarded a train for Switzerland to deliver the manuscripts (Reynolds 86). She left the suitcase unattended while buying a bottle of Evian water for the trip, and the suitcase was stolen before the train even left the station. Hadley had packed both the originals and the carbons, so the work was irrevocably lost. It is unclear how important the loss was to Hemingway at the time. Although Michael Reynolds reports that Hemingway made a hasty return to Paris to check into the matter (86, 89), James Mellow disagrees, asserting that Hemingway did not return to Paris until mid-January 1923 and that, due to his extensive journalistic activities, he had little time to write fiction in 1922 (208–13). Mellow concludes, “The enormity of his literary loss is definitely open to question” (211). Indeed, Hemingway did not bother to run a newspaper advertisement seeking the return of the manuscripts. When considering such an advertisement, he thought of offering a reward of just 150 francs—about $10 (Reynolds 86, 89–91). Yet in a 23 January 1923 letter to Ezra Pound, Hemingway wrote: “I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenilia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left and found that Hadley had made the job complete by including all carbons, duplicates, etc. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure [editor of Double Dealer] and me, and some journalistic carbons. You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood” (SL 77). Given this explicit statement of bitterness and distress, it seems odd that Hemingway did not seek the return of the lost Paris manuscripts more actively, regardless of the cost or even the chance for a successful resolution. But this does not necessarily mean that the event was not acutely traumatic.2 In fact, the relative lack of immediate concern fits neatly with Caruth’s psychoanalytic trauma-theory model, which states that the trauma victim often may not note the significance of the event until years later.

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Although other trauma theories also inform this study, Caruth’s model is most appropriate because it focuses on the writer of the traumatic account. Other theories often give attention to readers of trauma narrative. A writerfocused model is particularly suited to study of the loss of Hemingway’s Paris manuscripts because Hemingway never authorized publication of the narratives relating this event. Caruth follows a Freudian model,3 saying that a traumatic event “is not fully assimilated as it occurs” (5); in other words, no concrete, accessible memory of the event is formed. She explains that the trauma “is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). Kalí Tal says that such repetition of the traumatic experience is the penalty for the initial repression of the traumatic memory (7). And Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub suggest that for a traumatic memory to lose its power, a form of narrative construction and historical reconstruction must occur (69). Thus, it seems quite possible that Hemingway was writing and rewriting about the loss of his manuscripts in an attempt, perhaps unconscious, at psychological discovery (or recovery) of the original memory and perhaps even healing. Miriam Mandel observes that the events of Hemingway’s early life provided the majority of material for his writing (240). What makes the loss of the Paris manuscripts unique is that the four treatments of the episode in his writing appear in works that he chose—for whatever reason—not to publish. Perhaps the memory of this event was just too personal to make public. It is intriguing to review each of the four posthumously published works in chronological order according to the date when Hemingway appears to have stopped working on it. Rose Marie Burwell reconsiders previously accepted dates of composition and attempts to reconcile inconsistencies in Hemingway’s notes and letters and concludes that Islands in the Stream was written from 1945 to 1952, True at First Light from 1954 to 1956, The Garden of Eden from 1948 to 1959,4 and A Moveable Feast from 1957 to 1961 (xxiv−xxv). Writing about what she terms Hemingway’s “flower narratives,” Mandel says, “Although Hemingway uses the same material repeatedly, he does not repeat himself. The variations are instructive” (254). Her point also applies to Hemingway’s “suitcase narratives.” Examined according to Burwell’s chronological order, the variations are indeed instructive; a pattern of emotional healing emerges. Rather than depicting it as a vengeful act, as he does in The Garden of Eden, Hemingway learned to accept the loss of the Paris manuscripts and perhaps

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even, sympathetically, forgive Hadley for her carelessness (as well as seek her forgiveness for his own cruelty) by the time he composes A Moveable Feast. The relevant portion of Islands in the Stream is in the deleted “Miami” section, which was eventually published in the Finca Vigía edition of Hemingway’s short stories as “The Strange Country.” Burwell tells us that this section of Islands was written in 1945 and 1946, making this the earliest fictional record of the loss of the manuscripts (217). Burwell also suggests that Hemingway did not intend to include the section in the final version of the book. By the time he finished working on Islands, he had already included many of its thematic elements in The Garden of Eden manuscript, including the loss of the Paris manuscripts (58–59). Yet an examination of “The Strange Country” may reveal Hemingway’s attitude toward this loss during the mid-1940s. Twenty-three years after the event, he had had ample time either to realize the true significance of the trauma or to inflate its importance to mythic proportions in his mind, and he seems to have believed that the trauma of the experience was quite real. Roger, the protagonist, is traveling from Miami to New Orleans with Helena, who is fourteen or fifteen years younger than he. Helena seems quite in love with Roger, and Roger is struggling not to hurt her, as he has so many other women. Helena tells Roger that she wants to write stories also, and this seems to disturb him greatly. When Helena asks what it was like when he started out writing, she inadvertently reopens an old wound. Roger confesses, “I thought I was writing the greatest stories ever written and that people just didn’t have sense enough to know it. . . . Only I didn’t think I was conceited. I was just confident.” He tells Helena that the “first confident stories were lost” (CSS 645). Helena asks him to explain what happened, and Roger says that he’ll tell her the story another time. She again asks him to tell her, and he again refuses, saying that the memory of it “still hurts like a bastard. No it doesn’t really. It has a scar over it now. A good thick scar” (646). She continues to push, and he seems to relent. But after just three sentences, he stops. She pleads for him to continue. Roger finally begins the story in earnest, but halfway through he asks Helena if he really has to continue. She insists, and he then proceeds to tell the story in great detail. The story that Roger tells is identical to the account in Michael Reynolds’s Hemingway: The Paris Years. In fact, there is no detail in Reynolds’s account that is not also in Hemingway’s fictional treatment.5 Whether Hemingway added fictional details to Roger’s account is unclear (as is the complete veracity of Reynolds’s biographical account). Perhaps most fascinating is Roger’s reaction when he realizes that the work is truly and completely lost.

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I felt almost as though I could not breathe when I saw that there really were no folders with originals, nor folders with typed copies, nor folders with carbons and then I locked the door of the cupboard and went into the next room, which was the bedroom, and lay down on the bed and put a pillow between my legs and my arms around another pillow and lay there very quietly. I had never put a pillow between my legs before and I had never lain with my arms around a pillow but now I needed them very badly. I knew everything I had ever written and everything that I had great confidence in was gone. (647–48) Roger seems to regress into the womb, curled on his bed in a fetal position. Burwell observes that this passage might also evoke images of castration (217); Roger’s assertion that he had lost “everything” that he “had great confidence in” may include his trust in the wife who lost the manuscripts. Roger goes on to say that although this was the first “true despair” he had ever experienced, he did not cry, for he was “all dried up inside” (648). Roger further explains the reason for his extreme emotional shutdown: “Because I had worked on newspapers since I was very young I could never remember anything once I had written it down; as each day you wiped your memory clear with writing as you might wipe a blackboard clear with a sponge or a wet rag; and I still had that evil habit and now it had caught up with me” (649). Perhaps Hemingway was trying to accomplish the same thing here. By writing a (marginally) fictionalized account of the loss of the manuscripts, he may have been trying to “wipe his memory clear.” If so, this effort to erase his memory was not successful, for Hemingway would revisit it again and again in his often barely fictional novels. Yet in each of the treatments of the manuscripts’ loss that follow, some of the bitterness is lost, perhaps indicating a degree of psychological healing. Hemingway’s treatment of the lost manuscripts in True at First Light is more problematic. In the published version of this “fictional memoir,” there is no obvious mention of the lost manuscripts. Hemingway waxes nostalgic about his years in Paris; he recalls this time with no apparent bitterness, mostly remembering the “secret cafés” (TAFL 147–48). He makes cryptic comments about love, fidelity, and marriage, calling love “a moveable feast” and asserting that “fidelity does not exist nor ever is implied except at the first marriage” (262). Hemingway makes an even more obscure reference to the satisfaction of having someone steal from you, thinking they are undetected (267). Finally, he discusses his marriages, mentioning his present wife, Mary, his second wife,

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Pauline (who has died), and an unnamed wife whom no one would have liked (presumably Martha). Hadley is not mentioned. However, in the original manuscripts of the African book, Hemingway does remember the loss of the manuscripts by the wife that he “loved first and best and who was the mother of my oldest son” (qtd. in Burwell xxv and Jenks 55). He then dreams that Hadley is with him in an inn in the Swiss canton of Vaud: “We were sleeping close together to keep warm and because that was the best way to sleep if both people love each other and it is a cold night. . . . My first and best wife was sleeping soundly, as always, and I could smell every scent of her body and the chestnut trees as well and she was warm in my arms and her head was under my chin and we were sleeping as close and trusting as kittens sleep” (qtd. in Mandel 246–47).6 Hemingway remembers and records the traumatic event and the wife he blamed for it only in passing; perhaps this means he is a bit more healed. It is ironic that the loss of the Paris manuscripts (and the loving remembrance of Hadley) was cut in the final editing of the African book, making Hemingway the posthumous victim of a second manuscript “theft.” Fortunately, this deletion has been at least partially rectified with the 2005 publication of Under Kilimanjaro, which provides readers with the full Africa manuscript. In The Garden of Eden the trauma of the lost manuscripts receives its most creative and cathartic treatment when Catherine intentionally burns David Bourne’s stories and press clippings, leaving only his African narrative. Catherine initially tells David what she has done, but he cannot believe that it could be true. When David discovers that suitcase is indeed empty, he too becomes “empty and dead in his heart” (GOE 219). Here, writing is explicitly equated with life, and David has had more than just a brush with metaphoric death. He goes out to the metal drum that serves as a trash burner and stirs the ashes, just to make sure that it has really happened. When Catherine wants to explain why it was necessary to destroy David’s writing, he tells her, “All I want to do is kill you. . . . And the only reason I don’t do it is because you are crazy.” When Catherine tells David that she’ll kill him instead, he replies, “I wouldn’t give a shit” (223). David does not fear death because he has already been killed symbolically. This account seems to treat the wife more harshly than the previous versions of the tale. Gioia Diliberto calls The Garden of Eden account a “wicked, twisted version of what happened at the Gare de Lyon” (135). After all, Hadley did not mean to allow the suitcase to be stolen. However, Garden’s vicious twisting of the actual events of 1922 must be tempered by David’s fictional actions after Catherine leaves. Having neatly replaced Catherine with Marita, David determines to rewrite one of the missing stories—exactly what Roger in “The Strange Country”

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said was impossible. The reverse is true for David: not only can he remember the story clearly, he finds that “he knew much more about his father than when he had first written this story and he knew he could measure his progress by the small things which made his father more tactile and to have more dimensions than he had in the story before” (GOE 247). Not only can David remember the story, his memory—and thus his writing—is much improved. The novel closes (at least in the form that Tom Jenks has given it to us) with a statement of absolute authorial confidence: David wrote steadily and well and the sentences that he had made before came to him complete and entire and he put them down, corrected them, and cut them as if he were going over proof. Not a sentence was missing and there were many that he put down as they were returned to him without changing them. By two o’clock he had recovered, corrected and improved what had taken him five days to write originally. He wrote on a while longer now and there was no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him intact. (247) The memory of trauma has been more than blunted; David’s writing actually seems improved. Perhaps this was wishful thinking on Hemingway’s behalf, but it may have reflected his own healing. Caruth, again following Freud’s model, says that flashbacks of a traumatic event are expressed as “literal flashbacks” because the mind has not attached “psychic meaning” to the event (59). Thus, the mind might express the traumatic memory in terms of abstractions only after psychological healing (or at least understanding) has begun. The fact that Hemingway had finally truly fictionalized the events of December 1922 may indicate yet another degree of healing. The last book that Hemingway worked on was A Moveable Feast and is perhaps Hemingway’s most direct account of the loss of the Paris manuscripts. Although the reader receives more detail in “The Strange Country,” in A Moveable Feast the protagonist is (at least nominally) the author himself. Although this is also true in the manuscripts of the African book, the event receives only marginal attention there (and even less in True at First Light). In A Moveable Feast Hemingway is not only able to write about the event but also to speak of it in a way that suggests that he has learned to deal with it and move on. Hemingway again details the events of that fateful day but writes without bitterness. He acknowledges that the suitcase was stolen, perhaps indicating

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that he did not think Hadley lost it “accidentally on purpose” in a passiveaggressive attempt to destroy her “competition” for his attention, as some have suggested (Diliberto 135; Lynn 191). Hemingway says that she was bringing the stories and poems to him as a surprise, framing the event as a sweet gesture gone terribly wrong. He even describes Hadley’s despair as she struggled to tell him about the theft. And Hemingway writes, “That was over now and Chink had taught me never to discuss casualties; so I told O’Brien not to feel so bad. It was probably good for me to lose early work and I told him all that stuff you feed the troops. I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it, only trying to lie so that he would not feel so bad, I knew that it was true” (74–75). Gone are the bitterness and despair of the account from “The Strange Country”; gone is the desire to twist it into a vicious tale of a wife’s revenge that surfaced in The Garden of Eden. All that remains seems to be forgiveness and a knowledge that the author must and will go on. Apparently, Hemingway’s treatment of Hadley in A Moveable Feast was intended to be even kinder. According to Gerry Brenner, a comparison of the unedited manuscript with the published text edited by Mary Hemingway reveals that Mary did far more than cut only “where repetitions and redundancies occurred,” as she claimed (qtd. in Brenner 528). At the conclusion of the original manuscript’s chapter 16, Brenner tells us, Hemingway absolves Hadley of any blame for the collapse of their marriage and proclaims he is glad that she was able to build a better life with a better man. Brenner searches for Mary’s rationale for cutting Hemingway’s apology to Hadley but concludes that, regardless of the reason, Mary violated her own standard (539). Whether Mary excised passages that seemed kind to Hadley out of jealousy or out of concern for Hemingway’s artistry is irrelevant; scholars wishing to analyze Hemingway’s unexpurgated treatment of Hadley now have access to the manuscripts of A Moveable Feast. It is probably significant that Hemingway chose to write about the theft of the suitcase containing the Paris manuscripts only in texts that remained unpublished during his lifetime. These were texts that he was unwilling or unable to finish. Perhaps this level of cathartic experience was too private to share knowingly, akin to selling transcripts of confidential sessions with a psychiatrist. Indeed, these books are Hemingway’s attempts to expunge the pain and bitterness of the memory of this traumatic event. This fits well with the trauma theory proposed by Laurie Vickroy, who, adopting Suzette Henke’s concept of “scriptotherapy,” posits that trauma literature possesses an explicitly healing function (8).

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In The Garden of Eden, as in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway equates writing with life. Late in the text Hemingway tells the reader that when he is not working, he feels “the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life” (AMF 165–66). A day without writing is a day wasted, a day haunted by the specter of death. If the failure to write is death, then the loss of completed writing may be considered a kind of psychological and symbolic murder. Hemingway faced it and survived. Tal writes, “Literature of trauma is written from the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience. . . Such writing serves both as validation and cathartic vehicle for the traumatized author” (21). A repeated literary representation of the memory of trauma may be seen as a triumphant statement of survival. Hemingway’s writing about the loss of the Paris manuscripts serves these purposes. In writing about the assault on his literary “life,” Hemingway shouts to the world that he is alive, like a man trapped under the rubble of a collapsed building—or a man blown up by a mortar shell who sees the soul go out of him. He has survived and bears witness to his ordeal. Through this testimony, Hemingway heals the wounds of the trauma, gaining strength each time he tells the story. Narration of the traumatic memory is thus doubly therapeutic: if writing is life and loss of writing is death, then writing about the memory of his near-death experience is both a testimonial celebrating survival and, by the very act of writing, an act celebrating life.

Not e s 1. I do not include The Dangerous Summer because much of it was published during Hemingway’s lifetime (in three installments in Life magazine in 1960). 2. According to most of his biographers, Hemingway’s response can only be called mild when compared to the significance the event later appears to have taken on in his mind (or at least in his writing). 3. Caruth acknowledges that her model is largely based on Freud’s as outlined in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For a similar model, albeit one more inclusive of the narrative’s audience, see chapter 2 of Felman and Laub. 4. John Leonard’s “The Garden of Eden: A Question of Dates” does not change this general order of Hemingway’s posthumously published works. 5. The basic facts of the manuscripts’ loss are more or less consistent in each of the critical biographies examined. Reynolds’s account does not differ significantly from Carlos Baker’s 1969 “authorized” biography (103). Reynolds provides greater detail and documents his sources more carefully, drawing from additional letters and interviews for his account. Reynolds’s account also differs little from Kenneth Lynn’s (187–88). However, Mellow’s summary is the most thorough of

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all, with the best documentation, and he reasonably maintains that Hemingway may not have returned to Paris immediately to check on the carbons (209–13). 6. Though Mandel connects this dream to Hemingway’s “flower narratives,” the canton of Vaud is also the region of Switzerland where Lausanne is located.

Wo rk s C i t e d Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner’s, 1969. Brenner, Gerry. “Are We Going to Hemingway’s Feast?” American Literature 54.4 (1982): 528–44. Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Diliberto, Gioia, Hadley. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1998. ———. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ———. The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner’s, 1986. ———. Islands in the Stream. 1970. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. ———. A Moveable Feast. 1964. New York: Touchstone, 1992. ———. True at First Light. New York: Scribner’s, 1999. ———. Under Kiliimanjaro. Ed. Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2005. Hotchner, A. E. Papa Hemingway. New York: Random House, 1966. Jenks, Tom. “The Old Man and the Manuscript.” Harper’s Magazine (May 1999): 53–60. Leonard, John. “The Garden of Eden: A Question of Dates.” Hemingway Review 22.2 (2003): 68−81. Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Mandel, Miriam B. “A Lifetime of Flower Narratives.” Hemingway and Women. Ed. Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 239–55. Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Blackwell, 1989. Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002.

PART II

Memory and Allusion

3 Memory and the Sharks Sergio Perosa translated by Mark Cirino 

It is well-known that Hemingway’s ideal of life, and his favorite theme, is “grace under pressure.” But his best fiction originates in “emotion recollected in tranquility,” as William Wordsworth defined it in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads—in the remembrance and in the memory of experience more than in experience itself (as tends to be the common belief). In Hemingway’s oft-quoted “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” (DIA 192), the part that remains below water, the submerged seven-eighths, is the assimilated experience of the writer, that which he can leave out precisely because he has assimilated it, because it becomes his second nature. It is through his remembrance, or his memory, that he “makes up” or invents his stories, according to the double meaning of the quasi-Poundian term “to make it up” that Hemingway repeatedly applied to fiction and to the process of writing. Throughout his life and his career, Hemingway seemed to waver between the exigencies (for the writer) of experience and of imagination or invention, which only memory, that submerged seven-eighths, can reconcile for narrative purposes. It is useless to focus on the many passages in which Hemingway insisted on the absolute necessity of direct experience (of A Farewell to Arms he writes of having mainly listened to convalescing men in hospitals until other people’s experiences “get to be more vivid than your own. You invent from your own and from all of theirs” [SL 800]). More significant are the moments in which he reasserts that one invents from the experience that one has of the 31

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world (“How much more the writer learns from experience than one can truly imagine”) and that only through invention and imagination, through “making it up,” that experience can transform itself into narrative material. “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way” (SL 407). Elsewhere Hemingway seems to privilege pure invention. He praises Stephen Crane’s writing of The Red Badge of Courage “before he had ever seen any war. But he had read the contemporary accounts, had heard the old soldiers, they were not so old then, talk, and above all he had seen Matthew Brady’s wonderful photographs. Creating his story out of this material he wrote that great boy’s dream of war that was to be truer to how war is than any war the boy who wrote it would ever live to see. It is one of the finest books of our literature” (MAW xvi). A Farewell to Arms is based on the same principle: “I invented every word and every incident of A Farewell To Arms except possibly 3 or 4 incidents. All the best part is invented—95 per cent of The Sun Also was pure imagination. I took real people in that one and I controlled what they did—I made it all up” (qtd. in Bruccoli 203). Hemingway was perfectly aware of the substantial difference between journalistic reportage and fictional transposition: the first depending on direct experience, the second on the emotional yield and inventive rendering of facts, on the transformation of real experience into fictional truth. As we read in Death in the Afternoon: “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 get it” (2). “The real thing” has a typical Jamesian sound and tone; “the real thing” is what one imagines beyond lived reality. What mediates between experience and invention, or what allows the passage from one to the other for narrative purposes, is the operation and the distancing of memory working as filter and cushion, removing and softening the direct contact or relationship with immediate reality. “I try always to do the thing by three cushion shots rather than by words or direct statement,” Hemingway wrote in a letter in 1929. “But maybe we must have the direct statement too” (SL 301). Direct enunciation in Hemingway functions mainly on a stylistic level, in pure writing; narrative construction and inspiration are

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based instead on the principle of distancing and of memory, of the submerged “assimilated experience” that would allow for the emergent tip of the iceberg to move with the elegance and grace conveyed by its weight and its tension. Examples of this are clearest in Hemingway’s fiction and in his narrative development, proving convincing above all in his novels (while the exigencies and forms of direct enunciation function mainly in the celebrated short stories). The Nick Adams Stories, as we read them today, re-presented in sequence, are an exercise in nostalgia; they play their best game on youthful recollections and suspended re-evocations of childhood; events are removed into a far-away atmosphere outside time. They are a search for lost time, a remembrance of things past. The Sun Also Rises is strictly connected to the real happenings that inspired it—the experiences of Paris and Pamplona, the circle of Hemingway’s friends, and so forth—but is written at a notable distance, 1925, from the years immediately after the war that Hemingway intended to re-create and re-present. We are, one might say, halfway between direct experience and memory. But his corresponding memoir, A Moveable Feast (published posthumously), is clearly a work of memory and of remembrance, of re-created experience and memorializing in the other sense of the term. Memory returns to the assimilated experience that, for good or bad, becomes second nature. The most obvious case of Hemingway’s use of re-created experience is A Farewell to Arms, the writing of which took place in the ten years after the end of World War I. The novel centers on a traumatic and dramatic experience, the battle at Caporetto, at which Hemingway was not present. The book is clearly constructed by memory of impressions, sounds, and senses experienced in a relatively distant past and for which Hemingway availed himself of journalistic reports, photographs, books, and other people’s testimony. Hemingway had participated in war and was wounded, and he had observed the horrors; and his experience with Agnes von Kurowsky was based on “reality.” But in the novel he dealt with experience assimilated, re-created through the filter of memory and of remembrance, widely different from the “reality” of facts imagined and invented for specific purposes of narrative construction—“made up” in the best sense of the term, as Michael Reynolds unequivocally demonstrated. The novels named so far are, by almost unanimous consensus Hemingway’s best efforts, which would descend more and more often into the constant mimicry of himself and of his own surface style. One explanation of his relative deterioration over time can perhaps be found in the principle that the closer Hemingway works with immediate experience, the weaker his artistic results are liable to be. In the work after 1930, Hemingway seems to cancel

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out or restrict that distinction, the gap between reportage and narrative that earlier he felt to be essential to the success of the story (the “real thing” is indeed quite different from experienced reality): he removes the intervention of memory between lived life and narrated truth. “Mac worked too closely to life. You had to digest life and then create your own people,” he wrote in The Nick Adams Stories (238). After 1930, he tends to forget this lesson, to work too closely to his life, and this accounts for the inferior quality, as compared to his earlier achievements, of such novels as To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Across the River and Into the Trees (not to overlook those books unimaginatively assembled and published posthumously, as for example The Dangerous Summer, that clearly eradicated every distance between reportage and narrative, compromising both). At the halfway point between direct chronicle and distant narration, between direct enunciation and symbolic overtones, between raw experience and memory perhaps rests Hemingway’s late masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, which, more than any other book, helped secure him the Nobel Prize. A triumph of simplicity—that simplicity sought and asserted as a vehicle of truth and as a poetic mode almost for his whole career, in which everything comes down to the bone, like the great fish captured after an epic fight only to be picked out, before protagonist Santiago’s eyes, by the sharks. Hemingway had the story, taken from a real event, already in mind in 1936 and wrote a brief sketch of it in Esquire (“On the Blue Water”). But only fifteen years later was he ready to transpose it narratively. The story is so simple and linear that immediately one wonders if it is a trick: Will it not be a MobyDick deliberately deprived of its ideological and problematic, symbolic and philosophical apparatus, as Hemingway was shown to desire when writing about Melville’s book: “this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric like plums in a pudding” (GHOA 20)? And won’t the extreme simplicity and linearity of plot and structure, of characterization and style be the most easy means, or a price rather high to pay, to attaining the immediacy of response, the instant contact with the reader? Among other things, the narration is strewn with pointers, clues, traces, references, and allusions that legitimately make us think of a Hemingway who plays hide and seek with his declared mortal enemy, symbolism—but a symbolism even too easy and decipherable, the submerged seven-eighths that too forcefully rocks the simple one-eighth that emerges. The old fisherman who for two days and two nights clings to his capture, in which he recognizes a brother with whom he fights, converses, and identifies, a brother who brings

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a stigmata on his hands and crucifies him on the wood of the boat, can legitimately suggest an allegory of Christ. Another lesson of the book might also be that of Christian forbearance, of the moral role of man who wins not because of some conquest but simply because of the fight and loss of everything. Otherwise, Nature, at first subjugated, snatches back its prey, reasserts possession of its own, and reestablishes itself at the end of the violated order, with the fish returned to the mastery of the sea and man defeated but still triumphant, having asserted his dignity and force of spirit. One finds oneself between the archetypal man-nature relationship or between will and the attraction of the depths or even in the triptych of violation-punishment-expiation that can make one think of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. So, these are the aspects of this book in the middle of which we critics are thrown like so many sharks. And here snaps another, intriguing interpretative spring. Might the book not also be an allegory of the writer who pursues his vision and narrative prey, who suffers the punishment of hell in capturing and holding it, in literally fastening it to his boat only to have it taken away from him, stripped of its flesh, and nullified by the critics? We then, the critics, would be the sharks, while yet again Hemingway would be talking of himself, of his “grace under pressure,” of his exhaustion and contrasted triumph. Yet, just as he denied any symbolic intention, so did he deny, in a letter to Edmund Wilson, this rather appealing possibility: “You know I was thinking about actual sharks when I wrote the book and had nothing to do with the theory that they represented critics. I don’t know who thought that up” (SL 793). It is true, however, that in repeated statements Hemingway subscribed to the idea that art arises from suffering and from solitude, from the fight with the ghosts that are inside us as much as outside us. In this sense, the writer tears his prey away from the ghosts of the visible and invisible and better enjoys the narrative fruits of victory through the ring of memory and in the distance of time, where it is allowed and possible to reinvent what has been experienced, to join, as T. S. Eliot said, memory and desire. But how not to suspect that around him readers and critics—above all critics—will be ready to skin and pillage his prey? That which memory invents and creates from experience the shark destroys. Are we really, then, not the sharks?

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Wo rk s C i t e d Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947. New York: Scribner’s, 1996. Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. 1932. New York: Scribner’s, 1960. ———. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ———. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribner’s, 1995. ———. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. ———, ed. Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. 1942. New York: Crown, 1955. ———. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s, 1964. ———. The Nick Adams Stories. New York: Scribner’s, 1972. ———. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s, 1952. ———. “On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter.” By-Line Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. 236–44. ———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s, 1926. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway’s First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, 1798, of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Ed. W. J. B. Owen. London: Oxford UP, 1967.

4 Memory and Desire Eliotic Consciousness in Early Hemingway Matthew J. Bolton 

In the spring of 1922, only a few weeks after radically editing T. S. Eliot’s sprawling manuscript of The Waste Land and brokering its sale as a standalone volume to the firm of Boni and Liveright, Ezra Pound took another young writer under his wing. “It was clearly a tribute to Pound’s capacity for recognizing ability,” Carlos Baker noted thirty years later, “that he could admire talents as diverse as those of T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway” (9). While the decades following Eliot’s and Hemingway’s deaths have witnessed a sea change in critical perspectives on both writers, Baker’s characterization of the relationship between the two men’s talents has remained largely unchallenged. In most critical circles, Possum and Papa are still not thought to be on speaking terms. Yet this hesitancy to draw meaningful stylistic and thematic connections between the two authors may be rooted more in their public personae and in reductive generalizations about their art than in their work itself. The publication of the Pound/Eliot draft of The Waste Land in 1971 and the increased study of the Hemingway-Pound correspondence have illuminated the role that Ezra Pound played as an editor to both men. Revisiting Hemingway’s early work in light of these and other documents suggests that the author learned much not only from the poet who was his mentor but from the one who was his predecessor. Pound drew Hemingway into Eliot’s orbit, just as he had once drawn Eliot into that of Joyce. Eliot’s poetry, and in particular The Waste Land, served as one of Hemingway’s models for incorporating the remembered word or image into the fabric of a story and for using the processes 37

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of memory, notably in In Our Time, as a structuring principle for layering a series of scenes and stories outside the normal scheme of narration. Eliotic allusion was far more than a form of interior decoration for Hemingway, and Eliotic juxtaposition was no less than a form of architecture: from the one Hemingway learned how to render memories of texts, and from the other he learned how to render the text as memory. The notion that memory and perception interact through the layering of disparate images and voices was part of the zeitgeist for at least a decade before the publication of The Waste Land, and nowhere was this stronger than in Paris. One finds its visual analogue in the cubism of Picasso, whose 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon might be seen as a definitive representation of the layering of multiple planes of perception. One might hear it in the discord of Stravinksy, who in The Firebird Suite (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913) overlays tones and rhythms in combinations that suggest not only the transit between order and chaos but the fundamental artificiality of musical accord itself. And one finds the topic explicitly addressed in Henri Bergson’s writings on consciousness. In Matter and Memory Bergson argues against the commonsense notion that one’s memory is located entirely in the past and one’s perceptions entirely in the present: “From the moment it becomes image, the past leaves the state of pure memory and coincides with a certain part of my present. Memory actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure memory. The image is a present state, and its sole share in the past is the memory from which it arose” (140). Bergson would have a formative influence on T. S. Eliot, who not only read the philosopher but attended his lectures as a student abroad in Paris in 1910 and 1911. He would later describe himself as having been for several years afterward “entirely a Bergsonian.”1 The notion that the remembered image is as present to the conscious mind as the perceived image runs throughout Eliot’s work and finds perhaps its purest statement in the Four Quartets: “All time is eternally present” (117). Bergson’s conceptual framework, as reworked by T. E. Hulme, was central to the imagism movement that Pound, Richard Aldington, and H. D. founded in the 1910s. Though Pound had distanced himself from the movement by the time he moved to Paris, he never lost his concern with the primacy of the image. Indeed, the Chinese ideographic characters that anchor the verses of the Pisan Cantos, the work Pound undertook while imprisoned after the Second World War, represent the logical extreme of Pound’s fascination with word images. Pound’s critical writings on the image therefore remain valid even after he had disavowed the imagism movement itself. Writing about his poem “In

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a Station of the Metro” in his 1916 book Gaudier-Brzeska, for example, Pound explained that “the ‘one image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. . . . In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (89). Pound was referring to his own three-line poem, but the comment might as readily be applied to Eliot’s 433-line one. For much of Pound’s editing of The Waste Land consisted of rigorously eliminating page after page of narrative verse to leave only a series of hard-lined, unmediated images.2 For learning to pare down his own prose to render an image of the thing itself, Hemingway could not have found a better man than Pound or a better place than Paris. Pound urged Hemingway toward the same sort of objectification of the image in his early poems and stories that he had helped bring about in The Waste Land. Hemingway would later recall Pound as the “the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives” (AMF 134). John Peale Bishop’s account verifies this: “In Paris, Hemingway submitted much of his apprentice work in fiction to Pound. It came back to him blue-penciled, most of the adjectives gone. The comments were unsparing. Writing for a newspaper was not at all the same as writing for a poet” (qtd. in Hurwitz 16). Although there are no extant manuscripts showing Pound’s editing of Hemingway’s work, Harold Hurwitz deduces that Pound “read and criticized” the stories from Three Stories and Ten Poems and the vignettes of the first in our time (13). Pound’s role in criticizing the latter book was an official one, as in our time was the sixth in a series of “inquests into the present state of literature” that Pound edited and Bill Bird published. Eliot, too, was originally to have contributed to the series but subsequently backed out of the arrangement. Hemingway’s letters to Pound regarding in our time confirm that he was readily accepting Pound’s criticism. He writes of having made a series of changes that seem to be in response to Pound’s requests or advice: “I will do the hanging. Have done the death of Maera altogether different and fixed the others. The new death is good” (SL 91). This same letter finds Hemingway thinking about how the arrangement of scenes will produce meaning across the entirety of the book. He suggests an order for his vignettes, writing of how each leads logically to the other, and concludes proudly: “It has form all right” (92). This thinking aloud about form and structure, as well as a readiness to submit to Pound’s advice, is similar to what is found in Eliot’s letters from a year and a half before. Eliot’s letter of January 1922 begins, “Criticism accepted so far as understood, with thanks” and goes on to list a series of questions about form (e.g., “Do you advise printing Gerontion as prelude?”) and a series of concessions to Pound’s

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editorial opinion (e.g., “Certainly omit miscellaneous pieces”) (Letters 504). Pound therefore shaped the work he edited, be it Eliot’s or Hemingway’s, in two complementary ways: toward the paring down of lines to produce kinematic images and toward the coordination and arrangement of such images into a formal order. The publication of in our time marked the end of Hemingway’s apprenticeship to Pound, and when he later set out to expand the volume by writing one story about each thing he knew, he was no longer in the practice of submitting his work to Pound’s blue pencil. Yet as he structured the longer version of the book, Hemingway would have had available to him both the lessons in concision and form that Pound had imparted to him when they worked together on in our time as well the structural model that The Waste Land represented. Knowing, to one extent or another, the role that Pound had played in editing Eliot’s poem, Hemingway knew that the poem’s materials preceded its structure. Eliot came to Pound with a great number of pages he had written over a number of years, and Pound, through a process of excision and concentration, produced something with shape and form. The Waste Land might therefore have been one of Hemingway’s models for how the vignettes and stories of the 1925 In Our Time, written at different times and in different modes, could be organized and brought into conversation with each other. The answer lay not in adding a traditional narrative framing device but in eschewing such contrivances altogether in order to create a mosaic-like arrangement of brilliant fragments. Hemingway’s frequent jabs at Eliot may speak to his sense of indebtedness to the poet. During the period in which he was writing the stories that would transform the slim 1923 in our time into the expanded 1925 In Our Time, Hemingway made Eliot the butt of jokes both public and private. When The Little Review expressed a concern that “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” too obviously identified its subject, poet Chard Powers Smith, Hemingway selected another surname that held negative connotations for him: “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” Responding to the death of Joseph Conrad in the Transatlantic Review of October 1924, Hemingway took another swipe at Eliot, writing, “If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave, Mr. Conrad would shortly reappear, looking very annoyed at the forced return, and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage-grinder” (By-Line 133). At this early stage of his career, Hemingway was engaged in a process of defining what he was by determining what he was not: he was not his editor, Ford Madox Ford, with whom he would fall out when the older novelist apologized for Hemingway’s comments in the subsequent issue of

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the Transatlantic Review; he was not Gertrude Stein, for in editing her work he had come to realize that she lacked discipline and craft; he was not his quondam patron Sherwood Anderson, as The Torrents of Spring would soon make clear; and he certainly was not T. S. Eliot, the fellow midwesterner a dozen years his senior, the local boy who had made good in Europe. In private correspondence with Pound, the one mentor whom Hemingway never spurned, the young writer likewise joked about Eliot. In an inaccrochable 1924 letter, Hemingway lays out a career path for Eliot: the poet ought to “strangle his sick wife, bugger the brain specialist and rob the bank” so that he could write “an even better poem” (qtd. in Oldsey 32). Hemingway knows a great deal both about Eliot’s personal life—for this was the period that Pound was canvassing Hemingway and others to create the Bel Esprit fund that would free Eliot from his work at the bank, and Pound was talking quite freely about Eliot’s situation—as well as about Pound’s role in revising and editing The Waste Land.3 Admittedly, Hemingway might not have felt he could speak badly of a poem on which Pound himself had worked. Eliot’s dedication—“for Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro [the better craftsman]”—weaves Pound into the very fabric of the poem. Yet later in life, long after he needed to worry about bruising the institutionalized Pound’s ego, Hemingway would continue to distinguish between Eliot as a man and as an artist. In a 1950 letter to Harvey Breit, Hemingway writes of Eliot: “A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man and he never hit the ball out of infield in his life and he would not have existed except for dear old Ezra, the lovely poet and stupid traitor” (SL 701). It is perhaps not quite fair to extract the one piece of praise from this otherwise vitriolic line, yet Hemingway did seem to consider Eliot “a damned good poet.” He continued to read Eliot throughout his life, and by his death in 1961 he held ten of the poet’s volumes in his library (Oldsey 110). Pound was the only poet better represented in Hemingway’s collection. That Hemingway seemed to consider Pound il miglior fabbro of The Waste Land argues for the openness with which he would have read the poem. Eliot might be a minor poet, as Hemingway argued in his 1925 “Homage to Ezra,” but The Waste Land bears the mark of the major poet Pound—a poet who was making his mark on Hemingway (Reynolds 272). Pound had exerted perhaps the biggest influence on Hemingway’s emerging style, and he was one of the few mentors to whom Hemingway never felt compelled to minimize or repudiate. In 1922 Hemingway described the poet as “a great guy and a wonderful editor” (Baker 8). The two men had struck up an arrangement that seemed to please Hemingway. In a letter to Sherwood Anderson that same year, Hemingway

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writes: “I’ve been teaching Pound how to box and he’s helping me with my writing” (8). Hadley Hemingway recalled her husband’s uncharacteristic adulation of the poet: “Ernest listened at E.P’s feet, as to an oracle, and I believe some of the ideas lasted all through his life” (Reynolds 22). An older Hemingway’s own comments confirm this. Thirty years later, even after Pound, having broadcast for the fascists in Italy, had been charged with treason and institutionalized in St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, Hemingway spoke well of him. In an interview with George Plimpton in 1958, he affirmed that Pound is “a great poet and a loyal friend” (Bruccoli 118), while in A Moveable Feast he characterizes him as “the most generous writer I have ever known” (110). Hemingway presumably would have read The Waste Land not only for its own merits but as a testament to Pound’s skill as literary midwife. Pound had once mentored and championed Eliot just as he was now mentoring and championing Hemingway. In 1915 Pound had arranged for Eliot’s earliest poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” to be published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Now Pound saw to it that Hemingway’s poetry was published in the same journal. History seemed to be repeating itself, and Hemingway might well have seen himself embarking on a course similar to that of Eliot. Whether one takes a Bloomian family drama approach, arguing that Hemingway would have felt an intense rivalry and anxiety over the accomplishments of Pound’s former protégé, with his public and private disparagement speaking to how greatly the poet weighed on his mind, or whether one simply takes Hemingway at his word as respecting Eliot’s poetry despite disliking his personality, there is a case to be made for Eliot’s poetry, and The Waste Land in particular, as being seminal to Hemingway’s development as an artist. The poem offered in a concrete and assailable form the theory and practice of rendering in clear lines the memory-image that Eliot had taken from Bergson and that Pound had taken from Hulme and that the two of them, in that rarest of acts— a successful literary collaboration—had honed into a sculptured form. By the end of 1922 Pound himself had left Paris for Rapallo and then for Rome, and his relationship with Hemingway would subsequently be carried on by letters. Yet Hemingway had left to him in Paris the model that the shored fragments of The Waste Land represented a way to craft memory—images that he would utilize in In Our Time and later works. When Hemingway eventually admitted to having studied Eliot, it was with the same tongue-in-cheek admixture of scorn and admiration that marked his public and private writings about the poet in the early 1920s. Yet the forced hilarity of Hemingway’s Eliotic parody in Death in the Afternoon suggests that

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the poet still held an unnerving power over the novelist. It is not only single images and lines from The Waste Land and other Eliot poems that have stayed with Hemingway, but a distinctly Eliotic mode of alluding to and working with such memory-images. Talking about death and dying with the “old lady” interlocutor who wishes he would tell more conventional stories, the author’s own language modulates into that of Marvell. But regardless of how they started I hope to see the finish of a few, and speculate how worms will try that long preserved sterility; with their quaint pamphlets gone to bust and into foot-notes all their lust. Old lady: That’s a very nice line about lust. Author: I know it. It came from Andrew Marvell. I learned how to do that by reading T. S. Eliot. (DIA 139) The passage may serve less as a parody of Eliot than as a self-parody, for this is not the first time the novelist has tried his hand at Eliot’s mode of literary allusion. He alludes to Marvell in earnest in A Farewell to Arms, during the scene in which Frederic and Catherine spend a last evening together before Frederic’s return to the front. The waiter came and took away the things. After a while we were very still and we could hear the rain. Down below on the street a motor car honked. “‘But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,’” I said. “I know that poem,” Catherine said. “It’s by Marvell. But it’s about a girl who wouldn’t live with a man.” (AFTA 154) Catherine Barkley is correct: the lines are indeed Marvell’s. But of course they are also Eliot’s, for they appear twice, each time in a corrupted form, in The Waste Land. Eliot’s first allusion to “To His Coy Mistress” runs this way: “But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear” (185–86). A few lines later the Marvell quotation appears again, this time further corrupted: “But at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring” (196–98). In a process typical of The Waste Land’s allusive method, a line of verse is both dismembered and disremembered, as if words that had once been read and set to memory reemerge from the depths of the

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subconscious mind having taken on a strange new form. A fragment from Marvell suggests a fragment from John Day’s “The Parliament of Bees,” which in turn suggests the entirely unpoetic meeting of Sweeney and Mrs. Porter. The line becomes a chimera, a hybridization of an objective text and a subjective consciousness. Yet even a line that is remembered in an uncorrupted form changes when set into a new context. When Frederic quotes two lines from Marvell, they no longer take their weight and import from the rest of the stanza from which they were drawn but, rather, from the situation of the couple in the hotel room and the sounds of the rain and the road. In linking the sound of time’s winged chariot to the sound of motor cars, Hemingway is alluding not just to Marvell but to Marvell as approached by way of Eliot’s poem. Eliot’s chimerical lines had long been with Hemingway, making their way into his experimental writing exercise “Rapallo,” composed while he and Hadley and the Pounds were staying in Italy: “The big cat gets on the small cat. Sweeney gets on Mrs. Porter. Ezra gets nowhere except artistically of course” (Reynolds 158). In Rapallo in February 1923, lines from The Waste Land work their way into the sort of automatic writing that Gertrude Stein had advocated. And not surprisingly, Hemingway no sooner alludes to Eliot than he thinks of Ezra. The two artists remain linked for him: “Major Eliot” the minor poet, Ezra the major one, and the singular poem that the two men had produced. That the same chimerical line emerges in Hemingway’s prose in 1923, 1929, and 1932 suggests just how important The Waste Land was to him and just how deeply lines and scenes from the poem had lodged in his memory. Frederic Henry’s reference to Marvell might be read as Hemingway’s tribute to Eliot, were it not for its anachronistic relationship to Eliot’s poem. For while Hemingway is writing several years after the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, Frederic Henry is speaking several years before it. Frederic’s preleptic allusion therefore seems calculated to deflate the originality of Eliot’s lines, for Frederic offhandedly composes in the allusive vein that would make Eliot famous. Some readers like the passage. Donna Gerstenberger, for example, characterizes it as “a masterfully economical stroke” for bringing Hemingway’s characters into relation with The Waste Land (25). Yet perhaps more readers would find the effect forced and stagy, as if the characters were being made to speak only in order to demonstrate their author’s knowledge. This was the complaint that Aldous Huxley made of Frederic’s reference to the “bitter nail-holes” of Mantegna’s painting of the crucifixion: the line betrays a familiarity with high culture that the author elsewhere seems at pains to hide. Huxley takes issue less with literary and cultural allusion than

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with Hemingway’s apparent anathema for such allusion. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway cites Huxley’s criticism and concedes the point, saying, “It sounds very much like the sort of thing one tries to remove in going over the manuscript” (Meyers 191). Hemingway’s response is perverse, for Huxley was really calling for more of this sort of allusion rather than less. Hemingway overcompensates, proposing a litmus test for talking of culture in the context of a novel: “If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker . . . he is showing off ” (DIA 191). There is an uneasiness to the proposition, as if the writer constantly must guard against being found out as a faker. Ironically, Death in the Afternoon itself begins with Hemingway’s discussion of Goya, which is just the sort of cultural allusion and contextualization that Huxley wants to see more of in the novels. The allusive method that Eliot honed to an art form is one that Hemingway views with some measure of anxiety. In expanding on the topic of allusion, Hemingway proposes two of his most famous maxims about writing: first, that “prose is architecture, not interior decoration” and then that a good story shares with the iceberg a dignity of movement, in that the writer may “omit things that he knows” (DIA 191−92). A pair of Hemingway’s most definitive statements about his own aesthetic therefore emerge from a reactionary mode as the author attempts to define his own method as being distinct from the allusive one. Even after the tremendous success of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway is still defining what he is by defining what he is not. Frederic’s reference to Marvell is not the only instance of Hemingway’s characters alluding to lines of verse that Eliot had already made his own. When Jake Barnes laughingly identifies Bill Gorton as a taxidermist, Bill quips, “That was in another country . . . and besides, all the animals were dead” (SAR 75). The reference is to a passage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta that Eliot had used as an epigraph for his 1917 poem “Portrait of a Lady”: “Thou hast committed— / Fornication: but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead” (8). The epigraph works logically in the context of “Portrait of a Lady” by associating the young speaker of Eliot’s poem, who is paying a farewell visit to an older woman who once thought he had a romantic interest in her, with the villainous Barrabas in Marlowe’s play. In the context of Hemingway’s novel, the allusion is less freighted with significance, and the reader must either stretch the point by arguing that fornication in another country (and casual anti-Semitism, for that matter, a quality that Hemingway

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cultivated in his letters to Pound) is a central development in The Sun Also Rises or treat the line as witty rather than weighty. In either case, the scene passes the litmus test that Hemingway would later propose in Death in the Afternoon, for it comes naturally to the drunkenly garrulous Bill Gorton, who, unlike Frederic Henry, could and probably would have read The Waste Land. As does the consciousness that shapes Eliot’s poem, Bill adapts the remembered line of verse to the present situation, producing a chimerical version that has its full meaning only for one who knows both its original source and the new context in which it is being used. Yet if Hemingway tends to use direct literary allusion less skillfully and less naturally than Eliot, there are other referential modes in which he rivals the poet. He shares Eliot’s genius for using titles and epigraphs to situate his own work within the literary tradition, that “ideal order” of “existing monuments” that Eliot said “is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them” (Essays 5). In calling his first novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway brings the floating world of Jake Barnes, Robert Cohn, Brett Ashley, and his other expatriates into relation with the existing monument of Ecclesiastes. It is a remarkable act of literary synthesis and juxtaposition in a novel that is essentially a roman à clef. Paired with Gertrude Stein’s observation that “you are all a lost generation,” Hemingway’s long quotation from Ecclesiastes frames Paris and Pamplona in a larger metaphysical context that the author and his narrator would not have been able to express in the body of the narrative itself. Yet it is a context and a literary frame of reference of which Jake Barnes, a Catholic who still attends mass and who gravitates toward churches, would himself be aware. As with “In Another Country,” the title and epigraph exist outside the world of the narrative without being alien to it. Titles and epigraphs seem to have offered Hemingway a mode for bringing his own spare and externalized style into relation with the larger literary tradition of which it is a part and to draw thematic parallels that might have seemed showy or forced within the context of his externalized narratives. Another way that Hemingway brings his own text into dialogue with the literary tradition involves characters and narrators simply talking about what they’ve been reading. Such references not only draw parallels between Hemingway and the authors who were important to him, but they serve as an index of character within his text. In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes is reading Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, while Robert Cohn is reported to hold the turgid The Purple Land in high regard. Jake’s book reflects well on him; Robert Cohn’s does not. Reading good work is important in Hemingway’s formula-

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tion not simply because it reflects one’s aesthetics and values but because it shapes them. The memory of what one has read can be just as formative and visceral to the subconscious and conscious mind as is the memory of what one has done. Jake reflects, “I read the Turgenieff. I knew that now, reading it in the oversensitized state of my mind after much too much brandy, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it. That was another good thing you paid for and then had” (149). This is a sentiment with which Eliot might have sympathized on several levels. Like Hemingway, Eliot admired Turgenev for what he termed his “direct suggestiveness by precise reference,” arguing in his essay “Prose and Verse” that “There is more essential poetry in Turgenyev’s [sic] Sportsman’s Sketches, even in translation, than in the whole of Sir Thomas Browne and Walter Pater” (Rainey 163). More generally, Eliot, like Jake Barnes, seemed to consider memories of what he had read to have the same validity and emotional weight as memories of what he had done or seen. Poetry, he argues in 1919, is “a concentration . . . of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all” (Essays 7). It is not only the stuff of his active life but whatever the poet happens to read or overhear that becomes the material of his poem. Reading is one of the experiences that does not seem to be an experience at all. If Eliot proposed this theory in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he put it into practice in The Waste Land, where scenes from his life and lines from his reading life merge into synthetic and chimerical images that suggest the reshaping of experience in the depths of the artist’s memory. Hemingway’s admission in Death in the Afternoon to having learned how to work with literary allusion from “reading T. S. Eliot” may therefore be read as more sincere than the author intends it. Yet it should also be read as too limited an admission—a kind of authorial plea bargaining—for Eliot’s art consists of more than a knack for allusion, and Hemingway’s debt to Eliot may extend to a deeper structural level. As if taking their cue from Hemingway himself, however, critics who have laid the groundwork for a discussion of his relationship to Eliot have tended to do so within the narrow bounds of literary allusion. Beginning with Carlos Baker, the critic identifies a striking parallel between Eliot’s notion of the objective correlative and Hemingway’s technique of rendering objective and externalized the elements of his stories. In “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), Eliot defined the objective correlative as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such

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that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (Essays 145). It is by paying attention to the details that Hemingway sets down the formulae of emotion. His description in “Big Two-Hearted River” of Nick Adams pitching his tent in the Michigan woods, for example, produces in the reader the same sense of satisfaction and security that Nick himself feels: “He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep, hitting them down into the ground with the flat of the ax until the rope loops were buried and the canvas was drum tight” (IOT 186). Because Hemingway has gotten the chain of events or the external facts right, his reader shares in Nick’s sense that there is “something mysterious and homelike” (186) about the shelter he has just constructed. Although Baker affirms that “Mr. Eliot’s generic description fits Hemingway’s customary performance” (56), he then qualifies this parallel by noting that Eliot’s tendency to “fashion his objective correlatives into a series of complex literary symbols . . . pales and rarifies them” (56, 57). To illustrate his point, Baker cites Wagnerian allusion in The Waste Land. It is certainly true that the song of the Rhine maidens would never make its way into a Hemingway text, at least not in the form Eliot gives it: “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” (277–78). One might extend Baker’s point by comparing Eliot’s allusion to German opera to a scene from Hemingway’s “Cross Country Snow”: The girl brought the wine in and they had trouble with the cork. Nick finally opened it. The girl went out and they heard her singing in German in the next room . . . “What were you singing?” he asked her. “Opera, German opera.” She did not care to discuss the subject. (IOT 143) Whereas Eliot transcribes a line of opera, Hemingway reports on its being sung. While these two approaches seem at first to be worlds apart, both might be characterized as objective in that they bring German opera into the text without attempting to describe either the music itself or the effect that the music has on its listener.4 Yet cherry-picking a pair of lines from a very long poem is a risky proposition. Elsewhere in The Waste Land are phrases and passages that speak more directly to Hemingway’s preoccupations. In the last stanza of the poem, for example, is an objective correlative with which Nick Adams might identify: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me” (424–25). The

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poem is full of such concrete and immediately apprehensible images and scenes. Baker’s argument glosses over this immediacy and hence overstates the centrality of literary allusion to Eliot’s method. For every line in The Waste Land Hemingway would never have dreamed of writing, such as the Wagnerian transcription, there are a half-dozen others he might have wished he had: Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. (37) The scene is brilliantly realized, with an economy of diction and a directness that Hemingway had not been able to find in his own verse and, in 1923 and 1924, was just beginning to find in his short stories. The compound sentence of the first four lines, with its three “and’s” and its four prepositions of direction (“over,” “in,” “in,” “into”), enacts grammatically the episodic forward momentum of the scene. It is a construction that would not be entirely out of place in The Sun Also Rises. That The Waste Land is too often read as a “series of complex literary symbols” speaks to the abiding power of Eliot’s endnotes to overdetermine a reader’s interpretation of the poem. Eliot himself would eventually apologize for the “remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship” that his notes represented (Poetry and Poets 110). While a generation of critics would accept as integral to the poem the notes that Eliot had written at Pound’s prompting to fill out the page count of the Boni and Liveright edition, there is much to suggest that Eliot’s contemporaries were less easily misled. Pound, Hemingway, and anyone else reading the little magazines in 1922 and 1923 first encountered the poem in the Criterion or the Dial, where it carried no notes. Those who knew Eliot—or who knew a bit about him, as Hemingway did—read the new poem not as an act of modern mythologizing but as one of intense self-revelation. Virginia Woolf records in her diary Mary Hutchinson’s response to the poem: “Mary interprets it to be Tom’s diary—a melancholy one” (2:178). If the New Critics read the work not as a diary but as an autonomous text that draws its meaning from its relation to other works of literature rather than from its author’s life, they did so in part at the prompting of Eliot’s own endnotes and essays. For there is a disjunction between the critic who argued that poetry is “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (Essays 21) and the poet who made the most personal of confessions. The Waste Land

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is as much memoir as myth. Hemingway’s joke to Pound—that Eliot should “strangle his sick wife, bugger the brain specialist and rob the bank”—suggests that he knew enough of Eliot’s personal life to recognize the poet in the poem—or, conversely, that having read the poem as a quasi memoir he could infer the particulars of Eliot’s life. He would have recognized Eliot’s “sick wife” in the echoing monologue of “A Game of Chess”: “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. / What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?” (40). Pound had certainly recognized this as a portrait of the lady; in the manuscript he had boxed the lines and written “photography?” in the margin, as if to ask whether this were a snapshot of Vivian Eliot (Facsimile 11). So too would Hemingway have recognized the face of a certain Lloyds of London banker in the Dantean crowd that flows over London Bridge and through the streets of the unreal city. And he might have recognized in the obsessive, repetitive diction of “What the Thunder Said”—repetitive diction similar to the magisterial opening passages of both “In Another Country” and A Farewell to Arms—a textual representation of the nervous condition of a poet who had checked himself into a sanatorium in Lausanne midway through the composition of his poem: Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water (47) Hemingway’s use of repetitive diction has sometimes been credited to his reading and editing of Gertrude Stein, but it would be hard to find a passage in Stein that uses the technique as effectively as Eliot does here. Approaching The Waste Land via Pound, and first reading it in the version that did not carry Eliot’s notes, Hemingway would have seen the poem not only in a mythological context but as a far more personal expression of Eliot’s memories and desires. The Waste Land’s “heap of broken images” represents not a primer of English poetry but the objective rendering of memory, following an intuitive and associative logic rather than the chronological, cause-and-effect ordering that marks traditional narratives. Since the poet is a reader, some of these images will be drawn from what he has read. When the nerve-wracked wife of “A Game of Chess” asks her husband, “Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?” we assume she is asking

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for personal knowledge and recollections, a shared memory of something important to her or to their relationship. Instead, lines from The Tempest come unbidden to the mind of the silent husband: “I remember / Those are pearls that were his eyes” (41). For the Eliotic narrator, literary allusion is not an affectation but an impulse, a reflexive transit between the world unfolding around him and the ideal order of literary monuments. This awareness of an order outside oneself—be it that of history, literature, or religion—is central to Eliot’s representation of consciousness. The present that his narrators occupy is crowded with images from their personal and cultural histories, and the poems are the artifices whereby the past and the present, the personal and the cultural intersect. His poems gather force and structure through the juxtaposition of images and voices, the only essential connection of which is that they figure in the poet’s consciousness. A comparable process of association and juxtaposition is at work in both versions of In Our Time. In the 1923 version the isolated images of the vignettes stand out from each other in sharp contrast. In the 1925 version, however, these italicized interchapters represent one level of narration and the plaintext short stories another. As in The Waste Land, the dialectic between the two narrative threads suggests a governing consciousness that is expansive enough to contain both. The chapters and interchapters can be read independently of each other, but taken as a whole they create what Hugh Kenner termed, in talking of Prufrock, a “zone of consciousness” (40). It is this zone of consciousness that gives In Our Time a cohesion and an architectonic structure that marks it as something other than a short story collection. As with The Waste Land, these individual scenes and images speak to a governing consciousness that has gathered and arranged them: these are the fragments Hemingway has shored against his ruins. To define the field of consciousness of In Our Time, one might draw parallels among “On the Quai at Smyrna,” “Indian Camp,” and the second interchapter. “On the Quai at Smyrna” was written in 1926 and included in the 1930 edition of In Our Time (Smith 190). The first story is narrated by a British officer, the second by a third-person narrator who focalizes on the young Nick Adams’s response to a delivery and a suicide, and the third by a narrator who, in the effort to report clinically on what he has seen, erases his own identity. Yet the three stories are bound together by images of birth and death. The British officer is still haunted by scenes of mothers with their dead infants: “You remember the harbor. There were plenty of nice things floating around in it. That was the only time in my life I got so I dreamed about things. You didn’t mind the

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women who were having babies as you did those with the dead ones. They had them all right. Surprising how few of them died. You just covered them over with something and let them go to it” (IOT 11). The officer is recalling his own memory of the evacuation, but his pronouns shift from “you” to “I” and then back to “you.” Casting his own story into the second person is an act of displacement, a foisting off onto the listener of the traumatic scenes that the officer admits returned to him unbidden: “That was the only time in my life I got so I dreamed about things” (11). Nick, in “Indian Camp,” cannot share the officer’s sangfroid about women in labor. He looks away as his father delivers the Indian woman’s baby, just as his father will try but fail to shield him from seeing the husband who has slit his throat in the upper bunk during the delivery (IOT 20). It is perhaps an older Nick who witnesses the retreat from Adrianople, where he sees another woman giving birth in primitive conditions: “There was a woman having a baby with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it” (23). If the British officer keeps his stiff upper lip by shifting from the first- to the second-person pronoun, the witness to the evacuation does so by effacing the pronoun altogether and producing the fragmentary line: “scared sick looking at it” (23). These three stories share a primal image: a boy or a man unequipped to help with the delivery witnesses a woman having a baby under a dirty blanket in the midst of death or destruction. The juxtaposition of these three stories, with their images of birth and death, creates an overarching structure that suggests a consciousness to which all three episodes are meaningful. They are grouped together according to an associative process whereby what one perceives or hears in the present brings to mind a remembered image. The same person to whom the British officer speaks must himself have been a witness to the birth in the Indian camp or to the birth during the retreat or to both. One could make a facile identification of this consciousness with Nick Adams and argue that the stories document his life more or less chronologically, in a sort of intermittent bildungsroman, while the interchapters that punctuate the stories represent the unbidden return of traumatic memories of the war and the later scenes of violence—bullfights and robberies and executions—which he substitutes for the war. Taking a cue from Bergson, one could argue that the interchapters and short stories alike are memories rendered as images and that, hence, both are present to the conscious mind. Yet this approach is something of an oversimplification, for many of the stories and interchapters do not involve Nick at all. “Soldier’s Home” centers on a different veteran entirely, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” and “My Old Man” seem

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only tangentially related to Nick’s life, and in some of the bullfighting episodes the “I” refers not to a foreign spectator but to a Spanish participant. That the stories and scenes do not fully coalesce around the character of Nick Adams may be a function not only of their having been written at different times and places and only later gathered into a formal whole but of their having largely been written secondhand. Hemingway was learning that reworking images from other people’s memories could be as profitable as reworking his own. In the 1922 article “A Veteran Visits the Old Front,” he cautioned his readers not to return to the sights that were central to their war experience: “Don’t go back to visit the old front. If you have pictures in your head of something that happened . . . do not try and go back to verify them. It is not good. . . . Go to someone else’s front, if you want to. There your imagination will help you out and you may be able to picture the things that happened” (On War 248). This approach is consonant with Hemingway’s reworking of his friend Chink Dorman-Smith’s account of the siege at Smyrna or with his rewriting of newspaper reports of executions and gangland shootings. Imagination and a desire to tell it “how it was” allowed Hemingway to “picture the things that happened” to other people as convincingly as if they had happened to him. For if the memory-image is part of the present rather than the past, then the images from any one man’s memory are available to any other man, provided he works hard enough to get the picture right. The fragmentary images of In Our Time therefore present the reader with some of the same narratological and epistemological contradictions as The Waste Land. While both works are peopled with authorial doubles who gesture toward being their respective work’s governing consciousness, and who may stand as narrator for a time, neither has a single unified narrator or protagonist. This lack of a master narrator or single authorial “I” in The Waste Land seemed to worry Eliot. Before publishing the poem he asked Pound if he ought to preface it with his earlier poem “Gerontion” so that the disparate voices of The Waste Land would become “thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season” (Letters 23). Pound was firmly against this idea. Eliot’s later assertion in the endnotes that Tiresias is “the most important personage” in The Waste Land because “what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem” is singularly unconvincing (52). Eliot’s anxiety regarding his narrator suggests that he had hit on a structure in practice that he had not yet apprehended in theory: the collapse of narrator, author, and reader into an “I” whose referent shifts from passage to passage. As Denis Donaghue says of Eliot’s mode of narration in “Prufrock,” “the ‘I’ has textual but no ontological presence” (xi).

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Ultimately, none of the poem’s speakers have the authority to encompass all of the poem’s images. If one draws back far enough from these images to identify this governing consciousness, one finds it to be synonymous with the author himself, or with the author’s consciousness as represented and formalized by the poem. The search for a master narrator in The Waste Land or In Our Time is an inherently reductive one, therefore, in that each work’s images stand in relation to each other precisely because they have been gathered in the text. The text becomes an analogue for memory itself, and the act of reading is a Bergsonian drawing forward of memory into the assailable present. The Waste Land and In Our Time might each be thought of as a shoring of images over which the author’s and the reader’s consciousness darts and broods. Several of Hemingway’s critics and biographers have noted that in trading boxing lessons for writing instruction Hemingway got the better part of his bargain with Pound. He learned under Pound’s tutelage how to cut away adjectives and to bring out the hard lines of the image itself. During this same period, however, and perhaps in part because of his relationship with Pound, Hemingway was learning from the work of T. S. Eliot. These were lessons he paid for in a different tender—in the humility required to admire the work of a man whose life and character he disliked and in the anxiety engendered by reading the masterwork of a close contemporary. Yet this too was a fair bargain, for he learned from Eliot how to work with fragments of text and how to arrange images drawn from his reading and his own memory that would enact the processes of the conscious mind. Eliot’s work, particularly The Waste Land, was another good thing that Hemingway paid for and then had.

Not e s 1. Letter to Eudo C. Mason, 19 April 1945, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. 2. Pound struck from the poem its original first page, a narrative of a drunken night’s revelry in the mode of Joyce, so that it would begin as it does now: “April is the cruelest month” (Facsimile 37). He dismissed as “too loose” the first page and a half of Part III, “The Fire Sermon,” in which Popelike heroic couplets satirize a woman readying for her day. Some eighty lines into “The Fire Sermon” he wrote “echt [true]” next to the first arresting and unrhymed image: “A rat crept softly through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal / on a winter evening round behind the gashouse” (41). A long vertical line drawn down from the “echt” indicates that this is where the section should begin. From Part IV, “Death by Water,” he struck out the two-page-long narrative reimagining Dante’s account of Ulysses’s last voyage, leaving only the final eight-line image of the drowned Phoenician sailor whose corpse suffers a

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sea change. Eliot was unsure about this stark fragment and asked in a subsequent letter to Pound if he should cut it. Pound insisted it stay. The fragmentary fourth part of The Waste Land, which would become a convention in Eliot’s later Four Quartets, is essentially Pound’s invention. 3. Although Hemingway might not have seen the drafts and manuscripts that Pound had read and edited, he seems to have known of their existence. Satirizing Pound’s doomed Bel Esprit movement in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes that the fund meant “we could crown [Eliot] any time he felt lonesome or any time Ezra had gone over the manuscript or the proofs of another big poem like The Waste Land” (AMF 112). In October 1922 Eliot sent these manuscripts and proofs of The Waste Land, which were heavily edited and annotated by Pound, to his patron John Quinn (who was also the underwriter of Ford’s magazine the Transatlantic Review). When Quinn died in July 1924, the manuscripts, along with other papers, were put into storage. Although sold to the New York Public Library in the 1950s, they were not made public until 1969. Hemingway’s reference to an Eliot manuscript is therefore based on his memory of the 1920s. 4. The contrast between Eliot’s and Hemingway’s ways of including German opera in their texts raises a larger epistemological question: Which form of representation is more objectively rendered? Eliot’s line is entirely meaningless to a reader who does not recognize its allusion, but it conveys a melody, a harmony, and a host of other associations to one who recognizes it (or to one who having read The Waste Land seeks out Das Rheingold). In Hemingway’s story, however, every reader knows from the dialogue and narration that the girl is singing a certain kind of music, but no reader—no matter how familiar he or she may be with opera—has access to its melody. Because Nick doesn’t know the song, neither does the reader. Yet Nick, unlike the reader, might recognize the tune should he hear it again.

Wo rk s C i t e d Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1952. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986. Donaghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. ———. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1988. ———. On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957. ———. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. ———. The Waste Land: A Facsimile Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1971. Gerstenberger, Donna. “The Waste Land in A Farewell to Arms.” Modern Language Notes 76.1 (1961): 24–25. Hemingway, Ernest. “Conrad, Optimist and Moralist.” By-Line Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. 132−33. ———. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s, 1932. ———. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ———. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s, 1929. ———. In Our Time. New York: Scribner’s, 1925.

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———. Hemingway on War. Ed. Seán Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. ———. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s, 1964. ———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s, 1926. Hurwitz, Harold M. “Hemingway’s Tutor, Ezra Pound.” In Wagner. 8–21. Kenner, Hugh. Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1959. Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. Oldsey, Bernard. Ernest Hemingway: The Papers of a Writer. New York: Garland, 1981. Plimpton, George. “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway.” In Wagner. 15–32. Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970. Rainey, Lawrence. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Norton, 1999. Smith, Paul. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: McGraw Hill, 1989. Wagner, Linda, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1974. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of a Writer. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1953.

5 Lions on the Beach Dream, Place, and Memory in The Old Man and the Sea Larry Grimes 

Why are the lions the main thing that is left? Should we talk about Africa or about baseball? —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

In addressing both of these questions asked in The Old Man and the Sea, I will depart from the Eurocentric answers offered by previous scholars and suggest answers that take seriously Afro-Cuban elements in the novel. I will look carefully at the location of the lions in the text, asking questions about how the lions enter the narrative, where they are located in the construction of narrative consciousness, and how the text is situated each time the lions are mentioned. My purpose, as I ponder these and related questions, is threefold: to show that Hemingway is a multicultural writer, to locate The Old Man and the Sea inside an Afro-Cuban world, and to provide a reading of the lions on the beach from this new cultural geography. I begin the process of interpretative relocation with the obvious: the novel is set in Cuba. In addition, its Canary Islander protagonist knows and is willing to talk about Africa. He says to the boy, “Should we talk about Africa or about baseball?” (OMATS 22). The boy, like many American critics of the story, chooses baseball. However, Santiago returns again and again, through memory, to Africa and the lions on the beach. Further, the novelist sits in Cuba as he writes. He sits 57

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in the Finca Vigía, which contains numerous African artifacts—hunting trophies, a walking stick, small statues, a kudu skin on the floor. My remembered catalog of African materials parallels that provided recently to Hilary Hemingway by the current head of the Cultural Extension Department of Hemingway Research and expert on Afro-Cuban artifacts, Maria Caridad Valdes Fernandez (Hemingway and Brennen 104−08). Finally, the Finca Vigía sits at the edge of the village of San Francisco de Paula, whose people, within and behind its Catholic name, practiced Afro-Cuban religions. Among those practitioners was Hemingway’s major domo and Cuban “son,” René Villarreal, a Palo Monte priest.1 Philip Melling discusses the presence of things African and Afro-Cuban in the Finca and in the novella, suggesting that Santerian elements in the novel ultimately call deep memories of slavery and the Middle Passage into the text of The Old Man and the Sea.2 Afro-Cuban religions, unlike orthodox Christianity, are not concerned with sin, grace, atonement, and salvation. Rather, they focus on the here and now, on getting through each day, on bringing balance and harmony to a discordant life. These religions, such as Santeriá and Palo Monte, provide their adherents with active control over an unruly natural world, a control is gained in a variety of ways: the reading of the cowry shells, rituals of possession and divine empowerment, rituals for appeasing the deities, and practical, mechanical actions used to manipulate people and things (potions, cures, blessings, amulets, etc.). These activities “are conducted in order to tap into Olodumare’s [“one God” from whom all others spring] ashé and its beneficial, curative, and harmonizing nature” (Nodal and Ramos 171). Divine ashé, and access to it, lies at the heart of Afro-Cuban religions. Roberto Nodal and Miguel Ramos place the quest for power sufficient to bring order to a naturally chaotic world in this context: “Each orisha [avatar or manifestation of the divine] is related to one or more aspects of nature and/or human existence. Nature for the Lukumí contains ashé, the divine energy or power that Olodumare deposits in all He creates. Ashé is a cosmological power that exists everywhere and in everything, in varying degrees, since the dawn of time” (168). What do Afro-Cuban religions have to do with Hemingway’s lions on the beach? They first relocate the question, “Why are the lions the main thing that is left?” and then accent the African setting of the lions. Hemingway uses the lions as avatars of ashé. They are, in short, totemic.3 Through the old man’s recurrent return to the lions, he obtains the power needed to change his luck, catch the fish, endure its loss, and sleep at peace. The lion as totem is private to Hemingway and not a totem of a particular Afro-Cuban religion. In Carl Eby’s study of fetishism in Hemingway’s works,

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he notes that cats, including lions, “were fetishistically-invested objects, totem animals” (121). He connects Hemingway’s cats with “the mother” through an inversion of the Oedipus complex. Although he does not discuss The Old Man and the Sea in detail, his analysis of “Cat in the Rain,” The Garden of Eden, and biographical materials makes a strong case for cats of all kinds as totemic in Hemingway’s work. Eby concludes his study by arguing that cats serve as “a replacement for some unnamed lost object” (133). That object, he argues, is “the mother” (140). While Eby’s essay is focused on the fetishistic aspect of the cats, I emphasize their totemic role as conduits of divine power, ashé. For Santiago, the lost object replaced by the lions on the beach is complex and includes his lost youth, his dwindling masculine strength, and, most important, his lost wife. The totemic figure of the lions on the beach understood as images of lost youth and declining manhood is fairly obvious to Western readers and has been well argued already. The lions as totems of the lost “feminine” presence, however, become visible through the lens of Africa by reading the text through the framework of Afro-Cuban religions. Connecting Santiago’s wife, Afro-Cuban religions, his deep sense of loss, and his reclamation of ashé is the painting of the Virgin of Cobre that hangs in the old man’s shack. But to get to the importance of the painting in its Afro-Cuban context, we must first talk baseball. A close reading of baseball games chronicled in the story suggests that the novel begins on September 12 (Sylvester 247−48), the day on which adherents of Santeriá celebrate the feast of the Virgin of Cobre, whose African counterpart is the orisha Oshun, goddess of rivers, including Hemingway’s Great Blue River (the Gulf Stream) where Santigo fishes. Since Cuban Catholics celebrate the Festival of the Virgin four days earlier,4 I suggest that deep in this iceberg of calendar dates, Hemingway has called the Virgin of Cobre forth as her African self—Oshun. In that modality, she, in memory and dream, as water and luck, will bestow on him the power and presence of his lost wife (the lost feminine), essential to one who would take fish from the Great Blue River (see Beegel). Santiago’s access to the ashé of the lions through memory and dream causes him at times to appear as one possessed (OMATS 90–94). His body and his mind become the site of feminine power returned, of deep loss recovered. In the movement of the narrative and the Stream, in the motion of memory and dream, wife, orisha, lions, dream, memory (even baseball) combine to reestablish balance, harmony, and power—ashé—in Santiago’s life. To chronicle the movement from loss to “possession,” I return to the lions on the beach as the locus of power in things re-membered, aware that dreams

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and possession are related and mindful that in the Afro-Cuban geography of the story, dreams and memories are real, empowered, and embodied states of being. I am mindful, too, that in African thought memory functions outside Western concepts of past, present, and future and flows across dimensions (the living and the dead, gods and humans) and temporal designations (past, present, future) in an oceanic wholeness (Jahn 96, 101). The first mention of the lions occurs during an early conversation between Manolin and Santiago. The old man sits on a lone chair at the table in his oneroom shack in Cojimar. He eats black beans and rice, fried bananas, some stew and drinks beer the boy has brought to him. Manolin asks the old man, “Tell me about the baseball” (21). Santiago proceeds to do so as he eats, talking about DiMaggio—father and son—and Sisler, father and son. On the wall is a color picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. Africa is in the room, although it wears the mask of Catholicism for many readers. On the bed there are old newspapers the boy has brought along with the food. As the talk moves from DiMaggio to Sisler, the boy says, “The great Sisler’s father was never poor and he, the father, was playing in the Big Leagues when he was my age” (22). Santiago replies, “When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa and I have seen lions on the beaches in the evening” (22). Africa emerges from the talk of baseball. The lions recollected from memory are situated in the text and the conversation continues. “I know. You told me.” “Should we talk about Africa or about baseball?” “Baseball I think,” the boy said. “Tell me about the great John J. McGraw.” (22) So what is the geography of the text when we first see the lions? Physically, the characters are in Cojimar, Cuba, where Santiago subsists fishing the old way. The old man lives on the margins of the economic system. He also lives in a complex relationship with Manolin, the boy, each giving to and taking from the other. Finally, both Manolin and Santiago live through newspaper accounts of major and minor league baseball. Add the Gulf Stream and perhaps Havana and Manolin’s geography is fully inscribed. Not so Santigo’s, hence the slip in dialogue from baseball to lions then back to baseball. The old man’s territory extends beyond the harbor of Cojimar, far past the lights of Havana, outside the Great Blue River. As he told the boy, he was “before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa,” and he has “seen lions on the beaches in the

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evening.” Santiago is a native of the Canary Islands, a citizen of a larger world, a world that he has momentarily recollected. In this moment of memory, he is ready to guide Manolin to new country, though his offer is deferred. The second representation of the lions differs significantly from the first due to a shift in physical and mental geography. No longer in his Cojimar shack talking to the boy, Santiago sleeps in his skiff on the Great Blue River, and when “he was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa” (24). The locus of all the descriptive material that follows (three paragraphs) is dreamtime. But it is dreamtime presented in a way appropriate to Africa and not Vienna, a way unraveled by the santos and not Freud or Lacan, a call for an ethnographic rather than a psychoanalytic definition of dreamtime. Hans Peter Duerr says of dreamtime that it is “the perspective of perception when an event is what it is regardless of the point in time where it might be located” (118).5 Another way of putting it is to say that dreamtime “represents a perspective for seeing what we see without considering whether it once was or will some day be. In the same way, the ‘dream place’ is not any particular spot, although from the ordinary perspective, it is, of course, located somewhere” (Duerr 121). Dream is at best an odd form of memory, for it remembers on the slant. It is connected not only with the unconscious but with psychic activity that re-collects fragments of autobiography even as it re-members life, supplying the present with animation, vitality, ashé, power. Out on the boundary between memory and dreamtime there is a very big difference between things re-collected and those things that are re-membered and resurrected into life in the moment. In African thought things re-membered in dreamtime are animated by the active presence of the dead and by the powerful presence of an orisha (Jahn 111−13). Although we read that the old man dreamed (past tense) of Africa when he was a boy (past time), the descriptive material assigned to this dream triggers immediate (present moment) sense stimuli: “white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes” (24). Later in dreamtime we learn that “he smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning” (25). According to the text, “usually when he smelled the land breeze he woke up”; however, in this instance “the smell of the land breeze came very early and he knew it was too early in his dream to see the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea” (25). The territory of Santiago’s dream is hard to locate physically and temporally. It exists in past/present, in and out of the corporeal body. It is dreamtime and space. It is a powerful experience (ashé) remembered and enlivened. It is very like Hemingway’s descriptions of the Great Blue River on which the old man floats: it is “the last wild country

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there is left,” it “is an unexploited country, only the very fringe of it ever being fished” (By-Line 238). Or it is like the Gulf Stream he described in Green Hills of Africa: “this Gulf Stream . . . has moved, as it moves, since before man . . . it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before . . . the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream” (149–50). It is also similar to the deeply embodied ecstasy of possession. Once Hemingway has described the synapses that fire Santiago’s dreamscape, he qualifies it, listing those things no longer found in the old man’s dreams: storms, women, great occurrences, great fish, fights, contests of strength, his wife, the boy. These things do, however, occupy Santiago’s consciousness in time present, including his long remembrance of a contest with the great Negro from Cienfuegos (68–71). However, the old man’s dreamtime is limited to African landscape and “lions on the beach” (25). The subject matter of Santiago’s dreamtime and dreamscape are determined and fixed: Africa, beaches, lions, dusk, and play. There are “other places” too, though they are unspecified, undetermined in this narrative. Strangely, while the geography of dream consciousness is carefully laid out here, the lions themselves are not yet included as dream content. The third representation of the lions in The Old Man and the Sea also situates the lions in the territory of dream. Again, Santiago is not actually possessed of/by the lions in dreamtime. He is awake and alone in the Gulf Stream. He has hooked the great fish and begun his great battle with the creature. He has just said to himself, “I’ll kill him though . . . in all his greatness and his glory.” Having spoken (presumably aloud), he contemplates his words: “Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.” From thought he returns again to words, saying, “I told the boy I was a strange old man. . . . Now is when I must prove it.” As Santiago thinks about the implications of the agony, the coming kill, and the “strangeness” he must prove, he wishes he could sleep and could “dream about the lions” (66). Awake he makes a wish that Hemingway carefully locates in the territory of thought. We read, “I wish he’d sleep and I could sleep and dream about the lions, he thought. Why are the lions the main thing that is left? Don’t think, old man, . . . Rest gently now” (66, emphasis added). Talk and thought mediate dream in this touchstone paragraph about the lions. They are not allowed to impinge on his senses, as did the bright white of the beaches or the smell of the land breeze. Santiago does not escape from the boundaries of thought and enter dream territory. He is restricted to the world of language—talk and

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thought. The “wild country,” the “unexploited country,” the geographic space of dreamtime are not yet part of this narrative. The fourth time lions enter the text Santiago is, again, asleep, but something has happened along the boundaries of dreamtime since they were last traced. The old man can now dream of things other than lions. We learn that this time “he did not dream of the lions but instead of a vast school of porpoises. . . . Then he dreamed that he was in the village on his bed. . . . After that he began to dream of the long yellow beach and he saw the first of the lions come down onto it . . . and he was happy” (81). Hemingway situates Santiago in dreamtime at a most propitious moment, for it is from this dreamtime state that he “woke with the jerk of his right fist coming up against his face and the line burning out through his right hand” (82). He is jerked from dreamtime into fight-time with no indication of transition in space or time, without a distinct moment of border crossing. His jerk from one state to another suggests the sudden move into a state of possession. The great actions have begun that will culminate when Santiago, now possessed of divine ashé, thrusts his harpoon “into the fish’s side just behind the great chest fin” and the fish “came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty.” The descriptive language turns ecstatic, epiphanic: “He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash that sent spray over the old man and over all of the skiff ” (94). At issue in the language of this moment is the question: Where does this action take place—in empirical time and space or in a trance-state, in dreamtime? Or, where does the power and luck to land the fish come from? Hemingway works the word “dream” for four pages (92–95) as the old man reflects on the moment when the fish rises into the air. Hemingway’s narrative voice informs us that after the action, sense perception fully engaged, Santiago “could see the fish and he had only to look at his hands and feel his back against the stern to know that this had truly happened and was not a dream” (98). This empirical claim is followed by narration that slides into the old man’s consciousness. In the territory of his mind the event is much more ambiguous. We read: “At one time . . . he thought perhaps it was a dream. Then when he had seen the fish come out of the water and hang motionless in the sky before he fell, he was sure there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it” (98). Hemingway allows Santiago to think carefully about the moment of strangeness, the trance-state, before he concludes, “Now he knew there was the fish and his hands and back were no dream” (98–99).

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The geography of re-membered consciousness is quite complex in these sentences. They also include, intertextually, the first description of the fish breaking from the water. When the territory is mapped what appears are multiple perceptions and participations in a singular event. When the old man is jerked into action while in dreamtime, dreamtime does not cease. His condition parallels that of one possessed by an orisha, in this case Oshun, whose depths he has plumbed with great success. Man, lions, beaches, happiness, fish, skiff, back, and hands are all experientially present as the action unfolds. Therein lies the “great strangeness” of the experience, as well as the “strangeness” of the old man. As the ecstasy of the moment fades, the old man subjects the epiphanic moment to rational scrutiny. It is one thing to perceive the action from the perspective of rational thought; it is quite another to perceive the action from re-membered dreamtime. The geography of mind propounded in this narrative removes true and fast borders between the territory of dream and other territories of the mind, such as memory, sense, experience, and rational thought. The novel ends, literally, with “the lions.” The old man dwells in the territory of sleep. He is dreaming. The world around him is stark and simple (at this moment in time the skeleton of the fish remains, as do tourists who will mislabel it, and the waiter who would explain it; also present are the boy, the bed, the pictures, old newspapers and, perhaps, new ones). The main thing that remains is the dreaming, dreaming about and among the lions. The main thing that remains is a mode of perceiving and being that provides access to life without borders, truly wild territory, undescribed, and hence unlimited, territory where great fish can still hang motionless above a man and a skiff in the vastness of the Great Blue River. What is left are the lions, the dream, the wild territory. But the boy is also left, and for good reason. Santiago’s frequent yearning after the boy makes him a powerful presence in the story, even in his absence, and creates a narrative vacuum designed to pull readers into the boy’s role, become his surrogate presence, and transfer the old man’s way of doing things to themselves as Manolin assumes the mantle of the strange old man and asserts: “I’ll bring the luck with me” (125). I think both we and Santiago can rest assured that he will. He lets Santiago know that he can and will be prepared to follow in his way. He says, joining himself to Santiago with a plural pronoun, “We must get a good killing lance and always have it on board. You can make the blade from a spring leaf from an old Ford. We can grind it in Guanabacoa. It should be sharp and not tempered so it will break” (125). Manolin remains faithful to the old Afro-Cuban ways modeled by Santiago and witnessed by readers one

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and all. The mantel has passed. The old powers that allow one to work luck in the world have moved from one generation to the next. There is still luck, and its name is craft. And the locus of the craft is Africa. It is not accidental that Santiago directs Manolin to Guanabacoa. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley dated 11 October 1949, Hemingway asks him to send him a copy of Margaret Murray’s classic study The Witchcult in Western Europe, noting “there is considerable witchcraft practiced in this neighborhood especially in Guanabacoa. Us old ex-Cheyennes have various things we believe in but as an Indian said to me one time, ‘Long time ago good. Now no good.’”6

Not e s 1. Raul Villarreal, email exchange with the author, 1 July 2008. 2. Philip Melling’s essay provides the first extensive published analysis of Hemingway’s Cuban works to focus on Afro-Cuban religion. His postcolonial, Marxist application approach to the text and its context leads to a very different conclusion than my perspective drawn from the methodologies and theories of historians of religion and anthropologists. In “Hemingway’s Religious Odyssey: The Afro-Cuban Connection in Two Stories and The Old Man and the Sea,” in Hemingway, Cuba and the Cuban Works, ed. Bickford Sylvester and Larry Grimes (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, forthcoming), I provide a close reading of the novella that highlights Hemingway’s reference to and elaboration of avatars and symbols from two very popular Afro-Cuban religions: Santeriá, followers of the Yoruba religion from Nigeria, often called Lukumí by its adherents; and Palo Monte, followers of Congo religion. 3. Using Bantu philosophy as a touchstone for African philosophy, Janheinz Jahn argues that Nommo-force (or ashé) unites to produce magara life, a force that participates in the beginning of every human life, and in that union, “biological life (buzima) and spiritual life (magara) meet in the human being” (107). The magara force continues after bodily death. There is a dynamic relation between the dead and the living that allows each to strengthen the other. My contention is that through his ever-present connection with Oshun (the river orisha), Santiago is able to access again the strength of his lost wife, to reconnect again with the power of the feminine as manifest in the orisha and in his wife. To illustrate the power of the dead among the living, Jahn quotes the voice of Negritude, Leopold Senghor: “I would breathe the scent of our dead, that I might receive their life-giving voices and live (113). For Senghor, as perhaps for Hemingway, the totemic way to magara is through the lion (113). For a further examination of the lion totem see Sunday O. Anozie’s “Negritude, Structuralism, Deconstruction” (106–08). 4. A survey of websites for the Feast Day of the Virgin of Cobre date the celebration on September 8 (e.g., http://www.cubaheritage.org/articles.asp?lID=1&artID=108). The Catholic avatar of the Virgin dominates these sites. However, santos scholar Miguel “Willie” Ramos provides Santeriá/Lukumí (African) references at http://ilarioba.tripod.com/articlesmine/Pantheon.htm and confirms that among Santeriá/Lukumí celebrants the feast day of the Virgin of Cobre corresponds with the pilgrimage to Santiago—September 12. 5. Although I am uncomfortable with a direct correlation of dream and memory, my contribution to this discussion of Hemingway and “memory” lies in the exploration of the liminal

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boundaries between conscious memory, dreamtime, and religious ecstasy. My suggestion here is that the boundary is quite permeable in The Old Man and the Sea, hence my attempt to specify the geography of consciousness as I explore the “place” of the lions in this story. There is also a direct correlation between dream and the ashé of the ancestors in Yoruba (Santeriá/Lukumí) thought. E. Bolaji Idowo says that “the Yoruba believe that the deceased can be seen in dreams and trances, and that they can impart information or explanation, or give instructions, on any matters about which the family is in a serious predicament” (191). 6. Ernest Hemingway, letter to Malcolm Cowley, 11 October 1949, Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.

Wo rk s C i t e d Anozie, Sunday O. “Negritude, Structuralism, Deconstruction.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Routledge, 1984. 106–08. Beegel, Susan. “Santiago and the Eternal Feminine.” Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Ed. Lawrence Broer and Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 131–56. Duerr, Hans Peter. Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Eby, Carl. Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. ———. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. ———. The Old Man and the Sea. 1952. New York: Scribner’s, 1980. Hemingway, Hilary, and Carlene Brennen. Hemingway in Cuba. New York: Rugged Land, 2003. Idowo, E. Bolaji. Olódumaré: God in Yoruba Belief. New York: African Islamic Mission Publications, 1960. Jahn, Janheinz. Muntu: African Culture and the Western World. Trans. Marjorie Greene. 1961. New York: Grove/Weidenfield, 1990. Melling, Philip. “Cultural Imperialism, Afro-Cuban Religion, and Santiago’s Failure in The Old Man and the Sea.” Hemingway Review 26.1 (2006): 7–24. Nodal, Roberto, and Miguel “Willie” Ramos. “Let the Power Flow: ‘Ebo’ as a Healing Mechanism in Lukumí Orisha Worship.” Fragments of Bone. Ed. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2005. 167−86. Sylvester, Bickford. “The Cuban Context of The Old Man and the Sea.” The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 243−68.

PART III

Memory and Place

6 Hemingway and Cultural Geography The Landscape of Logging in “The End of Something” Laura Gruber Godfrey 

I visited Ernest Hemingway’s house outside Ketchum, Idaho, in the fall of 2004. The late-September weather was golden, crisp, perfect—the skies an intense western blue, long ribbons of quaking aspen and cottonwood trees lining the graceful curves of the Big Wood River. On that late-afternoon visit, I watched as a herd of elk grazed quietly in a meadow below Hemingway’s yard next to the river, and to the north the Boulder/White Cloud Mountains glowed brown and violet in the sun. The house itself, now under the care of the Nature Conservancy, has undergone few changes, and so when I peeked through the kitchen window, I knew that the faded, worn curtains I could see were probably chosen by Mary, Hemingway’s fourth wife, and that the kitchen table was one at which he often sat. In Kenneth Lynn’s massive biography, there is a picture of Hemingway in the Ketchum house in the winter of 1959 eating dinner with his cat at the kitchen counter. I glimpsed that same counter through the window. And there I saw the large green door on the south side of the house that marks the entrance to the foyer, where Hemingway used one of his double-barreled 12-gauge shotguns to take his own life on 2 July 1961. It struck me that afternoon that although Hemingway and his wife had long been absent, every detail of the place sang with the history of his life. To the outside observer the house might appear as an increasingly shabby structure on a spectacular piece of property—the slightly sagging deck with its chipped green paint, the forlorn white bench sitting outside the basement door, and

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the splintered, peeling wood on the windowsills make an odd juxtaposition to the stunningly beautiful landscape (and the land itself is surrounded by houses that are, needless to say, more reflective of current Ketchum property values). But to anyone familiar with Hemingway’s life story, each tiny detail on the property carries enormous weight and significance. I found myself taking a ridiculous number of pictures of any image I could catch—a worn patch of grass, a refrigerator visible through a window, a cloud shadow on the Boulder Mountains—bringing these images, like prizes, back to my baffled yet amused American literature students, who had just begun reading In Our Time. Geography and place lie at the heart of Hemingway’s art, as they did in his life; perhaps this fact explains the powerful urge Hemingway scholars and fans have to see the places where he situated and composed that art. Critical discussion of Hemingway’s sense of place is no new enterprise, and what we may call “place-centered” criticism of his work continues to be an active field of discussion. As an author, Hemingway presents again and again his disciplined and exacting aesthetic for landscapes. Susan Beegel reads Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and their “ecological comprehension” of the surrounding landscapes (102), and Terry Tempest Williams calls Hemingway “a powerful mentor, in terms of what it means to create a landscape impressionistically on the page, to make it come alive, pulse, breathe” (11). As these authors point out, many of Hemingway’s geographies do more for his narratives than simply elevate or give depth to the stories; these landscapes are also invested with both aesthetic and cultural meaning. Perhaps one passage that best demonstrates this awareness of the cultural geographies of places comes in the middle of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, where he describes the train of thoughts that come to him while fishing in the Gulf Stream: . . . when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone. (149)

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While the sentiments expressed in the passage might be called a kind of homage to the permanence of nature, or a sort of deep ecological awareness of the timelessness of the natural world, also striking is Hemingway’s interweaving of geography with cycles of both human and natural change. Place here is created from, influenced, and shaped by both natural forces (the flowing stream, the ancient shoreline) and human forces (politics, poverty, martyrdom, cruelty). This kind of awareness of place is a cornerstone of cultural geography. To impart the natural, historical, and cultural meanings of his settings, Hemingway investigates and presents these places on multiple planes, often documenting the changes that have played out there on human and natural levels. His sensitivity to topography and to the nuances of geography and landscape show him, then, to be a cultural geographer in the contemporary sense of the term. Hemingway once remarked that when it comes to art in general, “Unless you have geography, background, you have nothing” (qtd. in McComas 46). In Our Time was originally published by Boni and Liveright in 1925, some fifty years before the humanist renaissance in the field of geography. In connecting Hemingway’s short fiction to this more recent field, however, one can see that his early short fiction engenders its own geographies. This essay documents the ways that one of Hemingway’s early short stories from In Our Time, “The End of Something,” demonstrates his acute spatial awareness in the form of cultural geography. I am not so much interested in Hemingway’s “nature” as in his interweaving of “nature” with “culture.” Cultural geographers are not simply naturalists studying the ecological nuances of a landscape or ecosystem; nor are they merely geologists painting pictures of how the landscape was formed or of the science behind its topography; nor are they political or social scientists studying only the histories and lives of human movements on a given landscape.1 To be a literary artist in the vein of a cultural geographer means that the writer must encompass some mixture of these elements all at once. It involves a kinetic, dynamic presentation of place. Rather than presenting landscape, geography, or topography as fixed or static, Hemingway in “The End of Something” writes of a place that has shifted, is shifting, and will continue to shift due to a variety of forces. Everything about his northern lake setting in this piece is in a state of transition, and the spaces he depicts here have a tangible physicality of their own. Hemingway achieves this sense of force in the narrative by detailing—again, always suggestively— the long-standing cycles of history and change that have taken place on the landscape and within this particular Michigan geography.

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In a number of the stories within the In Our Time collection, logging serves as a driving force behind Hemingway’s fluctuating, potent, and multilayered landscapes and behind the emotional dramas of the characters. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” for example, Hemingway describes a moral struggle about whether to take abandoned logs left by the local mill; and in “Big Two-Hearted River” Nick Adams travels through a burned-out landscape that is a reminder of the “devastating fires that spread repeatedly through the [northern lakes] region” in the early twentieth century, fires ignited from “the great piles of slash waste left on the forest floor after the cut-out-and-get-out” method of the lumber industries there (M. Williams 158). But in “The End of Something” Hemingway evokes a particularly rich and detailed sense of the connection between the dynamic geographies surrounding his characters to the characters’ own emotional geographies. Alfred Kazin once wrote that “no nature writer in all American literature save Thoreau has had Hemingway’s sensitiveness to color, to climate, to the knowledge of the physical energy under heat or cold, that knowledge of the body thinking and moving through a landscape that Edmund Wilson, in another connection, has called Hemingway’s ‘barometric accuracy’” (334). Yet this “barometric accuracy” applies not only to Hemingway’s documentation of human progression through and existence in landscape but also to the cycles of change and flux (not simply natural, organic change) that exist in any landscape, in any geography. “The End of Something” presents just such a multilayered awareness of geography, and so when Kazin writes further that “the landscape of In Our Time had meaning only as the youth [Nick Adams] had learned from it” (328), or when Constance Cappel Montgomery remarks that Hemingway’s settings in this story are used as “background[s] . . . important only in that they give the reader a sense of time and place” (129), I must disagree. In fact, the “background” of Hemingway’s “The End of Something” is really no “background” at all—the geographies of its northern Michigan setting are instead presented as dense with their own histories and changes. “The End of Something” is a breakup story, where the characters Nick Adams and Marjorie find their relationship coming to a quiet, anticlimactic conclusion. Hemingway begins this brief story with a description of Hortons Bay and its atmosphere of abandonment. His fiction, both short stories and novels, often begins with intricate yet deceptively simple descriptions of place— five of the In Our Time stories (not to mention the interchapter vignettes) and seven of the later Men Without Women stories begin with some form of detailed description of topography, place, or geography. Of the opening descriptions in

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“The End of Something,” H. R. Stoneback writes that while some critics find such details “lumbering” and “ponderous,” he “rather like[s] Hemingway’s landscape-opening. At one level, put most simply, ‘The End of Something’ is an elegy for a place” (66). Place, rather than character, frames the narrative. More specifically, Hemingway opens “The End of Something” not only with a description of place but of place as it relates to history, to economics, to local industry; he focuses on the economic, or human, forces that shaped the town’s identity. Hortons Bay saw its prime long ago, and Hemingway anchors us in the present scene by giving us a glimpse of the past. “In the old days,” he begins, “Hortons Bay was a lumbering town” (CSS 79). Each of these ten words has meaning and purpose. Far more complex than a beginning depiction of “place,” here is an entire local economy, landscape, history, and folklore distilled into its most compact form. The description continues: “Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber. The lumber schooners came into the bay and were loaded with the cut of the mill that stood stacked in the yard. All the piles of lumber were carried away. The big mill building had all its machinery that was removable taken out and hoisted on board one of the schooners by the men who had worked in the mill” (79). With such evocatively simple images, Hemingway gives readers the clear sense that more than one “ending” is being documented in the narrative. Before we learn that Nick and Marjorie’s relationship is ending, we are given a dismal picture of the gradual dismantling of the lumber mill—a mill that was once the lifeblood for this entire town. The setting not only serves as a dramatic backdrop for the love conflicts between Nick and Marjorie but also—in its dismantled, “ruined” state—parallels the human drama itself, thereby giving depth to the story. The lumber mill was built and remained active while there were still resources to harvest; Hortons Bay was built up around the lumber mill the way towns are always born around industry, resources, and capital. Once the central industry is removed, though, the town falls apart. The same is true for Nick and Marjorie: our sense is that some “center” that held them together has diminished and then died. This parallel between change in the setting of “The End of Something” and change in its characters is often noted in critical discussions of Hemingway’s early fiction and in discussions of this story in particular. The presence of the abandoned lumber mill has been understood for years as symbolic representation of the decayed, dying status of the relationship between Nick Adams and Marjorie. However, the story’s setting—that embodied presence of this community’s historical past—deserves closer inquiry. From this opening

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narrative frame, the reader comes to understand that Nick and Marjorie are only two members of a broader community that has its own stories, its own folklore, its own important histories; this we know from Hemingway’s opening sentence, written as if he is embarking on the retelling of some myth or legend: “In the old days, Hortons Bay was a lumbering town.” The language of this brief opening frame evokes a sense of cultural geography in its mimicry of the intonations of oral histories.2 The repetitive, soothing incantations of the words themselves resemble some of the oldest patterns within oral traditions, stories passed down from generation to generation that served as the very fabric of local cultures and communities. “The End of Something,” then, maintains its emphasis on the importance of cultural geography not only in content but in sound and form. Hemingway begins his story “in the old days,” in a time almost outside of time. He describes the common condition of the people who populated this long-ago place, noting that “no one who lived in [the town] was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake.” He then shifts, again in keeping with that oral storytelling style, explaining simply, “Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber” (79). The architecture of Hemingway’s sentences and the rhythm of their movement support his emphasis on geography, on place, on local history. While it was once the lumber mill that held this community together, the fabric of the space is, arguably, kept intact now by memories and stories. The language in “The End of Something,” then, suggests long-standing knowledge of and involvement with place and history. Hemingway considered such knowledge of place, history, and geography as one of the most important—indeed, essential—kinds of critical thinking and responsible cultural awareness. He once took Yale instructor Charles Fenton (who was crafting a dissertation on Hemingway’s writing at Oak Park High School as well as on his journalism at the Kansas City Star) to task precisely for his ignorance of cultural geography, or local history. Did anyone in the old days have any right to work on a man’s past and publish findings while the man was alive unless he was running for public office or was a criminal? . . . I don’t know whether you went to Oak Park or just wrote out there. But I do know that the impression you would get from it is quite false. It used to have a North Prairie and a South Prairie. The North Prairie ran from a block beyond your [our] house as far out as the Des Plaines River which then had plenty of pickerel in it up to Wallace Evan’s game

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farm where we used to poach. Where you see an apartment building now there was usually a big old house with a lawn. Where you see subdivisions and row after row of identical houses there used to be gypsy camps in the fall with their wagons and horses. Oak Park had its own artesian water supply and some of us kids used to bring pickerel from the Des Plaines River and put them in the reservoir at night and we watched them grow big for years and never told anybody. We caught goldfish out of the creek and breeding ponds in the game farm and brought them back in minnow buckets and stocked the reservoir to make feed for the pickerel. In the deep water the goldfish all turned silver or silver and black mottled. . . . Any picture you would get of Oak Park now would be false. . . . The point I am trying to make by talking all around it is that when you come into something thirty-five years late, you do not get the true gen. You get Survivors’ gen. You can get statistics and badly remembered memories and much slanted stuff. But it is a long way from the true gen and I do not see what makes it scholarship. (qtd. in M. Hemingway 299) Deeply offended and upset by publicized (or to-be-publicized) interpretations of the geographies of his own life, Hemingway attempted to correct Fenton’s misunderstanding of Oak Park as place. He does so by creating for Fenton a miniature cultural geography that cites the varying forces that made Oak Park, Illinois, what it once was—the social forces, the natural forces, the economic development. To make this place more “real” for Fenton, Hemingway populates Oak Park with specific names, explanations for now-altered landscapes, localized traditions, childhood rituals, and memories. But here he also emphasizes the way Fenton’s mind and eye would be fooled into great misunderstanding by looking at Oak Park as it would have appeared to him, an outsider to this cultural geography, an observer who would be entirely ignorant of any personal or local history or meaning. The point to take away from this letter is that, for Hemingway, memory of place—its history, its cycles of growth, expansion, development, change—has as much to do with a landscape’s meaning as do the landscape’s actual physical features. Hemingway’s exacting aesthetic for writing place moves beyond a faithful mimesis of what the eye can see, attempting also to capture the aesthetics of memory. Memory as the key component to a full knowledge of place plays an important role in “The End of Something,” and the memories of the local landscape are kept alive through stories and retellings. Turning from a broad

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commercial picture of this landscape’s decline, Hemingway moves into a dramatic enactment of the economic forces that drove the lumber mill out of business and desolated the local geography. In a sense, he “remembers” this history aloud for his readers, recalling the time when the local lumber mill fell apart and its lumber and machinery were taken away. The lumber schooners came into the bay and were loaded with the cut of the mill that stood stacked in the yard. All the piles of lumber were carried away. The big mill building had all its machinery that was removable taken out and hoisted on board one of the schooners by the men who had worked in the mill. The schooner moved out of the bay toward the open lake carrying the two great saws, the traveling carriage that hurled the logs against the revolving, circular saws and all the rollers, wheels, belts and iron piled on a hull-deep load of lumber. Its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town. (79) While this mill and its machinery once were the driving force behind the economy, landscape, and livelihoods of the area, its pieces are now “covered with canvas and lashed tight,” rendered powerless. It is not clear where the schooner is headed; it is simply moving “out into the open lake.” Hemingway thus emphasizes the human (economic) forces that have shaped the geography of Hortons Bay, stressing the mill’s influence not only on the local natural landscape but also its impact on the entire town structure. But there can be no complete remembrance of this local history without including people from the past or the places they once inhabited. Hemingway seems to recognize this need as he shifts gradually into describing another “layer” of the cultural geography of this place: the town itself. “The one-story bunk houses,” he writes, “the eating-house, the company store, the mill offices, and the big mill itself stood deserted in the acres of sawdust that covered the swampy meadow by the shore of the bay” (79). Again, the local landscape has been undeniably altered by the human economic forces exerted on it—as is true for many of the topographies described in Hemingway’s fiction. Here is a veritable ghost town resting on a bed of sawdust, the sawdust itself a remnant of the trees that once blanketed the area and that were processed by the mill. We gain a clear image of the cycles of change that have taken place in Hortons Bay, almost as if watching time-lapse photography: the geography morphed from a

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landscape blanketed with deep forest, to a thriving, booming town and lumber mill, to a deserted ghost town where most of the first-generation timber has been removed and the people are either merely scraping by or have moved away. The visuals of the human and economic forces shift again at the close of this brief passage, focusing instead on the purely “natural” elements of landscape: the “swampy meadow” and the “shore of the bay.” In this brief, seemingly simple opening to the story, Hemingway has managed to present a distilled version of the long history of this one small cross-section of landscape—a cultural, economic, and natural history all in one. The landscape of this story as presented by Hemingway is alive with history and with stories from the past. Like the humanist geographers of the later twentieth century, Hemingway also shows his readers in “The End of Something” that culture and geography are interrelated constructions rather than separate or discreet entities. Understanding the history of the timber industry in the northern lakes region of the United States illuminates the ways that his fiction accurately depicts the artificiality, or constructedness, of the landscape left behind by the logging culture there. The landscape in “The End of Something” is a geography made by logging; here is not a depiction of “nature” but rather of what happens when “nature” and “culture” collide. Such “collisions”—between forest and logger, between the landscape and its human inhabitants—make up the very fabric of the local histories of this area. Logging was an industry that created its own landscape, never more so than with the nineteenth-century rise of commercial, industrial-scale logging in the United States: “The new scale and form of logging was a response to the increasing demand for lumber from a growing population and an increasingly industrialized economy and society. From a mere 0.5 billion board feet cut in 1801, the amount of lumber cut rose to 1.6 billion board feet in 1839, and the rate of cutting quickened at each successive decade to form a new and upward sloping curve which reached 8 billion board feet in 1859, 20 billion in 1880 and a peak of 46 billion board feet in 1904, an amount never reached since” (M. Williams 152). Hard as it is for us to conceive, portions of the northern lake geography of Michigan that Hemingway documents in his 1925 collection of fiction would have seemed to him, as a boy there each summer, in some ways like a geography abandoned: by the early twentieth century much of the forest there had been harvested, cleared, and hauled away. As Frederic Svoboda notes, “The young Hemingway hunted and fished in Michigan, but he really did not know a Michigan wilderness. That was long gone by the time he came there” (16). One of the only ways for Hemingway to keep the memories and stories of the area alive would be to accurately record these histories in his fiction.

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For Hemingway, an accurate and honest depiction of these geographical spaces is one that includes stories suggesting the great changes wrought by the local logging industry. Logging—as a livelihood, as a culture, and as an industry—worked itself into the cultural context of this landscape, altering the lives, the vocations, and the natural environments of the locals. As an industry it could do so swiftly and relentlessly. Michael Williams further describes the quick ruthlessness of this boom-and-bust, resource-based economy when he notes that“the landscape of commercial logging reached its characteristic form and epitome in the Lake States where the assiduous application of new inventions, with the addition of steam skidders, ice roads, and logging railroads, enabled exploitation to proceed efficiently and ruthlessly. The logging landscape had two faces: there was the landscape of the processes of exploitation and the landscape of depletion” (156). The methods employed by the burgeoning lumber industry in this region were particularly harsh; by the time timber companies established themselves in the Pacific Northwest in the later decades of the twentieth century, a somewhat more careful harvesting process was in place, and Williams points out that while “cutting had been careless” in the northern lakes region, “on the whole, there was far less cutover land in the Northwest than in any other region” (158, 161). Still, it is safe to assume that Hemingway himself would have been very familiar with the appearance of “cutover” land. Beegel notes that these “cutovers,” or clearcuts, amounted to a “wasteful assault on the Michigan forests” (84), and goes on to explain that memories of these ecological “wounds” exist throughout much of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories: “Those wounds are everywhere . . . in the burned-over terrain of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ . . . in the abandoned mill town of Hortons Bay in ‘The End of Something,’ and in the clearcuts of Hemingway’s final, posthumously published Nick Adams story, the aborted novel ‘The Last Good Country’. . . . ‘Fathers and Sons,’ and the reduction of its hemlock forest to ‘open, hot, shadeless, weed-grown slashing,’ are [also] a vital part of this lineage” (85). Although his family’s vacation home, Windemere on Walloon Lake, was itself the embodiment of a pastoral escape, much of the geographical subtext in “The End of Something” hints that some of the nearby landscapes are in the process of recovery from the impact of logging: “There was nothing of the mill left except the broken white limestone of its foundations showing through the swampy second growth as Nick and Marjorie rowed along the shore” (79). And while the second-growth timber—forming a dense, dark border along the lakeshore—serves as partial reminder of this altered landscape, we can assume that other areas would have been “strewn with debris and mas-

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sive stumps, often cut many feet above the ground. . . . [Often] the cutovers were (and still are in places) dotted with unpainted and sagging farmhouse structures. . . . In the deserted fields occasionally one still sees a lilac bush or a heaped-up pile of stones where a chimney once stood, both markers of an abandoned homestead, the whole scene a mute and melancholy testimony to abandoned hopes” (M. Williams 158–59). Hemingway’s deep cultural awareness of this local geography is present in the following dialogue between Marjorie and Nick: “There’s our old ruin, Nick,” Marjorie said. Nick, rowing, looked at the white stone in the green trees. “There it is,” he said. “Can you remember when it was a mill?” Marjorie asked. “I can just remember,” Nick said. “It seems more like a castle,” Marjorie said. (79) The force and speed with which the logging industry cleared and then abandoned these landscapes gives that industry’s former presence an almost mythical quality. For Nick and Marjorie, “the old days” seem more legend than reality, a legend of a time when the local landscape thrived with activity and prosperity and trees seemed in boundless supply. There are layers of cultural meaning attached to this geography as humans, their lives, and their economies interact with it; in this sense, the natural world, for Hemingway, is never simply “nature” untouched and pristine. The “natural world” and its geographies are, instead, spaces either altered or being altered, filled with reminders of cultural history. In Hemingway’s fictional world, the categories “nature” and “culture” are equally influenced by one another, and this mutual alteration is communicated through the weight of geographical detail. Elaine Scarry discusses a similar “weight” of aesthetic detail in Thomas Hardy’s novels when she notes that “thus [the human body] is . . . forever rubbing up against and leaving traces of itself . . . on the world, as the world is forever rubbing up against and leaving traces of itself . . . on the human creature. . . . Fleeting gestures become materials with shape, weight, and color. . . . A patch of paint or blood is a patch of history” (50–51). In “The End of Something,” Hemingway’s geographical portraits suggest that same sense of “mutual alteration” between nature and cultural forces. As Marjorie and Nick sit by the fire on the shore of the lake, Hemingway reasserts that “in back of them was the close second-growth timber of the point and in front was the bay with the mouth of Hortons Creek” (81). The existence of

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the second-growth timber here evokes that history full of “shape, weight, and color.” The ruins of the mill and the recovering forest both are “patches of history.” Hemingway constructs a changing, altered geography in the narrative, a careful combination of the cultural and natural elements of topography and a suggestive depiction of the long cycles of change, history, and industry that have taken place here. The abandoned mill’s presence in Hemingway’s fictional landscape, then, is more than the presence of a ruin. From their brief exchange of dialogue, Nick and Marjorie show their long-standing awareness of the evolution of this community’s geography: Nick can just remember the time when the mill was part of the local economy, and each time he glimpses it he can feel for himself the many layers of history, culture, and change that have occurred within this community. He is reminded of the decline of the smaller logging operations in northern Michigan, of the fact that a once-bustling and prominent town is no longer so bustling, and in the forests that surround him he sees the remaining impact of the logging in the form of the second-growth timber. This understanding of the place gives him a deeper sense of what it means to live here as well as a deeper understanding of his own relationships. Beyond chronicling the observations of a naturalist or escapist adventures in the woods, “The End of Something” demonstrates the careful interweaving of human characters with their communities and their landscapes and serves as an evocative portrayal of how the local logging industry influenced the history and emotion of one American geography. In the discussion of cultural geography, too little attention has been paid to literary artists—artists who were entirely separate from the fields of geography or cultural geography but who played important roles in the developing emphasis on the “constructedness” of space and place. In terms of critical discourse on Hemingway’s fictional geographies, emphasizing his awareness of geography as multilayered, kinetic, and constructed broadens the discussions of his spaces and places beyond the old critical binaries of “nature to be conquered” or “nature as escape,” whether that escape be from war or women. In an interview with Harvey Breit in 1954, Hemingway commented that “what a writer must try to do is to write as truly as he can . . . to make something which will be so written that it will become a part of the experience of those who read him” (Bruccoli 77). In his writing he attempted to create pictures of landscape reminiscent of the beauty and simplicity of Cézanne, but his writing was also an attempt to pass along the histories, memories, and emotional fabrics of the varying communities he observed and of which he was part.

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Not e s 1. As a field, cultural geography “concentrates upon the ways in which space, place, and the environment participate in an unfolding dialogue of meaning” (Shurmer-Smith 3). The humanist geographers of the 1970s began this dialogue as a reaction against more positivist midcentury geographers like Carl Sauer, for whom culture—and, by relation, “place”—was a monolithic concept treated as an entity that individuals merely “participate in” or “flesh out” (Jackson 18). Such reification “severely limits the questions that may be asked” about culture as construction and removes the agency almost entirely from the human (Jackson 18). Rather than viewing “culture,” “geography,” and “place” as separate, autonomous absolutes, the humanist geographers of the 1970s believed that these concepts were entities created by different societies. These geographers, perhaps most famously Yi-Fu Tuan in his 1977 work Space and Place, reacted against purely scientific and economic readings of geography and space, creating theories that often articulated space and place according to more emotional and personal characteristics. For humanist geographers like Tuan, space becomes place only by our interaction with and understanding of it: place (like culture) becomes a construct of perspective rather than an independent factual entity. Gillian Rose, in her 1993 work Feminism and Geography, argues against defining place as bounded or safe or as an environment for total belonging or as an enclosed or separate space, arguing instead for a more chaotic, kinetic, honest depiction of place. Similarly, Doreen Massey also theorizes place as ever-changing, always in flux, as unfixed as the social and economic and gender relations that exist within it. Thus, there is always—and has always been—a fluid quality to the identity of places, simply because the people in places are always changing and moving. Both Rose and Massey consistently highlight the constructedness of space and landscape, arguing that “space itself—and landscape and place likewise—far from being firm foundations for disciplinary expertise and power, are insecure, precarious and fluctuating” (qtd. in Ekinsmyth 64, emphasis added). 2. Stories rooted in an oral tradition contain characteristics, or “markers,” of their own both in terms of form and content. Formal characteristics include repetitions and word patterns at openings of sentences, as evident in this creation story recorded in the early twentieth century from the Pima tribe of the American Southwest: “And the moon he made in the same way and tried in the same places. . . . But when he made the stars he took the water in his mouth. . . . And now for a time the people increased till they filled the earth. . . . But Juhwertamahkai [the Pima culture’s original human in their creation story] did not like the way his people acted” (Thin Leather 23). Formal parallels between orally rooted creation stories such as this and “The End of Something” include the cadences as well as the openings to the sentences. Listening to Hemingway’s words read aloud evokes a similar sense of oral patterns and tones and underscores the parallel content: “In the old days,” “No one who lived in it,” “Then one year,” “Ten years later” are all opening “markers” eliciting the sense that Hemingway is embarking on a story rooted in his community’s own unique oral tradition, that he is about to tell a story that binds that community together with a common history.

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Wo rk s C i t e d Beegel, Susan F. “Second Growth: The Ecology of Loss in ‘Fathers and Sons.’” In New Essays on Hemingway’s Short Fiction. Ed. Paul Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 75–110. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986. Ekinsmyth, Carol. “Feminist Cultural Geography.” In Shurmer-Smith. 53–65. Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ———. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. Hemingway, Mary Welsh. How It Was. New York: Knopf, 1976. Jackson, Peter. Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin, 1989. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1994. McComas, Dix. “The Geography of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Out of Season.’” Hemingway Review 3.2 (1984): 46–49. Montgomery, Constance Cappel. Hemingway in Michigan. New York: Fleet, 1966. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Scarry, Elaine. Resisting Representation. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Shurmer-Smith, Pamela, ed. Doing Cultural Geography. London: Sage, 2002. Stoneback, H. R. “‘Nothing Was Ever Lost’: Another Look at ‘That Marge Business.’” In Svoboda and Waldmeir. 59–76. Svoboda, Frederic J. “False Wilderness: Northern Michigan as Created in the Nick Adams Stories.” In Svoboda and Waldmeir. 15–22. Svoboda, Frederic J., and Joseph J. Waldmeir, eds. Hemingway: Up in Michigan Perspectives. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1995. Thin Leather. “The Story of the Creation.” Recorded by J. W. Lloyd. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Sixth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2003. 21–24. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977. Williams, Michael. “The Clearing of the Forests.” In The Making of the American Landscape. Ed. Michael P. Conzen. New York: Routledge, 1990. 146–68. Williams, Terry Tempest. “Hemingway and the Natural World: Keynote Address, Seventh International Hemingway Conference.” In Hemingway and the Natural World. Ed. Robert E. Fleming. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 1999. 7–17.

7 Expatriate Lifestyle as Tourist Destination The Sun Also Rises and Experiential Travelogues of the Twenties Allyson Nadia Field 

Ernest cared far less than I about aesthetics. What he cared about was the action and the emotional body of the traveler. He was a born traveler as he was a born novelist. —Janet Flanner, in Hemingway’s Paris What was the value of travel if it were not this—to discover all romance is not bound between the covers of novels? —Robert F. Wilson, Paris on Parade

When The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously dubbed Ernest Hemingway’s novel “a romance and a guidebook” (Aldridge 123). The novel was celebrated as a roman à clef that depicted an actual segment of Parisian expatriate society. By the time Hemingway began The Sun Also Rises, he was already a fixture in the Parisian expatriate literary community and had garnered mention in Robert Forrest Wilson’s 1924 guidebook Paris on Parade. Hemingway was reputedly disdainful of tourists, yet the novel’s repetition of place names is organized into itineraries similar to those of travel guides contemporaneous to the novel. While not explicitly a guidebook, The Sun Also Rises can be considered part of the tradition of travelogues such as Pages from the Book of Paris, Paris with the Lid Lifted, How to Be Happy in Paris (without being ruined), and Paris on Parade that offer experiential guides to a lifestyle 83

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rather than monuments or museums. With Jake Barnes’s emphasis on his environment and recurrent references to the streets, bars, and cafés frequented by his expatriate companions, Hemingway contributes to a body of travel literature describing the places that constitute the geography of the infamous expatriate lifestyle. While A Moveable Feast presents a Paris of memory and nostalgia for Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises is a fictionalized depiction of the Left Bank that should be read against the contemporaneous travelogues promoting the quartier as a stylish destination. The expatriate artist lifestyle becomes a tourist experience as Hemingway depicts the fictional movements in The Sun Also Rises as experiential travelogue.1 In Paris on Parade, published in 1924, Robert Forrest Wilson presents a guidebook to Paris in the form of an exposé of the lifestyle of Americans who constitute a significant presence in the city: “only ten thousand of us; but, my, what a noise we make! How important we are to Paris!” (274).2 Wilson is uninterested in promoting an authentic French experience. Instead, he guides his reader through the “American village” in the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse on Paris’s Left Bank. He writes, “Gay Paree, indeed, can scarcely be regarded as a French institution at all. It is a polyglot thing existing upon French tolerance, the gaiety being contributed largely by the guests” (279). The legend of “Gay Paree”—drinking, dancing, and other behavior unencumbered by puritan values—lured tourists who were more enamored with the lifestyle on display than with the monuments speckling the city. Wilson devotes a chapter to the newly extended Latin Quarter (reaching to Montparnasse), an area “that has emerged from the war, a Parisian district which (so far as its American citizenry is concerned) has for its focus, community center, club and town-hall the Café du Dôme” (194). He explains that the area is defined by the “American influence” of its large expatriate artist community (196): “The new Latin Quarter is completely centralized around one spot—the corner of the Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse. Here stand the Café du Dôme and the Café Rotonde; and you can no more know the present Latin Quarter without knowing these two cafés than you can know an Ohio county-seat without knowing its public square and court-house. They are half its life” (209–10). The expatriates, he explains, frequent only a few of the area cafés: “At the Raspail-Montparnasse corner on a summer evening, for instance, those two chief artists’ cafés of the new Quarter, the Dôme and the Rotonde, will be jammed to the last chair inside and out, with dozens standing on the sidewalks waiting for places” (206). This is a Paris created by its American inhabitants and defined by main boulevards, particular cafés, and the mores

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of the expatriates. The result is a cosmopolitan American city unhindered by the restrictions of Prohibition. Wilson encourages his readers to seek out “one of the last few genuine American barrooms remaining on earth” (113). Writing to an American audience, he acknowledges that in Paris “Prohibition is three thousand miles away,” yet “these law-abiding pages will afford no clue to the location of this exiled place beyond assertions that it is in plain sight from the entrance to Ciro’s restaurant and that its owner’s name is Harry” (113–14).3 Wilson points to Harry’s Bar but guides his reader to engage in “a Parisian thing,” to order aperitifs at a café off the tourist path (114).4 After all, as the Gallic proverb professes, “the French cock is a wine-drinking cock” (168). Wilson’s guide to Left Bank lifestyle was one of many such volumes published in the twenties purporting to provide the reader an insider’s view of Gay Paree. In 1927 Bruce Reynolds published a travel guide to Paris that he promoted as a “Travel Cocktail” that would guide the reader to the “frolic” of “those raging, rousing, rapturous Nights in Peppy Paree.” In Paris with the Lid Lifted, Reynolds forgoes the tour book synopses of the city’s museums, cathedrals, and historic sites and writes a “joy-ride” covering bars, dance halls, restaurants, race tracks, balls, and “the naughty places” accompanied with pen-and-ink illustrations of gentlemen in top hats leering through monocles at scantily dressed flappers (4). Reynolds’s book is a guide to experience as destination; he outlines the steps the reader must follow to partake in the lifestyle specific to expatriate Paris and promises that his reader will be “richer in memory and experience” even if poorer in funds (224). After imploring the reader to forget about a budget vacation, the introduction ends with the enticement, “If you are one of us—come along. But remember, this trip is not for Goody-goods, or crepe-hangers, or hard-shells, or nose-tossers. This will be a chummy, clubby party. Very, very select. We must all understand each other; all be great friends and all enter into the spirit of the party, with a snap. We must be alert, a-sparkle, a-tingle, alive” (7).5 Reynolds’s guide includes timetables that cover every aspect of the tourist’s fifteen-day visit. Each element in the timetable is cross-referenced with an entry in the guidebook elaborating on the listed café, outing, or licentious behavior. These schedules reveal a penchant for the expatriate itinerary, leading the traveler to haunts such as Harry’s Bar, The Ritz, Zelli’s, and the New York Times office. Reynolds’s guide is ironic and tongue-in-cheek, complete with “alibis for the wife, if you couldn’t leave her at home,” and a list of hangover cures for fifteen days of binging (cures include “castor oil” such as the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, and Notre-Dame de Paris because, after all, “‘nice’ places do

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exist in Paris”). He concludes with a French-English glossary for terms useful when dealing with tailors and chauffeurs or when in the pursuit of young French women (228). Like Reynolds, Wilson mentions the monumental sights of Paris only in the last chapter of his guide, which is reserved for the “gentle tourist”: “Though the patient reader of these pages may long since have despaired of finding any reference to them, there are, after all, sights to be seen in Paris” (336). Dispensing with iconic monuments as mere footnotes to the main attraction, these guidebooks serve as guides to the party lifestyle of the expatriate community. Though humorous, they are also detailed and resonant with other guides as well as Hemingway’s depictions of the same environment in A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. In Paris on Parade Wilson reserves a chapter for “the bookshop crowd,” referring to the writers and literary enthusiasts who frequented Sylvia Beach’s famous Shakespeare & Company. Wilson identifies James Joyce as the “supreme modern master of English” in the eyes of the bookshop crowd, but he mentions “the outstanding personages of this interlocking directorate of the Continental advance movement in English letters” and names Robert McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, Bill Bird, George Antheil, Ezra Pound, and Hemingway (244).6 A favorite subject of Wilson’s guide, Hemingway reputedly “mingles democratically with the artist-writer crowd at the Café du Dôme” (248). Wilson writes of the up-and-coming young writer: “Mr. Bird has published a book by Ernest Hemingway and so has Mr. McAlmon. This fact and the further one that he is intimate with the bookshop circle seem to mark Mr. Hemingway for Young Intellectualism’s own, but there are indications that his sojourn is to be only temporary. In other words, his work promises to remove him from the threehundred-copy class of authorship. . . . He has recently finished a novel which is said to break new ground” (248). This novel was not The Sun Also Rises, the first draft of which was written between July and September 1925 and published in October 1926.7 Wilson is most likely referring to the thirty-page-long in our time, completed in May 1923 and published in Paris by Bill Bird in April 1924 (Brenner 731–33). However, Hemingway fulfilled Wilson’s prophecy with the publication of The Sun Also Rises, a novel that depicts travel as a permanent state of its expatriate protagonists. Hemingway’s novel, with Jake’s detailed itineraries, is indebted to the travelogues that represent the lifestyle of the “dilettantish Americans” that Hemingway held in contempt (Lynn 160).8 Yet the culture of drinking that Hemingway portrays in The Sun Also Rises is mirrored in the guidebooks, and the travelogues are strikingly resonant with Jake’s repeated itineraries and ref-

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erences to the lifestyle of the expatriate community, including the importance of cafés and bars such as the Dôme, Select, Closerie des lilas, Deux-Magots, Zelli’s, Café Napolitain, The Crillon, and The Ritz.9 The sequencing of items on the travelogue itineraries reads like a schedule of visits that have a specific order and timeline, a continuous chronology that demands discipline to be followed (Atherton 205). For Jake the former war pilot and Hemingway the former ambulance driver, the dividing of the day into spatially oriented tasks may be instinctual. Likewise, their shared discipline of journalism might serve as an organizational frame where experience is fit into delineated structured text—within a deadline. Yet this way of organizing time is also a product of the tour guide function that both Jake and Hemingway share (Atherton 201). John Aldridge writes that the expatriate writers of the twenties were like “proxy writers” whose work depicted the lifestyle they enjoyed that was inimitable in America (110). The belief in “the interdependence of art and experience” that Aldridge finds as a defining characteristic of Hemingway and his expatriate writer colleagues points to the importance of experience as literary trope that is highlighted by Jake’s experiential recounting of daily routine (111). Aldridge’s synopsis of the mythic legacy left by the writers of the twenties sounds like the touristic myth of Paris itself: “our view of the literary life of the twenties is a complex mixture of myth and reality, of reality fantasized into myth and myth personified to the point where it seems like something we ourselves experienced” (112). He credits Hemingway with mythologizing his experience while still in the midst of it (113). Yet the experience he depicts had already been mythologized by the travelogues. Tourism created the myth, but it was fed by its reiteration in fiction and legend; the emphasis of that generation on their own experiences, specifically of youth, created repeated literary explorations of the rite de passage (Aldridge 118). Hemingway literalizes rites of passage with Jake, who wanders through Paris delineating points on an itinerary marking sites of experience, a geography of memory. In chapter 4, after leaving Brett with the Count, Jake describes his walk home: “I went out onto the sidewalk and walked down toward the Boulevard St. Michel, passed the tables of the Rotonde, still crowded, looked across the street at the Dome, its tables running out to the edge of the pavement” (SAR 37). His path is defined by the cafés that line the boulevard and the activity still going on within them. In the morning, marked by the start of chapter 5, Jake describes walking to work and passing tourists engrossed in street performances. In contrast to the stationary tourists, Jake is among the crowds of people going to work and,

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implicitly aligning himself with the bustling Parisians, remarks, “It felt pleasant to be going to work” (43). Jake’s methodological recounting of street names, cafés, and quartiers underscores his status as an étranger, albeit comfortably cosmopolitan in his “home town” of Paris, and he distinguishes himself from the tourists he passes (Griffin 173). Jake’s walk to work recalls Claude Washburn’s 1910 personal memoir guidebook, Pages from the Book of Paris, in which he juxtaposes “Americans with guide-books,” who serve to “heighten one’s sense of the city’s emptiness,” with the working Parisians sequestered in their bureaux (159). Yet for all of his specificity, Jake’s Paris is not Hemingway’s Paris. Hemingway constructs another Paris distilled from his own experience. Hemingway’s Paris is an amalgam of brand names recognizable by their accents and familiarity (Café Select, Café Napolitain, Montparnasse, The Ritz). In this respect, it shares with the guides the implicit assertion that such names are code for certain social mores. It also reflects the fictional style of Hemingway as “not a realistic reflection of a world but the literal manufacture of a world, piece by piece, out of the most meticulously chosen and crafted materials” (Aldridge 123). Hemingway manufactures an environment for his characters based on actual places, but they become mere points on a decontextualized itinerary, a guidebook Paris without an overview map.10 While describing an itinerary through the city, Jake takes on the tone of a travelogue: “The Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding” (48). He also reflects the prejudices of the travel writers for certain cafés: “The taxi stopped in front of the Rotonde. No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they will always take you to the Rotonde” (49). Jake walks “past the sad tables of the Rotonde” and chooses the Select (49). In his guide to Paris, Wilson notes that the Rotonde (identified as a Russo-Scandinavian haunt) is a large, well-lit café with orchestra and nightly dancing and is “more pretentious in every way” than the Dôme, but it is a newer café “and the American Quarterites will have little to do with it” (210–11). Hemingway does not explain the Rotonde’s stigma, but Jake’s action is in keeping with Wilson’s prognosis. In his 1927 How to Be Happy in Paris (without being ruined), John Chancellor also notes that the American residents of the Latin Quarter frequent the Select or the Dôme rather than the Rotonde (161). As does Chancellor, Wilson identifies the Dôme as the locus of “America’s literary and artistic world” (215) and dedicates an entire chapter to “Domites”: “Accordingly if you are a Domite, a permanent resident, you can sit on that Parisian terrace and keep in touch with things at home. And on those great evenings, when some old acquaintance has shown up and is telling you about

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mutual friends, you forget that you are in a foreign city at all; you forget the thousand leagues of Atlantic water; and, with the murmur of English speech reaching your ears from the terrace, the Dôme itself seems only some eastern projection of your own land” (216). In Paris with the Lid Lifted, Reynolds writes that the habitués of the Dôme will disappoint the tourist looking for authentic starving artists: “they don’t look particularly starved or poetic or painter-ish, as you have pictured the romantic, thrilling Latin Quarter-ite to look” (204). He then nods across the street to the Rotonde, as Jake does, and notes that there are “some but not as many nuts” and that the more favored Select is “At its best, about 5 a.m. The haven of tired ‘street walkers’ and American gluttons for more” (204–5). The exclusivity implied by Reynold’s introductory invitation “if you are one of us—come along” is mirrored by Brett’s repeated assessment of who is “one of us” (40). The clublike aspect of Jake’s circle is defined by attitude and lifestyle and marks the distinction between figures like the Count and Robert Cohn. The appeal to inclusion in this insider’s Paris is a standard trope of travel literature that proposes to its reader a key to the city’s hottest bars, restaurants, and nightlife. The travelogues that appeared at the time of Hemingway’s tenure in Paris are no different; they guide their readers through the Paris enjoyed by Jake, Brett, and their fellow “club” members. Yet, at the same time, the novel does more than fictionalize a moment in Paris’s social history. With The Sun Also Rises Hemingway contributes to the body of travel literature that offers an insider’s perspective on the lifestyle of the self-exiled writers, artists, and bon vivants that made 1920s Paris legendary while at the same time mythologizing the moment. Writing on Hemingway in Paris, Carlos Baker explains: “One trouble was that tourists in the Latin Quarter, gazing raptly into the Rotonde in search of atmosphere, naturally supposed that what they saw were real Parisian artists” (6). Baker notes that Hemingway was put off by the “congregation of poseurs” milling idly at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail (6).11 Yet the cafés of the area, the Select, Rotonde, and the Dôme, feature prominently in Hemingway’s novel. While Hemingway might not have been one of the “barflyblown bohemians” that Baker distinguishes from the serious artists working on the Left Bank, he collapses the distinction between the authentic and the imitative in his fictionalizing of expatriate lifestyle in The Sun Also Rises (29). Baker portrays a divided Left Bank, one of true artists and “poseurs.” Yet this distinction is curiously absent from Hemingway’s novel. Biographers

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such as Baker and Griffin point to Hemingway’s concern over authenticity; his desire to portray the real underscores the impact of the frequent compliment Hemingway received from fellow writers, such as Fitzgerald, who famously asserted that Hemingway is “the real thing” (Kuehl and Bryer 78). He does little to defend the authenticity of his characters and, if anything, implies that the literary skills of Cohn, for example, are less than brilliant. Charles Fenton remarked that Hemingway’s familiarity with Europe gave “authenticity of atmosphere” to his early works. Yet his characters are concerned with a different authenticity, one that rewrites the aristocratic adage of People Like Us into the clubish moniker “one of us.” Another area in which Hemingway expresses a concern for authenticity is in the appreciation of bullfighting. In his discussion of the first manuscript of The Sun Also Rises, William Balassi notes that the character of Jake, identified in the manuscript as “Hem,” is conflicted between the world of expatriate Paris and afición, the passionate following of bullfighting (35). Balassi writes that “Hem’s emotions are complicated by sexuality, drunkenness, and contradictory rules of behavior, which cause him to doubt whether he truly has afición. Perhaps he is, after all, more like the other expatriates than he would like to admit” (35). To be an aficionado is perhaps a displaced concern for the authenticity of expatriate artists, but in the Paris segments of The Sun Also Rises Hemingway chronicles a lifestyle that could read like a page from Reynolds’s tourist timetable. Baker notes that perhaps the reader familiar with Paris might feel a “happy shock of recognition” on reading the names of cafés and streets of the Left Bank, yet the uninitiated reader may find tedious such excessive detail and critiques Hemingway’s emphasis on particular sites in Jake’s itineraries: “It is hard to discover . . . what purpose beyond the establishment of the sense of place is served by Barnes’s complete itinerary of his walk with Bill Gorton through the streets of Paris. . . . The walk fills only two pages. Yet is seems much longer and does not further the action appreciably except to provide Jake and Bill with healthy after-dinner exercise” (52). Without a hypothesis of the itinerary’s role in the novel, Baker concedes, “Still, this is the way it was at that time in Paris” (52). Verisimilitude alone seems to be purpose enough for Baker, the search for the authentic a suitable goal for the writer, what he characterizes as “Hemingway’s nearly absolute devotion to what is true” (64). The novel is also a guidebook to the ritual of the writer’s life. In the first chapter of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes his writing ritual as one linked to routine. When the weather was cold, he would need to buy wood; but if the chimney would not draw, he would walk to a favorite café along a particular

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route: “I walked down past the Lycée Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-Étienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St.-Michel and worked on down it past the Cluny and the Boulevard St.-Germain until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St.-Michel” (AMF 4–5). As a writer struggling to be productive, Hemingway challenges himself to “write the truest sentence that you know,” and Hemingway’s efforts to record the truth also led to the novel’s popularity as a succès de scandale (AMF 12). The titillation of loosely masked real Left Bank personalities served as de facto promotion for the novel. Baker notes that those who frequented the cafés mentioned in the books “were alleged to own a key which would admit the bearer to the ‘real’ identities of the fictional people” (78). Beyond verisimilitude, Hemingway’s itineraries function as guides to the lifestyle of his “club,” complete with particular streets, cafés, bars, and people. Yet by the time Hemingway was writing The Sun Also Rises, the same names had become synonymous with the expatriate artist lifestyle, the places known and laden with reputations reported in travelogues such as Paris with the Lid Lifted and Paris on Parade. In Claude Washburn’s 1910 Pages from the Book of Paris, he writes himself into French literary history as a witness to the most famous cab ride in French literature, from Rouen to Paris. In the long vista a fiacre [horse-drawn carriage], still far away, appeared somehow taller and more shadowy than the others; as it approached it resolved itself into one like the rest, but the hood of which had been raised. Within were a couple exchanging the most frantic kisses I had yet remarked, and with such desperate rapidity that one thrilled at the thought of the number they would have achieved by the time they reached the Place de l’Étoile. I lay back on my cushions and laughed and laughed. For do you think they had raised the hood in an attempt at concealment? . . . Not only does it disguise nothing, but the fact of its being up in fine weather is the signal for a close and curious inspection by all within range. No, this superlatively amorous pair had raised it in the pretense that they believed they were doing something wrong, and did not want to be seen; in the effort to realize the intoxicating impression of secret sin.12 (185–86) Washburn’s fiacre scene, Reynolds’s itineraries, and Hemingway’s street-bystreet accounts of Jake’s promenades recall Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in which

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Emma Bovary takes to the streets of Rouen in order to fulfill her libidinal desires with Léon.13 On leaving the cathedral that was the point of their rendezvous, Léon engages a fiacre to provide shelter for the lovers. Hesitant, she resists, and Léon appeals to her urbane affectations, “It’s done in Paris!” The narrator uncovers Emma’s failing resistance, “And that word, with its unassailable logic, decided her” (Flaubert 255). Paris and its urbanity are excuses for transgression, and the streets of Rouen provide the couple with the only privacy they can enjoy. As the fiacre speeds through the town, Flaubert traces its path street by street: It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, across the Place des Arts, along the Quai Napoléon, over the Pont Neuf, and pulled up sharply before the statue of Pierre Corneille. “Keep on!” came a voice from inside. The cab started off again, and gathering speed down the hill beyond the Carrefour La Fayette, drove into the station yard at full gallop. “No! Straight on!” cried the voice again. (255) And the tour continues all through the streets of Rouen until six in the evening, when the tour that began before noon ends with Emma descending from the carriage down a side street in the Beauvoisine quarter. In his 1919 The Paris of the Novelists, Arthur Bartlett Maurice notes that this cab ride through Rouen was “linked with a network of streets” that enhances both reading the novel and visiting Rouen (89): “Despite the many changes which took place during the latter half of the last century, the visitor in Rouen may without great trouble follow, as the Pilgrim has followed, the streets indicated in that celebrated journey” (221). Emma gives in to Léon’s supplications in order to shed her provincial naiveté. Likewise, as Cheryl Wall notes, American writers in Paris “wished to grow less provincial, not less American” (65). The invocation, however inadvertent, of Emma Bovary is therefore fitting for the expatriate American writer, though the ill-fated Emma proves to be a poor model. The also impossible love of Jake and Brett causes them to seek privacy in a cab, driving through the streets of Paris. The waiter came and said the taxi was outside. Brett pressed my hand hard. I gave the waiter a franc and we went out. “Where should I tell him?” I asked. “Oh, tell him to drive around.”

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I told the driver to go to the Parc Montsouris, and got in, and slammed the door. ....... The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. (SAR 32–33) Emma Bovary’s labyrinthine ride through Rouen is re-created, albeit more chastely, by Jake and Brett. Yet unlike Flaubert’s tragic couple, Hemingway’s pair cannot consummate their passion, and their cab ride ends at the Café Select in Montparnasse. Brett and Jake also have their scene in a cathedral, though in reverse order from that of Emma and Léon. Their visit to San Fermin’s is also cut short as Brett refuses to stay in the Pamplona church. She tells Jake that the church “makes me damned nervous” (212). Brett is like Emma’s doppelganger: the young provincial housewife seeks sanctuary in the chastity of the church, fearing the licentious streets of Rouen, while Brett can only curse the “damned” sanctity of the quiet sacred space and rushes outside where they cathartically “walk along” (212). The walk away from the church and the ensuing discussion of wind (“it’s liable to go down by five o’clock”) serve to counter the discomfort that Brett feels in the church, curing the frightening stillness inside with motion and the mundane (212).14 If there is a tautological relationship between Hemingway and tourism, then it is fitting that he has become a destination, of sorts, for literary critics and curiosity seekers. John Leland’s A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris with Walking Tours offers the literary-minded traveler a Jake-/Hemingway-inspired introduction to the city. For Leland, Hemingway’s appeal to the American traveler is that “he was only and always a visitor there, and gave us, exclusively and passionately, an outsider’s view” (viii). Unlike the “insider’s” guides of the 1920s, Leland’s guide is predicated on the shared outsider status of the American in Paris. It is also fitting that the bal musette located on the ground floor of Hemingway’s first home in Paris at 74, rue du Cardinal Lemoine was transformed into a pornographic theater in 1975 (Gajdusek 9).15 If the guidebooks discussed above and The Sun Also Rises could be understood as examples of experiential travel writing, then they should be considered in the context of an experiential

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movement of sex tourism in modern literature. From Flaubert’s 1849 licentious journey through the Middle East to Michel Houellebecq’s 2001 novel Platforme, travel provides the environment for sexual behavior unthinkable at home. The banality of sex and the boredom of travel are the unavoidable consequences of sexual jouissance and tourism’s frantic insistence on perpetual experience. Tourists who seek experience are like the readers of Reynolds’s and Wilson’s lifestyle guides complete with the “naughty places” of Paris. Such tourists, expatriates, and Hemingway’s fictionalized comrades all are iterations of Emma Bovary and Léon, seeking the sheltering space of foreign streets. Away from Prohibition and puritan prudishness, expatriate Paris becomes the city for experience. Yet on the other side of Gay Paree is the alcoholic self-destructiveness of Hemingway’s haunted expatriates whose lifestyle is rationed by the banality of rote itinerary. Like a Parisian prophetess, Gertrude Stein had the last word before Hemingway became an icon when she observed that Hemingway “looks like a modern and . . . smells of the museums” (qtd. in Aldridge 121). Hemingway wrote of experience and contributed to the experiential travelogue but has himself become a monument—a site for contemporary tourists who seek the Hemingway experience in his adopted city.

Not e s 1. J. Gerald Kennedy describes the Paris of A Moveable Feast as “an imaginary city, a mythical scene evoked to explain the magical transformation of an obscure, Midwestern journalist into a brilliant modern author” (128), which he sees as a function of Hemingway’s nostalgia, his longing to return to a mythical past in a “fantastic place” (130). 2. Wilson remarks that the numbers seem larger because Americans are “so flattered and deferred to” and “so much in the fore in post-war Parisian life” (276). The police counted 30,000 Americans in Paris, yet the Chamber of Commerce only found 10,000. Wilson attributes this discrepancy to the failure of the police to accurately count foreigners entering and exiting the country (276–77). By 1927 there were 15,000 official U.S. residents in Paris, 35,000 by the estimate of the Parisian police (Lynn 149). 3. By chapter 13 Wilson has forgone his earlier discretion and writes, “In the back room of Harry’s New York Bar in Paris the expatriates hold forth on their grandiose schemes” (302). 4. Wilson tells his Prohibition-era readers, quite charmingly, “And among the French, at least, drinking in a café carries no obloquy with it. French women visit the neighborhood bars almost as much as men—honest virtuous women of the community—housewives, store keepers, and shop girls and stenographers pausing on their way to and from work to snatch hot coffee” (120). Despite implying that the primary draw of the cafés is “hot coffee,” Wilson goes on for several pages to describe the various types of Parisian aperitifs unavailable, at least legally, in America, and includes a complete chapter on experiencing French wine. Anecdotally, some of Wilson’s advice for the 1924 readers is as useful now as it was eighty years ago, such as his advice

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for catching the attention of an evasive garçon: “Get up as if you were going to leave without paying. Then he will dart from his hiding, a model of smiling courtesy, and will add up your amount, give you your change, thank you for the tip, and bid you au revoir as if there had been no unpleasantness about it all” (134). 5. Here Reynolds’s assertion that the trip will be “very, very select” is certainly an allusion to the Café Select. 6. Ford Madox Ford’s role, according to Wilson, is in the publication of “a terribly dull magazine,” the Transatlantic Review (244). 7. For a detailed discussion of the first draft of the novel, see Balassi. 8. In the manuscript draft of the novel, Hemingway opens with a description of Montparnasse. Kennedy notes that “to suggest the torment of his characters, Hemingway created a nocturnal city, a nightmarish whirl of bars, cafés, taxis, restaurants, and dance halls” (97). 9. For a thorough discussion of Hemingway’s “mental map of Paris,” see Kennedy (chap. 3). 10. It is interesting that neither Reynolds nor Wilson provide maps of Paris in their guidebooks. 11. Baker notes, however, that the two supposedly opposing camps, the serious artists and the “wastrels and adventurers,” did commingle in the Left Bank cafés (20). 12. Washburn includes this scene to illustrate the hypocrisy of a city of paradoxical values as part of an odd defense of polygamy, though he concedes that (at least in 1910) “we have a long way to go before a satisfactory system of polygamy can be established” (187). 13. Hemingway certainly read Madame Bovary, as Flaubert is cited as one of his favorite “dead” writers (Griffin 99). Aldridge notes that Hemingway and his cohort of writers of the twenties were distinguished from previous generations of writers “by their dedication to the Flaubertian ideal of the artist, their sense of belonging to an aristocratic fraternity of talent” (111). Likewise, in Green Hills of Africa Hemingway notes that Flaubert was “one that we believed in, loved without criticism” (71). 14. This scene is foreshadowed in chapter 3 when Jake and Georgette leave the Café Napolitain in a “slow, smoothly rolling fiacre” (SAR 23). Though, unlike Léon, Jake rebuffs Georgette’s advances and tells the cocher to stop (24). 15. More recently the space has become an avant-garde cinema (Gajdusek 62).

Wo rk s C i t e d Aldridge, John W. “Afterthoughts on the Twenties and The Sun Also Rises.” New Essays on The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 109–29. Atherton, John. “The Itinerary and the Postcard: Minimal Strategies in The Sun Also Rises.” ELH 53.1 (1986): 199–218. Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1952. Balassi, William. “The Trail to The Sun Also Rises: The First Week of Writing.” Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment. Ed. Frank Scafella. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 33–51. Brenner, Gerry. A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2000. Chancellor, John. How to Be Happy in Paris (without being ruined). New York: Henry Holt, 1927. Fenton, Charles A. The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life. 1857. Trans. Alan Russell. London: Penguin, 1950.

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Gajdusek, Robert E. Hemingway’s Paris. New York: Scribner’s, 1978. Griffin, Peter. Less Than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. New York: Scribner’s, 1963. ———. A Moveable Feast. 1964. New York; Scribner’s, 2003. ———. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993. Kuehl, John, and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Dear Scott / Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence. New York: Scribner’s, 1971. Leland, John. A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris with Walking Tours. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1989. Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Maurice, Arthur Bartlett. The Paris of the Novelists. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1919. Reynolds, Bruce. Paris with the Lid Lifted. New York: George Sully, 1927. Wall, Cheryl A. “Paris and Harlem: Two Culture Capitals.” Phylon 35.1 (1974): 64–73. Washburn, Claude C. Pages from the Book of Paris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910. Wilson, Robert Forrest. Paris on Parade. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924.

8 Pursuit Remembered Experience, Memory, and Invention in Green Hills of Africa Lawrence H. Martin 

One of the great strengths of Ernest Hemingway’s mode of writing is his evocative development of memory. The technique is pervasive in his work, and powerful examples can readily be found in the two-page opening chapter of A Farewell to Arms, with its dark mood of tragedy, all in the past tense of recovered experience, setting the tone for the entire novel; in the first line of “In Another Country,” conveying resignation in terms of dark and cold, and the sight of dead game animals in the market; or in the old man Santiago’s proud reminiscence of his youth. Sometimes, as in Colonel Cantwell’s maudlin egotism, memory fails as a literary device. And often—A Moveable Feast is a charming if frequently malicious illustration—facts and events that can be otherwise verified are retold in such a way as to create an effect different from literal history. Green Hills of Africa, however, a book that appears superficially to be an account of Hemingway’s 1933–34 safari, is a special case in the Hemingway canon. The writer suggests somewhat ambiguously and disingenuously in the well-known foreword that the book isn’t fiction (and therefore must be something else, perhaps autobiography or a travelogue). While it is perfectly clear that Green Hills of Africa is largely an autobiographical memoir, it is also self-evident that Hemingway manipulated the memories in the retelling. The result is a book that, fortunately, is more art than history, and the foundation of fact supports a new construction and reinterpretation of memories. Because it fits no conventional genre, Green Hills has been something of a puzzle for reviewers and critics since the beginning. Its interpreters, from the 97

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critics who reviewed the book when it was published in 1935 to recent biographers, have commented pointedly on what this Depression-era book did not do and especially on how it reflected badly on an important author who failed to take a political position and refused to face contemporary social problems. The long view of history, of course, reveals that these attitudes mirror the momentary agenda of the critics who passed over the book’s innovations and lasting values. Its virtues drew scant praise, aside from some mild admiration of its descriptions of landscape and its realistic depiction of hunting. But what went unrecognized was a strong central motif that unifies and clarifies the story and transforms it from a mere travel report into a narrative projection of the modern romantic personality. What the politically energized critics wanted was topical appeal— labor unrest, the plight of the working class, political doctrine, important subjects all—but what Hemingway gave them was not topical but universal: a pastoral Homo ludens re-created from the memory of experience, refined through the literary imagination, and set down in an engaging, convincing tale of a month’s action, as Hemingway says. Although Hemingway was drawing on the traditions of safari books by the genre’s best writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (he owned an impressive library of the type), as well as on his own fresh memories of the trip, the book is a conscious and intentional modification of experiences into a meditation on man and nature. But the critics of the day were interested in matters that expressed the intellectual and political concerns of the mid-1930s. What appeared to be a sporting book wasn’t to their taste at all. Green Hills of Africa, said Granville Hicks in his 1935 New Masses review, “is the dullest book I have read since Anthony Adverse.” Hicks conceded that “there are perhaps ten pages that are interesting” but went on to say that “the rest of the book is just plain dull.” The reason, he proposed, is that “hunting is probably exciting to do; it is not exciting to read about” (23). Hicks’s review of Green Hills, like other reviews of what seemed to be partly a safari book and partly a writer’s musing on his art, found fault with Hemingway not only for what he did but particularly for what he failed to do: namely, to take up an important issue by adopting a fashionably leftish stance. Hicks did not hesitate to specify exactly what Hemingway should have been doing in the thirties: “I should like Hemingway to write a novel about a strike” (23), he demanded, forgetting for the moment the necessary kinship of experience, memory, and truthful invention. (Hemingway had seen war and revolution but not domestic labor unrest of the kind Hicks evidently had in mind.) His rationale, archly patronizing, was that a labor topic would “do something to Hemingway” (23)—presumably reform him morally and improve him ethi-

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cally. It is interesting to note, incidentally, with the clarity of three-quarters of a century’s retrospect, that Hicks’s review took one of Hemingway’s rare overtly political pieces, “Who Murdered the Vets?” from the 17 September 1935 New Masses—Hemingway was writing for the same left-wing magazine as Hicks—as a point of comparison to Green Hills of Africa and as a benchmark of Hemingway’s “passion” even if he was a “non-revolutionary writer” (23). Granville Hicks was not alone in charging Hemingway with dereliction of political duty. In a wiser and calmer review of Green Hills, Edmund Wilson at least nodded in the direction of the book’s experimentalism but still gave the bulk of his New Republic piece to the “moral implications” of literature (136). Wilson guessed that Ivan Kashkeen, the leading interpreter of Hemingway in the Soviet Union, would find that the Hemingway of Green Hills of Africa had become “more sterile and less interesting in proportion as he has become more detached from the great issues of the day” (135)—in effect, the same judgment that Hicks made but much less stridently delivered. Much of Wilson’s review, however, moved away from Green Hills itself and into a somber but deeply insightful defense of Hemingway’s trademark tendency to write about loss and death, for “there is always something else which is opposed to the decadence” and “to write tellingly about death you have to have the principle of life” (136). He found Hemingway’s first-person writing in Green Hills as well as in another unorthodox experiment, Death in the Afternoon, to be “burlesque” and “silly” and hoped that the African book was only an “interlude” before a return to serious work (135). Whereas Hicks’s criticism was that Green Hills was bad because it wasn’t political, Wilson’s criticism was that the book was bad because it wasn’t serious, as if only elevated moral declarations have political meaning. The observation that Hemingway lacked a doctrinaire political outlook was vintage 1930s criticism, but it was not the only view of Green Hills. Bernard de Voto brushed it off as “an unimportant book. A pretty small book for a big man to write” and declared the literary discussion in it “mostly bad” (5). However, Clifton Fadiman admired the “amusing conversations” (96), as did Edward Weeks, who singled out the “dialogue which is at once so natural and so unexpected” (30). Coincidentally, Hemingway’s authorial persona was twice found “Byronic,” once by John Chamberlain in the New York Times (“Byronic posturing” [19]) and again by Carl Van Doren in the New York Herald Tribune (“boyish as Byron” [3]). In one case the Byronic quality seems a criticism and in the other praise. Of all the reviewers, the British were the most sensitive, perhaps understandably, at recognizing and commending the depiction of the African landscape. The Times noted “the pleasure of being in such a country” and observed that “it

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is this fundamental enjoyment that he brings out so well” (10). The Times Literary Supplement found Green Hills to be “the expression of deep enjoyment and appreciation of being alive in Africa” (291). This review, from a non-American pen, came close to Hemingway’s own expression of the power of memory to retain and re-create the African experience, a point that American critics were unable to comprehend or even notice. In view of such various, even contradictory, opinions by some of the most influential critics of the 1930s, and especially in view of the expectation, during a time of social upheaval, that a leading author should be writing with a political slant and using his artistic talent in a doctrinally correct way to solve social and economic problems, Green Hills of Africa is a surprise and a puzzle. One may fairly ask, then, what the theme of the book really is. There are the conventional answers: Hemingway himself says in the oft-quoted foreword that the book is about “the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action” (i). It is a sportsman’s book, of the hunting genus and the safari subspecies, a not-too-distant cousin of books by British colonial professional hunters and amateur naturalists such as Frederick Selous and Sir Samuel Baker or, on the American side, Theodore Roosevelt.1 Selous, for example, hunted “koodoo” and lion in Africa in the 1890s and wrote several books about his adventures. Baker, who hunted and explored in Africa in the mid−nineteenth century, wrote not only about the country and its people but also about matters of fact, such as numbers of animals seen or killed, the qualities of Arabic music, and the danger of scorpions. Together they share a romantic interest in exotic lands and strange customs, and they both display a colonial Englishman’s assumption of superiority while living among Africans. To a certain extent, Green Hills is literary chit-chat, insider gossip, and artistic opinion, a sort of salon en plein air, a rue de Fleurus under the thorn tree, as it were. It is part travelogue, part domestic anecdote, part memoir. And, of course, it is a literary experiment to see whether an absolutely true book can compete with a work of the imagination (depending on what the author may have meant by “true” and “imagination”). Genre and theme extensively overlap in this pastiche of forms and topics. What the book is about remains elusive. Yet a dominant technique pervades Green Hills of Africa and elevates the book above the ordinary sportsman’s tale. More an attitude or point of view than an orthodox theme or topic, it forms and colors the book and gives it a distinctive character. This character results from a type of romanticism, a kind of imaginative invention based on memories of actual events, people, and geography but moving beyond the literal into a realm of a newly constructed version

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of reality. The “pattern of a month’s action,” though much of it is historically true, is the product of an imaginative recomposing, of selective recollection, and of creative development of personality and dialogue. It is certainly not a documentary record. What could have been merely an expansion of an Esquire column—“the rubbishy articles he writes for [a] men’s-wear magazine,” said Edmund Wilson (135)—became in Green Hills of Africa a narrative shell surrounding a core of imaginative conceptions of self and nature. In “Pursuit Remembered,” the second part of Green Hills, Hemingway and his party pause on a trek in the heat to rest in the shade and read. Reading Tolstoy’s Sevastopol, Hemingway recalled the Boulevard Sevastopol in Paris, the cobblestones, the weather, the trees, the bust of Flaubert in the Luxembourg Gardens—indeed, the essence of Paris. In addition to being the modern equivalent of a powerful emotion recollected in tranquility, the suggestive memory draws him to a reflection on nature in Africa: “All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already” (GHOA 72). He goes on: “Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the season, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and to have time to be in it and to move slowly” (73). These remarks, divided by the “happy and untragic” passage comparing love for a country to love between man and woman, show an interrelationship that goes far beyond admiration of conventionally pretty landscape and into the realm of man-in-nature or even man-as-nature. The observer-participant’s involvement with the natural world approaches the mystical, a state in which the very sense of nature replaces the rational consciousness and the observer comprehends nature through memory rather than only seeing it in the present. Early in Green Hills Hemingway dismisses several important nineteenthcentury writers of the New England school who “were gentlemen, or wished to be” and who had “nice, dry, clean minds” (20–21). For this tradition he has no enthusiasm, possibly because the New England gentlemen were “very respectable”—a flaw, no doubt, in the opinion of this brawny outdoorsman who prided himself on his public image of raffishness. If Hemingway had had a favorite writer of the early romantic era, that author might have been Cooper, the chronicler and mythmaker of the frontier, of action and adventure, of the manly virtues of the tracker, the rifleman, and the explorer. Not for Hemingway the genteel tradition, though he does have a good word for Henry James.2 One might suppose, though Hemingway dashes the supposition, that he

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might have profitably read Thoreau. Yet Thoreau is singled out for inaccessibility, if not for outright scorn. To Kandisky’s straight man invitation, “Go on,” Hemingway announces that Thoreau is “supposed to be really good,” yet, “I can not tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it.” Why? “Because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary” (GHOA 21).3 What Hemingway holds against Thoreau is what he also holds against Melville: “knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric like plums in a pudding” (20)—in other words, as a naturalist Thoreau is practicing selfconscious literariness instead of pursuing the truth of nature itself. Thoreau may have gone to nature to live deliberately but, in Hemingway’s opinion, not to write an absolutely true book. Hemingway’s preference, apparently, is for naturalists who are objective and scientific—“extremely accurate”—that is, naturalists who observe, record, and report the visible world. Of course, Hemingway himself was doing nothing of the sort in Green Hills of Africa. Just as Thoreau selectively developed episodes of life at Walden (and conflated two years’ residence into one for the purpose of natural symmetry and seasonal completeness), so also did Hemingway selectively recall events of the 1933–34 safari and restate these memories in the “pattern” that constitutes the narrative structure imposed on events. Obviously, one could prosecute Hemingway for bad taste in literature for his failure to appreciate Thoreau (or even to read him), or at least for a superficiality of understanding, but there is another message altogether in this opinionated view. Rather than finding grains of wisdom in nature, Hemingway apprehends a far grander sweep of the natural world as he hunts on the African plain and in the hills. While Thoreau meticulously recounts the details of backwoods life (the nail-by-nail accountancy of “Economy” or the learned farmer’s explanation of “The Bean-Field”), he quietly draws an elaborate picture of the independent, resourceful life. It is worth recalling that ten years of remembering, editing, and revising occurred between the years at the pond and the publication of the book. The result, which has the appearance of a linear, chronological journal, is no more literal than Hemingway’s consciously managed memories of the African adventure. Both, in their distinctive ways, are literary abstractions. In both one can see a paysage moralise, a landscape drawn from memory that symbolically expresses a moral meaning. Even so, Hemingway’s attitude toward nature was not always reflective, although he did on occasion see it as a living metaphor, as in his meditations on the Gulf Stream as a self-renewing river of life.4 Instead, he saw nature not only as picturesque and inspirational but especially as a theater of action in

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which he could enact the drama of the hunt. In this regard he is demonstrating his vigor in a contest that emphasizes skill, expertise, and stamina. In Africa he acted out the strenuous life, as many a turn-of-the-century youngster would have wished to do, in the manner of the preeminent public figure of Hemingway’s childhood, Theodore Roosevelt.5 Although Roosevelt preached publicspiritedness and high-minded conduct, he was without question “a master at publicizing himself ” (Reynolds, Young Hemingway 25). In Roosevelt may be seen a wholesome version of the romantic urge to express the self, a trait that is Hemingway’s best and worst quality. Like Roosevelt, Hemingway is the intellectual and the man of action, the man of letters on the frontier hunting game. Green Hills of Africa is patently a showcase for its author, a latter-day Rough Rider; it has all of the intrinsic virtues and all of the intrinsic faults of autobiography, that curious genre in which author and subject are the same. But above all, Africa between the wars was the last good country, a place (as Hemingway represents it) uncomplicated by change and upheaval, a country of endless vistas and noble animals. Hemingway’s penchant, after leaving Paris, for remote, simple, undeveloped, undiscovered places has often been noted.6 Africa before the Second World War was one of these distant, apparently changeless places, a locale that in Western perception was itself the very embodiment of romance, and that quality is what appealed to Hemingway and what he chose to remember in a book that crystallized its meaning. Uncivilized—that is, not Westernized and urbanized—and entirely natural, the African country and the way of life it demanded was an ideal match for the man who chose to live in the tropics, hunted in the North American mountains and plains, and measured landscape against his favorite dry hills of Spain. Best of all, the country was nearly uninhabited; it was nature uncorrupted by man. These visions and experiences coalesced into the memory of an ideal. In this natural setting, Hemingway subjectively recalls his feelings and lyrically describes his adventures. Despite his declaration about “an absolutely true book,” Green Hills of Africa is about its narrator-actor’s emotional state, and its mode is frequently lyric. If the story is self-centered, as the socioeconomic critics said it was, it was self-centered in the manner of egocentric memory. Everything that happens in this first-person account is, of course, filtered through the consciousness of the author-observer. His memories are the only memories that count, and the only memories that reach us, for the author is controlling them for narrative effect. The noise of Kandisky’s truck angers him; he is jealous of Karl’s success; and then he is embarrassed at the pettiness of his own envy. He turns mellow and discursive in the fireside chats, he exults over a

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good shot, and the restful afternoons of reading recall other times and places from his past. Even so, Hemingway’s self-centered point of view frequently produces a certain attractive charm: the Hemingway whom Hemingway remembers is the vigorous, physically active sportsman of great stamina and considerable skill, competitive in the extreme but also self-deprecating. What announces itself as an objective account turns out to be a highly, indeed entirely, subjective rendering of a month’s action and the shape of a country. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether “true” means “literal,” one may see that the truth of this book is the personal and individual truth of the narrator’s own experience, memory manipulated into an artistic narrative pattern. In its historical context, Hemingway’s African book is thus a vexing problem: on the one hand, it is a picture of man-in-nature; on the other, its exaggerated individualism shows that the self-regarding writer is so immersed in personality and celebrity that he has no social conscience. As an assertive, defensive Hemingway himself wrote to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich in July 1934 after the African trip but before the publication of Green Hills, “As far as I know I have only one life to live and I have worked hard and written good stories . . . and by Jesus I want to live it where it interests me; and I have no romantic feeling about the American scene” (SL 409). What interests Hemingway on the African scene is not only the grandeur of nature but the people who inhabit the place. These people, black and white, he tends to idealize.7 Under his pen the native inhabitants become what they appear to be in Edward Shenton’s illustrations. As Hemingway says of the Masai, they were “long-legged, brown, smoothmoving men . . . all laughing and smiling and talking. . . . They carried spears and they were very handsome and jolly” (GHOA 218–19). Although there are exceptions to this style of physique and demeanor—for example, Garrick—the black Africans are on the whole described in idealized terms. (Only a cynic would read into these descriptions the notorious clichés about childlike felicity.) Unburdened by many possessions and unblemished by envy, the Africans as Hemingway remembers them live happily and simply, and he admires them. Another kind of idealization of man is applied to Pop, their safari guide “Mr. J. P.,” in actuality the renowned professional hunter Philip Percival.8 Pop is the perfect colonial-era figure: understated, sage, witty, wise in the ways of the hunt, totally unflappable. He knows the country and almost casually directs the visiting guns, only rarely accompanying them. He has none of the tough abruptness of “Macomber”’s Robert Wilson, and he is instead warmly

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avuncular toward Ernest and Pauline. Professionally, he is a good man to back up an amateur in a sticky situation. What links Pop and the Africans is admiration for Hemingway, yet another form of idealization—self-idealization. The experienced professional admires the vigorous, young American sportsman; the Africans (of whose language he learns a few words and whom he greets with a hearty “Jambo” [224]) admire him. In his 1997 memoir of his days as a professional hunter in Africa, Percival mentions Hemingway only briefly, but tellingly recalls that he “was extremely observant and had a most retentive memory. He never made any notes; but anything that interested him in the course of conversation or during his hunts, he never forgot. I was amazed to realize the amount he had remembered with little apparent effort when I read his book, The Green Hills of Africa” (120). In addition, P.O.M., Pauline, who enjoys the special right of gently ridiculing his moods and vanities, admires him too. Naturally, the narrative and the characterizations proceed along lines determined by the author, who writes what he prefers to remember and what he wants the reader to see. The Hemingway who appears in Green Hills is the created self, not necessarily a realistic self-portrait, and in that projection there is a heroic unorthodoxy that, because it contrasts with the typically reflective artistic life, redefines the role of the writer. The book, indeed, centers not really on hunting or even on Africa but on its creator and central figure. Written before confessional literature came into vogue (and one should recall Hemingway’s bitter scorn of Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up), Green Hills of Africa offers a form of controlled introspection. There are self-disclosure and self-revelation here, but only insofar as they disclose or reveal a real self that agrees with the imagined self. For all of Hemingway’s posturing, his African adventure in Green Hills constitutes a genial memory—albeit a managed and manipulated one—of an experience that he genuinely enjoyed for itself as well as for its potential literary uses. Most important, the book is a record, however much modified, of the interplay of event and memory. This is no intellectual fantasy; its cousins are the safari books that Pop approves, and that fact leads to an interesting speculation: that a life itself can be a literary construct, a consequence of memory working on literal occurrences until they become something different and something more. If so, then Hemingway is not only reporting events partly as they occurred but partly as he wished them to be. What Hemingway recalls, or chooses to create, is a version of memory that will live as art long after the biographical sources are forgotten.

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Not e s 1. Hemingway owned a copy of Selous’s A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa (1881), two volumes of Baker’s travels along the Nile (1866, 1869), and a copy of Roosevelt’s African Game Trails (1910) (Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading). 2. See Baker (183) for a revealing comparison of techniques of dialogue in James and Hemingway. 3. Reynolds’s Hemingway’s Reading contains numerous entries on “accurate” naturalists, for example noted hunter C. H. Stigand’s The Game of British East Africa (1909). 4. One of the most famous uses of this figure is the “If you serve time for society” passage (GHOA 148–50). 5. See Reynolds’s The Young Hemingway (24–30) for an explanation of Roosevelt’s importance as a model for young people about 1910. 6. Perhaps the best and most trenchant of these is Hunter S. Thompson’s “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?” (369–73). 7. Baker argues that Hemingway does not romanticize Africans and Africa but draws attention at the same time to Hemingway’s depiction of “the merry Masai” (173). 8. Percival remembers far less of Hemingway than Hemingway does of him.

Wo rk s C i t e d Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. 4th ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Chamberlain, John. Review of Green Hills of Africa. New York Times, 25 October 1935. 19. De Voto, Bernard. Review of Green Hills of Africa. Saturday Review of Literature, 26 October 1935. 5. Fadiman, Clifton. Review of Green Hills of Africa. New Yorker, 2 November 1935. 96, 98. Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ———. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. Hicks, Granville. Review of Green Hills of Africa. New Masses, 19 November 1935. 23. Percival, Philip H. Hunting, Settling and Remembering. Agoura, CA: Trophy Room Books, 1997. Review of Green Hills of Africa, The Times (London), 3 April 1936. 10. Review of Green Hills of Africa. Times Literary Supplement, 4 April 1936. 291. Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway’s Reading, 1910–1940: An Inventory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981. ———. The Young Hemingway. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Thompson, Hunter S. The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. 369–73. Van Doren, Carl. Review of Green Hills of Africa. New York Herald Tribune, 27 October 1935. 3. Weeks, Edward. Review of Green Hills of Africa. Atlantic, November 1935. 30. Wilson, Edmund. “Letter to the Russians about Hemingway,” New Republic, 11 December 1935. 135–36.

9 Alchemy, Memory, and Archetypes Reading Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro as an African Fairy Tale Erik Nakjavani 

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. —Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Under Kilimanjaro is a notable success, for it is a well-conceived and wellexecuted work of imagination rather than a linear narrative account of the events of Ernest Hemingway’s second East African safari (1953–54). Hemingway’s innovative application of structural elements of fiction to nonfiction text, his extensive reliance on the transformative nature of personal memory, and his intuitive evocations of collective memory as archetypes serve him well in his enterprise. The whole ensemble essentially provides Hemingway with an effective alembic in this alchemical literary transformation. In this light, one may see Under Kilimanjaro as creative nonfiction, because it escapes the literal strictures of linear nonfiction and journalistic reportage. Therein lies its potential of making available to readers a horizon of knowledge as a corpus of interpretations. Consequently, what might have otherwise been no more than a passive, descriptive narrative of an African safari rises to the level of quasi fiction that requires interpretation. As always, the expanse and depth of any interpretation will vary according to the measure of imagination, acuity of memory, knowledge, and desire each reader brings to the text. 107

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Me m o ry a n d L i t e r a ry A l c h e m y i n Tr a n s m u tat i o n o f No n f i c t i o n i n t o C re at i v e No n f i c t i o n I describe the dialectical synthesis of fiction and nonfiction in Under Kilimanjaro as a supple literary alchemical transmutation, for it is capable of changing the lead of a literal coverage of an African safari into the gold of a fully connotative narrative of the art of fiction. The word “safari” finds its etymology in Arabic as safar, which denotes journey. For Hemingway, too, the safari in Under Kilimanjaro simultaneously implies a journey, spiritual and literary, as well as an African hunt. It is a journey into the realm of alchemy and magic in their widest meanings. As John Eberly reminds us, because of the basal transformative function of alchemy, the “use of the term art refers to the alchemist’s understanding not only of the concepts and theories of all the Arts, but also implies the plastic applications involved in undertaking any actual work of art” (65). As a semifictional first-person narrator in Under Kilimanjaro, Hemingway practices his art of fiction by inventing from lived experience, as making rather than describing. He re-creates from memory, with all the vagaries, instabilities, and indeterminacies inherent in such an endeavor, since memory and desire in particular also generate a subtle metamorphic discourse. Consequently, the fictionalized factual events of his safari evoke multiple emotions, moods, and reflections. The events supply various mnemonic devices that his first impressions, mostly visual, have made available, and his fictional mastery integrates such impressions into effective modes of alchemical art (ars alchemica) and art of memory (ars memorativa). Thus, his immediate perceptions acquire a past as memory and new gestalts as reveries, visions, fantasies, dreams and dream images, and poetry of lived experiences. This undertaking gives credence to Hemingway’s statement that “all a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I know and what I’ve heard. I’m a liar” (UK 113). As Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, “Lying is a language game [Sprachspiel] that needs to be learned like any other one” (90). In this specific sense, memory is also a language game and a lie, a game of vast fictionalizing complexities but always a creative one, full of imaginative Proustian remembrance of things past. It is as such that memory capitulates to unconscious desires and their projections into possibilities of future nostalgia as a yearning for the mythic past. Placed at the crossroads of fiction and creative nonfiction, Under Kilimanjaro offers

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an unlimited series of such creative lies. All the same, on its own ontological plane as fiction, the work is not counterfactual or unreal or untrue or deceptive. After all is said and done, it is simply creative nonfiction. However, I would still like to place Hemingway’s accomplishments in Under Kilimanjaro as creative nonfiction in a slightly larger but kindred philosophical domain, that of existential phenomenology. For the sake of accuracy, I need to do so in a slightly more technical language as phenomenological conversions of the everyday facts of life (factum) into fiction (fibula). These conversions result in a crossover from the world of conscious ordinary appearances into the logic of the extraordinary, the intuitive, and the imaginal. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur described this process as our “victory over brute fact [factum] by the method of imaginative variation. It is a victory in the direction of the eidos [mental images] accomplished in such a way that the fact is no longer anything but an example of a pure possibility” (108). Two decades earlier Hemingway had also attempted the same reconciliatory process between fiction and creative nonfiction in Green Hills of Africa (1935), using the events of that earlier African safari (1933–34) as the basic framework of the work. But Under Kilimanjaro accomplishes much more fully Hemingway’s previous imaginative intention. He seems to have greater confidence in the efficacy and responsiveness of fictional structures and functions such as characters, plot, fabulation, point of view, setting, theme, style, tone, mood, irony, understatements (litotes), and so on. He also more fully realized, however intuitively, that these elements also structure the art of personal and collective memory. Hemingway wrote Under Kilimanjaro when he was an acknowledged master of the art of fiction and its techniques. I find it interesting to think that Hemingway, as an artist of language, possessed something akin to the knowledge of alchemical processes of mummification. At first this connection may seem odd. Nonetheless, according to Jungian psychoanalyst Marie-Louise von Franz, ancient Egyptian high priests designated mummification as “technomagic,” a spiritual and religious form of alchemy (Psyche and Matter 147). In ancient Egypt mummification was not at all a purely funereal preoccupation with embalming; it was a refined spiritual exercise and a work of art. It was a solemn attempt to predetermine the future spiritual journey of the dead: “The Egyptians used elaborate mummification techniques on the bodies of the dead which were designed to ensure the soul’s unification with the body in the afterlife” (Strudwick 180). Only the highest priests undertook the task, and Egyptians referred to them as “psychopomps.” With their use of a consecrated

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blend of techno-magic and mnemotechnics, they ensured the resurrection and future recognition of the illustrious dead. Hence, mummification was a mystical undertaking that defied death, putrefaction, and eternal oblivion. Correspondingly, in Under Kilimanjaro Hemingway decided to let the imaginative, intuitive, sensual, eidetic, and memorial function as literary equivalents of a combination of mnemotechnics and techno-magic in a serious alchemical and death-defying creative act. Hemingway’s intention is to save the everyday language of sensations, perceptions, and emotions that memory at once preserves and alters. He endeavors to rescue the truths of everyday realities that, for him, approximate the holy from a different mode of inevitable death, decay, and oblivion, which is most often the destiny of such experienced realities. He does so brilliantly, acceding to a high degree of fictional authenticity. Hemingway’s accomplishment originates from yet another significant layer of an equally creative but mysterious subjacent source: his genius for alchemical transmutations of ordinary language as primary matter (prima materia) into fictional prose poetry. This fundamental mode of transmutation marks the best of his fiction. Not only Hemingway’s aesthetics of meiosis but also the plurisignificance of his poetic diction, the musicality of its cadences, and the openness of its semantics draw from the same source: prose poetry. In Under Kilimanjaro the understated, but nonetheless perceptible, poetics of his style permit Hemingway as quasi-fictional protagonist and narrator to produce prototypical passages of uncommon nuance and haunting beauty. Let us consider, for instance, his response to the scolding he receives from his irritated wife, Mary, about “lying about a lion” (241). His “lying” about her having killed a lion unassisted is the narrator’s way of sparing his wife’s insecurity about her ability to hunt as well as she wishes to do because of her diminutive size. By telling a lie, by a conscious alteration of memory, he hopes to prepare the way to a less obvious truth in their relationship: his concern about her being accidentally injured or hurt. He responds to her: “That’s [‘lying about a lion’] sort of alliterative. Just say ‘lying.’ Now I lie me down to sleep. Conjugate the verb lie and who with and how lovely it can be. Conjugate me every morning and every night and fire, no sleet, no candlelight and the mountain cold and close when you’re asleep and the dark belts of trees are not yews but the snow’s still snow. Conjugate me once the snow and why the mountain comes closer and goes farther away. Conjugate me conjugal love. What kind of mealies do you bring?” (241). At first glance, this passage may well intimate a brief but minimally intelligible monologue of lyrical beauty at best. It gives the impression of verging on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “private language,” namely, a paradoxically noncom-

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municative language. Wittgenstein advances the notion that “the individual words of this [private] language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language” (88–89). For Wittgenstein, private language is the subversion of language as a conversation among the speaker, the listener, and the world that they construct together in the interstices of such dialogic communication. Private language merely foregrounds itself as it did, say, in some of Gertrude Stein’s later writings. Private language, whether oral or scriptural, intentionally fails to open up a common world beyond its own self-referential grid, which excludes a shared discourse of memories. As much as communication is concerned, private language announces the twilight of language as communication. The language of the schizophrenic, totally beyond memory, would represent private language in its purest form. A more attentive reading of the quoted passage, however, makes it clear that it carries not so much a private language but, more accurately, a highly structured language game. It makes up its own rules as it unfolds and changes them according to the necessities of its internal dynamics as prose poetry. On a psycholinguistic level, the passage exemplifies the psychological phenomenon of word association based on compelling memories of places, conditions, and desires. Each word or combination of words can readily touch off a series of intricate affective, cognitive, and associative configurations. The narrator responds to the word “lying” using a present participle with its active connotations as a substantive in making an accusatory claim. This participle-substantive coupling vigorously activates images of memories of past places and events. It becomes, then, abundantly clear that the narrator’s “lying” incorporates much actual experience, but none of it is a simple matter of intentionally uttering untruth. Since as a creative writer he admits to being a “liar,” the word “lying,” with its various associations and its manifold implications, resonates in his psyche in an entirely different key (UK 113). Moreover, in this quoted passage Hemingway uncharacteristically offers the reader a privileged and generous glimpse into some of his hard-earned and safely guarded professional secrets of a fiction writer. His intent may be pedagogical as well. I judge it prodigiously instructive on a subject that largely defies or at least resists inclusion in the available pedagogies, for the attentive reader and prospective writer participate in Hemingway’s unveiling of a hermetic discourse, in its etymological sense, on a number of interconnecting lexical, syntactic, and semantic planes. As Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky succinctly observed, “Art is a means of experiencing creativity” (6). Hemingway intensifies our understanding of the art of fiction as a means of

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experiencing creativity by allowing us to participate as readers in his aesthetics and stylistics. In our imagination we mark the site where his memory of places and events passes into fictional ensembles. Along with him we engage in varying modes of poetic free association as the passage transforms itself first into a semimonologue form and then into a fully dialogic, heuristic, and hermeneutic discourse. It is a veritable case of lingual and linguistic alchemy, progressing from the initial nigredo stage of obscurity and puzzlement to the subsequent one of the scintillae, or points of clarity. Each reader responds from the depth of their individual psyches and particular cultures of reading to this alchemical operation put in motion by the unavoidable setting in motion of their own often inchoate memories. Hence, the passage discloses a personal experience of creativity as ars alchemica and ars memorativa, in which a whole world surfaces from the heart of the twin miraculous acts of writing and reading. The triangular relationship of the writer, the text, and the reader, permeated as they are, always and everywhere, by the writer’s imagination, emerges as a miraculous phenomenon. On yet closer examination, the alchemical and dialogic core of the passage can be discovered to be deeply rooted in the interspaces of its lexicon and syntax as prose poetry. As such, the passage offers full play to the homonymous verbs “to lie,” as in laying oneself down and making an intentional false statement, and “to conjugate,” meaning to join together, conjoin, or unite as well as to inflect a verb, systematically giving it different temporal forms according to voice, mood, tense, number, and person. The numerous meanings of these two verbs, added to their connotative semantics, slide along the trajectories of their conjugated similarities and differences into vast new semantic stretches. The conjugated verbs in their predictive, obligatory, and, finally, implied optative and conditional moods bring together past and present. Verb conjugations organize our memories and provide them with a narrative of the past and its projection into the future as the immediate present indiscernibly glides into the past. All these alchemical and memorial processes involve time and space as they metamorphose themselves into inner time and inner space. In fiction, this metamorphosis constitutes the realm of the imaginal. In the language of ancient Greek philosophy, the Under Kilimanjaro passage under discussion transforms chronos (clock time) into kairos (inner time) and kenón (undifferentiated space, or chaos) into chôros (inner space). A world whole and entire unto itself emerges from the depths of such imaginative integration of inner time and space. Hemingway casts a veritable spell on the reader as he integrates the opposites within the inflected unities and multiplicities of the verbs “to lie” and “to conjugate.” On the one hand, the passage regresses to the world as it is

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in its objective reality and as perception makes it available to using immediate experience, the Husserlian phenomenological “thing-in-itself.” On the other, it progresses toward finding the conditions of possibility of fictionally reinterpreting and reconstructing the world provided by imagination and memory.

R e a d i n g Un de r Ki l i m a n ja r o as a n Au t o b i o g r a ph i c a l Fa i ry Ta l e Under Kilimanjaro as creative nonfiction appears to spring from an active alchemical imagination that employs the indispensable intermediations of elements of fiction and memory transformations. Reading it as such reveals a generous package of “enchantments” ordinarily associated with poetry. Yet, unless every reader discovers ways of unpacking the secrets of Hemingway’s art of literary alchemy and art of memory in Under Kilimanjaro, as in all his fiction, a full appreciation of the extent of its enchantments will remain latent. Every reader needs to find ways of discovering anew the hidden levels of significations that organize themselves below the surface of Hemingway’s narrative discourse beyond its necessary but limited literal comprehension. On the part of both the writer and the reader, Hemingway deems necessary a receptive, childlike state of mind for this unpacking or interpretive task. What distinguishes a childlike mind from a childish one, and the difference is important, is the child’s luminescent and pure imagination. Such a state of mind enables the reader to match the correspondingly childlike sensitivities and sensibilities that Hemingway’s innovative narrative carries. The fairy tale, so dear to children and so helpful to the development of their inner lives, appeals to the ever-present child in the adult as well—if the adult has been lucky enough to keep the childhood memories alive. Fairy tales are archetypes of primeval patterns of humanity’s childhood. Guardians of young humanity as collective memory, fairy tales hold the promise of at least a dawning understanding of the mysteries of adult life. As the semifictional first-person narrator in Under Kilimanjaro, Hemingway tells us, “To have the heart of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honor. A man must comport himself as a man. . . . But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child’s heart, a child’s honesty, and a child’s freshness and nobility” (23). If one is lucky enough, having a child’s heart means having a memory of an infantile paradise. Later, unhappily, the paradise of childhood always appears in memory as paradise lost. Hemingway discloses this rarely understood truth of attachment to, separation from, and loss of a primal world in simple language. Thus, a reading of Under Kilimanjaro through the intermediation elements and

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motifs of fairy tales intimates a possible return to this wondrous prelapsarian country of a child’s heart and mind. Since autobiographical details predominate in Under Kilimanjaro, it would seem helpful that we read it as an autobiographical fairy tale. Such reading will have the added advantage of bridging the chasm between subjective versus objective, private versus public, and individual versus collective memory as dichotomies. Moreover, doing so establishes a generative matrix for the book’s implications that are metaphysical and often occult as well. Finally, such a reading would account for the narrator’s spiderweb of significant interest in the truth of the unreality of the real, as we ordinarily perceive the real, and its creative potential consequences for a mythic Africa in Hemingway’s writings. As an autobiographical fairy tale, which always denotes recollection and invention, Under Kilimanjaro accounts for its own rich tapestry of surreality, fantasy, alchemy, magic, sorcery, visions, divinations, prophesies, dreams, and superstitions. The whole endeavor will therefore reveal the truth of fiction as remembrance of time and place, the basis of all reality as we know it, as a complex of transcendent creative lies that reconcile the “real” and the “unreal.” The action in Under Kilimanjaro mostly takes place either on or around a small plain in the lee of Kilimanjaro in the faraway land of Kenya, Africa. Christopher Ondaatje locates it southwest of Nairobi, “near the Kimana River and swamp” (171). The narrator declares the setting reminiscent of the “mystical countries that are part of one’s childhood. Those we remember and visit sometimes when we are asleep and dreaming. They are as lovely at night as they were when we were children. If you ever go back to see them they are not there. But they are as fine in the night as they ever were if you have the luck to dream of them” (UK 23). The setting, the remembered space-time locus of narrative events, with its sparse dream imagery, is already closely interwoven with the mystical countries of childhood, the originary source of all the mysteries each of us is likely to encounter in our lives. The countries of childhood originate in the prenatal, all-enveloping, protective, and intimate place of the mother’s womb. Later, during the postnatal and infant stages, the spatiotemporal world of the infant extends to the corporeal topography and geography of the mother of infancy and the time spent in her proximity. There is a latent sense of unsurpassable mourning for the irredeemable originary loss of childhood topography that is coextensive with the mother’s body. The mother’s corporeal topography lays the very foundation of our adult sense of space and time, both in reality as perception and in dimly remembered memories. Later, one can only vividly relive them in dreams, daydreams, and privileged moments of one’s active imagination. I would suggest that the never-ending work of mourning

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for the loss of our infantile topography, a state of living at peace and harmony with the unconscious, activates what von Franz thinks of as the “genius of that unknown, mysterious something in our psyche which is the inventor of our dreams” (Interpretation 79). The narrator, with his extraordinary sensitivities as an artist of language and memory, is intimately acquainted with that “mysterious something,” the sense of interminable loss, lack, and separation from which the plenitude of all creativity strangely enough bursts forth. Within this understanding of the narrator’s mind, the setting of Under Kilimanjaro attaches itself to the unconscious traces of childhood experiences. Dreams and regressive infantile fantasies redeem the abandoned child and the landscapes of childhood in their crepuscular but all the more intense reality as an absent presence that the French language so pertinently designates as a revenant. The reality of the setting undoubtedly engages the deep structures of childhood memories. They surge up into psychic life as dreamscapes in our nocturnal, oneiric life, the ur-setting of myths, folklore, and archetypal fairy tales. The nostalgia for such originary setting is omnipresent in Hemingway’s fiction. It enables him in making plains, valleys, forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans in his fiction. Nostalgia gives his fictional inventions of time and place a dynamic quality that mere descriptions would have lacked entirely. It allows him to engage in fictional “world-making,” to use Nelson Goodman’s language. Hemingway’s nostalgia for the countries of childhood borders on topophilia in its most intuitive sense. Accordingly, with exemplary exactitude Hemingway tells us, “In Africa when we lived on the small plain in the shade of the big thorn trees at the edge of the swamp at the foot of the great mountain [Kilimanjaro] we had such countries [countries of childhood]” (23). Every detail stands out in that sentence with dreamlike sharpness. Its ekphrastic expression in the reader’s mind may come close to the quality of space in some of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings in which time improbably seems to have stopped. The finitude of the plain, the thorn trees, the swamp, and the mountain opens up to the infinities of space-time beyond them. They set up a quaternion that moves as an ensemble from the perceptional concrete in lived experience to the eidetic, hypnologic, oneiric, and fictive. There is a dialectical relationship between place and space in the book’s setting. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has differentiated between space and place in the contexts of geography, anthropology, and philosophy. “In experience,” Tuan writes, “the meaning of space often merges with that of place. ‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). The narrator of

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Under Kilimanjaro aims to extend the qualities of the campsite setting as place and as home to the environing space, to be at home in the African world. The quaternion of the plain, the thorn trees, the swamp, and the mountain also generates the symbolic, mythological, and archetypal framework of interpretive significations. The horizontal terrain of the plain embraces the vertical axis of the great ascending mass of Kilimanjaro. The verticality of the snow-capped Kilimanjaro unites the archetypal dwelling places of the earth gods below and the abodes of the sky gods above. The thorn trees, defensive and offensive in nature, play a large symbolic role in the holy scriptures of the Abrahamic religions of the Middle and Near East. As Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant have commented, “Thorns conjure up visions of barriers, difficulties, external defences and, in consequence, of an unpleasant and unwelcoming exterior.” To which they add, however, “As [René] Guénon has observed, Christ’s crown of thorns, woven, it is said, from acacia, is not unrelated to a solar crown, the symbolism of the thorns being reversed so that they are identified with the Sun’s rays radiating from the Redeemer’s body” (990). As a result, the setting in Under Kilimanjaro appears to be concurrently a defended but vulnerable place. The swamp, too, brings to mind subliminal clusters of conflicting significations. The swamp is a place of porous decay, decomposition, and putrefaction that one can sink into and become overwhelmed and hopelessly engulfed. It imparts the impression of being a weird and fateful place where one can be mired or, more precisely, swamped in its spongy formlessness. And on a psychological plain, it may suggest the dark and often fearsome intimations of the unconscious. Yet the swamp is also a genuinely regenerative and redemptive region, one promising vital nourishment; it is essentially life sustaining in that it serves as nature’s filter, or aquifier, distilling fresh water, aquapura. Finally, and, literally and figuratively, above all, there is the great mountain, Kilimanjaro, so loved by the narrator. The unavoidable and abundant symbolism of this mountain takes it beyond its sheer geographical and topographical semiotics as a majestic geological formation. In its ascent it becomes one with the infinite space-time. Its snow-capped summit suggests visions of inaccessible purity and incorruptibility. Kilimanjaro intermediates between the dark earth below and the luminous heavens above, integrating the divine space of monotheism, the earthly dwelling place of pagan gods, and the habitat of human beings. It evokes visions of the first days of the world beyond memory. Thus, the campsite as a sort of dreamscape is richly evocative. It centers and encircles the diurnal realties as objective correlatives, or prima materia, of their imaginative reconfigurations in memory and fiction. In his introduction

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to The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Irish poet and novelist Padraic Colum reflects on the kind of artistic responsiveness that produced fairy tales. He puts forward the notion that for the writers of fairy tales, creation of a dreamscape had much to do with articulating the remembered “rhythm of the night,” and then he examines how the writers of fairy tales were “attuned to this rhythm.” “A rhythm that was compulsive fitted to daily tasks waned,” he proposes, and a “rhythm that was acquiescent, fitted to wishes, took its place” (vii). Walking in the African night, thinking much like a medieval pilgrim as he makes slow progress on foot, his bare feet taking the measure of the earth’s ancient mysteries, and feeling the luminous darkness through his sensitized body, the narrator of Under Kilimanjaro may well have surrendered to such nocturnal rhythms and cosmic undulations. The contrapuntal orchestration of fairy tale significations in Under Kilimanjaro is due to its mythological African setting as remembered and transcribed by Hemingway as creative fiction. Even though the setting may not satisfactorily coincide with one’s mental images of a gingerbread fairy-tale castle in a forest designed by Antoni Gaudí, it is an effective mood enhancer. It contains at once the conscious and unconscious evocation of depths, multiplicities, revelations, and prelapsarian memories of place in its narrative. Under Kilimanjaro features many accounts of fabled animals, birds, and reptiles present or recollected. Of course, a safari in Africa, “where it is all the world of the animals” (113), is at the heart of a quasi-fictional narrative that portrays the teeming animal life. Animals self-referentially or symbolically have a vital relevance to life in general in Under Kilimanjaro, as they do in most folklore, myths, fairy tales, and archetypes. The animal world finds its own prominent place within the matrix of the fairy tale. As von Franz has noted, “in certain ethnological setups what are called fairy tales are practically all animal tales, and even in the Grimm collection there are very many animal tales.” Nevertheless, she cautions, “The word animal is not very good in this connection because although the characters are animals, everyone knows that these animals are at the same time anthropomorphic beings” (Interpretation 35). In Under Kilimanjaro the world of animals often entails a modified anthropomorphic view of the animal domain. There are psychological, mythological, religious, and alchemical rituals associated with animals. Largely, however, the narrator reverses the anthropomorphizing process by locating the animal in the human as libidinal and instinctual forces rather than attributing human traits to it. In this light, animals play such a major part in the story that the reader can only regard them as fictional characters of great significance. For example,

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Mary’s lion, which she loves dearly and yet wishes to kill, transmutes the hunt into an outwardly ineffable ritual. The mystery of Mary’s lion and the necessity of its ritual killing within the narrative bring together a triad of signifying elements. Archetypal images of Christmas (the birth of Jesus, the Messiah), of Mary (with all the inescapable implications of her name as the mother of Jesus), and the “hunt” for Christ (in the double meaning of the preposition, a notion so dear to Christian mystic Meister Eckhart) are at once conjoined by the hunt for Mary’s lion. Mary herself compares it to the “search for the Holy Grail and for the Golden Fleece” (127). Hemingway’s own ritualistic hunting also symbolically coincides with what Chevalier and Gheerbrant have found in their research on the symbolism of hunting in ancient Egypt, where hunting was considered “an extension of the creative activity of the gods in so far as it drove back the borders of chaos [from cháos, or primordial space], represented by wild animals, which always subsists on the edge of ordered society” (532). As a writer of fiction, the narrator is aware of the ostensibly indomitable chaos of sensations, perceptions, language, memory, and desire. He also knows that the order of the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels of language and, beyond them, the elements of fiction carry a promise of order. The narrator loves nearly all the animals he mentions, even the ones he and others kill, and he does well in reestablishing the mystical bond between himself and the animals. The ancient, scared, partly lingual understanding that existed between human beings and animals, which has since been almost totally lost, reappears in Under Kilimanjaro. The narrator says plainly that the “time for shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me. I still loved to shoot and to kill cleanly. But I was shooting for the meat we needed to eat” (116–17). He feels privileged, now, merely “to know many places where the cobras lived,” which is indicative of his general attitude on this safari (116). He appears to experience instinctive commonalities with animals he describes and goes as far as communicating with an imaginary animal that he generically calls “faru,” which can only exist within the “African world of unreality that is defended and fortified by reality past any reality there is” (147). Faru, as a slight nuisance of a generic animal, is part of the spiritual and creative unreality of the real that the mysteries of a mythical Africa elicit in the narrator. Faru is an excellent fairy-tale animal. The main point of his imaginary appearance is that the narrator and his gunbearer, Ngui, can speak faru’s unknown “tongue,” a language that can shift into a plurality of languages and magically remain the same, simultaneously weaving in and out of reality. The narrator is fully aware of the magical quality of his imaginative creation. He discloses as

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much by remarking, “If Ngui and I could talk to faru, who was incredible to start with, in his own tongue well enough for him to answer back and I could curse and insult faru in Spanish so that he would be humiliated and go off, then unreality was sensible and logical beside reality” (147). This brings to mind René Guénon’s reference to the symbolic “language of birds” in many religious traditions, including Islam. Guénon considers the knowledge of such language as the “prerogative of a high spiritual initiation that does not permit literal interpretation” and quotes the Koran: “And Solomon was David’s heir. And he said, Oh, Humankind! We have been taught the language of birds (ullimna mantiqat-tayri) and have been accorded wondrous things” (55).1 The narrator’s dialogue with faru hints at such a high initiation into the spiritual order. On a spiritual plain, the African world of unreality is in no way an illusory world in Under Kilimanjaro. Born of the unconscious evocations of ancient myths of the African continent itself, the awareness of this sense of unreality only makes the narrator as a writer of fiction keener, stronger, and more available to the call of the creative, the archetypal, and the mystical. As Bruno Bettelheim said, “Only when animal nature has been befriended, recognized as important, and brought into accord with the ego and superego does it lend its power to the total personality” (78). That is indeed what the narrator attempts to do and succeeds so well in doing. In addition, within the archetypal perspective of collective memory, this understanding of our close psychical relations with the animal world makes us part of an immense living totality. The first-person narrator is fully understood by the reader to be a quasifictional version of Ernest Hemingway, variously addressed as Pop, Papa, Big Kitten, and General. His nicknames specify his degree of intimacy, familiarity, social and personal affinities, and mode of interaction with others in various circumstances. They indicate his standing as the man of power and as the dominant father. According to Jungian analytic psychology, he is archetypically the source from whom animus (the male figure in women) derives. His appearance amply supports such an archetype. His photographs at the time show him with the graying hair and white beard that symbolically represent “involuntary, unconscious thoughts and fantasies” in fairy tales, because gray hair has “mana,” the Melanesian word for numinous quality, and a white beard also “plays an enormous role in fairy tales” (von Franz, Animus and Anima 18). Known worldwide as a writer of fiction, hunter, angler, and bullfight aficionado, Hemingway approaches the role of a fairy-tale prince—or perhaps king because of his age and his aura of wise authority and physical prowess. Much like the kings in fairy tales, he faces certain problems, both as a big-game hunter and as the designated honorary game warden. He is responsible for security of

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the nearby shamba, or farm, against possible Mau Mau attacks. He also has to provide fresh meat and medicine to the people of the shamba as well as to his gunbearer, tracker, driver, and safari servants. Similar to the fairy-tale king, he manifests “generally magical qualities,” because “he has mana” and is capable of solving the difficult problems his position implies (von Franz, Interpretation 52). Likewise, one imagines the narrator to be a shaman-king, with magicoreligious powers that simultaneously confer a hierarchical as well as spiritual status on him. He is a creative man of knowledge, “intuition,” and “magic powers” (UK 154). He differentiates between benefic magic powers and woi, or witchcraft. He does not practice woi, which is malefic and belongs to the domain of Shaitân (Satan); whoever practices “woi” is “the worst kind of wizard who can and does kill people on order or for choice” (UK 155). But he does divulge an understanding of the seemingly “non-rational” mystery of sacral matter as numinous that comes close to the secrets of his own art of alchemical fiction. And he is an excellent tracker and hunter, and yet he declares it “against my religion to kill anything except vermin that I would not eat” (15). His hunting, then, observes tenets of a personal religion and its attendant rituals. His strength is not limited to his physical skills as a hunter. He exhibits superior intuitive knowledge of space, the shared human and animal space as place, where essential activities of grazing, hunting, mating, birthing, and dying occur. This knowledge of space as place further refines itself as the acquired mastery of local geography and topography, which has always been present in his work in the alchemical art of fiction. Within the quasi-fictional world of Under Kilimanjaro, the narrator’s knowledge of nature is vast. This knowledge may be qualified as scientific and relegated to the various fields of natural sciences. It is interesting to enumerate some of his scientific areas of expertise according to their proper taxonomy: meteorology, biology, medicine, zoology, ornithology, herpetology, entomology, agrostalogy (study of grasses), and dendrology (study of trees). Equally well developed is his supernatural knowledge, which includes receptiveness to the prompting of the unconscious. He is responsive to memory, nocturnal dreams, daydreams, prophecy, magic, healings, divination, animals, and nature. The narrator habitually carries with him a gin flask that bears the name “Jinny flask.” He often partakes from the content of the appropriately named Jinny flask at strong emotional moments of creative and archetypal revelations. He invokes the name of the benign legendary Muslim shape-shifter Jinn, or genie, to change, ameliorate, and enhance his mood, and using the Jinny flask in acts of invocation is a way to ward off evil. Jinny exits the flask as a libational and liberating elixir. It is alchemically as effective in the transmutation of psychological conditions

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as the primary alchemical event of its own birth. The distillation from “neutral” grains that originally produced the spirit gin-Jinn and its supernatural effects is alchemy in practice. The whole process has a venerable and sacred history, a mode of collective remembering and memorializing, going back to Christ’s changing of water into wine and, later, the interest of monks in certain monasteries in wine- and spirit-making inspired by the same expectation of divine alchemical intervention. So it is not surprising to read that Nguili, the young mess attendant, “loved to fill the Jinny flask almost as much as to pour beer and he always filled it as though he were serving the Mass” (78). Thus the narrator represents a truly formidable character, a powerful and worthy model of a fairy-tale king of remarkable powers. In the final analysis, one has to regard him as a man whose childlike love of knowledge makes him susceptible to possession of it as much as being possessed by it. “All men and animals acquire a year more of age each year,” he tells us, “and some acquire a year more of knowledge. The animals that die the soonest learn the fastest” (23). He is a man of a certain age who has acquired knowledge at a prodigiously accelerated rate. And he keeps learning more each day, much like the animals that die the soonest. One may well say of him that his passion for acquisition of knowledge qualifies as epistemophilia, in the best sense of that designation. The quest for knowledge, natural and spiritual, renders him an inordinately dynamic and complex fairy-tale king. There is the young Wakamba woman, Debba, who is mostly silent and remains as enigmatic to the reader as the ancient continent of her birth. The narrator accords her royal status as the “queen of the Ngomas,” or parties. She approximates more closely the role of a black fairy-tale princess, with the narrator’s wife, Mary, as a fairy-tale queen. For the narrator, Debba stands for “Africa” and “a sort of not too simple trust and something else. It’s hard to say it” (30). What is difficult for the narrator to articulate about Debba is that she embodies the mysterious, magical spell of Africa, the appeal of a continent whose history is shrouded in the unimaginable birth of the human race and the dawn of self-consciousness. She leaves the narrator spellbound and oddly wordless for a wordsmith of uncommon powers. The black princess, as von Franz has argued, appears as the “anima in fairy tales and as the devil’s daughter. This is because the feminine principle in Protestant countries is lacking: there is no goddess, so she has fallen into the unconscious where she takes on a dark aspect.” But she points out that in Catholic countries, where the “cult of Mary provides the Christian man an idealized feminine figure onto which project his anima,” this “dark side of anima is missing, for Virgin Mary presents the light side” (Animus and Anima 70).

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Quite interestingly, the narrator in Under Kilimanjaro accords his own Mary a religious dimension: “The rougher Pagan element of the camp thought that Miss Mary’s tribal religion was one of the sterner branches of religion” (45). This pagan assessment involves “the slaying of a gerenuk under impossible conditions, the slaughter of a bad lion, and the worship of a tree” that she chose for a Christmas tree (45). Unbeknown to Mary, this tree produces a hallucinogenic “concoction that excited and maddened the Masai for war and lion hunting” (45). Within the framework of fairy-tale fantasies, the African princess Debba may well know about the hallucinogenic effects that Mary’s chosen Christmas tree produces and that she would be aware of that other generally well-kept secret: the kind of biological need the hallucinogen fulfills for the tree itself. These differences between Mary and Debba are substantial and not at all matters of the narcissism of small differences. They are part of what make up the hard-to-say and perhaps the unsayable about Debba for the narrator. For him, Debba may represent the unconscious side of his own psyche, the hazy, mostly unformulated, but vitally strong and noteworthy female principle of the male psyche, anima. Debba and the narrator share a strong elemental attraction for one another. He often refers to her as his fiancée, perhaps as a figment of a more general erotic fantasy. As a fantasized fiancée, Debba offers the potential of pregnancy and some mode of future union of momentous consequences, dragging in its wake still other possibilities of fusion of the dialectically differing phenomena in Under Kilimanjaro. Such differences would include but not be limited to: masculine versus feminine, young versus old, possible fertility versus infertility, monogamy versus bigamy, white versus black, African female versus American male, language versus private language, literate versus illiterate, and so on. In the absence of the facilitating structures and functions of a shared language, the narrator’s communication with Debba appears to take place within the narrator’s own private language. It unfolds mostly in cryptic Spanish. Reciprocal communication would only take place between them as a part of an intricate language game at the level of imagination. This “private language” oddly functions on the plane of literal misunderstanding but emotional comprehension, which makes manifest their mutual attraction to each other. But it would be inaccurate to consider this mutual attraction as being entirely sexual. Mary qualifies their private language as “Unknown Tongue” (240). It is akin to Wittgenstein’s fantasy of a private language, a mode of “subjective understanding” of the language whose comprehension is limited to the speaker (80). Just the same, it carries in it a hint of similarity to the religious phenomenon of speaking in tongues, in which a certain atypical understanding takes place.

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The narrator’s status as quasi-fictional character offers the reader an opportunity to view him, to some extent, at a distance from the writer himself. This critical distance provides the reader greater freedom for the interpretation of the narrator-as-character’s associative networks of thoughts and feelings. By definition, a fictional character can possess significantly greater autonomy and freedom in the imaginal world than the writer himself. The quasi-fictional narrator’s personality in Under Kilimanjaro exhibits fundamental traits of what Carl Jung assigns to the anima archetype, which he assigns to the unconscious feminine side of the male psyche. The effects of such all-permeating archetypal traits are overwhelming because they have the force of the unconscious behind them. As Jung states, “For a man anima experiences are always of immense and abiding significance” (203). Elaborating further on Jung’s comment, von Franz asserts that “anima creates the symbolic life, for she transforms ordinary food for the body into spiritual food through creating art and mythological tales” (Interpretation 102). These statements would apply to the narrator of Under Kilimanjaro. In von Franz’s view, the implications of anima’s work are as extensive as the history of the development of the human mind itself. Clearly, Jung and von Franz invest anima with immeasurable alchemical and archetypal transformative powers. For von Franz, anima underlies “man’s capacity for artistic work and with the fantasy world. A man who represses his anima generally represses his creative imagination” (Interpretation 102–03). What is attributable to anima in the narrator’s psyche is his remarkable active alchemical imagination and his expansive use of memory. His strength as a language artist comes from his ability to reconcile in his psyche the plenitude of his male archetype, animus, by means of delicate internal negotiations, for as long as he can, with his dominant and uncompromising creative female archetype, anima. This radical reconciliation makes up the force of his much-valued creativity and fiercely defended sense of manhood. Between these two relentless forces, and in his own fashion, he maintains psychical integration. This is the case at least within the space of his creative work, which, judged by any standard, is no mean accomplishment in and of itself. His reconciliatory ability, oddly, resides in the transcendent creative powers of anima that can absorb and surpass the animosity of animus. In the case of the narrator, this reconciliation produces durable fiction and creative nonfiction. Since, as Jung describes it, the “anima is bi-polar,” it can reconcile opposites (199). This bipolarity translates into the narrator’s profound recognition of binary oppositions and how they belong to an infinitely greater continuum: unus mundus, both inside and outside of us. As Jung concludes from his psychoanalytical investigations, the “anima has ‘occult’ connection with mysteries, with the world of darkness in general, and

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for that reason she often has a religious tinge” (199). The narrator’s passion for mysteries of childhood, alchemical transformations in fiction, transmutations of divergences into convergences and eventual unities, reflections and fantasies about a new religion, dreams, and visions all flow from his active anima. Furthermore, Jung reveals that whenever anima “emerges with some degree of clarity, she always has a peculiar relationship to time: as a rule she is more or less immortal, because outside time,” a relationship that makes memory also a realm wherein anima rules supreme (199). Anima is a truly archaic archetype, constantly engaging in elemental and regressive-progressive enterprises. All these characteristics of anima are consistent with the creative configurations of the narrator’s fiction and his views on the potential immortality of great works of art, the art of fiction in particular. In contrast, the narrator describes his quasi-fictional wife, Mary, as exhibiting characteristics of animus. She is portrayed as the type of woman in whom the “feminine nature emerges all the more strongly, coupled with masculine traits” (Jung 247). The white hunter, Philip Percival, who stringently adheres to ethical and pragmatic standards of hunting properly, appears to serve Mary as a father figure. She contrasts Percival’s sobriety, pragmatism, and reliability to what she deems to be her husband’s often erratic, childish, coarse, and reckless behavior. What Mary finds to be Percival’s masculine traits, with which she closely identifies, are directly attributable to animus. She represents the couple’s less emotional and more reasonable, rational, logical, objective side. She possesses feminine charm but also strength, vitality, confidence, conviction, initiative, practicality, and discipline. She is relatively formal and polite in her encounters with others but can occasionally be abrupt and unforgiving. A sense of clear purpose and courage orients her with unusual dexterity toward mostly concrete rather than abstract goals. Aside from her obsession with the shooting of a particular lion, she appears uncompromisingly unsentimental and conventionally sane. For example, she is inclined to learning languages systematically through the study of their different vocabularies and grammars. She generally extends this mode of learning to the prose of the world. As a rational, logical woman, Mary appears to be the “soul of reason,” with the “soul” derived from and driven by animus in her psyche. To the contrary, her husband, as she sees him, is inclined toward visionary experiences and imaginative flights of fiction so closely linked with anima. Intuition and imagination structure his world, as is evident in his improvisatory conversational approach to learning languages. For him, oral language, adopted and retained by memory, is older, deeper, and richer in its chaotic patterns, rhythms, and musicality.

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The narrator’s anima and his wife’s animus, both archaic unconscious archetypes of unfathomable depths, create tension between them, which is palpable throughout the narrative. To her, he seems to be irresponsible, often intoxicated, childish, needlessly brutal, and even occasionally irrational. She is fearful that he might “hurt other people or spoil their lives” (84). She regards his universal pessimism as reflected in the Spanish phrase No hay remedio (there is no remedy) to be just “too easy” a way out of the vagaries and confusions of life. As the voice of rational and logical animus, she tells her husband, “When it is all fantastic and you all make up your lies and live in this strange world you all have then it is just fantastic and charming sometimes and I laugh at you. I feel superior to such nonsense and to the unrealness. Please try to understand me because I am your brother too” (84). To grasp the sense of her feelings of superiority and of being a brother to her husband is tantamount to understanding the concept of animus as the male principle of her psyche. She adds, “Suddenly the nonsense gets so real that it is like having somebody chop your arm off. Chop it off truly. Not like chop it off in a dream. I mean chop it off truly the way Ngui uses a panga [machete]. I know Ngui is your true brother. Then there’s the way everyone laughs when you kill. No one is even respectful to the animal” (84). All this offends her and causes catastrophic anticipations in her mind about her husband’s excessive drinking, expounding on a new religion, speaking harshly to Debba, and going on walks or hunting with a spear in the ancient African nights. Anima, as a creative principle, has lodged itself in the inner recesses of the narrator’s psyche. According to Jung, anima is a “natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of language and religion” (17). Therefore, anima surfaces fearsomely from the depth of the unconscious and bursts onto the manifest rationality that is ceaselessly attempting to prevent the splintering of the ego. Jung’s remarks allow us to locate on a different plane what often appears to Mary as the narrator’s abnormal affective and cognitive inclinations. The narrator’s behavior is easier to understand when reading that anima leaves in her wake “just the most unexpected, the most terrifyingly chaotic things which reveal a deeper meaning” (Jung 31). The alchemical fusion of fiction and nonfiction, lived experience and memory, collective memory and archetypal patterns unfolding in the narrative as a fairy tale in and of itself is a rare accomplishment. Within and without the boundaries of such a reading other readings should, and no doubt will, come forth. Under Kilimanjaro, like most of Hemingway’s fiction, is a multilayered and plurisignificant text. It richly deserves a continually developing hermeneutics of its own.

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Not e 1. All translations from René Guénon’s Symboles de la science sacrée into English are mine.

Wo rk s C i t e d Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner’s, 1969. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Interpretation of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1989. Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. New York: Penguin, 1997. Colum, Padraic. Introduction. The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Trans. Margaret Hunt. New York: Pantheon, 1972. vii−xiii. Eberly, John. Al-Kimia: The Mystical Islamic Essence of the Sacred Art of Alchemy. Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Prennis, 2004. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Guénon, René. Symboles de la science sacrée. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Hemingway, Ernest. Under Kilimanjaro. Ed. Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2005. Jung, Carl Gustav. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990. Ondaatje, Christopher. Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari. New York: Overlook Press, 2003. Ricoeur, Paul. Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1967. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Strudwick, Helen, ed. The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. London: Amberbooks, 2007. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. von Franz, Marie-Louise. Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales. Toronto: Inner City Books, 2003. ———. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Boston: Shambala, 1996. ———. Psyche and Matter. Boston: Shambala, 1992. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.

10 “A Moveable Feast” or “a miserable time actually”? Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle, and Modernist Memoir Verna Kale 

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. . . . But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast There was death from hunger and disease among the expatriates in Paris. . . . The lives of the very few who survived have now become barely recognizable in the distortion of time and memory, and constitute the fragile substance of myth. —Kay Boyle, in Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together

For every writer of Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation,” there exists a separate Paris. Like modernism itself, Paris of the 1920s resists definition, and memorializing their own version of Paris was something of a cottage industry for the aging Left Bank writers who survived the 1920s. Along with Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Malcolm Cowley’s Exiles Return, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published A Moveable Feast is probably the most famous of these memoirs. But there are others. Four years after A Moveable Feast, Kay Boyle published Being Geniuses Together as a revised and expanded edition of poet and publisher Robert McAlmon’s 1938 memoir of the same name. Boyle’s 1968 edition heavily alters the late McAlmon’s memoir, cutting entire chapters and

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significantly paring down those that remain.1 In their place Boyle adds chapters describing her own expatriate experience contemporaneous to McAlmon’s. By alternating McAlmon’s chapters with new chapters of her own, Boyle inserts her voice into the pages of his narrative, creating a dialogue with her late friend and mentor that rewrites the Paris mythos memorialized by McAlmon, Stein, Cowley, Hemingway, and others. Boyle’s 1968 edition may be an attempt to “tighten the sense of community shared by the American writers discussed in the narrative” and thus to “outline modernism” (Monk 486). But the 1968 edition of Geniuses is more than just another account of the lost generation.2 Boyle’s darker palette tempers the rosy hues of works like A Moveable Feast, and despite the sense of community implicit in its title—which she retained from the 1938 original—her chapters tell the story of a perennial outsider. Though it may seem odd to compare two memoirs in which the authors seem almost totally unaware of the other’s existence—Boyle barely mentions Hemingway in Geniuses, and Hemingway does not mention Boyle at all—it is precisely in this omission that the exigency of such a comparison is to be found. In reading Boyle’s little-known Being Geniuses Together against Hemingway’s commercially and critically popular A Moveable Feast, the argument can be made not only that Hemingway and Boyle have disparate, gendered perspectives of 1920s Paris but that these gendered perspectives further complicate the synchronic experiences that create 1920s Paris as a tropological space rather than a historical reality.3 This comparison thus takes on both of the “significant enterprises” that make up the “rubric” of the new modernist studies as outlined by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz: “reconsider[ing] the definitions, locations, and producers of ‘modernism’” and “apply[ing] new approaches and methodologies to ‘modernist’ works” (Bad Modernisms 1). This first enterprise is accomplished not only by the inclusion of the critically neglected Kay Boyle as one of these important “producers” but by the inclusion of the late-career Ernest Hemingway as well, an author whose mainstream success, long career, and popularity with the first generation of postwar scholars seem to have discouraged interest of recent scholars of modernism. This is also achieved by expanding the reach of modernism to include the memoirs of the 1960s as modernist works themselves, open to critical scrutiny, rather than reading them only as documentary evidence produced after modernism was deemed officially over. Methodologically, rereading A Moveable Feast alongside Being Geniuses Together provides an examination of the tropes of the two concomitant memoirs and considers the ways in which these tropes reflect “the issue of gender

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as an important element in defining the aesthetics and politics, the theory and practice, of what we now call Modernism” (Benstock 4). Doing so also recognizes the modernist “preoccu[pation] with . . . collage and translation,” a preoccupation visible in the way both authors admittedly offer up their memories as fragments of a whole imperfectly recalled (Mao and Walkowitz, Bad 2). Comparing these memoirs and the way in which they are both fragmented and gender-inflected increases our understanding of modernism as “polyphonic, mobile, interactive, [and] sexually charged”—a synchronic concentration of events rather than a movement (Scott 4). Furthermore, the glimpse at the inherent multiplicity of modernism offered by the two memoirs contributes to the ongoing project in modernist studies to “transform our conceptions of what counts as literary production and of the actors, collaborators, and media involved in it” (Mao and Walkowitz, “New Modernist Studies” 738). Kay Boyle (1902−1992) may be the most famous writer nobody has ever heard of, even within the canon of “recovered” authors. In 1929 William Carlos Williams predicted that Boyle’s work would “not succeed in America” because of its “disturbing view” of humanity, a view that is “anathema to United Statesers” (314). Nevertheless, she won two O. Henry Awards and two Guggenheim Fellowships, among other honors, and, like Hemingway, she moved steadily from publishing her work in the avant-garde little magazines like transition and This Quarter to “slicks” like The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. Yet fame of the kind Hemingway, Stein, Williams, and others experienced continued to elude Boyle. Scholars have offered various explanations for her enduring obscurity, but there is a general consensus that Boyle’s work lacked recognition because it rarely matched dominant strains of critical or political thought. For nearly seventy years Boyle gave voice to stories people did not want to hear, maintaining her unflagging commitment to lost causes and unpopular opinions until her death in 1992. Even her account of Paris in the 1920s resists the popular imagination, refuting the idea of Paris as a “moveable feast” and suggesting that “it was a miserable time actually” (qtd. in Spanier, “Kay Boyle” 251). Boyle’s story is that of a woman desperate to be a part of an important literary movement but who constantly finds herself separated from the major players by time, geography, economics, and doubt. Boyle gives the distinct impression that McAlmon—who did not answer her letters, who visited Paris without calling on her, who belittled her work as “senseless,” and who asked her, “When are you going to grow up, kid?”—found her annoying (316, 328). She ends the memoir with McAlmon’s final criticism of her: “Kay, come hell or high water, had to romanticize every situation” (332). Yet Boyle is decidedly

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unromantic in her slash-and-burn approach to editing McAlmon’s text. The combination of self-deprecation (in subject) and audacity (in form) sets the 1968 Being Geniuses Together apart from the other memoirs that cropped up during the twilight of the modernist period. Boyle’s heavy-handed approach to editing McAlmon compels readers to consider the female alongside the male voice, and her memoir, which is not a success story, demonstrates how female modernist writers often negotiated their entrance into literary history as editors, publishers, patrons, and even as secretaries.4 Thus, in its method as well as in its material, Boyle’s memoir presents a female outsider’s account of the Paris mythos. And though the expatriate experience Hemingway describes is quite different from Boyle’s, it is important to note that the two authors—and their memoirs—also have much in common. Born three years apart and both raised in the Midwest, Hemingway and Boyle arrived in France within eighteen months of one another (Hemingway in late 1921, Boyle in the summer of 1923). They had close relationships with many of the same people (including James Joyce, McAlmon, Ernest Walsh, Archibald MacLeish, and others), and they published some of their earliest writing in Poetry magazine (Boyle’s “Monody to the Sound of Zithers” in December 1922 and Hemingway’s group of poems “Wanderings” one month later in January 1923). Both attended Stein’s famous salon, Hemingway more frequently than Boyle. Stein reportedly deemed Boyle “as incurably middle class as Ernest Hemingway” and famously declared Hemingway to be “ninety percent Rotarian” (Geniuses 296; Stein 207). Their similarities are not merely biographical; in their memoirs both authors self-consciously confront the myth of expatriate Paris, exploring and ultimately rejecting the pose of the starving artist who hangs around cafés. Both writers are bound by time and place to the same community, even as they are, at heart, outsiders: Boyle because certain conditions of her exile exclude her from the other Americans and Hemingway because he willfully excludes himself. And finally, both memoirs are complicated by the circumstances of their production: Hemingway’s memoir is a posthumously edited work with no extant fair copy and Boyle’s is an editorial project run amok.5 Hemingway’s and Boyle’s accounts of Paris differ from one another (and sometimes from the facts recorded in Baedeker or the archival record), not necessarily because the authors make mistakes but because their memories are influenced by personal experience—as expatriate, as writer, and as flâneur/ flâneuse—and by the exigency of writing the memoir itself. Hemingway’s memoir may be “barely more autobiographical than his fiction, and, in many ways,

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just as fictional” (Tavernier-Courbin 65), and Boyle’s memoir may be “riddled with Kay’s errors of fact and of omission . . . as if she never even referred back to her own letters and papers” (Mellen 458). But a more productive task than trying to untangle the facts from the fiction is the decoding of “textual scenes” and “the symbolic experiences of place which they inscribe” (Kennedy 5). Part of the difficulty of this task lies in language itself. Walter Benjamin suggests that memory is spatial, not verbal, and that it is based on images, which can be involuntary memories or sudden flashes of historical moments: “Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater” (25−26). These encodings and reencodings of experience necessarily become increasingly subjective. Memoir, then, is less about relating the past than editing it. This relationship between memory, language, and writing is especially complicated in these two memoirs of artistic development, because the authors employ the very skills that they describe themselves learning, a paradox noted in early scholarship on A Moveable Feast. Alfred Kazin writes, “Line by line and stroke by stroke, [Feast] is in subject and tone indistinguishable from much of Hemingway’s fiction,” and a reviewer in The New Republic noted that “if [Hemingway] and [his wife Hadley] really talked like that one wonders what the struggle was . . . to work out his style,” as the dialogue in Feast is already the Hemingway style “over-ripened” (both qtd. in Collett 343, 345). More recently Marc Dolan has suggested that “aesthetically [Feast] most resembles In Our Time” with its “indirectly connected and occasionally opaque fragments” (53). The hidden narrative behind the fragments of the memoir, Dolan argues, is the story of Hemingway’s artistic development.6 Likewise, Being Geniuses Together, in content and style, asks the “aesthetic question” essential to Boyle’s work: “how to wed her experimental style with themes that are central to women’s domestic and artistic lives” (Elkins 5). Hemingway and Boyle indicate a certain metatextual awareness of these problems inherent in life writing. Their self-consciousness is inevitable, and the disjuncture in chronological time necessitated by the process of remembering is also a defining characteristic of modernist poetics in which “time is a tyranny to be abolished” (Boyle et al.). Both Boyle and Hemingway make explicit and unapologetic reference within their own memoirs to the necessity of fictionalizing whatever details the human memory cannot (or prefers not to) supply. Boyle remembers her first attempts at an autobiographical novel, “as if a recounting of these experiences must finally reveal to me who I was” (68). Likewise, Hemingway writes insistently on page after page in the Feast manuscripts that the book is “fic-

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tion.”7 The goal and difficulty of memoir—to isolate and re-create a specific moment in the past—echo one of the basic goals and difficulties of modernism: to locate “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” and to find “that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits” (Pound 200). Just as the poet is compelled to use language in his or her quest to discover the root of language, Boyle and Hemingway use skills honed over four decades to describe their apprenticeships as writers. Thus, they unavoidably—and selfconsciously—obscure the past in their attempt to describe it. Meanwhile, the same subjectivity that makes recollection impossible also allows for productive analysis based on what the author chooses to include—or, keeping in mind Hemingway’s famous iceberg theory, what he or she chooses to omit (DIA 192). Despite the inevitability of distorted and imperfect memories, both memoirs evoke the impression of authenticity—getting at an emotional truth—by providing street names and landmarks, and these almost-literal signposts situate Hemingway and Boyle, and the reader, within the milieu of cosmopolitan flânerie. Flânerie, the act of walking the Paris streets, observing and experiencing without participating, is crucial to the artist’s training, and Hemingway, like Baudelaire’s flâneur, is able “to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere,” and he “has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler. . . . He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call ‘modernity’” (98–99). Hemingway makes it clear throughout Feast that even during his interactions with people, he is apart from them observing and recording. Nevertheless, Hemingway also resists playing the part of the flâneur, and he is careful throughout Feast to note that he was working. This work ethic sets him apart from the other café denizens, whom Hemingway resisted and ridiculed—at least in print—from his earliest days in Paris. In a letter written when Hemingway had been in Paris less than two months, he tells his mother that he has met a great many people and could easily spend all his time socializing but that he chooses to work instead (Letter). In one of his earliest dispatches to the Toronto Star as a foreign correspondent (“American Bohemians in Paris,” 25 March 1922), Hemingway ridicules the “scum of Greenwich Village” who have been “skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on that section of Paris adjacent to the Cafe Rotonde” (By-Line 23). This crowd has no time to do any actual work because “they put in a full day” at the café (25). Hemingway then expresses a mock nostalgia for “the good old days when Charles Baudelaire led a purple lobster on a leash through the same old Latin Quarter” and regrets that “there has not been much good poetry written in cafes” (25). Critics have been too quick to dismiss Hemingway’s ironic allusion to Baudelaire and flânerie here

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as “pretension” and “ignorance,” since it was not Baudelaire but rather Gérard de Nerval who took his lobster for walks on the Paris streets (Kennedy 85−86). The allusion, however, is not the result of carelessness but more likely a deliberate conflation. Because Hemingway credits Baudelaire with the absurd act, he offers the flâneur as a spectacle and not something with which a professional writer should be associated.8 Even before he himself had published much of anything, Hemingway positions himself as a working writer, though he possessed many of the characteristics of the flâneur. Walking in the metropol is, as Deborah L. Parsons has noted, a gendered experience, and while the flâneur walks unhindered through the cosmopolitan urban spaces, the modernist woman exile, like Boyle, seeks “not so much to enter but to survive in the urban environment” (123−24). Boyle walks the city streets, as Benjamin describes, “as one loses oneself in a forest,” but she is also in search of work, in search of contact with other writers, and in search of herself (8−9). In the process she finds herself “walking street after street, avenue after avenue” (Geniuses 106). Her efforts are often fruitless. While Feast uses the cafés, gardens, and museums its author enjoys as its signposts, Geniuses uses shop windows the author will only ever view from the outside: “I walked up and down the lavish blocks of the Faubourg St. Honoré and studied the elegant shopwindows in which were displayed objects contrived of shining beads and golden threads and variously coloured silks—purses, vanity bags, ballet slippers—my mind scheming and scheming, seeking a way that I might copy them and sell them to humbler shops in other quarters” (84). For Hemingway, however, springtime in Paris brings “no problems except where to be happiest,” and, in Feast, happiness, hunger, and creativity are bound up together (49). Like Boyle, Hemingway and his wife look into shop windows, but their window shopping is a diversion on the way to having lunch in a nice restaurant: “So we walked up the rue des Saints-Pères to the corner of the rue Jacob stopping and looking in the windows at pictures and at furniture. We stood outside of Michaud’s restaurant reading the posted menu” (AMF 56). His hunger is also relatively short-lived and is part of the overall aesthetic experience of walking: “It was a quick walk to Lipp’s and every place I passed that my stomach noticed as quickly as my eyes or my nose made the walk an added pleasure” (72). The constant references to restaurants, food, and drink evoke the sights and smells of Paris, as a good memoir should, and Hemingway’s return to the idea of his own hunger establishes him as a young artist struggling against poverty. He also equates hunger with creativity and clarity. While viewing Cézannes at the Luxembourg Gardens museum, his awareness of his hunger lets him better

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understand the artist’s work: “All the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry” (69). But hunger serves another, more important function in the memoir as well. Hemingway’s decision to eat lunch at Lipp’s rather than “skipping a meal,” or even just buying “a large piece of bread” with its “brown lovely crust,” is a conscious rebellion against playing the part of the starving artist and is a reaction to Sylvia Beach’s comment to him that “all writers ever talk about is their troubles” (72). Though Hemingway has been criticized for overstating his poverty during the Paris years, in Feast he calls himself out on his own pretensions: “God damn complainer . . . dirty phony saint and martyr” (72). Throughout the memoir Hemingway sets himself up as a working writer among dilettantes, and his meal is another way in which he distinguishes himself from writers like Ralph Cheever Dunning, “a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat” (143). While Hemingway walks, eats, and writes confidently in his Paris—and tries to keep other writers away from his table at the cafés—Boyle’s steps are impeded by self-censure. She, too, positions herself as a starving artist, emphasizing not only the meagerness of her meals but their loneliness as well. She restricts herself to one meal a day—pickled pigs feet from a cardboard container eaten in her hotel room. When she finally enters a café—to meet Harold Loeb and McAlmon for the first time—she does so hesitantly, ashamed of her poverty and overawed by Loeb’s and McAlmon’s membership in a community to which she desperately wants to belong. Boyle expresses her feelings of inferiority by attacking her own physical and hyperfeminine appearance: “Before I could bring myself to join them I had to walk twice around the block again, berating my own reflection in the shopwindows, saying to it Oh overweening ego! Who cares that you are thin as a rail and smeared with make-up like a whore! Yes, the earrings are uproarious, and the hat is a scream, and the skirt may split up the sides at any minute”(85–86). She finds the courage to enter the café, however, because she believes that she, McAlmon, and Loeb share the same purpose and trajectory: “These men and I have died the same deaths for the same poets, and they will hear me saying all the things I have not said yet and cannot say, and all the things I have not yet written they will know I will one day write. They move on the same, sad troubled waters with me” (86). Though Boyle feels an artistic connection with McAlmon, Loeb, and others, economic circumstances keep her separate from them. Unlike Hemingway or McAlmon, Boyle was not technically an expatriate. She was instead an émigrée with a French passport, because, by law, her marriage to a French citizen required her to renounce her U.S. citizenship. While others, Hemingway

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included, benefited from a favorable exchange rate, Boyle lived off what her husband earned in francs. Boyle’s attempt to conform to the role of a French housewife during her first few months in Paris also sets her apart from Hemingway, who is free to roam the boulevards and write in cafés because his wife keeps the house and watches the baby. Again Hemingway plays with the stereotypical image of the expatriate writer. Though earlier in the memoir he makes references to writing at home and in a rented hotel room, in the chapter “Birth of a New School” he again pokes fun at the image of a writer working in a café. A rather long list of items—“notebooks . . . pencils . . . pencil sharpener . . . marble-topped tables . . . smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping . . . and luck” (in the form of a “horse chestnut” and “a rabbit’s foot”)—is “all you needed” (91). The inevitable question from a nosy interloper—“‘What are you trying to do? Write in a café?’”—is annoying precisely because it highlights the pretension of the activity, even in a neighborhood café like the Closerie des Lilas (92). At the end of the chapter Hemingway decides to work at the dining room table in his apartment. Though its address “could not have been a poorer one,” it is a “warm and cheerful” space (35, 11). There the young author writes, receives guests, eats, and makes love, but he is able to come and go as he chooses—to cafés, to the racetrack, to the Luxembourg Gardens, to Stein’s salon, and to ski vacations in Austria and Switzerland. Though these early chapters establish Paris as an ideal space for writing, and his overt target in “Birth of a New School” is a hapless literary critic, Hemingway also aims some of the blows at himself, continuing to play with the image of the starving artist and debating the role of luck in his early career. He chastises himself for not knocking on wood when, ironically, “there was wood everywhere” (the couple lives above a saw mill), but later he recants his earlier list of necessary items for writing, ultimately declaring “you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit’s foot” (38, 96). Though he is ambivalent about the role of luck in the writer’s craft, Hemingway’s jibes at café life deny outright the idea that writing is connected in any important way to place (except to suggest that one cannot write about a place while still living there). A Moveable Feast is most often read as a book about Paris, but its cosmopolitan protagonist gives the impression that he could be at home anywhere. Boyle, however, equates her identity with her physical space, and she smothers her artistic identity in the process. When her husband finds work and the couple leaves Paris and moves to Le Havre, she understands that they “would be poor as the French were poor, and the mere fact of this would define our

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meaning and our geographical place” (109). Boyle emphasizes that their poverty would not be the romanticized poverty of the expatriates in Montparnasse— who, according to Stein, “can either buy clothes or buy pictures” (AMF 15). Instead, Boyle and her husband move away from Paris and into the French working class. Cut off from Paris, Boyle links the bleak surroundings with a lack of literary output. In the couple’s first Le Havre apartment, with its coal dust on the floor and a belching stove, she cannot write until she is able to ignore her surroundings: “I avoided the stove, and although it was damp and cold in the apartment I started writing again” (123). Her second apartment in Le Havre is still shabby, but with its “comfortably warm wall” it also has a certain coziness (126). There Boyle begins to make some strides as an author: “The room behind the restaurant, where we lived all that winter, became notable to me because the correspondence with [Emanuel] Carnevali began there; and because it was the room which Flossie and Bill Williams did not come to when they passed through Le Havre on their way to Paris; and because the cat had kittens in bed with us one February night; and because I finished my first novel there” (129). It is a creative space—for producing novels and kittens—but it is also a space for disappointments: Boyle felt snubbed by William Carlos Williams, and the first novel would be lost in transit between publishers and not rediscovered and published until after her death. Fearing that she has tuberculosis, Boyle, with her husband’s consent, goes to Grasse at the invitation of poet Ernest Walsh, coeditor of the little magazine This Quarter. She hyperbolizes the move as a drastic change to Earth’s surface: “The bitter cold of all I had left behind me was tempered, transformed as startlingly as if the Gulf Stream had decided to alter its course and come along the coast of Normandy” (179). In comparing her experiences in the two cities, Boyle contrasts the cold and artificial to the warm and natural. Le Havre is the frigid, windowless apartment and malfunctioning stove, while Grasse, a town famous for its perfumes, is characterized by an open window “with drifting curtains of wisteria hanging at their doors” (176). The open window is evocative of Boyle’s new freedom of movement. Living with Walsh and Ethel Moorhead as the couple puts the magazine together, Boyle reenters a literary sphere that she had abandoned—and that had abandoned her—when she moved to Le Havre. In contrast, Hemingway’s perceptions of the French winter again focus on his “good luck working,” and he grows “accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky . . . the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind” (11−12). Though Hemingway suffered from

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terrible throat infections aggravated by the cold weather, his frequent illnesses make no appearance in Feast. Instead he chooses to remember the beautiful aspects of winter—the trees without their leaves, the bright winter light, and the mandarins and chestnuts he snacks on while working. Hemingway presents the cold, and its attendant constant hunger, as positive aspects of the hard work he was doing that winter: “I was always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working. . . . It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working” (11−12). Hemingway, hungry for more than roasted chestnuts, keeps moving and keeps working. The weather, too, cooperates in Hemingway’s Paris. Though Hemingway opens Feast in medias res with the sentence, “Then there was the bad weather,” the bad weather in Paris does not last long. Unlike Boyle, who only escapes Le Havre because to stay any longer would be life-threatening, Hemingway is not a prisoner of his bad weather. “We could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines,” he writes, alluding to the skiing trips he and his wife take (7). With that problem solved, the Paris rain becomes “only local weather and not something that changed your life” (7). In Geniuses Boyle depicts a greater struggle with the grim winter landscape, and before her exodus to Grasse, she escapes by creating for herself a safe, sunny space in the dreary apartment out of found objects, covering the panes of a window with broken pieces of yellow and green glass. That she must sift through “the remnants of drowned cats” and “glaucous pods that exploded under one’s foot” to find the glass pieces makes her small victory over the bleakness of her environment even more significant (143). Building a faux landscape of colored glass into the window, which “allows no weather of any kind to penetrate” (142), Boyle integrates art into her domestic life and controls her environment both in the past and in the narrating present. When Boyle returns to Paris in 1928, she finally lands among the community of writers and artists. Seven years after Hemingway, Boyle finds herself making the rounds of places like the Dôme and Lipp’s. She supports herself and her daughter by writing the memoirs of the Dayang Muda, Princess of Sarawak. In a metatextual moment, Boyle recounts how “it was therefore necessary to invent the story as one went along” because the Princess was unable to recall the details of her own life (258). In a similar episode in Feast, Hemingway relates a conversation with Georges, a bartender at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, who insists, “You must tell me something about [F. Scott Fitzgerald] for my memoirs” (192). Hemingway promises Georges that he will put Fitzgerald in the book “exactly” as he remembers him (193). The genre of memoir, Hemingway and

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Boyle both suggest, need not rely on accuracy or even on personal experience in its reconstruction of people and places. Eventually Boyle grows uncomfortable with the opulent lifestyle her employer provides, including caviar for breakfast and hand-me-down couture clothes, and she joins a psuedo-Greek colony led by Raymond Duncan. There Boyle works in the colony’s shop, selling the textiles the members allegedly weave on rustic looms. But the colony proves to be a sham. Boyle had joined the colony to appease her social conscience, to have time and funds to work on her writing, and to secure reliable child care for her daughter, but the colony was not where she belonged. With the help of friends, she sneaks her daughter out of the group and returns to civilization. Though Boyle is reluctant to write much about the colony in Geniuses, having already fictionalized it in her novel My Next Bride (1934), her experience there offers a glimpse at the dangers of belonging too closely to one community. But Boyle, a single mother with literary aspirations and an active social conscience, was desperate to figure out where she belonged. Geniuses is the memoir of a writer’s introduction to, isolation from, and, finally, acceptance into a community, albeit a largely illusory one defined not by space but by a common goal to “revolt . . . against all literary pretentiousness” (336). Focusing on the difficulties of balancing an artistic and a domestic life and on her relegation to the periphery of the movement, Boyle’s memoir helps explain how modernism would be gendered masculine by its contemporary and later critics. Boyle challenges the hypermasculine posturing of McAlmon’s and Hemingway’s memoirs, in which the writers take on their contemporaries one by one. It would be wrong, however, to characterize Boyle as a feminist writer simply because she writes about community or because her memoir is one of resistance. As a cosigner of the manifesto “The Revolution of the Word,” Boyle quite literally defies Benstock’s characterization of the women of the Left Bank as “a countersignature to the published Modernist manifestos” (Boyle et al. x). Suzanne Clark rightly notes that “Boyle’s work resists certain categories, traps of ideology . . . includ[ing] the categorical oppositions of male and female” (324). Instead, Boyle presents a more complicated, nuanced example of modernism and modernity that resists easy classification. As her biographer Sandra Whipple Spanier notes, Boyle “did not view the word as apart from the world or believe that commitment to modernist aesthetics was incompatible with commitment to community” (“Paris” 177). Boyle’s memoir, even as it denies the possibility of reconstructing Paris of the 1920s and insists on her refusal “to give consideration to the requirements of American publishers and editors,”

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continuously returns to the project of literary modernism and her struggle to be counted as a part of “the international writing scene” (299, 213). But Boyle also insists on her independence, refusing to give “allegiance to any group or state of mind, rather than allegiance to individual women and men” (299). Despite its faults and inconsistencies, she would not reject the community of writers the way Hemingway does in Feast. If Boyle’s memoir tells us anything new about Paris of the 1920s, it is that those who marketed modernism, like McAlmon, were aware of the indulgences, pretensions, and ridiculousnesses of the movement—and they continued the work even after “the lines that people spoke . . . the props, the scenery, no longer had any meaning” (288). Reshaping McAlmon’s memoir in the late 1960s, Boyle brings an awareness of the futility of the modernist project to the familiar stories of Paris. Hemingway resisted the idea of a community of writers almost as soon as his first mainstream successes—The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms— allowed him to leave it behind. In 1929, the same year that Boyle signed “The Revolution of the Word,” Hemingway, in his introduction to Kiki of Montparnasse, fails quite purposefully at memorializing the already legendary community of writers, artists, and colorful personalities. He declares the “era of Montparnasse . . . definitely marked as closed” before launching into a treatise on the difficulties of translation, stating that “it is a crime to translate it”—“it” being not only the memoirs of Alice Prin, originally in French, but also the era itself (11, 14). Hemingway’s advice for those who cannot read the memoir in the original is “learn French and read it” (13). This glib statement is actually quite telling. Hemingway asserts the power dynamic felt throughout much of his work: those who know the “true gen” and those who do not; those who experienced Montparnasse and those who can only read about it in imperfect translation. Hemingway seems aware that translation and autobiography are both artificial systems that rely on language and the subjective experience of the reader. Because it cannot be explained to anyone who was not there, Hemingway plays down the importance of the era (“personally I don’t think it was worth much”) and draws a distinction between “the cafés and the restaurants where people are seen in public” and “the apartments, studios and hotel rooms where they work in private” (11). Three decades later Hemingway will reiterate this point in A Moveable Feast. It is unusual in a memoir so concerned with the street names, sights, and smells of the place that the author would deny the importance of place even as he can ostensibly recall the minutest details. But in this respect, Hemingway and Boyle reach a similar conclusion: what people think they know of Paris

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in the 1920s is largely mythical. A Moveable Feast and Being Geniuses Together are neither works of fiction nor nonfiction. They are works that are part of the “distortion of time and memory, and constitute the fragile substance of myth” (Geniuses 336). For Hemingway, however, the revolt against pretension and the pursuit of good writing was highly personal, and in Feast he introduces, and often rejects, the other players one by one. Hemingway’s distinctions between public and private, social and professional point to his relationship with the city, his role as a flâneur within it, and his intention to remain separate from the other people who inhabit it. Nevertheless, two spaces in particular provide an entrance for Hemingway into the community he will later reject, and he includes them in Feast: 27, rue de Fleurus and 12, rue de l’Odéon. The former, Stein’s address, and the latter, Beach’s bookstore and lending library Shakespeare & Company, are, along with the cafés, two centers of Hemingway’s early literary life in Paris. Unlike Boyle, Hemingway portrays his entrance into these spaces as immediate, and despite his obscurity he is automatically accepted. Beach even allows him to check out books before he has paid for his library card. Boyle, however, on first crossing over to the Left Bank, ”walked . . . up the Rue de l’Odéon towards Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, to number 12, thinking that if I came here every day and watched I might catch a sight of James Joyce or George Moore either going in or coming out. But once I actually saw the sign, Shakespeare and Company, I did not have the courage to approach the door. I stayed on the other side of the street, my back half turned, glancing at the bookshop from the corners of my eyes” (84−85). Boyle and Hemingway view Beach’s bookshop as an important point of contact. For Boyle it is a place to meet great people, but for Hemingway it is a place where he can read work by great writers; on his first visit he takes out books by Turgenev, D. H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. He, like Boyle, is interested in seeing Joyce (whom he has already seen in a local restaurant), but he adds that “it’s not polite to look at people when they are eating,” perhaps a reference to Hemingway’s own annoyance when he is approached while in a café (36). Hemingway’s contact with Beach and, to a greater degree, his account of time spent with Stein illustrate how he simultaneously plants himself within the community (his easy acceptance by Beach and Stein) while distancing himself from it as its only real writer. Significantly, he leaves out that he met Beach, Stein, and Pound through letters of introduction by Sherwood Anderson, a crucial detail that explains his rapid acceptance into their circle. He does, however, take time to mention Anderson’s “strangely poor” novels, and he

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devotes three chapters to Stein, who angered Hemingway with her portrait of him in Toklas (28). Stein, Hemingway suggests, did not like to be compared to other writers, particularly Joyce: “It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. . . . You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten” (28). In these chapters, Stein is, to use Hemingway’s own idiom, “beaten”—and she is not the only one. Hemingway takes on Stein, Pound, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, and several poets and patrons. With most of his competition dead, and as one of the last things Hemingway would write, Feast gives Hemingway the last word. Even Pound, one of the few contemporaries to avoid Hemingway’s ire, does not escape critique in the memoir, though the seemingly sympathetic portrait of Pound is more subtle than the critiques of Stein or Fitzgerald. He feminizes the “gentle” Pound, calling him “the most generous writer I had ever known,” but he fights Pound in a literal sense, teaching him to box (28, 110). Hemingway “blocked [Pound’s punches] with an open right glove,” thus showing not only that he can beat Pound but that he can beat him easily and without effort (109). To beat a writer is to best him at the craft, and Hemingway “was embarrassed at having [Pound] work in front of anyone he knew” (110). Although Hemingway learned many important lessons about writing from Pound, in this scene near the end of Feast Hemingway is the teacher and Pound is the student who can’t learn “to shorten his right” (110)—or perhaps his “write”? Hemingway feminizes Pound not only by describing Pound’s terrible boxing stance but also by focusing on Pound as a patron. Hemingway devotes a chapter to Pound’s program of Bel Esprit, the plan to buy T. S. Eliot out of his day job as a banker, deeming Pound’s support of his friends “beautiful as loyalty but . . . disastrous as judgment” (107). The tone in the chapter is sardonic, and though Hemingway participates in Bel Esprit, he concludes ironically that “the whole thing turned out badly for me morally . . . because the money that I had earmarked for getting the Major out of the bank . . . I bet on jumping horses that raced under the influence of stimulants” (112). Patronage was the domain of women, and Hemingway positions himself as an antipatron, gambling the money on horses. The irony is in the similarity between betting on a horse and speculating on the success of a poet: neither, Hemingway implies, makes good financial sense. Ernest Hemingway is not alone in his posturing. In his sections of Geniuses, McAlmon, like Hemingway, works to cement the permanent (negative) reputations of other authors. McAlmon criticizes Sinclair Lewis and Joyce, and he shares some common targets with Hemingway: Eliot and Ford in particular.

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Boyle, however, does not join in Hemingway’s or McAlmon’s sparring: the alternating McAlmon-Boyle chapters of Geniuses highlight this difference, almost distractingly so. Craig Monk criticizes Boyle for rearranging McAlmon’s chapters and for cutting out approximately one-third of McAlmon’s text, suggesting that Boyle’s edits falsely create a “centripetal” sense of community out of what Malcolm Cowley described as “several loosely defined and vaguely hostile groups” (491, Cowley qtd. in Monk 489). But in his defense of McAlmon’s text, Monk overlooks the value of Boyle’s project, both on its own merits and in dialogue with McAlmon’s—and, as I argue, with Hemingway. It is a function, not a failing, of memoir to filter objective truths through a subjective lens, and the importance of each memoir lies not in the story but in its telling. As such, the supposedly factual errors or misconceptions by Boyle (and by Hemingway) are not mistakes but carefully constructed rhetorical choices. The inconsistencies and anomalies help us understand women’s experiences of modernism by highlighting “difference . . . within gender and genre, manifest through the inversions and diversions of Modernist logic” (Benstock 34). Boyle’s Geniuses is important precisely because it is a revision of McAlmon—and of other memoirs. Hemingway’s memoir, too, is a revision of the autobiographical narrative he had been working on his entire life. Matthew J. Bruccoli suggests that Hemingway’s decades-long project of self-styling may even have “damaged the profession of authorship” itself “by providing readers with a distorted model for how writers were supposed to live and work” (xviii). “Ernest Hemingway’s best-invented fictional character,” Bruccoli argues, “was Ernest Hemingway” (xix). By the time Hemingway set about writing his memoirs, his life was already written for him in the popular imagination. By 1930 Paris was over, but what had happened in that time and place had taken on a new life in the memories of its survivors: “It did not seem strange to us then . . . ” Boyle writes, “how the scattered bits and pieces of the lives and hopes of writers kept falling into place, finally making a mural, a frieze, of such continuity that people would look on it for a long time to come as literary history” (175). At the end of Geniuses, Boyle confesses to McAlmon that for six years she had often recited to herself a poem by him that asked, “Where are the pieces / quivering and staring and muttering / that are all to be a part of me?” (12). In response, McAlmon angrily shouts at her to “let the God-damned pieces fall apart!” (328). But in her revision of Geniuses Boyle self-consciously ignores McAlmon’s criticism, gathering together the pieces into her own story, which, alongside Feast, is another piece in a larger collage.

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Not e s 1. I will be citing McAlmon’s book by its abbreviated title Geniuses rather than by its author so as to avoid confusion. 2. Craig Monk notes that, on the suggestion of Doubleday editor Ken McCormick, Boyle published Being Geniuses Together when plans for a history of German women fell through (485). This move suggests confidence on the publisher’s part that there was room in the market for another modernist memoir. 3. Feminist recovery work like Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank has long established these different gendered perspectives. Benstock called for an increased attention to women’s contributions to modernism as writers but also as publishers, patrons, and salonnieres. She focuses on “the ways in which the patriarchal social and political settings of Western culture affect the subject matter and methods of women’s writing and influence the creative process from which that writing is born” (3). Since the 1980s great strides have been made in expanding the definition(s) and opening up the canon(s) of modernism to include formerly underrepresented writers. Nevertheless, Boyle was surprisingly missing from Benstock’s 1986 work. In one of the few critical examinations of Being Geniuses Together, Christine H. Hait notes that Boyle “privileges a both/and position,” an authorial positioning on Boyle’s part that risks being “self-effacing” and thus “traditionally feminine” (301−02). Yet the dialogue Boyle creates between her chapters and McAlmon’s, Hait argues, ultimately enables Boyle “to expose the illusions . . . lurking behind the autobiographical act” (300). 4. Before she came to Europe, Boyle worked as a secretary for Broom. Her duties included serving tea “in silent awe” to William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, John Dos Passos, Elinor Wylie, Jean Toomer, and others who attended readings in Lola Ridge’s Greenwich Village basement during the early 1920s (Geniuses 18). 5. It bears noting that A Moveable Feast was subject to posthumous editing by the author’s widow, Mary Hemingway, and Scribner’s editor Harry Brague. Chapters were shuffled, the preface was cobbled together from manuscript fragments, and the final chapter was gleaned from more than 100 pages of starts and stops, revisions, and marginal notes doubting the publishability of the work. Gerry Brenner suggests that the editorial changes alter the character of the memoir significantly: “Hemingway stops projecting himself as that responsible young artist or as an innocent victim of the rich. Instead he exposes himself, tries to deal honestly with complex emotions and guilt” (“Are We Going” 535). Though the differences between Hemingway’s and Boyle’s projects remain significant, Hemingway’s work, if finished, likely would not have concluded with the confident, if slightly wistful, persona that Mary Hemingway shaped in the last chapter. Then again, the numerous false starts expose the author’s difficulty in bringing this vulnerable new Hemingway to life, and it is impossible to say whether Hemingway would ever have been able to settle on an ending. In 2009 Hemingway’s grandson Seán Hemingway published a restored edition that presents “a truer representation” of the work Hemingway “intended to publish” (3). The new edition restores Hemingway’s word choices, rearranges the chapters, and eliminates the preface. Most significant, the new edition refuses to manufacture an ending where Hemingway provided none. But because the 1964 edition played such a significant role in shaping 1920s Paris as we know it, it is to this edition that the quotations in this essay refer. 6. “Simply put, the text of the Paris sketches is most focused when Ernest is writing well and most diffuse when he is writing poorly,” a case of art imitating life imitating art (Dolan 60). Dolan’s thesis suggests that Feast has, for too long, been read as a work of nostalgia (at best) or a work of petty revenge (at worst) when it is actually a carefully constructed “oscillating pattern” detailing the simultaneous development of the artist at the expense of personal happiness (60).

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7. The oft-quoted line in the preface, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction” (emphasis added) is the result of posthumous editing. In the manuscripts Hemingway adamantly insists that the book “is fiction” (ms. 122; see also The Restored Edition 229−32). While editorial changes are always in some way significant, any minor discrepancies between the published text and the manuscript/restored edition in the passages I quote here do not seem to affect my thesis. If anything, the susceptibility of the text to editorial intervention further demonstrates the malleable nature of memoir. For a detailed description of the editorial changes, see Gerry Brenner’s A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Rose Marie Burwell’s Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. 8. I would like to credit Lisa Tyler for pointing out the example of Baudelaire and the lobster. In her paper “Hemingway as Flâneur,” delivered at the 13th International Hemingway Society Conference, Tyler argued that Hemingway’s anxiety about the commodification of art prevented him from being a flâneur, and that in A Moveable Feast he invokes the flâneur while consciously playing against the type.

Wo rk s C i t e d Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” 1863. From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence E. Cahoone. New York: Blackwell, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. “A Berlin Chronicle.” 1932. Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1986. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900−1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Boyle, Kay, et al. “The Revolution of the Word.” transition 16−17 (1929). Brenner, Gerry. “Are We Going to Hemingway’s Feast?” American Literature 54 (December 1982): 528−44. ———. A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2001. Bruccoli, Matthew J. “Introduction.” Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, with Judith S. Baughman. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2006. Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Clark, Suzanne. “Revolution, the Woman, and the Word: Kay Boyle.” Twentieth Century Literature 34 (Fall 1988): 322−33. Collett, Alan. “Literature, Fiction and Autobiography.” British Journal of Aesthetics 29 (Autumn 1989): 341−53. Dolan, Marc. Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of “The Lost Generation.” West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1996. Elkins, Marilyn. “Introduction.” Critical Essays on Kay Boyle. Ed. Marilyn Elkins. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Hait, Christine H. “Life-Giving: Kay Boyle’s Innovations in Autobiography in Being Geniuses Together.” In Elkins. 299−311. Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. ———. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s, 1932. ———. “Introduction.” Kiki of Montparnasse. Kiki (Alice Prin). New York: Black Manikin Press, 1929. ———. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s, 1964.

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———. A Moveable Feast Ms. 122. Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. ———. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Intro. and ed. Seán Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s, 2009. ———. Letter to Grace Hall Hemingway. 14 February 1922. Ernest Hemingway: Letters to His Family 1917−1957. Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. Bad Modernisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. ———. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737−48. McAlmon, Robert. Being Geniuses Together. Revised with supplementary chapters and an afterword by Kay Boyle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Mellen, Joan. Kay Boyle: Author of Herself. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Monk, Craig. “Textual Authority and Modern American Autobiography: Robert McAlmon, Kay Boyle, and the Writing of a Lost Generation.” Journal of American Studies 35 (December 2001): 485−97. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste.” Poetry (March 1913): 200−206. Scott, Bonnie Kime. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Spanier, Sandra Whipple. “Kay Boyle: ‘No Past Tense Permitted.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 34 (Fall 1988): 245−57. ———. “‘Paris Wasn’t Like That’: Kay Boyle and the Last of the Lost Generation.” Lives Out of Letters: Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth. Ed. Robert D. Habich. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004. 169−88. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933. Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: The Making of Myth. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. Tyler, Lisa. “Hemingway as Flâneur.” 13th International Hemingway Society Conference. Kansas City, MO, 12 June 2008. Williams, William Carlos. “The Somnambulists.” 1929. Twentieth-Century Literature 34 (Fall 1988): 313−17.

PART IV

Memory and Truth

11 The Persistence of Memory and the Denial of Self in A Farewell to Arms Mark Cirino 

How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man The wave of remembering has finally risen so that it has broken over the jetty that I built to protect the open roadstead of my heart. —Ernest Hemingway, 2 October 1951

Two years after the publication of A Farewell to Arms, Salvador Dali’s surreal masterwork The Persistence of Memory showed melting clocks on a desolate landscape, suggesting the inapplicability of linear chronology to modern life and its irrelevance to the way human consciousness truly operates.1 In 1929, the year A Farewell to Arms was published, William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson futilely attempts to destroy time by mutilating its instrument of measurement, recalling his father’s teachings that “time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels: only when the clock stops does time come to life” (Sound and the Fury 85). Quentin’s father cautions that the watch should not encourage 149

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“constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function” (77). A Farewell to Arms—unlike the works of Dali and Faulkner—has never been widely recognized as a particularly profound statement about the nature of memory, or praised as an incisive investigation into the psychological or philosophical implications of time. Hemingway’s war novel is most fruitfully read as an eloquent, complex example of the writer’s own attitudes toward the past and toward consciousness in general. It is too easy to dismiss a war veteran and widower’s view of the past as simplistic. The complexity of trauma and grief is the subtext of a seemingly straightforward narrative. By discussing A Farewell to Arms in its manuscript stage, as well as its crucial moments in its published version, we can expose memory as a crucial hidden player in the tragedy. Through an examination of memory’s role in the novel, we can better appreciate the novel’s structural subtleties and the more fragile dimensions to Frederic Henry’s character. Why would Dali’s concern have been the “persistence” of memory? Surely Dali was not alluding to pleasant memories. The connotation of “persistence” is that of a dogged, unyielding force that even when temporarily repelled returns unbidden. In Daniel L. Schacter’s recent study, he lists “persistence” as a major problem in the way that we remember and incorporate the past into consciousness and includes “disappointment, regret, failure, sadness, and trauma” as the “primary territory of persistence” (162). Hemingway’s fiction always exists in the arena where such persistent memories would be in play; Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Richard Cantwell, Robert Jordan, Thomas Hudson, and Frederic Henry all either cope with traumatic memory of a war or deal with sadness and regret and failure during the war. “Persisting memories,” Schacter writes, “are a major consequence of just about any type of traumatic experience” (174), including war. Philip Young’s “wound theory” thesis, then, extends beyond the psychic trauma of unseen wounds and influences matters of consciousness and cognitive functioning. The famous first sentence of A Farewell to Arms reads, “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains” (3). When Frederic begins his retrospective narrative by specifying “that year,” he immediately signals that he intends to embark on a distant and particular memory. “That year” denotes the process of selection in memory, in conjuring up an experience from the past that is the responsibility of any storyteller, and the role of any individual consciousness in calling forth an intentional memory. The narrator, by pinpointing the year 1915

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as significant in his past, is constructing a novel in which the artistic canvas will be his own autobiographical memory. Although the Italian army’s clash with the Austro-Hungarian forces, the ramifications of Frederic’s desertion of the army, and the health of Catherine Barkley form the three external tensions, the understated, or unstated, psychological tension rests in the inherent unpleasantness of the memories that the narrator chooses to recount, causing Frederic to negotiate with and at times reject the nature of his own memory. Autobiographical memory describes “the capacity of people to recollect their own lives” (Baddeley 26) and can simply be defined as “memory for information related to the self ” (Brewer 26). Although Proust may be the master at mining autobiographical memory for literary purposes, A Farewell to Arms is also productively examined as a search for lost time, although the styles that convey these memories are famously disparate.2 Hemingway’s Frederic relates to memory in a far different—at times opposing—manner than does Proust’s Marcel. Rather than luxuriating in the free introspective exploration of his memory, Frederic is uneasy about surrendering his consciousness to a chaotic, unfettered investigation of the past. If A Farewell to Arms is itself constructed as an extended autobiographical memory from the first sentence, in its manuscript stage Hemingway articulates perhaps his most explicit analysis of the phenomenon of human memory. In so doing he provides a valuable key to the narrator’s attitude and indeed expounds on a central theme in the collective consciousness of the so-called Hemingway Hero in all its various incarnations. In chapter 17 of the manuscript, which takes place following the operation on his leg, Frederic Henry offers the following meditation: “Nothing that you learn by sensation remains if you lose the sensation. There is no memory of pain if there is no pain. Sometimes pain goes and you can not remember it from the moment before but only have a dread of it again. When love is gone you can not remember it but only remember things that happen and places. There is no memory of love if there is no love. All these things, however, return in the dark. In the dark, love returns when it is gone, pain comes again and danger that has passed returns. Death comes in the dark” (qtd. in Grebstein 213).3 In this fascinating rumination, Frederic reveals the kind of antagonism toward thought and introspection that is a hallmark of the Hemingway hero. However, Frederic’s surface criticism and scorn for thought and memory must be read carefully: it is by Hemingway’s consistent denial of its importance that he betrays his understanding of its centrality in the lives of human beings, even his characters who are famously Men of Action. Deny it though he may, the

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Hemingway protagonist is a reluctant intellectual, a sensitive, pensive man with an impulse toward introspection, though the exigencies of his current situation bar such rumination. Hemingway intentionally creates Men of Thought: Nick Adams is a writer of fiction; Jake Barnes is a journalist; Frederic Henry is a student of architecture; Robert Jordan is a teacher; Thomas Hudson is a painter; David Bourne is also a writer. These are all creative, cerebral occupations. The tension in a Hemingway text emerges when these characters, who by nature are thinkers, find themselves in active and urgent situations—situations of violence and fiascoes of love. Frederic Henry has had his experiences of action and love and must revisit them through the power of memory. Frederic’s thesis on memory in the manuscript appears at first glance to be nonsense. The gap in logic marring Frederic’s argument is no less than a rejection of memory itself. To suggest that without an equivalent present sensory experience there is no attendant memory, or that the present lack of pain or love eliminates the memory of pain or love, is essentially to undo the way memory works. In Saint Augustine’s Confessions, one of the defining statements on memory, a description of a functional memory offers virtually a point-by-point refutation of Frederic’s stance: “memory also records emotions previously experienced in the mind, not in the same way as the mind experienced them at the time, but in the mode proper to the power of memory. I remember having been happy, without feeling happy now; I recall my past sadness but feel no sadness in so doing; I remember having been afraid once, but am not frightened as I remember; I summon the memory of how I once wanted something, but without wanting it today” (X.13.20:250). Augustine draws the distinction between recalling something and reliving it. If we needed to relive something in order to conjure up an experience in the past, then memory would have no utility. Memory depends not on a reimmersion into an identical sensory experience but simply on the individual imagining and recognizing (re-cognizing) the emotions connected to the experience. Augustine supplies another useful illustration: “I can distinguish the scent of lilies from violets even though I am not actually smelling anything, and honey from grape-juice, smooth from rough, without tasting or feeling anything: I am simply passing them in review before my mind by remembering them” (X.8.13:246). He is describing memory the way most of us experience it: we don’t need to touch an object to imagine the way it feels, since we have already experienced it and can access the stored sensation. However, it is by protesting too much against the incessant tide of stored sensations and experiences that Frederic unwittingly provides the greatest

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insight into his character and the utter sadness with which his relationship with the past is framed. Even the imagery each writer uses is indicative of their opposite stances with respect to the past: Augustine speaks of making the effort to willingly “call for” and to have “brought out” and “summon” senses and experiences from the past; Frederic does not use verbs through which the individual controls consciousness but verbs that describe consciousness preying on the individual. In the manuscript excerpt we read of death “coming” and love “returning,” emotions acting by their own volition, not through the will and mental control of the individual.4 Hemingway also analyzed the same phenomenon of the relationship between the memory of a sensory experience within a wartime context in his short story “A Natural History of the Dead,” claiming, “The smell of a battlefield in hot weather one cannot recall. You can remember that there was such a smell, but nothing ever happens to you to bring it back. It is unlike the smell of a regiment, which may come to you suddenly while riding in the street car and you will look across and see the man who has brought it to you. But the other thing is gone as completely as when you have been in love; you remember things that happened, but the sensation cannot be recalled” (SS 443−44). As snidely as the distinction is articulated in this excerpt, in each example the narrator suggests that in order to retrieve a sensation from the past, one must experience a similar sensation in the present. This either speaks to the unmatchable profundity of the original experience or to the inadequacy of human memory. These faulty sensory recollections of war suggest the presence of a dissociative element. In Hemingway’s less urgent settings, an odor can freely be recalled; the narrator in Green Hills of Africa reports, even while smelling the other scents around the camp (roasting meat, the smoke of the fire, Hemingway’s boots, another person), “I could remember the odor of the kudu as he lay in the woods” (239). And during a relaxing moment in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan identifies the “odor of nostalgia” (260), the scent of fresh pine bringing him back to his Montana boyhood. By suggesting that no emotion remains, and that no memory exists of what has come before, Frederic reveals the unconscious posttraumatic coping mechanism of dissociation, in which an individual’s errant memory allows him not simply to be removed from his past but ultimately to be divorced from his own identity, his very self. Psychologist Elizabeth A. Waites discusses dissociation as a “subversion of memory” (146) and identifies it as a common reaction to a traumatic situation like Frederic’s: “Most psychologists who specialize in the study of trauma view dissociation rather than repression as

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the typical dynamic in posttraumatic memory loss and recovery” (144). In a novel in which the turning point—Frederic being blown up—depicts the hero floating out of himself, literally having an out-of-body experience, it seems as if his imperfect memory has perpetuated this phenomenon: he has come back, but not all the way. Waites’s work sheds further light on Frederic’s monologue on memory from the manuscript. She remarks that the emotions lost in a dissociative reaction may be “altogether lost to recall until reactivated” (145), which explains why Frederic’s claim—that, to him, memories of these emotions are lost—ranks as more than just an obstinate declaration. The memories of this period of Frederic’s life may indeed be depersonalized and dissociated to where he is not able to recall them with the “warmth and intimacy” (James) that usually characterizes an autobiographical memory. In a study that analyzes those affected by the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, researchers concluded that victims tended to exhibit symptoms consistent with those in Frederic’s excerpt: “there seems to be little doubt that transient dissociative phenomena may be expected among a considerable percentage of individuals exposed to traumatic events. . . . While we may not be able to make the world more predictable or controllable, an understanding of the common occurrence of dissociation will allow us to give more comfort and empathy to victims of disaster” (Cardeña and Spiegel 478). If as a typical Hemingway protagonist, Frederic seeks order and control, one way of finding it is by avoiding the disorder and chaos in his mind. The issue of memory is so crucial for the foundation of a retrospective narrator because it is in recalling an experience, through memory, that a person links himself to his past. Memory is the principal component by which an individual forms a sense of self. In Garry Wills’s lucid commentary on Augustine’s Confessions, he remarks, “Without memory we would have no sense of our own identity. . . . To wake with no memory of who one is, what one has done, what one’s relations to others are, is to be denuded of one’s very nature, since that depends on maintaining a continuity with one’s former actions” (11–12). Wills’s description of Augustine’s autobiographical testimony is also an apt categorization of Frederic’s project, which is to detach himself from his painful past, to deny the overwhelming force of memory by believing that his unpleasant experiences did not exist. William James urges the importance of a continuity of self, of recognizing that the person you are today is bound through consciousness to the person you were yesterday; memory is the tool that makes this link possible. James writes, “where the resemblance and the continuity are no longer felt, the sense of personal identity goes too” (335). As horrifying as

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most would find the idea of waking up with no tie to one’s former being, for Frederic this separation may be the one state that lends itself to a semblance of stability: an existence where the death of Catherine, the death of his friends, his own traumatic injury, and the sum of his other brutal war experiences might abate and allow him a vacuum in which to cope with current perceptions and sensations without memory acting as a sniper that unpredictably, in Henri Bergson’s words, “imports the past into the present” (73). The denial or avoidance of memory in chapter 17 of the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms is merely a more explicit articulation of the denial or distrust of thought that populates so many other Hemingway texts. In “Big Two-Hearted River” the motivating force behind Nick Adams’s solo fishing expedition is that “he felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs” (SS 210). Nick finds a geographical location that affords him the solitude where he can avoid the trauma of past experience, the “swamp” of his mind that represents his “tragic adventure” (231). However, Hemingway critics who have decided that this mentality is the writer’s way of systematically renouncing or minimizing thought fail to understand the context. When Nick Adams and Robert Jordan hope to stem the tides of their own streams of consciousness, this is not a sign that they believe that thinking is unimportant but rather that they understand just how mighty their own thoughts are. If thought were an inessential part of a man’s existence, then there would be no need to structure his life in avoidance of it. As a prototypical Hemingway hero, Nick Adams is reluctant to allow his memory to exercise its power. Frederic Henry shares similar misgivings. Implicit in any narrator’s stance against memory is the inescapable truth that we are reading his memory. The basis of retrospective narrative is an imaginative reinvestigation of the past through memory. Frank Budgen once asked James Joyce about his theory of imagination. Joyce, Budgen reports, “brushed it aside with the assertion that imagination was memory” (187). As delicious as Joyce’s pithy comeback is, it may be more accurate that the reverse is true. Joyce’s aphorism implies that in order to create, the artistic mind must summon up past experiences, emotions, and perceptions to create anew. This axiom is not altogether original, of course, since the ancient muses were linked to memory long before Ulysses was written (or even The Odyssey). However, when examining the function of memory, William James states, “the object of memory is only an object imagined in the past (usually very completely imagined there) to which the emotion of belief adheres” (652). James is urging the distinction between the idea of memory as being a tangible object embed.

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ded in the person’s brain and something that is conjured up by the powers of human imagination that the person believes to be real, an experience to have actually occurred. With this statement, James describes no less than an individual’s role in creating his own autobiography through memory, which is to say the power of his own imagination. This notion is most memorably rendered in fiction in Faulkner’s Light in August, the sixth chapter of which opens with the salvo, “Memory believes before knowing remembers” (119). A corollary in Hemingway’s work appears in a conversation between Santiago and Manolin early in The Old Man and the Sea. “How old was I when you first took me in a boat?” “Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green and he nearly tore the boat to pieces. Can you remember?” “I can remember the tail slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the noise of the clubbing. I can remember you throwing me into the bow where the wet coiled lines were and feeling the whole boat shiver and the noise of you clubbing him like chopping a tree down and the sweet blood smell all over me.” “Can you really remember that or did I just tell it to you?” “I remember everything from when we first went together.” (11–12) When Santiago asks the boy, “Can you really remember that or did I just tell it to you,” he is in effect asking him, Is this an experience that you can recall through your own autobiographical memory, or does the “emotion of belief ” adhere to this image in your mind because I have retold the story so many times? Although the boy insists that this is out of a page of his autobiographical memory, Santiago teases Manolin that the story is probably part of his biographical memory, of which the old man himself has been perhaps the principal author. The “warmth and intimacy” described by James as an individual’s recognition that something recalled in memory belongs to his personal consciousness is an emotion that Frederic is desperately trying to avoid, whether he believes it is possible or not. It is clear that although he is bound to tell his narrative as best he can, by his flights of denial Frederic wishes to rid himself of the “emotion of belief ” (James 652) that the tragedies of his war experiences are actually his. James comments on this aspect of conscious or unconscious repression by quoting Théodule Ribot: “Oblivion, except in certain cases, is thus

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no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and its life” (681).5 Freud writes that “painful memories merge into motivated forgetting with special ease” (Psychopathology 89). The motivation is for the benefit of the organism for its ease in existence, moving forward. The passage in chapter 17 of the manuscript prefigures the published novel’s hostility to memory, be it a philosophical opposition or a physiological need for protection from the past. It is illustrative to examine three of the most celebrated passages in A Farewell to Arms. In all three scenes, Frederic’s quarrel with memory plays a central role in his attitude toward the war and toward himself. In an early passage Frederic concludes a reverie that describes his leave from the Italian army, chronicling how he spent his time whoring rather than more placidly visiting the priest’s family in Abruzzi. In a rare break of linearity in the novel’s narration, Frederic uses beautifully intricate language to distinguish his selves (present and former) with the priest: “He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later” (AFTA 14). Frederic uses his temporally remote perspective to plot his knowledge and memory in time as compared to the priest’s. In this meticulously crafted pair of sentences, Hemingway provides perfect symmetry: the priest always had known, while Frederic was always able to forget the same thing. The priest knew what Frederic did not know, and then even though he learned it and subsequently forgot it, he insists that he did not know at the time of the action. Also, the phrase I learned it is repeated in each sentence, so that the two sentences read: “ . . . always . . . I did not know . . . I learned it . . . always . . . I did not know . . . I learned it.” Here, Frederic gestures at his control over memory, being “always able to forget” the knowledge that the priest had, which is almost certainly intended to be a sense of the divine or the holy.6 However, Frederic’s is an inexact use of the word “forget.” After Frederic learns what the priest “had always known,” he does not forget this knowledge but disregards or disobeys it for his own immediate gratification. As the battler in an ongoing war on memory, Frederic Henry declares himself the victor, although it is implicit that the winner may indeed take nothing in this circumstance as well as elsewhere in Hemingway. Another example demonstrates the way memory can be unwelcome, a function of consciousness to be mastered or overcome. As Book Three of A Farewell to Arms concludes, Frederic is completing his abandonment of the Italian army; lying on the floor of the flatcar of a freight train, he catalogs his consciousness in an acutely introspective way.

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Doctors did things to you and then it was not your body any more. The head was mine, and the inside of the belly. It was very hungry in there. I could feel it turn over on itself. The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much remember. I could remember Catherine but I knew I would get crazy if I thought about her when I was not sure yet I would see her, so I would not think about her, only about her a little. . . . Hard as the floor of the car to lie not thinking only feeling. . . . I wished this bloody train would get to Mestre and I would eat and stop thinking. I would have to stop. (231–32) This passage, one of the rare occasions in the novel (and indeed all of Hemingway) in which Hemingway dips his toe into stream-of-consciousness writing, must not be read reflexively as Hemingway’s renunciation of thought or memory. Indeed, it is an ironic gesture, a rant against consciousness told in a lush stream-of-consciousness technique. Likewise, Frederic’s position that his head should be reduced to the proverbial hat rack and should not be a tool of introspection or retrospection—in his ungrammatical rendering, “not too much remember”—is immediately followed by “I could remember,” emphatically leaving useless his self-exhortation. The unstated point of reminding himself that it would be best to “not too much remember” is the sheer impossibility of this challenge, particularly for someone like Frederic. If a nonintrospective, noncerebral man were lying on the train, he would not have to issue himself the reminder. Similarly, he immediately modifies that he will not think of Catherine, rescinding her absolute banishment from his consciousness to a softened stance: “only about her a little.” In what is perhaps the novel’s most quoted passage, and one of its thematic centerpieces, Frederic describes his position toward the war, and as he does so he perpetuates the negative characterization of memory’s role in his consciousness. On his train ride to Stresa, Frederic characterizes his attitude: “I had the paper but I did not read it because I did not want to read about the war. I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace” (243). Directly preceding Frederic’s “separate peace” declaration is a proclamation that he will not only abstain from fighting in the war but that he will also not even remember that it exists. However, these statements must not be taken at face value. Frederic may be able to control the veracity of the first statement, but he is not in complete command of his memory simply by proclaiming that he is. “I was going to forget the war” is phrased as if Frederic is recalling the formulation and execution of a plan; however, the sentence is better paraphrased, “At that time, my

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naïve idea was to forget the war.” Frederic’s retrospective stance more closely resembles a paraphrasing that conveys its irony rather than the simplistic, “I succeeded in forgetting the war.” It is through Frederic’s somewhat ambiguous, understated phrase that the retrospective narrator imbues his character’s sentiments with meaning. Clearly, the war was not, and could not be, forgotten, and Frederic Henry (and his creator) knows all too painfully that memory does not work in such a convenient, take-it-or-leave-it fashion. Voluntary memory consists of experiences in the past that the individual summons intentionally, as in Augustine’s example. The controllable aspect of memory, however, is only one kind of memory. Involuntary memory involves associations that spring from the past of their own volition, such as the mysterious associative sensations that Proust’s Marcel experiences after eating his madeleine: “Where did it come from?” asks Marcel. “What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?” (60). Although Frederic and Marcel are both objects acted on by involuntary memory, Marcel’s tasty cake is an “exquisite pleasure . . . this all-powerful joy” (60), while Frederic’s personal history is the nightmare from which he is trying to awake. And like Nick Adams, Frederic can remove himself from stimulation that would tempt involuntary memory to find associations—he does go to Switzerland and attempts to replicate a scene of Edenic domestic bliss with Catherine—but minimizing the likelihood of memory’s intrusion is the best that can be done. It is senseless to declare, “I was going to forget the war.” Ultimately, that is for the war to decide. Frederic can detach himself from the war, the army, and declare peace more easily than he can ever separate himself from the persistence of his memories. In these three representative excerpts from A Farewell to Arms, along with the extended passage from chapter 17 of its manuscript, memory is viewed as an impediment to stability, a burden that must be shed in order to gain enjoyment or to forge a separate peace of mind. Frederic knows that he is not able to “forget” what the priest knows but can simply disobey it. He knows intellectually that his mind cannot stop its own relentless cognition, nor can it fend off the force of memory, but he beseeches it to leave him alone. His separate peace, like Nick Adams’s before him, can be declared eloquently and emphatically, but this does not mean war is to be forgotten. The tenaciousness of the immediate past haunts Frederic soon after he declares his separate peace. The separate peace is declared when he is on the train to Stresa. He arrives, checks into his hotel, and heads toward the bar, where he drinks his first martini, which “felt cool and clean” (244). He drinks a couple more martinis, realizing, “I had never tasted anything so cool and

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clean” (245). Looking at the image of himself in civilian clothes in the mirror behind the bar, Frederic recalls that he “did not think at all” (245). In response to a question from the barman, he again articulates his quest for separation, which, to use one of his least favorite phrases, may well be “in vain”: “The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn’t any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant” (245). The separate peace, it is clear, is more easily declared than maintained. The realization that the war is “over” is irrelevant, Frederic admits, if it does not have the accompanying feeling of peace. Planning to forget about the war and actually forgetting it are two vastly different enterprises. As daring as his escape was, and as boldly individualistic as his separation from the Italian army may have been, Frederic has been reduced to feeling the furtiveness and guilt of childhood misbehavior, certainly not what he intended. Likewise, the recollection that he “did not think at all” rings hollow when it is followed by the feeling of being a boy whose thoughts are occupied by fears and anxiety. Frederic can claim to have forgotten the war, but in the passage the word “war” appears three times in the first three sentences; it does not appear in “Big Two-Hearted River” even once. Later, even while safely ensconced in Switzerland with Catherine, Frederic notes, “The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else’s college.” And the next sentence, begun by the crucial first word, introduces the reality behind the illusion/delusion: “But I knew from the papers that they were still fighting in the mountains because the snow would not come” (291). The dialectic between the two sentences evidences the very difference between “seems” and “is.” The cleansing Frederic reports from his series of martinis continues the crucial transformation that he has forced. The physical separation from the army has triggered a psychological rebirth. It is no accident that Frederic’s escape following a frenzied dash through a hail of bullets reads as a de facto baptism. The last sentence in chapter 30, the epic account of the retreat at Caporetto, is, “The shore was out of sight now” (225). While this certainly describes the safety of Frederic’s removal from the Italian battle police, the “shore” also represents that which is known, as in The Old Man and the Sea, where Santiago’s removal from the shore is a symbolic venturing into the uncharted waters to discover aspects of the self that could not have been ascertained by staying on the shore or even in the safer, familiar waters in which the shore was easily visible and easily obtainable.7

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Frederic’s escape inverts the movement of “Big Two-Hearted River”: he moves from the river to the train, from the chaotic free-flowing current to the plodding segmented train. After gaining convenient relief in a flatcar filled with guns, and exhorting himself not to use his head to think or remember too much, Frederic uses language that reveals himself to be a freshly converted individual. Speaking in the second person, but referring to himself as if completely dissociated from him, Frederic says, “you seeing now very clearly and coldly—not so coldly as clearly and emptily. You saw emptily” (232). These adverbs—the same words that will soon describe martini after martini— suggest a new clarity, the refreshing of the soul and mind unburdened now from the responsibilities of warfare. “You were out of it now,” Frederic says. “You had no more obligation.” The emphasis continues throughout the rest of the quite brief chapter 32 that chronicles his escape to Milan: “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation . . . I was through. . . . it was not my show any more . . . I would eat and stop thinking. I would have to stop. . . . That life was over” (232–33). Frederic’s is the language of conversion, of the welcoming of a new identity. A peculiar statement at the end of Frederic Henry’s ruminations on memory is his qualification at the end of the manuscript excerpt: “All these things, however, return in the dark” (qtd. in Grebstein 213). The memories that have been assiduously avoided during the day cannot be repelled in the night. This theme recalls vivid examples elsewhere in Hemingway’s work that emphasize the difference in the operation of human consciousness between daytime and the night. Hemingway’s soldiers and veterans are virtually without exception afraid of the dark and insomniacs. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” might be the epitome of this idea, starting with the title of the story. In The Sun Also Rises, after Jake Barnes studies his naked body in the mirror of his armoire, he tries to go to sleep, but in the quiet calm of night he cannot control his consciousness: “My head started to work. . . . I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn’t keep away from it. . . . It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing” (38, 39, 42). The short story “Now I Lay Me” contains an even more devastating examination of the problem; at night Nick Adams dreams of death and his wounding: “I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort” (SS 363). Indeed, in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick’s main intention in hiking such a great distance is to tire himself out so he can fall asleep quickly, bypassing this stage of lying awake, a vulnerable target for his

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thoughts and memories. Before he falls asleep for the night, danger is narrowly avoided: “His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough” (SS 218). Freud describes this liminal state as the most fruitful moment to analyze a patient: “The point is to induce a state which is in some degree analogous, as regards the distribution of psychic energy (mobile attention), to the state of the mind before falling asleep—and also, of course, to the hypnotic state. On falling asleep, the ‘undesired urges’ emerge, owing to the slackening of a certain arbitrary (and, of course, also critical) action, which is allowed to influence the trend of our ideas; we are accustomed to speak of fatigue as the reason of this slackening; the merging undesired ideas are changed into visual and auditory images” (Interpretation 14). Frederic’s recognition of the powers of the nighttime echo Nick’s nighttime experiences. His posturing about how memory does not apply since he has dissociated himself from his past leads to a significant exception: when the defenses are lowered at night. Each of the last three sentences of the manuscript excerpt from chapter 17 contain the phrase “in the dark” in the same way that the phrase “in the rain” is ominously repeated in the published novel. Significantly, before Frederic was blown up, he viewed the nights as representing celebration and hedonism, the likes of which could not be enjoyed in the daytime. As he explained to the priest, “I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know” (13). After his traumatic wound, however, his opinion changes drastically. Frederic candidly tells the priest that although he does not love God, he fears God “in the night sometimes” (72). Later he tells Count Greffi that he is only Croyant at night and that his religious feeling “comes only at night” (263). One of the main gifts that Frederic’s relationship with Catherine gives him, ultimately, is a temporary relief from the mind-set of war, the same mind-set that haunts Nick Adams so palpably. In another rare meditation, Frederic speaks of the comfort he finds in the nighttime when he is with Catherine: “I know that the night is not the same as the day; that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time” (249). The statement from the manuscript passage—“All these things, however, return in the dark”—then, is still useful for understanding Frederic Henry as a character as well as his relationship with his past self through memory. When he is happy, in love,

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and together with Catherine, frightening images or bad memories do not lurk in the dark to prevent him from a peaceful sleep. However, the fear of God, pain, danger, lost love, and death return in the dark when he does not have the comfort and protective company of the woman he loves. In 1952, the year The Old Man and the Sea was published, Dali painted a sequel to his most famous work that he called The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. Although Frederic Henry, in theory, would welcome a relief from the persistence of his own memory, it would also be pulling the plug on his self, on his consciousness. Santiago, for one, can attest to the danger of the loss of memory. Hemingway’s oldest protagonist treats memory quite differently from the younger fictional counterparts that preceded him. Desperately clinging to consciousness as he clings to his life, his ruminative nature distracts him from the task at hand; yet he is described as contemplating: “But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left” (OMAS 103). The voyage ends with the old man doomed with “no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind” (119). This state may be a victory for a man in need of temporary mental relief—as in Nick Adams’s fishing trip in “Big Two-Hearted River”—but it is a frightening void in Santiago’s case. If Bergson is right, and memory “imports the past into the present” (73), regardless of whether we bid it or not, then for the traumatized or depressed individual it will indeed be an unhappy component of one’s consciousness. However, this persistence is not to be denied, despite the narrator’s elaborate protestations. It is by the gift of memory that Frederic Henry can assemble the fractured emotions of the past to form the narrative of his life, to write the story of his war on memory within his memory of war.

Not e s 1. See The Sun Also Rises for an earlier example that calls into question conventions of chronological time, as Jake Barnes shows his “date” the multiple clocks on the New York Herald building, telling her, “They show the hour all over America.” An apparently unimpressed Georgette responds, “Don’t kid me” (23). 2. A discussion comparing Hemingway and Proust might not be as far-fetched as it seems at first glance. In Under Kilimanjaro the character known as G.C., or Gin Crazed, says of Papa Hemingway, “I always said he had a delicate side. It’s his Proustian side. It comes out completely unexpectedly” (178). G.C. intends it as a homosexual slur, but the charge applies in a discussion of Hemingway as a psychological novelist and as a writer who understood the complex workings of memory. Of Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway wrote Arthur Mizener: “I would like it [to] be better than Proust if Proust had been to the wars and liked to fuck and was in love”

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(SL 691). Rose Marie Burwell reports that Hemingway also had Proustian conceits about The Dangerous Summer, which were “cumulative in its effect” and which “eliminating detail would destroy” (187). Burwell posits that Hemingway’s four posthumous books (Islands in the Stream, A Moveable Feast, the African book [True at First Light and Under Kilimanjaro], and The Garden of Eden) were “at times consciously modeled on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past” (1). Michael Reynolds, referring to the same books, excepting the African book, concurs that they were “guided, if guided at all, by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, a work to which Ernest referred repeatedly in the postwar period” (257). 3. The manuscript first read, “Nothing that you learn by sensation is of any value,” but “is of any value” was replaced by “remains” (64). For an amusing, ironic counterpoint, see James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Buck Mulligan, in scrambling to deny that he offended Stephen Dedalus, begs a stricter form of memory: “I don’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations” (1.192–93). 4. This observation of the verb choices explains why “Big Two-Hearted River” must be read as a tentative triumph of mental control. Nick Adams, whose trauma is more recent than Frederic Henry’s, succeeds to the extent that he “was holding something in his head” (NAS 241, emphasis added), with the active control of his thoughts providing an emotional crescendo. The manuscript ends in this way as published in the short story “On Writing.” 5. James is quoting from Ribot’s Les maladies de la memoire (Paris: Librairie Germer Balliere, 1881); the English translation is The Diseases of Memory, trans. J. Fitzgerald (New York: Fitzgerald, 1883). 6. In The Garden of Eden David Bourne “had his father’s ability to forget” (147). In Hemingway’s manuscript fragment on the war entitled “A Story to Skip: A Badly Organized Story of No Importance,” he writes: “A broken heart means that never can you remember and not to be able to remember is very different from forgetting” (qtd. in Scafella 78–79). 7. The description of Santiago’s departure is similar to Frederic’s: “He left the smell of the land behind” (OMAS 28); “The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it” (35); “He could not see the green of the shore now” (40); “Then he looked behind him and saw that no land was visible” (46); “He thought of how some men feared being out of sight of land in a small boat and knew they were right in the months of sudden bad weather” (61); “Now alone, and out of sight of land, he was fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of ” (63).

Wo rk s C i t e d Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Trans. Edward B. Pusey. New York: Dutton, 1942. Baddeley, Alan. “What Is Autobiographical Memory?” Theoretical Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory. Ed. Martin A. Conway et al. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1992. 13–29. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Brewer, William F. “What Is Autobiographical Memory?” Autobiographical Memory. Ed. David C. Rubin. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 25–49. Budgen, Frank. Myselves When Young. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Cardeña, Etzel, and David Spiegel. “Dissociative Reactions to the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake of 1989.” American Journal of Psychiatry 150.3 (1993): 474–78.

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Faulkner, William. Light in August. 1932. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library, 1994. ———. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 1914. Trans. A. A. Brill. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway’s Craft. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribner’s, 1995. ———. Unpublished manuscript of A Farewell to Arms. Folder 64. Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. ———. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. New York: Scribner’s, 1995. ———. The Garden of Eden. 1986. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. ———. The Nick Adams Stories. 1972. New York: Scribner’s, 1999. ———. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s, 1952. ———. Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ———. The Short Stories. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. ———. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. ———. Under Kilimanjaro. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2005. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. 1890. New York: Dover, 1950. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Viking Penguin, 1964. ———. Ulysses. 1922. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. 1913. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff et al. New York: Modern Library, 2004. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: Norton, 1999. Scafella, Frank. “‘Nothing’ in ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’” Hemingway: Up in Michigan Perspectives. Ed. Frederic J. Svoboda and Joseph J. Waldmeir. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1995. 77–90. Schacter, Daniel L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Waites, Elizabeth A. Memory Quest: Trauma and the Search for Personal History. New York: Norton, 1997. Wills, Garry. Saint Augustine’s Memory. New York: Viking, 2002. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. 1952. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966.

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12 The Currents of Memory Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” as Metafiction Robert Paul Lamb 

Hemingway began “Big Two-Hearted River” in Paris in mid-May 1924 and completed what would become the first part of the story when his work was interrupted by magazine editorial duties and a trip to Pamplona for the bullfights. In Spain he enjoyed trout fishing on the Irati with John Dos Passos and Robert McAlmon, but he was also burdened by financial needs, his responsibilities to his wife and small child, and fears that he would not be able to write. Nevertheless, he managed to finish the first version of the full story before returning to Paris in July, and sometime in late summer he decided to divide it formally into two parts. In October, in response to Gertrude Stein’s comments that “remarks are not literature” (207), he deleted the final nine pages of the text, in which he had written directly about actual people and events from his life, and, after several attempts, eventually rewrote the ending to his satisfaction. The story was subsequently published in the first issue of This Quarter in May 1925 and republished as the last full story of In Our Time in October. In a letter to Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead, Hemingway claimed it was by far the best fiction he had yet written (SL 144).1 Others shared this assessment, and “Big Two-Hearted River” quickly assumed an important place in the Hemingway canon, a rank forever secured when Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to The Portable Hemingway, made it the centerpiece of his interpretation of Hemingway’s writing. Cowley’s essay— which stressed the repetition of themes in Hemingway’s works, the haunted consciousnesses of his protagonists, and their attempts to escape a world of 166

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danger and pain through “the faithful observance of customs they invent for themselves” (48)—implicitly linked “Big Two-Hearted River” to Nick Adams’s experience of war. Eight years later, in the first major, full-length study of Hemingway, Philip Young further developed this “war wound” thesis. Young’s two main arguments were that the Hemingway hero is “pretty close to being Hemingway himself ” and that “one fact about this recurrent protagonist, as about the man who created him, is necessary to any real understanding of either figure, and that is the fact of the ‘wound,’ a severe injury suffered in World War I which left permanent scars, visible and otherwise” (6). Deriving from Hemingway’s own wounding, near Fossalta di Piave in July 1918, it is the “figure in the carpet” of his fiction, as the author, acting under a repetition compulsion, returned to it continually in his writing. Like his creator, Nick too is a shell-shocked veteran, a “sick man” seeking to escape from the experience that has “complicated and wounded” him (Young 165–71). That, Young asserted, is “the whole ‘point’ of an otherwise pointless story” (47). For thirty years, from the Korean War through the fighting in Vietnam, Young’s thesis went unchallenged by critics. Then, first in a 1981 essay and later in a lengthy biography, Kenneth S. Lynn disputed the nature of Hemingway’s wound and its place in his work. Concurring with Young that the Hemingway protagonist was usually a thinly veiled fictional persona for the author himself, Lynn posited a different kind of wound for the figure in the carpet—a troubled childhood. According to Lynn, Hemingway’s lesbian-leaning, emotionally conflicted mother dominated his youth and produced in him a lifelong confusion over his sexual identity and a fear of his own androgynous impulses. “Hemingway’s hurt began in childhood,” Lynn explained, and “he was compelled to write stories in which he endeavored to cope with the disorder of his inner world by creating fictional equivalents for it” (10). In “Big Two-Hearted River,” Lynn suggested, Nick is escaping not from war memories but from “a need to please his mother”; his tent is a sort of alternative home (his mother had thrown him out of the family’s Michigan summer home on Walloon Lake in July 1920); and “the activity of his mind that keeps threatening to overwhelm his contentment could be rage” (103–04). For Lynn, the war was a surrogate issue imposed on Hemingway criticism first by Edmund Wilson, then by Cowley, and finally, fully elaborated, by Young. Once this thesis had taken hold, Hemingway embraced it and lent it a retrospective credibility because it served as a sort of subterfuge, even more effective than the enormous ambiguity of his fiction, that hid the true nature of his emotional problems (104–08).2 “Big Two-Hearted River” thus became a focal point in one of the major

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debates raging in Hemingway scholarship, a debate that will never be resolved until critics in both camps adopt a “both/and” rather than an “either/ or” attitude and come to see that what I have termed the “war wound” and “childhood wound” theses are not mutually exclusive, that Hemingway’s experience of the war was gendered and that his sexual identity was influenced by his military experiences. In fact, the Young and Lynn interpretations only seem incompatible. More interesting are the similarities: both perceive in Hemingway a psychological disturbance; both believe that once this problem is recognized and the fiction read in light of it, then the meaning of the texts becomes clear; and both acknowledge that the fiction, especially this story, is difficult to decipher without searching outside of the text. Meanwhile, the question remains: What is “Big Two-Hearted River” really about? A good place to start is by asking what actually happens in the story. The final version begins with Nick jumping off a train in a hilly country near a river. There has been a fire, and the whole landscape is “burned-over” (BTHR 133).3 Where Nick expected to find the town of Seney, all that is left are the chipped foundations of the old hotel. He surveys the landscape, picks up his backpack and fishing rod case, and heads uphill parallel with the river. After an arduous trek, he reaches a place where the fire line has stopped but keeps on walking until, hot and tired, he lies down to rest. He then walks some more, finds a good place to camp, sets up his tent, eats, reminisces, and falls asleep. In the second part of the story, Nick awakes in the morning, catches some grasshoppers for bait, fixes breakfast, and tidies up the camp. He enters the river, catches a small trout, and throws it back. He continues downstream where he hooks an enormous trout, nearly the size of a salmon, but loses it. Overcome with excitement, he sits down and has a cigarette until he is calm. Then he catches one good trout, loses another when his line gets snagged, and catches a second good trout. He smokes, has lunch, and looks at the river where it narrows and goes into a swamp. There are many big trout in the swamp, but because “the fishing would be tragic” he does not want to go in there. He cleans the two fish and heads back to camp. The narrative concludes: “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (BTHR 155−56). The story is filled with resonances and suggestiveness, yet, as this summary shows, these are not inherent in the plot. Lacking the necessary exposition, there is no way for a reader to answer any of the many questions raised by the text: Where has Nick been? Why is he so easily unhinged? What is he escaping from? What causes him to alternate between getting excited and getting anxious lest he become too excited? What are the “other needs” (134) he feels he has put behind him? Why would fishing in the swamp be “tragic” as opposed to,

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say, merely difficult or unsuccessful? “Big Two-Hearted River” may indeed be magnificent fiction, but it is textually indecipherable on its own. Thus critics have been forced to go outside of the text to figure it out, and the meaning they find in the story, as Young and Lynn have demonstrated, therefore depends on which extratextual evidence they choose to employ. There is, however, one such piece of material that is particularly illuminating—the original ending that Hemingway deleted. This material, which once was textual, is closer to the story than considerations of its location in In Our Time, which fail to treat the story as the autonomous text it originally was; considerations of the story’s place in the Nick Adams saga, which not only neglect the story’s autonomy but also ignore the many inconsistencies in that saga (there is, after all, a very good reason why Nick successfully served an enabling function for Hemingway in his stories but never as a protagonist in a novel); and psychoanalytical musings that remain, at best, highly speculative. Although Hemingway wisely removed the original ending, which he called “mental conversation” and “shit” (SL 133), from the story, the deleted material gives significant clues as to what the story, in the author’s mind, was “about.” The original ending begins after Nick has hooked and lost the giant trout and then hooked and caught his first trout and put the big fish in his long sack that hangs in the water. It is now forenoon: “It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck” (OW 233). The stream is still “shallow and wide,” and many large trout will later gather “in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream.” Nick knows this because he and his old fishing buddy, Bill Smith, had discovered it years ago on the Black River. The fish are waiting for the sun to go down before they move back out into the current: “Just when the sun made the water blinding in the glare before it went down you were liable to strike a big trout anywhere in the current. It was almost impossible to fish then, the surface of the water was blinding as a mirror in the sun. Of course you could fish upstream, but in a stream like the Black or this you had to wallow against the current and in a deep place the water piled up on you. It was no fun to fish upstream although all the books said it was the only way” (OW 233). The rewritten ending, which finishes off the story with what Hemingway called “just the straight fishing” (SL 133), uses this exact passage but removes the references to Bill Smith and to books. Thus the passage in the final version concludes: “It was no fun to fish upstream with this much current” (BTHR 153). From there Nick hooks another trout, but the line gets caught on a branch and the fish is lost; he hooks and catches a second trout; he smokes, eats, and looks warily at the swamp; and finally, he cleans the fish and leaves, looking back and thinking about the swamp.

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In the original version, however, there is no second trout; Nick releases the first trout because it is too big to eat and decides to catch a couple of little ones for supper later by the camp. Nor is there any “tragic” swamp that obsesses him (though there is a casual mention of a swamp). And the narrative, which until now has concerned trout fishing, takes an abrupt turn into a rambling, free-associative remembrance of the lost friendships and activities of his youth and of his new life as a married expatriate as well as a meditation on the nature of writing and his vocation as a writer. Fishing in the river after an extended absence, engaged in an activity that as a boy he loved, and remembering the youthful companions associated with that activity, Nick is struck with nostalgia for le temps perdu. Hemingway was never as autobiographical in fiction as he was in this fragment in which he and Nick are nearly one and the characters he mentions are his former reallife friends. He recollects how he and Bill Smith, the friend who served as the model for Bill in “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow” (and who would later appear as a partial model for Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises), used to have “fun with the books in the old days” that always started “with a fake premise” like the one about fishing upstream (OW 233). But then his present life intrudes as he remembers a silly statement made by Bill Bird’s Parisian dentist. Bird was the American expatriate who had just published Hemingway’s collection of vignettes, in our time; Hemingway and Bill Smith had undergone a falling out two years earlier and were no longer in touch (Reynolds 198, 251). Remembering the dentist, he interjects, “Bill Bird, that is,” and adds wistfully, “Once Bill meant Bill Smith. Now it means Bill Bird. Bill Bird was in Paris now” (OW 234). The change in “Bills” symbolizes what he has lost and how it saddens him. His new friends, Europeans and expatriate Americans living in Europe, cannot understand his youthful pursuits, how much they have formed him and how much a part of him they remain in memory. He recounts a sarcastic remark that his new friend, the poet Ezra Pound, made about fishing and repeats three times in different contexts the sentence, “Ezra thought fishing was a joke.” His own feelings on the matter are quite clear when he follows the first of these sentences with the rejoinder, “Lots of people think poetry is a joke. Englishmen are a joke.” Before his marriage to Helen—Hemingway’s fictional name in this story for his wife Hadley (Oldsey 219)—he had been married to fishing. “Really married to it.” Ezra was wrong: “It wasn’t any joke” (OW 234). It was not his new life in Europe but his marriage to Helen/Hadley that had cost him his boyhood pals. “When he married he lost Bill Smith, Odgar, the Ghee, all the old gang” because “he admitted by marrying that something was

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more important than fishing.” Before fishing had drawn him and Bill together, Bill had been, figuratively speaking, a virgin: “Bill had never fished before they met. Everyplace they had been together. The Black, the Sturgeon, the Pine Barrens, the Upper Minnie, all the little streams. Most about fishing he and Bill had discovered together.” The homoerotic nature of this male bonding is underscored in the next passage: “Bill forgave him the fishing he had done before they met. He forgave him all the rivers. He was really proud of them. It was like a girl about other girls. If they were before they did not matter. But after was different.” Marrying Helen was after. “So he lost them all” (OW 234). Helen always thought his friends had left because they did not like her, but to Nick the real reason was more complex. He implies that they did not dislike Helen personally but what she represented—something new and paramount in Nick’s life. Nick remembers how Odgar loved Kate (Bill Smith’s sister, who later married John Dos Passos) but that she only wanted a friendship, and he recalls how the Ghee visited brothels in Cleveland but nevertheless remained an ascetic and how he, Nick, remained one also. He concludes that “it was all such a fake. You had this fake ideal planted in you and then you lived your life to it.” But what he really had loved was fishing, and the summer—“He had loved it more than anything” (OW 235). After this statement about fishing comes a lengthy, disjointed, euphoric reminiscence about his long-gone youth: digging potatoes with Bill, car trips, fishing in the bay, playing baseball, swimming off the dock, the long summers, home cooking, the fields and lake, drinking with Bill’s old man, fishing trips, and even “just lying around” (OW 235). The memories become increasingly specific and evocative until they erupt into a metaphor that describes his very act of remembering—a muddy stream that overflows in the rain—and he wonders, “Where were the trout when a stream was like that?” (236). Here the trout are metaphors for stories themselves. In effect, what he figuratively asks is this: How does a writer capture stories from the river of memory? But his meditations are suddenly interrupted by a different memory that seems to come from out of nowhere: “That was where a bull chased him over the fence and he lost his pocketbook with all the hooks in it” (OW 236). Just as the Spanish bullfight has replaced American trout fishing, so the European experiences of his young manhood have replaced the American experiences of his youth—the fishhooks lost to the charging bull suggest this transition. He had wondered where the trout were, but now he wonders where the bullfighters Maera and Algabeno have gone. Maera (Manuel García López), the great matador whom Hemingway had admired since watching him at work in Pamplona the previous summer, was actually alive and at the height of his

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fame, though he would be dead of tuberculosis by the end of 1924, and Hemingway had earlier killed him off fictionally in the sixteenth vignette of in our time. Here, caught up in his sense of loss and the passage of time, he has Nick wonder what has become of him. At first Nick had clung to earlier memories of things he understood rather than embracing a “sport” that seemed so foreign; “phrases from bullfight papers kept coming into his head all the time until he had to quit reading them.” But soon he came to love bullfighting, and he lends his brief relationship with it a false legitimacy of duration by noting that “Maera’s kid brother was a bullfighter now. That was the way it went” (OW 236). As for Maera, he was “the greatest man he’d ever known.” In a lengthy passage he recounts exciting scenes from one of Maera’s bullfights. He also recalls “the saddest thing he’d ever seen”: an old, fat picador who badly wanted to be a cabellero en plaza (a matador who fights on a trained, blooded horse). Nick remarks on how magnificently one of these, young Da Veiga, could ride but that it “didn’t show well in the movies.” The next two paragraphs of this free association are transitional: The movies ruined everything. Like talking about something good. That was what had made the war unreal. Too much talking. Talking about anything was bad. Writing about anything actual was bad. It always killed it. (237) Until these paragraphs, the original ending has been about Nick’s (and Hemingway’s) past: the precious memories of friends and experiences that have shaped him—memories that this fictional return to the river have rekindled in his consciousness. But Nick and Hemingway are writers. For them, memories are not merely nostalgic but vital. Memories enable writing by producing the need to tell and by providing the stuff of fiction. That is precisely what these memories have done, leading Hemingway to the real subject of the deleted ending as well as of the final version of the story from which it was removed: the nature of writing and the writer’s vocation. There are two reasons why the fragment now wends its way into a discussion of writing. First, the reminiscences of his youth were produced by, and further produced, his own pressing desire to tell about the past; to save it from the swift, effacing current of time and fading memory; to catch these trout of his past (the metaphor is inescapable) before they swim too far downstream to be hooked and reeled into the present. Like Mark Twain fictionally returning to the Mississippi in 1875 to rediscover and be inspired by the rich mine of memory from his own youth, Hemingway and Nick have returned to the river

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to rediscover theirs. Second, the example of Maera’s competence at his craft, that which makes him, in Nick’s eyes, the greatest man he has ever known, as well as Da Veiga’s great riding skills, remind him of his own calling. It was Maera who caused Nick “suddenly” to know that he was “going to love bullfighting” (OW 237). He would love it because it was not a sport but an art, like writing, and Hemingway would later equate the two in his classic treatise Death in the Afternoon. But Maera was famous, a Joyce or an Eliot, the embodiment of what Nick/Hemingway hoped someday to be; for now, the analogy to young Da Veiga is much more appropriate. There is time for Nick to follow his calling and become a Maera, and so the descriptions of the matador and the caballero en plaza hold out the promise of a bright future. But equally motivating is the sobering sight of the old, fat picador who “threw his hat into the ring hanging on over the barrera watching young Da Veiga” (OW 237). If Maera represents what Nick wishes to become, then the pic is a presentiment of what he hopes never to be—an old man who abandoned his true calling for a lesser vocation, who now watches with envy someone who is following the path that he wishes he himself had followed. Again, time is fleeting and threatening—writing is in so many ways a race against time, an effort to snatch immortality from the inevitable fact of human finitude. A third major interpretation of “Big Two-Hearted River” also views the story from the perspective of Hemingway’s new vocation but within the complex context of expatriation. In Imagining Paris J. Gerald Kennedy says of the Michigan stories that Hemingway was writing in Paris in 1924: “If the landscape of these stories bears a legible inscription, it is that of Hemingway’s nostalgia for simplicity, which must be read against the emerging complications of his life in Paris” (93). Using the deleted ending, Kennedy observes that “the problem that oppresses Nick as he fishes the Big Two-Hearted River is not postcombat trauma so much as an agonizing consciousness that in getting married, becoming a writer, and moving to Paris, he has forfeited the halcyon world of northern Michigan” (94). Hemingway, in other words, is experiencing a “crisis of exile” as he realizes that “the country he had loved exist[s] for him now only in memory and imagination” (92). According to Kennedy, the deleted ending “permits us to gauge, as no other Nick Adams material does, the intensity of Hemingway’s psychic attraction to the Michigan country and the nature of his alienation from the Parisian milieu. Through a series of imaginative displacements, Hemingway (working in Paris) portrays Nick Adams in Michigan, thinking back to his life in Paris and—from that exilic perspective—remembering the Michigan that he has already lost. The suppressed fragment thus represents Nick as a jaded expatriate, already estranged from the familiar terrain to which he has returned”

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(95). Kennedy’s subtly persuasive reading of the story as enacting Hemingway’s unconscious ambivalences about his new vocation, his marriage, and his life as an expatriate gets to the heart of “Big Two-Hearted River” in a way that both the war wound thesis and the childhood wound thesis never have. The latter interpretations are based on unresolved trauma from Hemingway’s past, but Kennedy’s perspective filters these through the author’s situatedness in the present moment of narration. Crucial to that situatedness are his vocation as a writer and his attempts to work out the relation of that vocation to a past that increasingly exists only in memory. The war and his unhappy filial experiences are, of course, important elements of that past, but they are only a part of the story and not the determining part of this particular story. Thus Kennedy’s reading brilliantly illuminates another layer of meaning in this rich but cryptic narrative by connecting memory and metafiction. In my own analysis of “Big Two-Hearted River” as consciously self-reflexive, how can these fish of memory be caught? How can the past be saved? How can the writer achieve his own apotheosis? As with Kennedy’s argument, talking too much about something good ruins it, makes it seem unreal, like in the movies. That was what had happened with the war, which was good for a writer because it provided so much fictional material. This is the only significant reference to the war in either version of the story, and perhaps it was the above realization that caused Hemingway to omit it in the final version. Certainly, Hemingway is beginning to realize that talking too much is exactly what he has been doing in this fragment of “mental conversation,” and this is what will lead him eventually to discard it and get back to the “straight fishing.” But he has not only been talking too much, he has also been writing about something “actual.” This too can kill the past. To make meaning of the past the writer must transmute memory into fiction, which Hemingway had been doing successfully until he got to the original ending. The material of the story was based on an actual fishing trip Hemingway made in September 1919 on the Big Fox and Little Fox rivers, accompanied by John Pentecost (nicknamed “the Ghee”) and Al Walker, in which he really did hook “the biggest trout [he had] ever seen” but lost it when the hook broke at the shank (SL 29). In an earlier version, he included his two companions and narrated the story in the first-person. But in the final version he eliminated his two real-life friends and switched to the third-person (Oldsey 219). He also changed the name of the Fox to a river on the northern part of the Michigan peninsula where he had never before fished (SL 153); made Seney into a recently burned and now abandoned town (it had actually burned down nearly thirty years earlier and

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was not completely abandoned); altered the flat landscape around Seney so that Nick would have to walk uphill; and created grasshoppers that had been blackened by the fire—according to orthopterists, Sheridan Baker comments, “a highly unlikely phenomenon” (157). To save the past, the writer must maintain a considered distance and shape it through art. This is why the psychological remove provided by his new life in Paris served such a powerful enabling function in the Michigan stories he wrote there, forcing him to draw on the memories of events rather than relying too much on the actual events themselves. However, in the original ending Nick has been “talking” too much (through free indirect speech) and Hemingway has been writing about something “actual.” Recognizing this, he tries to disengage himself, but this only causes him to continue talking too much about the actual. He defends himself from the implicit self-accusation by stating that the “only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined” (OW 237). His defense is two-pronged; he accuses other writers of standing too close to real life, and he asserts that the stories he has written were made up. “Mac [McAlmon] had stuff ” but he failed to “digest life” and “then create [his] own people” (OW 238). In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus “was Joyce himself, so he was terrible,” but Bloom and Mrs. Bloom were made up; the former was “wonderful” and the latter was “the greatest in the world” (OW 238). Oddly and tellingly attributing his own stories to his fictional persona, Hemingway says that Nick had never seen a jockey killed before he wrote “My Old Man,” and he insists that “Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he’d never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that. He’d seen a woman have a baby on the road to Karagatch and tried to help her. That was the way it was.” This is what his family did not understand. “They thought it was all experience” (OW 238). Now reflecting on “Indian Camp” and unable to extricate himself from this self-absorption, Hemingway gives up the struggle and pours out his innermost thoughts and feelings in a passage that may very well be the most touchingly honest, direct statement he would ever make about what writing meant to him. He wished he could always write like that. He would sometime. He wanted to be a great writer. He was pretty sure he would be. He knew it in lots of ways. He would in spite of everything. It was hard, though. It was hard to be a great writer if you loved the world and living in it and special people. It was hard when you loved so many places. Then you were healthy and felt good and were having a good time and what the hell.

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He always worked best when Helen was unwell. Just that much discontent and friction. Then there were times when you had to write. Not conscience. Just peristaltic action. Then you felt sometimes like you could never write but after a while you knew sooner or later you would write another good story. It was really more fun than anything. That was really why you did it. He had never realized that before. It wasn’t conscience. It was simply that it was the greatest pleasure. It had more bite to it than anything else. It was so damn hard to write well, too. (OW 238) This remarkable affirmation of vocation almost completely abandons any pretense at being fiction. The use of a third-person pronoun and a fictional name for Hadley are but trappings; more indicative of the confessional tone of this passage is the way Hemingway uses the second-person pronoun to affect the reader with persuasive force. This is akin to the slip into direct, immediate speech and the first-person pronoun earlier in “Big Two-Hearted River” when describing the enormous trout that got away: “By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of ” (BTHR 151). Just as Nick has faith that the country “could not all be burned” (BTHR 135), so Hemingway has faith that he will someday be able to write stories like “Indian Camp” at will. Just as Nick puts behind him “other needs” to go fishing, Hemingway sets aside his need to explain his writing to his uncomprehending family and his need to be a responsible husband to attend to his calling. The exhilaration that Nick feels in setting up camp is the joy a writer feels in sitting down to write, on his own, attentive to nothing but the appointed task, free from all social obligation and conflicting demands on his time and consciousness, responsible only to his art. Nick in his fishing and Hemingway in his writing will succeed “in spite of everything.” This steady faith is what earlier enables Nick to “choke” (142) back anxious thoughts when his mind starts to work, and to go to sleep, knowing that he is “in the good place” (139) where he belongs. Hemingway, too, can set his mind at ease when he is writing, knowing that his faith in his vocation will transcend his doubts. The image of Nick “awkward and professionally happy with all his equipment hanging from him” (147) as he steps into the stream is a figurative description of young Hemingway sitting down to write. A writer is selfish; Hemingway makes no apologies for this and will not justify it by invoking some notion of the sublimity of art. Writing is simply “more fun than anything.” His first love, fishing with his male friends, had

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been replaced by a “fake ideal,” marriage, which in turn has yielded to a greater love, writing, which feeds off of and shapes the memories of his earlier loves, both real and fake. This new love is truer than all the others. It is involuntary, something almost biological—“peristaltic action”—and Hemingway needs and enjoys it in the same way that Nick relishes cooking and eating his food. “Geezus Chrise” (BTHR 140) is the ecstatic reaction of both. But writing is hard. A writer must live well and “digest life” but not become so absorbed in that life that he settles for its many tangible comforts and neglects his calling. That is why a certain amount of “discontent and friction” can be helpful, by turning him away from the world as, paradoxically, he searches for fictional ways of expressing that world. The joys of setting up camp and fishing for trout compel Nick onward in his hard trek uphill to his campsite, and the same is true, metaphorically, for Hemingway, who looks forward to the “bite” of writing even when, as he says at the end of the first paragraph of the passage, “It was hard, though”—an important enough statement to repeat at the end of the passage: “It was so damn hard to write well, too” (OW 238). A writer must avoid the temptation to neglect his difficult work for mere worldly delights. He must also avoid false writing: “There were so many tricks.” It would have been easy for Nick to have set up camp near Seney, or after he had gotten clear of the fire line, yet he struggled uphill until he reached the place where he should be. When he fishes he employs real bait instead of “tricks,” the manufactured lures that guarantee a higher rate of success. “It was easy to write if you used the tricks. Everybody used them. Joyce had invented hundreds of new ones. Just because they were new didn’t make them any better. They would all turn into clichés” (OW 239). Almost a decade later, Hemingway returned to this matter of “true” writing and “trick” writing, first in Death in the Afternoon and then in Green Hills of Africa. In the latter, conversing with a hunting companion about the difficulty of the kind of writing he is trying to do, he defines it as “a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.” “It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.” “And why has it not been written?” “Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be

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and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.” (GHA 27) The “prose that has never been written,” like the giant trout that Nick could hook but not catch, is still out there, the former in the future and the latter in time’s fictional and figurative equivalents—the river and memory. Neither can be captured with tricks, which only lead to competent fiction or averagesized fish. To get perfect prose or a giant trout, you need luck, talent, and discipline, and you must survive. The need for luck is manifest; both the writer and the fisherman must be in the right place at the right time. Moreover, if he is to succeed, there must necessarily be things he does of which he is not fully conscious—the mystery of great art that Hemingway later said “does not dis-sect out” (SL 770). He must also possess talent and discipline; talent without discipline leads to dissipation, what Hemingway later believed had happened to Scott Fitzgerald, discipline without talent to futility. It is talent that led Hemingway back to the memories of his youth; it is discipline that leads Nick to put behind him “other needs.” The greater the talent and discipline, the greater the competence. If both are great enough, the fisherman or writer can achieve mastery and, with luck, something beyond even that. For Hemingway, the beau-idéal of the artist was Paul Cézanne; Nick and he “wanted to write like Cezanne painted”: “Cezanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was hell to do. He was the greatest. The greatest for always. It wasn’t a cult. He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick. Nobody had ever written about country like that. He felt almost holy about it. It was deadly serious. You could do it if you would fight it out. If you’d lived right with your eyes” (OW 239). Cézanne—so temperamentally similar to Hemingway with his dedication above all else to art; his attempts to convey emotion through a technique of simple, carefully selected images rather than through the piling up of realistic details or other sorts of elaboration; his distrust of intellectual abstractions; and even his boorish manners, emotional outbursts, and subject matter that was so often, to use Stein’s expression, inaccrochable—had early on learned

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the techniques of his craft from the works of past masters in the Louvre and from his impressionist companions, especially Camille Pissarro. But then he had moved beyond them into an aesthetic of his own, a sort of protocubism that Hemingway would later emulate. Referring to his paintings as “constructions [from nature] based on the means, feelings and approaches suggested by [nature]” (Letters 327–28), Cézanne sought to discover the actual form that existed within the subject rather than imposing one on it from the outside. To do that meant, as Hemingway put it, “liv[ing] right with your eyes”—neither ordering details nor merely replicating them but seeing their natural ordering and expressing it. The landscape’s natural order impresses itself on the artist’s eye, and he, ignoring social conventions and the distortions of his own temperament, works “from inside [him]self ” to depict exactly what he sees with no sentimental or intertextual associations. “The thesis to be expounded,” Cézanne told a fellow painter, “is to render the image of what we see” (Letters 312); that, for the painter, is the hardest thing of all. And the same, Hemingway believed, holds true for the writer. Eight years after writing “Big Two-Hearted River,” he would echo Cézanne’s thoughts on painting in one of his most famous statements on his own early attempts at depiction in fiction: “I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you 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 that produced the emotion that you experienced.” This would be “the real thing” that, “if you stated it purely enough,” would be valid . . . always” (DIA 2). Cézanne’s forms, like Hemingway’s sentences, are deliberately simple. As Hemingway would later say, “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over” (DIA 191). Both use basic, striking colors. Both move the reader’s eye in a specific direction over particular objects; as Sheldon Norman Grebstein observes, they often alternate “different components of the landscape (earth, trees, houses, mountains) in such a way that each is distinct as the eye focuses upon it separately, yet tends to blend into the next as the whole composition is viewed” (164). Even Hemingway’s search for the critical detail that will convey a scene’s emotional essence is “perhaps the literary equivalent to Cézanne’s search for the point of most striking light as the axis of the object or mass to be painted” (Grebstein 165). There is, it should be noted, some debate on this matter of a “central” or “culminating” point in the artist’s paintings. Although Cézanne explicitly stated the theory near the end of his life (Letters 296, 299), several art historians have observed a significant divergence between his theory and his actual practice. Erle Loran, for instance,

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notes that “Cézanne’s space is compensated, balanced, related to the picture plane; and thus often rotates around, not toward, a central point” (8). But if this weakens the analogy between Cézanne’s central point and Hemingway’s critical detail, it also opens up possible analogies to Hemingway’s method of indirection and, more important, to his theory and practice of omission. As Theodore L. Gaillard Jr. points out in this regard, “In several of his later paintings, Cézanne would intentionally leave small areas of canvas blank in the midst of a sea of roofs or on the side of a hill, causing viewers to fill spaces with preconscious constructs of complementary line and color, subtly moving toward the substitution of impression and feeling for cognition” (67). While writing “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway told Stein he was “trying to do the country like Cezanne . . . and sometimes getting it a little bit” (SL 122). And one of the best of these Cézanne passages occurs as Nick starts up the burned landscape. The road ran on, dipping occasionally, but always climbing. Nick went on up. Finally the road after going parallel to the burnt hillside reached the top. Nick leaned back against a stump and slipped out of the pack harness. Ahead of him, as far as he could see, was the pine plain. The burned country stopped off at the left with the range of hills. On ahead islands of dark pine trees rose out of the plain. Far off to the left was the line of the river. Nick followed it with his eye and caught glints of the water in the sun. There was nothing but the pine plain ahead of him, until the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land. He could hardly see them, faint and far away in the heat-light over the plain. If he looked too steadily they were gone. But if he only half-looked they were there, the far-off hills of the height of land. (BTHR 180) The scene is composed like a painting, with Nick standing at midheight (typical for the viewer in many of Cézanne’s paintings), above the pine plain and below the distant high hills. The winding road, or route tournante, takes us into the scene, as it does in both Cézanne’s late landscapes and their literary equivalents in Hemingway’s fiction. The picture is framed on the left by the range of hills and the line of the river and on the top by the far blue hills. Nick’s view spans to the left, suggesting that his perspective is from the right side of the canvas. Each of the three main areas of the painting is distinguished by a particular quality of light: on the left the glints of sunlight reflecting off of

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the river (which contrast with the darkened burned country and the range of hills), at the top the faint blue hills in the heat-light, and in the center the pine plain that is lighter than the burned country but darker than the blue hills. Each element of the scene is distinct, but they all blur into one another to establish an overall effect. What Hemingway says of the far-off hills at the end of the passage is also true of each of the other components of the scene: if you look too closely at any one of them it disappears (as in an impressionist painting, none has enough specificity of detail to sustain it in isolation), but if you only half-look it is there. In other words, the particular shapes and planes matter only insofar as they contribute to the totality of the painting, and each of them is essential to that larger effect. Here is where we see the movement from memory to metafiction, from the external landscape to the internal terrain of the mind, as Hemingway eschews an accurate depiction of the actual landscape outside of Seney in favor of a constructed one that will, paradoxically, represent the emotions he currently feels about how, as a writer, he can fictionally employ his memories of past experiences. The passage is one of his most complex objective correlatives, achieved through external focalization with the emotion of the passage expressed purely through the seemingly neutral depiction of the fictionally reconstructed landscape. The burned country, like Nick’s past, is behind him. He has reached a certain elevation, or realization of his writing abilities. In the distance he can barely make out the Lake Superior height of land, which resonates symbolically as the sort of true writing he wishes to achieve but, at this point, can only glimpse. Between those hills and where he now stands is the vast pine plain with its islands of dark pine trees like so many steps along the way. The road he has traveled to this point has risen and dipped but has steadily climbed. Now, however, it has ended, and he is on his own. He will have to keep “his direction by the sun” (BTHR 136). Cézanne had continually urged his fellow painters to “not be content with the fine formulas of . . . illustrious forebears” and to “free [their] minds” through “contact with nature, and with the instincts and with the artistic sensations within” (Letters 310–11, 291–92, 303–04). Like Cézanne, Nick has learned all that he can from others; from now on he will have to teach himself. As both he and his author have come to realize, if you want to do in writing what Cézanne had done in painting, “You had to do it from inside yourself.” Although it is “a thing you couldn’t talk about,” he reaffirms his sense of vocation, voicing a faith that survives in the face of doubt: “He was going to work on it until he got it. Maybe never, but he would know as he got near it. It was a job. Maybe for all his life” (OW 239).

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With this, the fragment reaches its climactic moment of recognition. Recalling the Cézanne portraits he has viewed, including the one at Stein’s home, Hemingway realizes that Stein will be the vessel through which the deceased painter will acknowledge him if he ever achieves his ideal: “She’d know it if he ever got things right” (OW 239). He imagines how “Cezanne would paint this stretch of river” and exclaims, “God, if he were only here to do it. They died and that was the hell of it. They worked all their lives and then got old and died” (OW 240). Cézanne had luck, talent, and discipline, but he failed to survive. A month before his death, he would lament, “Will I ever achieve the goal I have sought so fervently and pursued so long?” (Letters 324). These considerations of Cézanne’s finitude cause Nick to feel the press of time and cut short his desultory musings. He turns his attention to his surroundings, which, in his present state of mind, he views as a painting: “Nick, seeing how Cezanne would do the stretch of river and the swamp, stood up and stepped down into the stream. The water was cold and actual. He waded across the stream, moving in the picture.” The water is cold and actual, a residue of memory, but Nick’s task now is to turn it into art. He needs to write. He releases the big trout he has caught (“He was too big to eat”) and decides to “get a couple of little ones in front of camp for supper.” He hurries up the bank and starts through the brush. “He was in a hurry and the rod bothered him. He was not thinking. He was holding something in his head. He wanted to get back to camp and get to work” (OW 240). In his haste, the line catches on a branch, but he cuts the leader and reels in so he can get back. Nothing must interfere with his immediate return to camp so he can write the picture he is holding in his head. Less than a year before, Hemingway had described himself as “constipated” with stories that needed to get written (SL 104), and earlier in the fragment he spoke of “peristaltic action.” Now the metaphor has shifted from his digestive tract to his head, reflecting his growing understanding of, and control over, both his memories and his craft. Along the trail he sees a rabbit that has been paralyzed by two large ticks. He stops grudgingly, and removes the parasites. He lays the rabbit under a sweet fern bush and wonders whether it will revive. “Probably the ticks had attached themselves to it as it crouched in the grass. Maybe after it had been dancing in the open.” In this allegory of writing, even the rabbit becomes one more metaphor of the writer. Was he stopped while in the grass in contemplation or as he danced in the open in the practice of his own craft? Nick “did not know.” But he has no time to think about it. There is work to do. “He went on up the trail to the camp. He was holding something in his head” (OW 241).

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This is how the original version of “Big Two-Hearted River” ends, with Nick, having affirmed his vocation, hurrying back to camp to write. In both this and the final version, fishing is used as a metaphor for writing. The rushing river is the writer’s life; downstream it is his memory of the past, upstream the future, and where he stands the present. The trout are stories that he fishes for in his memory, and the success of both the fisherman and the writer depends on luck, talent, and discipline. The giant trout that gets away in both versions represents the kind of ideal fiction he is trying to achieve, something he can but glimpse since he does not yet possess the artistic ability to catch it. In both versions, writing has its difficulties and risks, but always its potential rewards. Thus, as the sun sets the water is blinding and it is almost impossible to fish, but “you were liable to strike a big trout anywhere in the current” (OW 233). You can avoid the sun’s glare by fishing upstream, figuratively avoiding the difficulties of the task by turning away from the material of the past and memory, but this is unsatisfactory. And so you fish in the dark, blinded by the sun’s glare, and make do as best you can. The rest, to complete Hemingway’s echo of Henry James, is “the madness of art” (James 276). In both versions, the story was entitled “Big Two-Hearted River” and divided decisively into two linked stories (in In Our Time, chapter 15 is placed between them). In the original version, Nick decides to release the big trout he caught and to get two smaller ones later by the camp. This decision takes place right after he has tried to explain the kind of prose he is after. He could hook but not catch the giant trout, an incident that literally takes his breath away. The trout he catches, although not nearly as big as the first, is still too large to eat, so he will settle for the two smaller ones by the camp. Figuratively, the little trout he initially caught and threw back is a story too unambitious for him to keep; the giant trout is the kind of story that he aspires to write, but which is, for now, beyond his reach; and even the large trout he catches is too much, like explaining the influence of Cézanne, for his ability to digest and communicate. The two smaller trout he will catch back at camp represent the two parts of the story he will write, less ambitious in his eyes than the trout/ story he releases but within the range of his art. When Hemingway revised the ending of the story, he retained the bipartite structure and symbols; the Big Two-Hearted remained two-parted. In the final version, having caught “one good trout” (BTHR 152), the first part of the story, he describes his successful but difficult efforts to catch another, the second part. The trout he hooks feels heavy as a log, and Hemingway depicts in great detail how hard it is to capture this trout that Nick fights “against the current”

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(BTHR 154). This struggle figuratively represents the efforts of the author to finish the second part of the story. With both trout in his sack, Nick then sits down to smoke and eat and watch the river.4 In this final version, besides the capture of the second trout and the symbolism this entails (he has at last “caught” the second part of the story), the material about the past and about the nature of writing has been replaced by another fictional representation—the swamp. Both the swamp and the swamp of memory are filled with large trout, but although Nick can hook them, he does not yet have the ability to land them. In the swamp the river narrows, the sun does not shine, and the water is fast and deep. The trout there are large, but whether they represent the trauma of Nick’s (and Hemingway’s) war wound or of his unhappy childhood, he is not yet eager to go after them. They are “impossible to land” (BTHR 155) because he does not yet possess the art to get them. In this parable about writing, that is what matters most. Although he will one day possess the art to represent his war wound in “A Way You’ll Never Be,” his childhood wound in “Fathers and Sons,” and both in “Now I Lay Me,” in the present, in his efforts to write Cézanne-like stories, it is important that Hemingway, and Nick, not reach for something that too far exceeds their grasp. A writer’s craft is achieved in increments, his development a daily battle. On his way to the far-off hills he must stop by many islands of dark pine trees. For now, fishing in the swamp would be a “tragic adventure,” and “Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today” (BTHR 155). He takes the two fish he has caught and lays them “side by side on a log. They were fine trout” (BTHR 155). And, I would add, fine stories as well. He cleans them, rolls them up in his sack, and heads back to camp. Looking back over his shoulder, he is confident, as well he should be. There would be plenty of days ahead to fish the swamp of memory.

Not e s 1. The best and fullest biographical account of the writing of this story is Reynolds (201–47). For three valuable analyses of the various manuscripts, see Oldsey (218–24) and Smith (“Hemingway’s Early Manuscripts,” 280–86; “Hemingway’s Luggage,” 45–52). 2. After railing against Young’s thesis for several years, Hemingway suddenly agreed with the gist of it in letters to Malcolm Cowley (Lynn 106–07) and to New York Times reporter Charles Poore, who was writing an introduction to a Hemingway reader (SL 798). Not surprisingly, Lynn views these letters as “warm-ups for the gloss he offered the public at large in A Moveable Feast” (107).

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3. All “Big Two-Hearted River” (BTHR) quotations are from In Our Time (133–42, 145–56), and all quotations of the original ending, which Philip Young entitled “On Writing” (OW), are from The Nick Adams Stories (233–41). 4. Here I see the captured trout as metaphors for successful stories and the uncaptured trout as metaphors for stories too difficult for him to complete successfully at this stage in his career. Earlier I viewed the trout as metaphors for the material of stories, the fabula that the act of fishing/ writing turns into stories if it can catch them. In either case, the metaphor seems inescapable.

Wo rk s C i t e d Baker, Sheridan. “Hemingway’s Two-Hearted River.” 1959. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Ed. Jackson J. Benson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1975. 150–59. Cézanne, Paul. Paul Cézanne: Letters. Trans. Seymour Hacker. Ed. John Rewald. New York: Hacker, 1984. Cowley, Malcolm. “Introduction.” The Portable Hemingway. 1944. Rpt. “Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway.” Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert P. Weeks. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 40–51. Gaillard, Theodore L., Jr. “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives.” Twentieth-Century Literature 45.1 (1999): 65–78. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway’s Craft. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973. Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s, 1932. ———. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ———. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. New York: Scribner’s, 1963. ———. In Our Time. 1925. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. ———. The Nick Adams Stories. Ed. Philip Young. New York: Scribner’s, 1972. James, Henry. “The Middle Years.” 1893. Tales of Henry James. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Christof Wegelin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. 260–76. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993. Loran, Erle. Cézanne’s Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs. Berkeley: U of California P, 1947. Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Oldsey, Bernard. “Hemingway’s Beginnings and Endings.” College Literature 7.3 (1980): 213–38. Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: The Paris Years. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Smith, Paul. “Hemingway’s Early Manuscripts: The Theory and Practice of Omission.” Journal of Modern Literature 10.2 (1983): 268–88. ———. “1924: Hemingway’s Luggage and the Miraculous Year.” The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 36–54. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 1933. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1972. 1–237. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. 1952. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966.

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13 A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Killing Nostalgia in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon Emily O. Wittman 

The homesickness of the Swiss . . . which befalls them when they are transferred to other lands, is the result of a longing that is aroused by the recollection of a carefree life and neighborly company in their youth, a longing for the places where they enjoyed the very simple pleasures of life. Later, when they visit these places, they find their anticipation dampened and even their homesickness cured. They think that everything has drastically changed, but it is that they cannot bring back their youth. —Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery. —Albert Camus, The Rebel

When Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932, few critics understood why a successful fiction writer would devote nearly a decade to a lengthy exposition of an archaic sport many considered immoral.1 Questions about “the book’s genus and species” guided initial critical response (Thurston 47). Reviewers struggled to label the unusual book, which combined 279 pages of text with nearly a hundred pages of photos and an eighty-four-page glossary. What logic organized this mass of information? A reviewer from the Book-

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man awkwardly described it as “an interlude of reporting and miscellaneous comment in a career chiefly devoted to fiction” (Collins 115). Taxonomic questions continue to surface in critical studies of Death in the Afternoon. Nevertheless, we would be mistaken to see the book as a radical departure from Hemingway’s earlier writing, or even from other travel literature of the same era. Death in the Afternoon is less an aberration than a parallel project to The Sun Also Rises, which he wrote seven years earlier. This is particularly clear when we investigate how Hemingway uses nostalgia in Death in the Afternoon to guarantee his authority and to distinguish himself from both his readership and the other foreigners who have irrevocably altered “the way it used to happen at San Sebastian” (DIA 33). As Malcolm Cowley observed in his review of Death in the Afternoon, every Hemingway book “has been an elegy” (123). Cowley referred to Death in the Afternoon as a “Baedeker of bulls” (121). Carlos Baker likewise dubbed it a “Baedeker of the bullfight” (A Life Story 220). Hemingway’s own classification is less clear. Forty pages into his book, in the middle of a long description of the pleasures of Aranjuez, he apostrophizes the reader: “You can find the sights in Baedeker” (DIA 40). Yet in chapter 7 he acknowledges that he has written a kind of guidebook: “There are two sorts of guide books; those that are read before and those that are to be read after and those that are to be read after the fact are bound to be incomprehensible to a certain extent before” (63). When he directs the reader to go to Spain and see a bullfight for himself before finishing the book, Hemingway suggests that a book cannot take the place of first-hand experience. The reader is invited to attend a fight but will later be told that the spectacle he will see is decadent. Hemingway also argues that each fight differs so much that even if he did describe one, “it would not be the one that you would see” (63). Thus, at the same time that he offers broad information and “how-to-ism” about the bullfight, he also implies that the kind of bullfighting he describes will have disappeared by the time the reader actually attends a fiesta (Said 238). Death in the Afternoon is thus both a meditation on an idealized era of bullfighting and a complicated introduction to a rapidly deteriorating practice. This demand that the reader witness a bullfight before finishing the remaining thirteen chapters of Death in the Afternoon highlights Hemingway’s ambivalence about sharing his knowledge and downplays language as a useful medium for sharing information and appreciation. Intimations about the reader’s insufficiency are conjoined with implicit doubts about the power of

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writing to reach the unelect. The difficulty of communicating essential information about Spain and the bullfight is reiterated throughout the book, especially in Hemingway’s descriptions of exaggerated conditions, for example, in the dreamy, mournful final chapter in which he follows a description of Valencia with “You do not know what hot is when you have not been there,” evincing a lack of faith in the power of writing to express experience (272). Hemingway paints those with afición as temperamentally aloof and, like himself, scornful of the general crowd. Afición is as rare among non-natives in Death in the Afternoon as it is in The Sun Also Rises, in which Anglophone crowds rush to the Pamplona festival and destroy its integrity. Montoya, the arbiter of afición in The Sun Also Rises, designates Jake as one of the safe elect with whom he can share the secret; he alone among his expatriate posse bears the sign of election, a matter he acknowledges with predictable understatement. The Sun Also Rises suggests the insufficiency of prose to communicate the finer aspects of the bullfight and foregrounds the danger of talking about it; Brett seduces Pedro Romero only after Jake talks him up. It is possible that in both books Hemingway is atoning for his own role in adulterating the very spectacle whose lost purity he now mourns. Renato Rosaldo coined the term “imperialist nostalgia” to describe the tendency of “agents of colonialism” to mourn the destruction of a culture at the very moment when they precipitate its destruction. He describes “a particular kind of nostalgia . . . where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have destroyed” (69). Death in the Afternoon casts the author as a solemn initiate to the bullfight, earnestly trotting off to the Iberian peninsula with a selfimposed mission to write about death. Yet in his early letters he invited friends and friends of friends to join him at the San Fermin Festival of Navarre for drunken fun at bargain-rate festivities. “Bull fighting is the best damn stuff in the world,” he wrote to Howell Jenkins in 1924. “For Christ sake come on.” “Spain is the real old stuff,” he counseled Jenkins, “you could have a hell of a good time here and spend hardly any money” (SL 131). When Death in the Afternoon hit bookstore shelves, Hemingway was firmly under what Leonard Leff terms “the magnifying lens of the new media” (107); the writer Ernest Hemingway had morphed into a communally produced phenomenon. Hemingway typically appeared bearded and venerable in the photographs and sketches presented to the public eye. Even by 1932 he had long been known as “Papa.” This epithet for a thirty-three-year-old man seemed fitting to a public well aware of Hemingway’s strong personality and virile hobbies as well as—if they read his books and not just newspaper and

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magazine articles about him—the nostalgic tone that pervades his writing. Anthony Burgess invokes a catalog of manly traits to describe Hemingway in his prime as “six feet tall, huge-chested, handsome, ebullient, a warrior, a hunter, a fisherman, a drinker” (7). Many reviewers speculated that Hemingway was catering to public interest in Death in the Afternoon by casting himself in his book and using his rugged life to assist his “will to textual power” (Comley and Scholes 4). In Death in the Afternoon the presence of “the author” as the narrator and the emphasis on the act of writing itself explicitly connect the book with Hemingway, the writer named on the title page. References to Hemingway’s family and personal history are scattered throughout the book. Yet Death in the Afternoon was a commercial failure, living out the fears of editor Maxwell Perkins as well as the prophesy of the copy editor who typed “Hemingway’s Death” across the galley proof.2 Hemingway’s treatise on bullfighting came under fire for its style as well as its bloody subject matter. The familiar elements of Hemingway’s prose were here: the understatement; the repetition of simple adjectives such as “fine”; the homey, conversational parataxis; the idiomatic translation of foreign dialogue. But something new surfaced as well: a volatile and almost tangible aggressiveness that prompted reviewer Robert Coates to call the book “almost suicidal” (116). Reviewers objected to Hemingway’s tendency to take on anticipated detractors with swaggering challenges. In correspondence from the period, Hemingway expresses his commitment to portraying something as he really experienced it. Hemingway had been in Spain as a young foreign journalist: “In Madrid I lived in a bull fighter’s boarding house and followed the bullfights all over Spain travelling with a cuadrilla of bull fighters. I’m going back again next summer” (SL 148). As important as the book itself is the way it came to be written, the way it originated in a specific time in the experience of a specific person. This pre-history is emphasized repeatedly. Chapter 1 suggests that this autobiographical element will assist the uninitiated reader by presenting him or her with a writer who had not always been an expert. In the first chapter Hemingway explains that he wrote Death in the Afternoon for personal reasons: he hoped to become a better writer by learning how to write about death. Eager to indulge a personal passion, he suggests that it might also be helpful for the English-speaking world to have a book on the subject (4). But herein lies the paradoxical nature of the book. Although Death in the Afternoon includes Spanish lessons, minute directions to cafés selling last-minute tickets, a detailed inventory of the menus at local restaurants, and

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a list of festival dates, Hemingway insists that he did not intend it for tourists, especially the sophisticated, educated variety he accuses of destroying the bullfight. At the end of chapter 3 he scorns upper-class American tourists who squeamishly left bullfights until they became popular, at which point they stayed, raising prices and ruining the spectacle for others: “In nineteen thirty-one I did not see one leave within range and now it looks as though the good days of the free barreras at San Sebastian are over” (34). These foreigners are identifiable as fellow Americans by Hemingway’s description of their “skull and bones-ed, porcelain-ed, beach-tanned” appearance (34). The one-upmanship essential to travel literature is exaggerated in his description of the tourists’ belated appearance. As Death in the Afternoon progresses, the narrator’s specific experiences of the fight serve principally to distinguish the narrator from the reader and establish the bullfight as a dying spectacle. Hemingway laments the end of “a country you love very much,” doomed to lose its fragile charm through the destructive effects of a growing number of Anglophone visitors (277). As Peter Messent observes, Hemingway “is not writing as a Spaniard or for a Spanish audience”; he falsely exempts himself from the role of tourist in Death in the Afternoon in order to retain his status as “mediator” and retain connection to his home culture (126). Instead, Messent asserts, Spanish culture becomes “the yardstick against which an absent and ‘diseased’ America is measured,” permitting Hemingway to create “a type of fiction constructed from a position of personal (and cultural) need” (127, 137). Hemingway’s claims to excellence as writer, traveler, and aficionado necessarily entail the rejection of other writers, other visitors to Spain, and, more specifically, other visitors to the ring. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway assumes Montoya’s suspicions. “What you will want at a bullfight . . . is a good public,” he declares, suggesting the audience’s crucial role played in upholding and preserving a spectacle’s standards (42). As an analogy between bullfighting and writing is developed throughout the book, the audience becomes an analogue for his readership. Throughout the chapters writing is cast as a struggle in which an author’s standards and ideals are pitted against readerly expectations. From his habitual café chair at the modest pension, the author intimates that readers have the capacity to destroy even the most well-intentioned piece of writing, just as tourists destroy Spain and the bullfight. Death in the Afternoon manifests an ambivalent and troubled stance toward the reader. Although a book of initiation, it refuses its readership, revoking its initial welcome.

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In the first chapter of Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway describes bullfighting as “a way to study death, one of the subjects that a man might write of ” (3).3 He presents the book as an attempt to write about the bullfight in a way that captures how he really felt when he saw it, not how he was supposed to feel. In 1925, seven years before the publication of Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway mailed his first letter to Perkins. Still under contract with Boni and Liveright, he wrote as a response to Perkins’s encomiastic overtures to join him at Charles Scribner’s Sons and publish a novel. Hemingway was already committed to another project, “a sort of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta of the Bull Ring, a very big book with some wonderful pictures” (SL 156). New to writing and new to the bullfight, Hemingway hoped to capture death as one of the emotion-producing actions that served as a self-prescribed rite of passage. In the book he emphasizes the importance of an extended apprenticeship for both vocations, arguing that writing, like bullfighting, is characterized by rites of passage, rules, and proximity to death: “I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death” (2). He recalls early visits to Spain as a young writer and apprentice aficionado, emphasizing the contemporary decadence of both vocations and the crucial importance of careful beginnings and good timing. Spain provided the young Hemingway with ideal subject matter for his ambitions as a writer. In 1923 he described his discovery to William D. Horne: “It isn’t just brutal like they always told us. It’s a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you (SL 88). He embraced the tragedy with considerable passion. By the time he finished Death in the Afternoon, he had witnessed the death of hundreds of bulls; he was a self-identified aficionado, a Spanish word he defines in the glossary as signifying “one who understands bullfights in general and in detail and still cares for them” (DIA 380). Polemically identifying himself as a “part of the human race” that derives “pleasure and pride” from killing, he would explain the bullfight to an uninitiated audience from a position of knowledge and experience (232). Death in the Afternoon has none of the euphemistic trappings of what Ann Douglas has called the period’s “high-minded idiom” (224).4 The bibliographical notes at the end of the book describe his project as an attempt “to explain that spectacle [the modern Spanish bullfight] both emotionally and practically” (487). This dual approach is already manifest in

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chapter 1, when Hemingway recalls his first bullfight and his reaction to the goring of the horses in the second and middle part of the bullfight, one of the most controversial elements of the spectacle and the one, in his view, most repugnant to foreign spectators. He details this first reaction to “establish the fact that the reactions were instant and unexpected” (8). According to this logic, immediacy guarantees authenticity. The knowledge he imparts will differ from that found in other treatises on the same subject; the note that ends Death in the Afternoon claims his use of 2,077 works about bullfighting but asks the indulgence of “competent aficionados” for narrowing this information into “one man’s arbitrary explanation” (487). Hemingway nimbly assumes the pedagogical authority conferred by his philosophy of experience, following the account of his reaction to the goring of the horses with a history of the role of horses in the bullfight. Engaging accounts of personal experience are blended with extensive factual exposition and digressions into alternately shocking and irrelevant subject matter. Hemingway conceived of this as a tauromachian style. In his first letter to Perkins, he describes his approach: “It is a long one to write because it is not to be just a history and text book or apologia for bull fighting—but instead, if possible, bull fighting its-self. As it’s a thing that nobody knows about in English I’d like to take it first from altogether outside—how I happened to be interested in it, how it seemed before I saw it—how it was when I didn’t understand it—my own experience with it, how it reacts on others—the gradual finding out about it and try and build it up from the outside and then go all the way inside with chapters on everything” (SL 236). In the narrative method outlined in chapter 1, information of emotional interest is connected to what is termed the “outside,” whereas the “inside” designates practical, factual information about the bullfight. The outside is characterized by anecdotes and frank, lively description, whereas the inside includes detailed practical information such as the rules of the fight or a clarification of differences among shrimp, gambas, and langostinos. Although he explores the bullfight through the lens of traditional humanistic values such as beauty, symmetry, and honesty, Hemingway gives feeling primacy for judging the spectacle’s interest and moral acceptability; immediate feeling allows him to consider the spectacle’s moral status in a Rousseauist twist. He writes, “So far, about morals, I know only what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (4). A reader can only pronounce moral

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judgment after he witnesses an entire bullfight and knows his “reactions to them” (1). Knowledge and moral guidance are provided by immediate experience and feelings.5 However, the personal experience that entices the reader also establishes an unattainable level of expertise. The book’s ostensible project of initiating the reader is gradually abandoned and the friendly persona is recast as a hostile guide who teases the reader with his exploits and superior knowledge. The narrator’s perpetual demarcation of himself from his readership comes to organize the book’s presentation of information and inform its unusual diversity of approaches. If the reader is lured by Hemingway’s cape, she is also removed from the ring through a rhetorical strategy of exclusion. Hemingway initially begins this process of removal by suggesting that a person’s capacity to appreciate bullfighting is a matter of election, not training; one will know immediately if one appreciates it or not. “However I feel about the horses emotionally, I felt the first time I saw a bullfight” (8); there are simply those who can appreciate it and those who cannot. Limits are set to what literary endeavors can achieve. This logic is reiterated in the “Some Reactions” in the appendix, where Hemingway demonstrates what immediate reactions reveal about a person’s overall potential for afición. Hemingway draws a comparison between afición and wine connoisseurship. Continued exposure to bullfighting and wine might bring broader and more sophisticated appreciation of both pleasures, but only if one’s initial reaction is positive: “A person drinking, not tasting or savoring but drinking, wine for the first time will know, although he may not care to taste or be able to taste, whether he likes the effect or not and whether or not it is good for him” (11). This paragraph, written during the Prohibition, serves as a microcosm of Death in the Afternoon, substituting one prohibited custom for another. Hemingway frequently refers to his alcohol consumption in Death in the Afternoon; like Barnes, his afición is complemented by love of drink. The passage on wine, with its implicit claims to expertise, ushers in one of the principal turns in Death in the Afternoon, the inclusion of subject matter other than bullfighting, material destined to shock the reader and demonstrate the wealth of Hemingway’s ken. When he refers to any activity, be it hunting, fishing, bullfighting, sexual intercourse, or downing shots at a speakeasy, it is with the viewpoint of the hardened veteran. “Do not look for beautiful women on the stage, in the brothels or the canta honda places,” he counsels (41). His specialized knowledge is legitimate because it originates in repeated experience. He catalogs his own success at the many tests posed by Spain: finding

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scalped tickets, identifying the best bullfights, and gaining local support, successes that, Thomas Strychacz has argued, make Death in the Afternoon “less a handbook to bullfighting than a guide to the multiple modes of performance undertaken by men” (11). Hemingway’s knowledge of Spain is a special kind culled from cafés, bars, brothels, and chance confidences. The result of election, luck, and good timing, it covers more than Spain and Spanish customs, although it necessarily includes these things. Hemingway invokes in familiar terms the seedier elements of the corrida— prostitution, alcoholism, gonorrhea—self-consciously distinguishing himself from other writers about Spain through his insistence on the underbelly of Spanish culture. “Nowhere else,” Edward Said remarked, “do words like ‘nobility’ and ‘elegance’ have so lurid and yet so compelling an aura” (233). Hemingway also distinguishes himself from his readers through his mastery of Spanish. Defining the Spanish word suerte, Hemingway muses that “the translation of trial or manœuvre is quite arbitrary, as any translation must be from the Spanish” (96). His mastery of Spanish is emphasized repeatedly in Death in the Afternoon, in part through the inclusion of untranslated Spanish dialogue but also through the glossary of Spanish terms that comprises nearly a third of the book. The glossary’s extensive narrative entries suggest that equivalent English words don’t necessarily exist. Like the rest of the book, the glossary has roots in gritty experience, not the classroom; definitions couch words in stories and anecdotes.6 Entries are sometimes normative; a matador should have pundonor, although he most likely will not. Entries also explicitly reference Hemingway’s experience of Spain, such as the entry for tacones (“heels”), which details the corrupt practices of a specific Catalan heel-thief whose cheek Hemingway permanently scarred. Several glossary words do not appear in the main body of the book but are incorporated instead on their own merit, complete with mininarratives; the glossary is intended for independent reading. The choice of entries is indicative of Hemingway’s insistence on the cultural singularity of Spanish practices. As the glossary illustrates, words are not just indicators of things; they indicate a way of life, a way of being in the world. The entries suggest the language of a frank people who can be sentimentally opposed to Americans, people who, Susan Stewart writes, “speak without selfconsciousness, without criticism, and without affectation” (16). Hemingway also conveys this difference by translating Spanish dialogue into nonidiomatic English, as in the following excerpt from the glossary definition for cartel: “For instance, you ask a friend in the business, ‘What cartel have you in Malaga?’ ‘Wonderful; in Malaga no one has more cartel than me. My cartel is unmea-

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surable’” (393). Here the original Spanish is indicated by grammatical deviation from standard English. Hemingway does this elsewhere in Death in the Afternoon, such as in his translation of Gallo’s speech, which he also peppers with easily comprehensible Spanish words: “What do I want with exercise, hombre? What do I want with strength? The bull takes plenty of exercise, the bull has plenty of strength! I have now forty years, but every year the bulls are four and a half going on five” (157). Chapter 7 combines the basics of the bullfight with the introduction of an imagined reader/interlocutor, the Old Lady, with whom Hemingway will converse for nine chapters. He explains the inclusion of this personified reader as an attempt to create the dialogue that readers expect and also to perform a pedagogical function by allowing the reader to ask him questions. Through this characterization of the reader, he addresses not only his book’s creation but also its anticipated reception. The Old Lady is chosen after a staged interview with her and four unnamed men, all of whom have just witnessed their first bullfight. She alone enjoyed the fight and the goring of the horses and is therefore selected to learn about it through a dialogue with the author. The narrator reveals little about the Old Lady except that she is American, unaccompanied, and an avid consumer of popular fiction. She has all the signs of potential for afición, yet she will be thrown out of the book in chapter 16, no more enlightened about bullfighting, writing, or Spain than when she entered. She is an explanatory tool but also a foil to demonstrate Hemingway’s unattainable knowledge. The Old Lady learns the essentials of the bullfight, yet she retains only misunderstandings and irrelevant details. Her failure to “get” the bullfight is partially attributed to her gender. “Mas cornadas dan las mujeres”—women gore more often than the bulls—goes the Spanish proverb Hemingway repeats several times in Death in the Afternoon. The chapters that include the Old Lady emphasize the importance of distinguishing an ideal bullfight from the modern, decadent kind pioneered at the beginning of the century by Juan Belmonte, a matador whose stubby legs bred a style of fighting that privileged aesthetically rich cape work over risky killing. These chapters celebrate the globally dangerous life of the ideal matador from the ring to the bedroom. The philosophy of the corrida equates authenticity with mortal danger; matadors risk venereal disease because syphilis is “a disease of all people who lead lives in which a disregard of consequences dominates” (101). This commitment to danger is explained to the Old Lady in archaic diction and rhythm, as if the author were conscious of reproducing a hackneyed philosophy.

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“Ah, madame,” the narrator explains, “you will find no man who is a man who will not bear some marks of past misfortune” (103). The civilized Old Lady is described as a pious and hypocritical Victorian matriarch secretly drawn to the more salacious aspects of the fight as she hides her prurient interest behind humanistic homilies and false outrage. The Old Lady is both a spokesperson for an outdated humanism but also, despite her age, a quintessential latecomer. Ronald Weber defends Hemingway’s nonfiction from the criticism of overinclusion, arguing that the writerly stance of the fiction resembles that of Jake Barnes—you’ll lose it if you talk about it—whereas the nonfiction is about offering, insisting on openly providing information to the reader in a generous spirit (87). However, although Death in the Afternoon provides a wealth of information about the bullfight and nearly a hundred pages of photos with detailed captions, it contains much of Barnes’s reluctance. The tension between talking about the fight and guarding the secret is palpable in the narrator’s resentful exposition of the very information the book is ostensibly written to reveal. The author carefully monitors the Old Lady’s reactions to his writing but denies her any advancement in knowledge. Unnamed and generally anonymous except for her gender, she remains generalized, like a group sensibility, even referring to herself on occasion in the first-person plural, as when she thanks Hemingway for the explicit account of bull seeding: “We find them most instructive” (121). Hemingway’s choice of a recalcitrant reader appears increasingly strategic; as the chapters progress, she illustrates the gap between aficionado and reader. The Old Lady’s rejection is crystallized in the short piece entitled “A Natural History of the Dead,” which ends chapter 12.7 This metafictional section is presented as a piece of writing given to the Old Lady by the author in lieu of dialogue. It is presented as work in the process of being written, which she will read as he writes. His response to her request for something “amusing yet instructive” is a harrowing description of a battlefield that bitterly ridicules humanistic philosophy by proposing war as a field for natural history (133). This gruesome encapsulation of one man’s experience of war foregrounds the distinguishing logic of hardship. “A Natural History of the Dead” revisits nineteenth-century adventurer Mungo Park and his clockwork argument for God. While dying of thirst in the African wilderness, Park contemplated a moss flower and renewed his faith and his will to survive, rationalizing that a beautiful flower implied a creator. Hemingway dismisses this kind of tidy inspiration as outdated: “One wonders what that persevering traveller, Mungo Park, would have seen on a battlefield in hot weather to restore his confidence” (138).

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In the absence of lofty, comforting thoughts, the author proposes to investigate instead “what inspiration we may derive from the dead” (134). What follows is a graphic first-person account of a postbattle Italian landscape. He pays particular attention to the female dead. “The sight of a dead woman is quite shocking,” he writes, pulling female bodies into the theater of war (134). He describes his first encounter with dead women after the explosion of a munitions factory near Milan that killed all the female employees inside: “It [was] amazing that the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell” (137). He notes the unusual sight of women without hair, robbed of a significant element of their visual difference. Deeply implicated in the war, women have no exalted difference. “A Natural History of the Dead” is striking for the proprietary account it gives of war; it does not suggest any kind of fellowship. “A Natural History of the Dead” is, in part, a polemical response to humanist criticism of Hemingway’s treatment of sexuality and violence. Like a good bullfighter, Hemingway insisted on the importance of writing about death without disguise or embellishment. As Susan Beegel writes, “Hemingway felt that the modern writer’s chief responsibility to those who had died in the war was to accurately depict their condition” (80). The Great War separated him from the last Victorians, teaching him that “most men die like animals, not men” (DIA 139), and it was less obscene to write about death than to gloss over the reality of mechanized slaughter and trench warfare with abstraction. In a letter to a concerned librarian, he explained that he used explicit language “spareingly and never to give gratuitous shock—although sometimes to give calculated and what to me seems necessary shock” (SL 381). The metafictional element present in much of Death in the Afternoon is carried further in this section by the author’s insistence on the difficulty of writing and the repeated interruptions. He accuses the Old Lady of disrupting his writing process with irrelevant questions and requests and barks at her, “Be patient, can’t you? It’s very hard to write like this” (135). The fragile status of “A Natural History of the Dead” is foregrounded by these interruptions that illustrate the dangers of writing for the nonideal reader. Hilary Justice suggests that the dialogues between the author and the Old Lady “present, in microcosm, Hemingway’s lover’s quarrel with his profession” (116). He casts his combative, aggressive stance as the legitimate response to a destructive readership. The hostility manifest in “A Natural History of the Dead” is echoed throughout Death in the Afternoon in aggression toward other writers and critics. The final

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five chapters in particular intersperse lessons about bullfighting with writing lessons and score-settling. Chapter 16, the final chapter including the Old Lady, contains the celebrated iceberg theory of literature, which advocates understatement and suggests that specialization has ruined writing just as it ruined bullfighting. As in good bullfighting, aesthetic concerns should not determine a work of writing: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over” (191). Knowledge is of the utmost importance to the writer; a good writer will omit things, but he must still know them. The project of the writer is cast in mythic terms; the writer’s purview should be unlimited. “A good writer should know as near everything as possible,” he writes, but he should only show a part of what he knows (191). The iceberg protrudes gracefully because the majority of its body is out of sight, underwater, and only “one-eighth” of it shows. Yet in chapter 20, the final chapter of Death in the Afternoon, it is precisely the remaining seven-eighths—all of the things Hemingway left out—that dominate. Eight pages register everything that he did not have time or space to include. He names and apologizes for these omissions, draining the water for a chapter to expose the iceberg that grounds what he considered a diminished text. The contradiction manifested in this chapter’s overinclusion highlights the tension in Death in the Afternoon between omission and inclusion, between concealing and revealing. Like previous chapters, 20 puts a premium on personality. A “condensed narrative poem,” in Donald Junkins’s words, it tells the story of Hemingway in Spain, giving credit to the teller without traditional boasting (115).8 By emphasizing what he has not told, but nevertheless naming it, Hemingway emphasizes the failure of prose to bring back experience. “If I could have made this enough of a book,” the chapter begins, “it would have had everything in it” (270). The following pages detail the contents of this “everything,” a widereaching tribute to Spain and youth and his youthful days in Spain. Now it is Hemingway’s failure if the reader did not get what he should have: “No. It is not enough of a book, but still there were a few things to be said. There were a few practical things to be said” (278). Hemingway’s anger against the reader mutates into nostalgic humility in this final chapter. Nostalgia, Stewart writes, “wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past that has only ideological reality” (23). The most prevalent pronoun in the elegiac chapter 20 is “you,” not “we” or “I.” But even this “you” is not the same one that littered the previous nineteen chapters. It is the “you” of storytelling and still belongs exclusively to the author; it’s a “you” that really means “me.” The pronoun “we” barely appears in Death in the Afternoon, which instead

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privileges the “I” that experiences and is therefore vested with authority. “We” appears mainly in the nostalgic evocation of Spain in chapter 20. It enters as a way to talk about concrete experiences, such as “the Cathedral at Santiago and in La Granja, where we practiced with the cape” (278). It is the pronoun of generational pathos; Hemingway’s “we” is the “we” of a bygone generation, a nostalgic “we.” A generation or group becomes “we” in retrospect; it becomes “all of us ourselves as we were then” (273), a utopian “we” that points to both an unrecoverable past and an impossible future. “We” is never used to include the reader, in the sense of “you and I.” The “we” of nostalgia and distinction is no more inclusive or welcoming than the “I” who has been to war. Both “I” and “we” emphasize a gulf between author and reader on the basis of experience. The shifts between pronouns in Death in the Afternoon are often startling. An anecdote in chapter 5 leads the reader through a sentence that shares two pronouns: “Seeing the sun rise is a fine thing. As a boy, fishing or shooting, or during the war you used to see it rather regularly; then, after the war, I do not remember seeing it until Constantinople” (48). After the semicolon, he insists on the exclusivity afforded by his war experience. By means of a changing pronoun, Hemingway thus moves from a commonly shared experience to an individual, exclusive experience. This changing pronoun echoes the rejection of fellowship that characterizes Death in the Afternoon. The insistence on unrepeatable experiences is such a familiar trope in travel writing that we might overlook it. But it is precisely this difference between the “I” of Death in the Afternoon and its projected reader that permits such a book about travel and bullfighting to be written. The author’s jealous insistence on irrevocable change and the decline of the bullfight is in part a defense of his authority; he not only has more knowledge than the reader, he has more knowledge than the belated reader can ever have. Singular experiences require an audience whose comparative poverty of experience gives sense and wonder to the traveler’s accounts. Hemingway’s ambivalence toward the reader is also apparent in his insistence on the bullfight’s decline: “The bullfight is a Spanish institution; it has not existed because of the foreigners and tourists, but always in spite of them and any step to modify it to secure their approval, which it will never have, is a step towards its complete suppression” (8). Hemingway laments the tourists. As Rosaldo notes, “The agents of change experience transformations of other cultures as if they were personal losses” (70). Yet, insofar as the tourists disrupt the culture he loves, they are also affording him the possibility of nostalgia, his point of departure.

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Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two forms of contemporary nostalgia: restorative and reflective nostalgia. Hemingway’s nostalgia links him to the latter kind, which, rather than attempting to rebuild a lost past, “lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time” (Boym 41). The fragmentary nature of Death in the Afternoon suggests a world that can be gestured at but never entirely reconstructed. Hemingway, resisting the travel writer’s glassy-eyed perspective, acknowledges that the golden age of bullfighting has always been in the past: “Historians speak highly of all dead bullfighters,” he writes, just as bullfighting “has always been considered by contemporary chroniclers to be in a period of decadence” (240). As his four-year-old son Patrick remarks at his second Spanish bullfight, “Quand j’étais jeune la course de taureaux n’était pas comme ça [Bullfighting wasn’t like that when I was young]” (465). The rhetoric of belatedness is wellworn in nostalgia’s “romance with the past” (Boym 11); it is always late for the traveler and too late for the reader of travel writing. Hemingway also mourns the book that Death in the Afternoon might have been. As Stewart has observed, nostalgia is “the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition” (23). Hemingway considered Death in the Afternoon a reduced work.9 He paraliptically nods to all the things he would have liked to write about had it been “enough of a book” (270), claiming authority for both what he includes and for what—due to editorial decisions—he was obliged to leave out.10 Writing about Hemingway’s classic style, Philip Young describes “a pattern of mannerisms and responses which give an illusion of reality that, in its completeness, reality itself does not give” (205). This is precisely the nature of reflective nostalgia: “a meditation on history and the passage of time” that “cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space” (Boym 49). As Allen Josephs has noted, Hemingway’s nostalgia is not just for the predecadent phase of bullfighting but also for his “discovery of Spain and the Spanish way of life which were best exemplified in toreo” (6). It is useful to consider Rosaldo’s contention that the changing meanings of nostalgia in the West indicate that “feelings of tender yearning” are not “natural” or “pan-human” and “therefore not necessarily as innocent” as we might imagine (71). The nostalgia of Death in the Afternoon is, in part, nostalgia for a time when Hemingway did not realize that his very presence at the fiestas destabilized the integrity of the very atmosphere he admired. Chapter 20 cautions that the bullfight is a doomed spectacle. His readers, like the Old Lady, will not share the

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community or the “good days,” but they will experience belatedness. His nostalgia is very modern in the sense that he longs for Spain as a non-native; his nostalgia is partially a refusal of home. “Today,” Jean Starobinski writes, “nostalgia no longer designates the loss of one’s native land, but the return toward the stages in which desire did not have to take account of external obstacles and was not condemned to defer its realization” (103). Hemingway longs not for home but for a temporal elsewhere characterized by immediacy and authenticity. Linda Hutcheon, commenting on Immanuel Kant’s writing on nostalgia, observes that nostalgics “did not want to return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth. . . . The aesthetics of nostalgia might, therefore, be less a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the invocation of a partial, idealized history merges with a dissatisfaction with the present” (195). “Memory,” Hemingway muses as he reflects on the history of bullfighting, “of course, is never true” (100). Even if we do not join Said in ranking Death in the Afternoon among “the greatest American books of the twentieth century,” we might accept Josephs’s claim that it is “one of the most original books in American literature” and also “one essential for understanding all the rest” of Hemingway’s books (232, 5, 16). It is a key to his art, insofar as “no treatment of Hemingway can begin to deal with his work satisfactorily if it does not confront the role of bullfighting in his writing” (Comley 40). Death in the Afternoon is as much metatravelogue as it is metafiction; it is a lesson on traveling and writing that ultimately invites the reader to do neither. It is generated out of the paradox of initiating the reader into a community-based experience with a rhetoric of hardship and nostalgia. Hemingway introduced an archaic ritual to the modern world. But in doing so he articulated a very modern way of thinking about experience and travel.

Not e s 1. The idea for Death in the Afternoon had been gestating for eight years and Hemingway had spent two years composing before he sent the manuscript to Scribner’s in 1932. 2. See Robert Trogdon’s The Lousy Racket. Hemingway, Scribner’s, and the Business of Literature for a detailed study of the correspondence between Hemingway and Perkins about Death in the Afternoon’s format. 3. Ann Douglas suggests that the perceived equation between difficult experience and literary authority was widely prevalent in the interwar years, particularly among young veterans like Hemingway who hoped to “get” a novel out of the war (195). 4. Paul Fussell has located sources for Hemingway’s personal idiom in both “the Cable-ese of the foreign journalist” and in “the Great War style of British Phlegm” (181).

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5. In a study of Death in the Afternoon’s paratexts, Nancy Bredendick argues that the title itself can be read as a defense of bullfighting, insofar as it “disassociates the death of the bull from feelings of horror and morbidity” (210). 6. As Trogdon has pointed out, Hemingway was actively translating for Death in the Afternoon. He originally intended for the glossary to be accompanied by a Reglamento, “the Spanish government’s rules that regulate the bullfight,” but abandoned this plan when he found out that a new one would be coming out shortly (“Composition” 23). 7. The twelve-page “A Natural History of the Dead” was later published separately in Hemingway’s 1933 short story collection Winner Take Nothing. 8. Hemingway was pleased when Arnold Gingrich, the future editor of Esquire, praised the chapter: “Am glad you liked the last chapter in the last book—it is what the book is about but nobody seems to notice that. They think it is just a catalogue of things that were omitted” (SL 378). 9. Junkins and Trogdon (“The Composition”) have detailed Hemingway’s decision, following the recommendation of John Dos Passos, to leave out the first half of this chapter and the final chapter of Death in the Afternoon, as it appeared in the galley proofs. 10. Ronald Weber points out that Hemingway uses this device elsewhere in his oeuvre: “It forms part of Harry’s dying recollection in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, and in The Garden of Eden David Bourne carefully lists all the things he has not yet got right in the Africa story he is writing” (56).

Wo rk s C i t e d Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner’s, 1969. Beegel, Susan F. “‘That Always Absent Something Else’: ‘A Natural History of the Dead’ and Its Discarded Coda.” New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Jackson J. Benson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1975. 73–95. Bredendick, Nancy. “‘¿Qué tal, hombre, qué tal?’ How Paratexts Narrow the Gap between Reader and Text in Death in the Afternoon.” In Mandel. 205–34. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Burgess, Anthony. Ernest Hemingway and His World. Norwich, UK: Jerrold and Sons, 1978. Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage, 1992. Coates, Robert M. “Bullfighters.” In Stephens. 115−16. Collins, Steward. “Bull-fights and Politics.” Bookman 75 (October 1932). In Stephens. 113−15. Comley, Nancy R. “Reading ‘Up in Michigan.’” New Essays on Hemingway’s Short Fiction. Ed. Paul Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 19–45. Comley, Nancy R., and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994. Cowley, Malcom. “A Farewell to Spain.” In Stephens. 120–23. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the Twenties. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s, 1960. ———. Selected Letters: 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s, 1926. ———. Winner Take Nothing. New York: Scribner’s, 1933. Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory. Ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 189–207.

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Josephs, Allen. “Death in the Afternoon: A Reconsideration.” Hemingway Review 2.1 (1982): 2−16. Junkins, Donald. “The Poetry of the Twentieth Chapter of Death in the Afternoon: Relationships between the Deleted and Published Halves.” Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays. Ed. Robert W. Lewis. New York: Praeger, 1990. 113–21. Justice, Hilary K. The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978. Leff, Leonard. Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribner’s, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Mandel, Miriam B., ed. A Companion to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Messent, Peter. “‘The Real Thing’? Representing the Bullfight and Spain in Death in the Afternoon.” In Mandel. 123–41. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Said, Edward. “How Not to Get Gored.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 230–38. Starobinksi, Jean. “The Idea of Nostalgia.” Diogenes 54 (1966): 81–103. Stephens, Robert O., ed. Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1977. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2003. Thurston, Michael. “Genre, Gender and Truth in Death in the Afternoon.” Hemingway Review 17.2 (1998): 47–63. Trogdon, Robert W. “The Composition, Revision, Publication, and Reception of Death in the Afternoon.” In Mandel. 21–41. ———. The Lousy Racket. Hemingway, Scribner’s, and the Business of Literature. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2007. Weber, Ronald. Hemingway’s Art of Non-Fiction. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. 1952. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966.

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14 Memory in The Garden of Eden Barbara Lounsberry 

He wrote on a while longer now and there was no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him intact. —Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

An unfinished, posthumously published 1986 novel now looms as a benchmark in Hemingway studies. This is only part of the lure of The Garden of Eden. In 1996, citing the novel as a “benchmark,” Hemingway Review editor Susan F. Beegel reported that the publication has prompted “a radical reassessment of Hemingway’s canonical output” (“Conclusion” 290). The published text, she notes, is read and criticized almost as often as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms (290). The published Garden represents but a third of Hemingway’s unfinished 2,409-page manuscript (Burwell 99); nevertheless, both book and manuscript extend at least two facets of his art. They explore the boundaries of sex, race, and gender more daringly than any other Hemingway work. At the same time they treat a writer’s creative life in richer nuance than before. Indeed, Hemingway interweaves these threads. The unfinished state of Hemingway’s Garden makes it, ironically, something of a postmodern work. The incompletion leaves space for a plethora of readings: Hemingway’s Catherine as a feminist—wittingly or unwittingly (Strong 193)—or Hemingway’s writer-hero as Bluebeard (Roe). Anne Hollander finds one of the

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novel’s major themes “the dangers of transexuality and the way it can destroy a man’s Garden of Eden” (qtd. in Elkins 108), while Debra A. Moddelmog sees instead one of Hemingway’s queer families. Somewhere in between Mark Spilka finds evidence of Hemingway’s lifelong “quarrel with androgyny.” Biographer Michael Reynolds describes the work as Hemingway’s “portrait of the artist in the twentieth century” (257). In truth, The Garden of Eden can be read as a reprise and an elaboration in fiction of the challenges faced (and overcome) in Hemingway’s 1935 nonfiction volume Green Hills of Africa. To read The Garden of Eden is to feel Hemingway reprising betrayal and loss in discrete sentences and in story after story. The elephant is renowned for its memory. Furthermore, as J. E. Cirlot reports, the elephant, “in its broadest and universal sense,” is a symbol of strength and of the power of the libido (96). The lost and twice-recovered elephant story in The Garden of Eden enlarges the celebration of memory and art that occurs in Green Hills. The published version of Hemingway’s Garden particularly foregrounds this link. Like Green Hills of Africa, the published Garden is structured in four sections. Like Green Hills, The Garden’s longest section—sixteen chapters of thirty— represents a “Pursuit Remembered” interlude during which the writer, David Bourne, recalls African hunts and turns them into art, into “stories.” In each work, too, a literal victory—Hemingway’s double kudu kill in Green Hills and David’s successful completion of his African stories (including the elephant story)—is followed, and topped, by a victory on the plane of memory (and recall). In Green Hills of Africa two planes of action unfurl: the literal game rivalry on the plains of Africa and the higher plane of memory and art. This dualism recurs in The Garden of Eden in the contrast Hemingway makes between the “narrative” David is writing of his and Catherine’s marriage as it unravels and the clearly greater work, the “stories” he is recalling and crafting from his past.1 Catherine’s action in burning the “stories” so that only the “narrative” remains would be analogous to Karl’s crossing into Papa’s territory in Green Hills and sabotaging his memory. In The Garden of Eden Catherine plays the role Hemingway divides between P.O.M. and Karl in Green Hills, and Marita serves the function of the guide, Pop, in validating David’s views. In Green Hills, P.O.M. (“Poor old Mama,” the Pauline figure) exists with Karl as a prosaic dweller on the literal African plains. Early on in the work the hunters are after a rhinoceros bull with its huge horn when a rhino cow intrudes. “What are we going to do?” P.O.M. asks in one of several allusions to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Hemingway then

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writes, “She was practical.” Pop answers, “We’ll work around her” (GHOA 104). Hemingway creates a parallel moment in The Garden of Eden, but now the context is art rather than hunt. Like the rhino cow, Catherine intrudes on David’s writing in her plan to have the “narrative” of their marriage typed and shown to artists. “You know, don’t you, that you don’t get manuscripts typed until whoever writes them has gone over them and has them ready for typing?” David asks her, to which Catherine responds: “That isn’t necessary because I only need a rough draft to show the artists.” “I see. And if I don’t want it copied yet?” “Don’t you want it brought out? I do. And someone has to get started on something practical.” (GOE 188) Here, too, David and Marita (Pop) will work around her. Soon after, in one of seven passages in The Garden reminiscent of Hemingway’s journeys to literary landscapes in Green Hills, Hemingway writes: “[David] had been happy in the country of the story and knew that it was too good to last and now he was back from what he cared about into the overpopulated vacancy of madness that had taken, now, the new turn of exaggerated practicality” (193). Like Karl in Green Hills, Catherine is the character most plagued by those two Hemingway nemeses: fatigue and time. “I’m going to [take wonderful care of everybody],” Catherine says, “but I was so tired and there wasn’t any time” (163). She tries to hurry David in the middle of his elephant story by pressing him to go to Spain, and he is forever telling her, “Take a nap” (115) and “Go to sleep, Devil” (196), an evocative incantation if one thinks of Catherine as a projection of the betraying forces within Hemingway himself. It is Catherine, too, who (like Karl and P.O.M. in Green Hills) most suffers from memory loss. In a richly allusive scene, Hemingway uses memory lapse to signal Catherine’s fraying mind. David leaves when Catherine goes to Marita’s bed; however, when he returns, they meet alone at the bar at dusk. David asks Catherine if she feels better, and she replies with prophetic words: “Much better really. You just lose something and it’s gone that’s all. All we lose was all that we had. But we get some more. There’s no problem is there?” (118). Does she refer here to her lost heterosexuality, to the Garden of Eden, or is destruction of the African stories already in her mind? A few speeches later she reveals her sad plight: “I wish I could remember what it was we lost.” “But I wasn’t unfaithful,” she insists, only to refer a few speeches later to “When I knew I was unfaithful”

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(118, 119). Such contradiction telegraphs a flailing mind. Catherine then forgets Marita’s gift of caviar and champagne as well as the phrase she has prepared to invite David to a ménage à trois (121, 149). On the next to last day she remembers stopping at Saint Raphael (Raphael in Hebrew means “God heals”) but, poignantly, she cannot remember whether she lunched.2 David Bourne, in contrast, is the character forever reminding himself to remember. As the elephant story unfolds, we discover that this penchant exists even in the young Davey who reminds himself to remember that a different color blood spilled from the elephant’s ear (199) and to remember to “never tell anyone anything again” (181). In the opening pages of the published Garden we see David “learning to remember” how Catherine likes her coffee and eggs (4). In moments of crisis, David even reminds himself to remember things that will make him more understanding of others. He reminds himself that he likes his haircut and, at the end, that Marita is hurt as badly as he (85, 238). David’s most telling reminders to himself, however, relate to his art. David remembers the need to “tighten his discipline” (224) and “to do the work” (127) and to always “remember the things you believed” (166). Memory seems the key to David’s writing process. “[David] had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out,” Hemingway’s narrator explains (211). This parallels Hemingway’s affirmation in the final chapter of Green Hills of Africa that “[shooting and fishing] and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I could remember all the pictures” (285). As David works on his elephant tale, we learn that “the dreadful true understanding was all to come and he must not show it by arbitrary statements of rhetoric but by remembering the actual things that had brought it. Tomorrow he would get the things right and then go on” (GOE 182). As with the thirteenth-hour crisis of the missing bull-sable in Green Hills of Africa, the burned “stories” in The Garden of Eden present a crisis of memory and faith that David first finds insurmountable. “You can write them again,” Marita tells him. “‘No,’ David told her. ‘When it’s right you can’t remember. . . . When it’s once right you never can do it again’” (230). “But you can remember them. You must,” she repeats, sounding like Karl at the close of Green Hills.3 “Not me and not you and not anybody. They’re gone,” David replies (230). But David has been wrong at other points in the novel, and, fortunately, he is wrong here too. Working slowly (not hurriedly) and pursuing and failing at first light,4 David finds in the final chapter that the stories return. A manuscript passage Scribner’s editor Tom Jenks chose to omit underscores the link between memory and both artistic and sexual prowess. In the opening

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paragraph of the published chapter 29, Hemingway describes David’s failure. The published text reads: “He wrote a first simple declarative sentence again and it was impossible for him to put down the next sentence on paper” (239). In the manuscript Hemingway next wrote: “He had never in his relatively short life been impotent but in an hour standing before the armoire on the top of which he wrote he learned what impotence was” (ser. 422.3, folder 44, p. 1).5 However, the next day, when David tries once more to recollect, the “stories” (including, we are led to believe, the elephant story) start to return. As in Green Hills, “Pursuit as Happiness” follows “Pursuit and Failure.” The elephant of David Bourne’s (and Hemingway’s) elephant story is more than merely a symbol of memory—although it is a huge elephant that is hunted, felled, and resurrected in art. The phallic tusks of David’s elephant have “grown beyond their normal size” (173), they stand “so tall and thick that no one could believe them even when they touched them and no one, not even his father, could reach to the top” (202). This elephant, with its enviable tusks and its eye “the most alive thing David had ever seen” (199), becomes David’s brother: “The elephant was his hero now as his father had been for a long time” (201). The oedipal dimensions of this tableau bellow. Furthermore, we can see that in the twenty-plus years between Green Hills of Africa and The Garden of Eden, Hemingway enlarges the writer’s challenge, making loss of memory and faith one of The Garden’s central conflicts. In The Garden he also seems more willing than in Green Hills to admit his own role in the betrayal and loss. As Terry Tempest Williams astutely observes, “Hemingway, hunter of hunters, introduces through his characters the idea that betrayal may be inherent in the hunt” (11). The great richness of The Garden of Eden, book and manuscript, rests in its portrayal of unending stories of betrayal. One might say that intellectually and emotionally Hemingway takes up The Garden where he left off Green Hills. The 1935 Green Hills of Africa ends with pedantics by the Sea of Galilee. Hemingway counts the grebes and wonders why grebes do not appear in the Bible. He then achieves a final victory over Karl when this rival disclaims all hope of being a Messiah. “I’m not going to walk on it,” Karl says of the Sea. “It’s been done already” (294). The crisis of memory and faith then surfaces once more in P.O.M., who has already lost the memory of Pop’s face. “I can remember him,” Papa ends Green Hills in triumph. “I’ll write you a piece some time and put him in” (295).6 The published version of The Garden of Eden opens on a similar biblical tableau. On his honeymoon with Catherine at the idyllic Grau du Roi, David Bourne emerges in the first chapter as a fisher of men. Hemingway pens this

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erotic passage: “[Catherine] had seen the fish clearly from above and his length and the shine of him in the water and her husband with the bamboo pole bent almost double and the procession of people following” (9). But even in these opening moments, Hemingway casts Catherine in the role of Doubting Thomas—if not yet Judas. “I couldn’t believe him when I saw him out of the window and you with your mob following you,” she declares, foreshadowing all that will come (10). With his Garden of Eden title and opening chapter, Hemingway neatly compresses the betrayal stories of the Old and New Testaments as the context for the further betrayals to come. The marriage “narrative” and the African “stories” offer further sagas of faithlessness and defection. If the postmodern marriage “narrative”—the very novel we are reading—reveals Catherine’s doubt and betrayal of David as Messiah/artist, the African “stories” show David’s father’s betrayal of both the African natives (Juma’s people) and the elephant and David’s betrayal of the elephant, his brother, as well. Betrayal, as Williams notes, seems now “inherent in the hunt” (11). Hemingway moves from Messiah/artist in Green Hills of Africa to a Messiah/artist who also partakes of the roles of Eve, Lilith, Satan, and Judas in the never-ending story of betrayal that is life.7 Since Catherine’s ivory hair links her to the brother elephant’s tusk, and since she has earlier called David her brother, David’s acknowledged betrayal of the elephant represents his acknowledged betrayal of her. On 28 May 1934, in the midst of writing Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start” (SL 408). This distasteful phrase compresses the point of The Garden of Eden: betrayal and loss are our life state. Given this plight, all that remains is memory of the fall, of the betrayal, and the chance to transform the memory into art. In the conflict between human ties and art, Hemingway chooses art. As his marriage fragments, David asks himself, “What’s happened to you since last May? What are you anymore anyway? But he touched the glass [Marita’s glass] to his lips again and there was the same reaction as before” (127). Here is Adam with the apple, and the narrator continues, “All right, he said, remember to do the work. The work is what you have left” (127). Is this not the Genesis story?8 Days later, as he tries “to make the elephant come alive again,” David tells himself, “There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make” (166).

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Writing serves as Hemingway’s sanctuary from betrayal, where he can transform the fall, the loss, into enduring art. As life falls into pieces, art alone remains whole. “He had not known just how greatly he had been divided and separated because once he started to work he wrote from an inner core which could not be split nor even marked nor scratched. He knew about this and it was his strength since all the rest of him could be riven” (GOE 183). “Nothing can touch you as long as you can work,” he later repeats, and the narrator confirms: “He cared about the writing more than about anything else, and he cared about many things” (211). That art can endure when individuals and cultures fall is a truth that obtains—even when that art inescapably conveys the culture. In 1934, following the death of friend, artist, and invigorating spirit Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “But then, next day, today which is Thursday . . . the other thing begins to work—the exalted sense of being above time & death which comes from being again in a writing mood. And this is not an illusion, so far as I can tell. Certainly I have a strong sense that Roger would be all on one’s side in this excitement, & that whatever the invisible force does, we thus get outside it” (245). Whatever the invisible force does, we thus get outside it. The published version of The Garden of Eden ends with a renewed (and expanded) celebration of memory and art. The great elephant, symbol of memory and the libido, vital powers lost once and then lost again after their resurrection, are re-Bourne in David Bourne. “David wrote steadily and well and the sentences that he had made before came to him complete and entire and he put them down, corrected them, and cut them as if he were going over proof. Not a sentence was missing and there were many that he put down as they were returned to him without changing them. By two o’clock he had recovered, corrected and improved what it had taken him five days to write originally. He wrote on a while longer now and there was no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him intact” (247). Today we have two Hemingway works—one nonfiction, one fiction—that celebrate memory and the important role of memory in Hemingway’s artistic process. Editor Jenks’s ending, with its hopeful final word “intact,” was, of course, too hopeful. Hemingway himself penned a darker “provisional ending” that involved a double suicide pact. The irony of the published Garden’s close is that Hemingway’s memory would not long be intact. As Reynolds reports, in the winter of 1958–59 in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway hoped to finish both A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden (313). “Under no financial pressures to bring any of these books to completion,” Reynolds helpfully reminds us, “he always imagined there would be time to finish them” (319).

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The final irony of The Garden is that Hemingway could not know in 1935 or in 1959 that a day would come when memories would “cease returning to him intact” (GOE 247). If Beegel is right and Hemingway suffered from hereditary hemochromatosis, the “bronze diabetes,” then his betrayal was, indeed, both parental and his own. One of the earliest signs of hemochromatosis, she reveals, is impairment of memory, particularly recent memory and orientation (“Hemochromatosis” 379). To this inner complicity in mental decline came the outer betrayal of the world in the form of the electroshock treatments ordered by Mayo Clinic doctors. If these treatments obliterated the memories that were foundational to Hemingway’s creative process, then, indeed, nothing would be left—nothing, that is, but this extraordinary hymn to betrayal, memory, and art.

Not e s 1. In her interesting reading, Amy Lovell Strong views the “narrative” as the more important text; indeed, as Catherine’s effort to replace the masculine African stories with a narrative that insists not only on greater female participation, but also on the “unstable territory between binaries” and gender identity as “a dynamic and fluctuating entity, fraught with conflicts and contradictions” (192). 2. In the parallel plot omitted in the published Garden, Barbara Sheldon shares Catherine’s memory loss. Her suicide note reads: “Dear Andy[:] Thank you very much. I know you’ll write it well [Nick and Barbara’s story]. . . . I don’t know how I was so stupid not to remember to do this before. . . . It’s such a fine place really [Venice] I don’t like for it to be associated with something that I undertook that turned out badly. But I must do it and not put it off in case I should get stupid again and forget” (Burwell 127). 3. “You must remember him,” Karl says in the next-to-last line of Green Hills of Africa, referring to Pop (295). In the holograph manuscript, Hemingway uses “it” instead of “him.” 4. Hemingway titled the four sections of Green Hills of Africa “Pursuit and Conversation,” “Pursuit Remembered,” “Pursuit and Failure,” and “Pursuit as Happiness.” 5. Reynolds reports that in 1957 Hemingway worked steadily on The Garden of Eden at the Finca, “standing in front of his typewriter, pecking away,” then swimming laps in the pool (304). 6. In a parallel passage that Jenks omitted from the published Garden, Catherine fears she will forget the landscape, but David replies, “I’ll make it for you if you don’t remember” (Burwell 100). 7. Critics have complained of the repetitions in The Garden manuscript and found in them signs of Hemingway’s loss of artistic control; however, repetition may be his very point. 8. Hemingway repeats the act more explicitly a few speeches later: “She tasted it and passed her lips very lightly over the rim and then passed it to him and he did the same and took a long sip” (127).

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Wo rk s C i t e d Beegel, Susan F. “Conclusion: The Critical Reputation of Ernest Hemingway.” The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 269–99. ———. “Hemingway and Hemochromatosis.” Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. In Wagner-Martin. 375–88. Broer, Lawrence R., and Gloria Holland, eds. Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2001. Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Cirlot, J. E. A Dictionary of Symbols. 2nd ed. Trans. Jack Sage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Elkins, Marilyn. “The Fashion of Machismo.” A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 93–115. Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner’s 1981. ———. The Garden of Eden. Ed. Tom Jenks. New York: Scribner’s, 1986. ———. The Garden of Eden manuscripts. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. ———. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. Moddelmog, Debra A. “Queer Families in Hemingway’s Fiction.” In Broer and Holland. 173–89. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: Norton, 1999. Roe, Steven C. “Opening Bluebeard’s Closet: Writing and Aggression in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden Manuscript.” In Wagner-Martin. 311–27. Spilka, Mark. “Hemingway’s Barbershop Quintet: The Garden of Eden Manuscript.” In WagnerMartin. 349–72. ———. Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990. Strong, Amy Lovell. “‘Go to sleep, Devil’: The Awakening of Catherine’s Feminism in The Garden of Eden.” In Broer and Holland. 190–203. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1998. Williams, Terry Tempest. “‘Hemingway and the Natural World: Keynote Address, Seventh International Hemingway Conference.” Hemingway and the Natural World. Ed. Robert E. Fleming. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 1999. 7–17. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Contributors

Matthew J. Bolton is a teacher and writer in New York City. He earned his Ph.D. in English literature in 2005 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote his dissertation on T. S. Eliot. He received the T. S. Eliot Society’s Fathman Young Scholar Award for work related to his dissertation. His work has been published in such journals as Yeats/Eliot Review, The Explicator, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Victorian Studies. Mark Cirino is an assistant professor of English at the University of Evansville (IN). He received his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of two novels, and his critical work has been published in the Hemingway Review and Italian-Americana. Allyson Nadia Field is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies in the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA. Her primary research interest is in race and ethnicity in American film, including nontheatrical film production, independent cinema, and Hollywood. She is currently completing a book on African American uplift films of the 1910s and the film production of southern agricultural and industrial educational institutions. In 2007–2008 she was a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in the Hemingway Review. Laura Gruber Godfrey is on the faculty in the English department at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene. She earned her Ph.D. in American literature from Washington State University in 2005. She has published in Western American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and the Hemingway Review. She is currently working on a project that discusses Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic geographies in his 2006 novel The Road; a portion of this essay compares the landscapes within that novel to those in Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. Larry Grimes holds the Perry and Aleece Gresham Chair in Humanities at Bethany College (WV), where he serves as chair of the Department of Literature 213

214 contributors and Languages. He is the author of The Religious Design of Hemingway’s Early Fiction and editor (with Bickford Sylvester) of Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works (forthcoming from the Kent State UP). He also writes on American film and detective fiction. Marc Hewson is currently an instructor in the English department at Carleton University. He is the author of several articles on issues of gender in modernist American literature, including A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. His current research explores the impact of nature and geography on the history of American literary and popular heroism. Verna Kale is a lecturer in English at Hampden-Sydney College and a doctoral candidate at Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching interests include American modernism, periodical culture, and textual editing. She has published in the Hemingway Review. Robert Paul Lamb received his doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard University and is professor of English at Purdue University. He is coeditor (with G. R. Thompson) of A Companion to American Fiction, 1865–1914 (2005) and author of James G. Birney and the Road to Abolitionism (1994) and Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (2010) as well as many articles on such writers and topics as Melville, Whitman, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Langston Hughes, literary naturalism, film, and pedagogy. The recipient of more than three dozen teaching awards from Harvard and Purdue, in 2008 he was named the Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Barbara Lounsberry examined the holograph manuscript of Green Hills of Africa at the University of Virginia and wrote about it for the Hemingway Review. She has studied the Garden of Eden manuscripts at the Kennedy Library as well. A specialist in artful nonfiction, her books include The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction (1992), The Writer in You (1994), Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality (coedited with best-selling author Gay Talese, 1996), and The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story (coedited with Susan Lohafer, 1998). She is currently finishing a book on Virginia Woolf ’s diaries and the sixtyplus diaries Woolf read. Lawrence H. Martin is Elliott Professor of English emeritus, Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia. He is the author of numerous articles on the literature of Ernest Hemingway, including “Ernest Hemingway, Gulf Stream Marine Scientist: The 1934–35 Academy of Natural Sciences Correspondence” and “Safari in the Age of

contributors

215

Kenyatta,” both published in the Hemingway Review. He also contributed a chapter, “‘The Revolutionist’: Historical Context and Political Ideology,” to Hemingway’s Italy: New Perspectives (edited by Rena Sanderson, 2006). Erik Nakjavani, Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh, has published on American literature, interdisciplinary studies, literary theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. Among his most recent publications on Hemingway are “Hemingway on War and Peace” (North Dakota Quarterly), “The Prose of Life: Lived Experience in the Fiction of Hemingway, Sartre, and Beauvoir” (North Dakota Quarterly), and “Hedâyat and Hemingway: A Study in Comparative Stylistics” (Edebiyat). Mark P. Ott teaches at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He is the author of Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream; A Contextual Biography (2008). Ott has presented academic papers at international Hemingway conferences in Spain, Cuba, Oak Park, Bimini, Italy, and Key West, and his scholarship has been published in the Hemingway Review. He has been awarded grants from the Ernest Hemingway Society, the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, and the Arts and Sciences Advisory Council of the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. He lives in Deerfield and Kailua, Hawai’i. Sergio Perosa, Professor Emeritus at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy, where he was professor of Anglo-American Literature from 1968 to 2003, is the author of numerous books and articles in both English and Italian. Marc Seals is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin− Baraboo/Sauk County. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Florida in 2004. He has published articles in journals such as the Hemingway Review and Storytelling: A Critical Journal of Popular Narrative and has presented conference papers on the works of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Horatio Alger, and Dashiell Hammett. Emily O. Wittman is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Alabama. She has published articles on modernism, translation studies, and world literature. Presently she is completing a book on translation and travel in British literature of the interwar period.

216

index

Index

Across the River and Into the Trees, 3–5, 34; Richard Cantwell in, 4–5 Adams, Nick: effects of war on, 162, 167; efforts to control thought, 155, 162, 163, 164n4; as expatriate, 173; as Hemingway, 170, 175–77; as “Hemingway Hero,” 152, 161–62; role of “Big Two-Hearted River” in saga of, 169; thinking about bullfighting vs. fishing, 171–73; as writer, 178, 181–84. See also specific titles Africa, 65n3, 100. See also specific titles; depictions of landscapes of, 98–100; Hemingway using as theater of action, 102–3; influence on Hemingway, 58, 104; mythic, 114, 119, 121–22; in The Old Man and the Sea, 57–58, 61–62, 64–65; Under Kilimanjaro in, 114–16, 119, 121–22 alcohol, 193; in expatriate lifestyles, 86–87, 94; Jinny flask in Under Kilimanjaro, 120–21 Aldington, Richard, 38 Aldridge, John, 87, 95n13 allusions: Eliot’s use of, 47–49, 51, 55n4; Hemingway’s use of, 55n4, 205; religious, 118, 121–22, 208–9; in Under Kilimanjaro, 116–18 Anderson, Sherwood, 41, 140–41 Antheil, George, 86 appearance, Hemingway’s, 188–89 art, 4, 8–10, 35 Augustine, Saint, 152–53, 154 autobiographical elements: in “Big TwoHearted River,” 174–75; in Death in the Afternoon, 189; Hemingway’s critique of other writers for, 175; in Hemingway’s fiction, 170; in Under Kilimanjaro, 119

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), 127, 141 Baker, Carlos, 37, 187; on Eliot’s use of allusions, 47–49; on expatriate community, 90–91, 95n11; on Hemingway’s concern for authenticity, 89–90 Baker, Samuel, 100, 106n1 Baker, Sheridan, 175 Balassi, William, 90 Barthes, Roland, 9 baseball, in Old Man and the Sea, 59–60 Beach, Sylvia, 86, 134, 140–41 Beegel, Susan, 70, 78, 197, 204, 211 Being Geniuses Together (Boyle), 143n2; on effects of place, 135–37; integrating women’s issues into, 130–31, 142; A Moveable Feast compared to, 128–32; on writers and community, 138, 142 Being Geniuses Together (McAlmon): Boyle editing and republishing, 127–28, 130; posturing in, 141–42 Bel Esprit, 55n3, 141 Belmonte, Juan, 195 Benjamin, Walter, 131 Benstock, Shari, 143n3 Bergson, Henri, 38, 42, 155, 163 betrayal: in The Garden of Eden stories, 208–11; loss and, 209–11; writing as Hemingway’s escape from, 209–10 Bettelheim, Bruno, 119 Bible, allusions to, 208–9 “Big Two-Hearted River,” 161–62, 166; autobiographical elements in, 174–76; Bill Smith in, 169–71; differing interpretations

216

index of, 167–69, 173–74, 184n2; A Farewell to Arms compared to, 160–61; Hemingway’s nostalgia for youth in, 173–74; as meditation on writing, 172, 183–84; Nick Adams in, 48, 72, 163, 164n4, 168–71 (see also Adams, Nick); Nick as writer in, 178, 181–84; Nick’s distrust of thought in, 155, 163; original ending for, 166, 169, 173, 175, 183; Part I, 48, 72; writing of, 166, 180–81 biographies, loss of Paris manuscripts in, 26n5 Bird, Bill, 39, 86, 170 Bishop, John Peale, 39 Boyle, Kay: editing and republishing McAlmon’s memoir, 127–28, 130–31, 139, 142; effects of place on writing of, 135–37; as emigrée vs. expatriate, 134–35; ignored by critics, 128–29; McAlmon and, 129–30, 142; as outsider, 129–30, 138, 140; on Paris life, 129, 133, 139–40; poverty of, 134–36; relations with other writers, 138–39, 143n4; return to Paris, 137–38 Boym, Svetlana, 200 Brague, Harry, 143n5 Bredendick, Nancy, 202n5 Breit, Harvey, 80 Brenner, Gerry, 25, 143n5 Bruccoli, Matthew J., 142 Budgen, Frank, 155 bullfighting. See also Death in the Afternoon: afición of, 188, 193; as analogy to writing, 173, 190–91, 197; Death in the Afternoon as elegy for, 187, 190, 201; decline of, 188, 190, 199–201; Hemingway claiming authority in, 195–96, 199; Hemingway’s concern for authenticity in, 90, 187–92, 195; morality of, 192–93; reception of book on, 186; taking over fishing in Hemingway’s mind, 171–73 Burgess, Anthony, 189 Burwell, Rose Marie, 4, 20, 22, 163n2 Caruth, Cathy, 19–20, 24, 26n3 cats, as totemic for Hemingway, 59 Cézanne, Hemingway’s admiration for, 178–82 Chamberlain, John, 99 Chancellor, John, 88 Charles Scribner’s Sons, 191, 201n1

217 Chevalier, Jean, 116, 118 childhood, Hemingway’s, 167, 170–71 Cirlot, J. E., 205 Cixous, Hélène, 12 Clark, Suzanne, 138 “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” 161 Coates, Robert, 189 Colum, Padraic, 117 Comley, Nancy, 10 Confessions (Saint Augustine), 152, 154 Cowley, Malcolm, 127–28, 142, 166–67, 187 The Crack-Up (Fitzgerald), 105 Crane, Stephen, 32 “Cross Country Snow,” 48 Cuba, 57, 65 cultural geography, 74–75, 81n1 Dali, Salvador, 149–50, 163 The Dangerous Summer, 34 Dayang Muda (princess of Sarawak), 137 daytime vs. night, 161–63 De Voto, Bernard, 99 death: Death in the Afternoon as study of, 188–89, 191; Hemingway’s writing about, 99, 196–97; memory and, 110, 155 Death in the Afternoon, 201n1, 202n5; authenticity of, 189–92, 194–95; criticisms of, 99, 189; difficulty classifying, 186–87, 191, 201; as elegy for bullfighting, 187, 190; evaluations of, 200–201; gap between reader and narrator in, 186–87, 190, 193, 195–96, 198–99; glossary in, 186, 194–95, 202n6; goals in writing, 188–92, 192–93; Hemingway’s experiences in, 188–89, 192–94; influences on, 47, 188–89; as meditation on writing, 45, 173, 177–78, 187–88; “A Natural History of the Dead” in, 196–97, 202n7; nostalgia in, 198–99, 200; Old Lady in, 195–97; omission vs. inclusion in, 198, 202n8, 202n9; reception of, 186–87, 189; as travelogue, 201; writing style of, 42–43, 45, 47, 197–99 Diliberto, Gioia, 23 The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (Dali), 163 “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” 72 Dolan, Marc, 131, 143n6 Donaghue, Denis, 53–54

218 Dorman-Smith, Chink, 53 Dos Passos, John, 166, 202n9 Douglas, Ann, 191, 201n3 dreams, 65n5; fear of, 161–62; in The Old Man and the Sea, 61–64; realness in Afro-Cuban religions, 59–60; in Under Kilimanjaro, 114–17 Duerr, Hans Peter, 61 Duncan, Raymond, 138 Dunning, Ralph Cheever, 134 Eberly, John, 108 Eby, Carl, 15, 58–59 Ecclesiastes, in The Sun Also Rises, 46 elephants: in The Garden of Eden, 10–15, 205, 207–9; in Green Hills of Africa, 205 Eliot, T. S.: Hemingway’s allusions to, 42–45, 205; Hemingway’s relations with, 40–41, 42, 55n3; influence on Hemingway, 37–38, 42–44, 47–50, 54; juxtapositioning of images by, 38, 51; McAlmon criticizing, 141–42; Pound and, 37, 39–40, 141; similarity of Hemingway’s writing style to, 46, 49; use of allusions by, 38, 43–44, 47–49, 51, 55n4; use of “I” as narrator, author, and reader, 53–54; The Waste Land seen as memoir of, 49–51 Eliot, Vivian, 50–51 “The End of Something”: Bill in, 170; cultural geography in, 71, 75–77; on effects of logging, 78–79; evolution of geography in, 79–80; memory in establishing sense of place in, 75–76; natural and cultural forces in, 79–80; Nick Adams in, 72–74, 78–80, 161–62 (see also Adams, Nick) Esquire, Hemingway’s columns for, 101 Exiles Return (Cowley), 127 expatriate community, in Paris, 84–85, 87–89, 94n2, 94n3; Boyle as outsider to, 129–30, 134–36, 140; demise of, 139, 142; gender and, 128, 143n3; Hemingway distancing self from, 133–34, 140, 170; Hemingway in, 130, 140–41; Hemingway on, 132–33, 139; mythical Paris of, 91, 139–40; writers in, 42, 89–90, 92, 127 expatriate lifestyle, in Paris: allure of forbidden behaviors in, 87, 91, 94; Boyle and, 134–37; guidebooks to, 83–88, 91; Hemingway’s ridicule of, 132–33, 135; Hemingway’s separateness from, 132–34,

index 173–74; memoirs of, 127; of writers in Paris, 89–90, 92, 132–33 experience: Death in the Afternoon blending with research, 192; of expatriate lifestyle in Paris, 87; Hemingway inventing fiction from, 98, 108; Hemingway’s range of, 193–94; Hemingway’s unattainable knowledge from, 195–96, 199; Hemingway using, 31–34; limitations of language and, 187–88, 198; lying incorporating, 111; memory and, 33, 47, 100, 110, 131, 152–53; reading as, 47; of space vs. place, 115 Fadiman, Clifton, 99 fairy tales: animals in, 117–18; archetypes in, 113, 119–21; autobiographical, 114; Under Kilimanjaro as, 114, 117–22, 125 A Farewell to Arms, 50, 149; allusions in, 43–45; Catherine in, 162; Frederic Henry in, 162; and Frederic’s allusions in, 43–45; Frederic’s dissocations in, 153–55; Frederic’s efforts to control thoughts in, 158–61; Frederic’s quarrels with memories in, 151–52, 156–58; and Frederic’s relationships to past in, 152–53; hostility to memory in, 157–58; as invented experience, 32–33; persistence of memories in, 150–51; success of, 45, 139 fathers, in The Garden of Eden, 8–14, 24 “Fathers and Sons,” 184 Faulkner, William, 149–50, 156 Felman, Shoshana, 20 Fenton, Charles, 74–75, 90 fetishism, in Hemingway’s work, 58–59 Finca Vigía, African artifacts in, 58 The Firebird Suite, 38 fishing, 166; in “Big Two-Hearted River,” 168–70; bullfighting taking over for, 171–73; importance to Hemingway, 170–71; as metaphor for writing, 176–78, 183–84; trout as metaphors for stories, 183–84, 185n4 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 18, 90, 105, 137, 141, 178 Flaubert, Gustave, 95n13 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 34, 153; Robert Jordan in, 152, 155 Ford, Ford Madox, 40–41, 86, 95n6, 141–42 Foucault, Michel, 9 Four Quartets (Eliot), 38

index Freud, Sigmund, 12, 157, 162 Fry, Roger, 210 Gaillard, Theodore L., Jr., 180 gambling, Hemingway’s, 141 “A Game of Chess” (Eliot), 50–51 García López, Manuel, 171, 173 The Garden of Eden, 202n10, 211n5; African stories in, 7–10, 12–14; Barbara Sheldon in, 16n1, 211n2; betrayal and loss in, 208–10; Bluebeard in, 204; Catherine Bourne in, 15; Catherine burning David’s stories in, 14, 23, 205–6; Catherine and gender identity in, 10–11, 204; Catherine’s marriage in, 5, 208–9, 211n1; Catherine’s memory loss in, 206–7, 211n2, 211n6; Catherine and sexual experimentation in, 6–8; David Bourne’s African stories in, 205–6, 209; David and elephant hunt in, 10–15, 205, 208–9; David and father in, 8–9, 10–12; David as “Hemingway Hero,” 152; David and memory in, 164n6, 207; David and parents in, 12–14; David rewriting burned stories in, 23–24, 207; David’s marriage in, 5, 8, 208–9; David’s masculinity in, 6–10; David in various endings in, 14–15; David as writer in, 209–10; difference from other novels, 5–6; effects of incompleteness of, 204; elephant hunt story in, 10–15, 205, 207; endings for, 15, 210; as fictional elaboration of Green Hills of Africa, 205, 208; gender identity in, 10–11; Hemingway’s worry about publication of, 9; honeymoon story in, 6–8, 11, 14–15; Jenks editing, 207–8, 210, 211n6; Juma in, 11–12; loss of memory and faith in, 208, 211n2; Marita in, 9, 14–15, 205–6; memory in, 4, 6–7, 210; Nick Sheldon in, 16n1; parallels with Green Hills of Africa, 205–6, 208, 210; sanitized, published version of, 14, 16n1, 210; trauma of lost manuscripts in, 18, 20–21, 23, 25; writing style of, 205, 211n7 “The Garden of Eden: A Question of Dates” (Leonard), 26n4 Gardner, Ava, 18 gender: anima archetypes of, 120, 123–25; commodification of women, 11–12; in The Garden of Eden, 204, 211n1; in Heming-

219 way’s war experience, 168; modernism and, 130, 138, 142; in Under Kilimanjaro, 124–25; women blending domestic and artistic lives, 135–36, 138 gender differences, 195; in expatriate experience, 128–29, 143n3; in walking the streets of Paris, 132–33 gender identity, 14, 59; in The Garden of Eden, 6–7, 10; Hemingway’s evolving thought on, 15, 16n1; Hemingway trying to recoup, 4–5; memory and, 12–13; sexual experimentation and, 6–7 gender roles, changes after WWII, 4 geographies: cultural, 74–75, 81n1; evolution of, 73–74, 79–80; of expatriate lifestyle in Paris, 86–88, 90; Hemingway constructing for characters, 73–74, 88, 90; Hemingway’s awareness of, 70, 79–80; of Hemingway’s own life, 74–75; human and natural forces in cultural, 70, 75–77, 79; natural vs. emotional, 72; in Old Man and the Sea, 60–64; of space vs. place, 115 “Gerontion” (Eliot), 53 Gerstenberger, Donna, 44 Gheerbrant, Alain, 116, 118 Gingrich, Arnold, 104, 202n8 Grace, Nancy McCampbell, 9 “Grace under pressure,” as ideal, 31 Green Hills of Africa, 62, 70, 211n4; The Garden of Eden’s relation to, 205–6, 208, 210; Hemingway claiming truth for, 97, 103–4; Hemingway manipulating memory in, 97, 109; idealized people in, 104–5; Karl in, 205, 208; memory in, 97, 153, 210; Papa in, 205, 208; P.O.M. in, 205; Pop in (see Percival, Philip); reviews of, 98–102; as self-centered, 103–5; as study of nature, 101–2; themes of, 100, 105; on “true” vs. “trick” writing, 177–78; writing style of, 109, 205 Griffin, Peter, 90 Guénon, René, 116, 119 A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris with Walking Tours (Leland), 93 guidebooks. See travelogues Gulf Stream, 102; in Green Hills of Africa, 62, 70; in The Old Man and the Sea, 59, 61–62 Hait, Christine H., 143n3 “Hamlet and His Problems” (Eliot), 47–48

220 Hemingway, Hadley, 42; fictionalized as Helen, 170–71; inclusion and omission in stories, 23, 25, 131; losing manuscripts, 18–19, 21–23, 25; marriage leading to loss of childhood friends, 170–71 Hemingway, Hilary, 58 Hemingway, Martha, 23 Hemingway, Mary: editing The Garden of Eden, 25; editing A Moveable Feast, 5, 143n5; in Under Kilimanjaro, 110, 118, 122, 124–25; marriage of, 22–23 Hemingway, Pauline, 6, 22–23, 105 Hemingway, Seán, 143n5 Hemingway: The Paris Years (Reynolds), 21 “Hemingway heroes,” 154; as author himself, 167, 170; characteristics of, 151–52, 155, 161–63 Henke, Suzette, 25 Hicks, Granville, 98–99 Hollander, Anne, 204–5 “Homage to Ezra,” 41 How to Be Happy in Paris (without being ruined) (Chancellor), 83–84, 88 Hulme, T. E., 38, 42 hunger, in Boyle’s vs. Hemingway’s life in Paris, 133–34 hunting, 118, 124, 208. See also safari books; in The Garden of Eden, 7, 10–15; in Green Hills of Africa, 205; in Under Kilimanjaro, 120 Hurwitz, Harold, 39 Hutcheon, Linda, 201 Hutchinson, Mary, 49 Huxley, Aldous, 44–45 identity, art in determining, 8 illness, Hemingway’s, 136–37, 167, 211 imagination: Hemingway blending experience with, 31–32; in writing other people’s memories, 53 Imagining Paris (Kennedy), 173 imagism movement, 38–39 “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound), 38–39 “In Another Country,” 46, 50 In Our Time, 166. See also specific story titles; influences on, 37–38, 40; landscapes in, 72; A Moveable Feast compared to, 131; Nick Adams left out of parts of, 52–53 (see also Adams, Nick); in our time expanded into, 40; writing style in, 37–38, 51, 52–54

index in our time, 39–40, 86, 172 “Indian Camp,” 51–52, 175–76; Nick Adams in, 51–52, 52–53 (see also Adams, Nick) Islands in the Stream, 4, 18, 20–21; Thomas Hudson in, 152 Jahn, Janheinz, 65n3 James, Henry, 101 James, William, 154–57 Jenks, Tom, 14, 16n1, 24, 207–8, 210, 211n6 The Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 45–46 Jones, Robert, 7 Josephs, Allen, 201 journalism: discipline of, 87; fiction writing vs., 22, 32; Hemingway’s, 19, 132–33 Joyce, James, 4, 155, 164n3; “bookshop crowd” of, 86, 130; celebrity of, 140–41; criticisms of, 141–42, 175 Jung, Carl, 123–25 Junkins, Donald, 198, 202n9 Justice, Hilary, 197 Kant, Immanuel, 201 Kazin, Alfred, 72, 131 Kennedy, J. Gerald, 94n1, 173–74 Kenner, Hugh, 51 Ketchum, Idaho, 69–70 Kiki of Montparnasse, 139 “Land, Sea, and Air Book,” 4. See also The Garden of Eden; Islands in the Stream; A Moveable Feast; Under Kilimanjaro Laub, Dori, 20 Le Havre, Boyle in, 135–36 Leff, Leonard, 188 Leland, John, 93 Leonard, John, 26n4 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), 38 Lewis, Sinclair, 141–42 Light in August (Faulkner), 156 lions: in Under Kilimanjaro, 118; in The Old Man and the Sea, 58–62 literary critics, effects on Hemingway, 35 logging, 72–73, 75–79 Loran, Erle, 179–80 loss: of childhood paradise, 113–15; in The Garden of Eden, 206–8, 210; as life state, 209 love, helping Frederic with bad memories, 162–63

index “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 53–54 Lynn, Kenneth S., 26n5, 69, 167–68, 184n2 MacLeish, Archibald, 130 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 91–93, 95n13 Maera (García López fictionalized as), 173 Mandel, Miriam, 20 Mao, Douglas, 128 Marlowe, Christopher, 45–46 marriage, 22; in The Garden of Eden, 5, 8, 208–9; leading to loss of childhood friends, 170–71 marriages, Hemingway’s, 6, 22–23, 25 Marvell, Andrew, 43–44 masculinity, 10, 14; of Hemingway’s characters, 4–5, 8–9, 59; Hemingway trying to reinvent, 4–5, 15, 16n1; symbols of, 11–14, 59 Massey, Doreen, 81n1 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 38 Maurice, Arthur Bartlett, 92 McAlmon, Robert, 175; “bookshop crowd” and, 86; Boyle and, 129–30, 134, 142; criticizing other writers, 141–42; Hemingway and, 130, 166; memoir of, 139, 141–42 (see also Being Geniuses Together) Melling, Philip, 58, 65n2 Mellow, James, 19, 26n5 Melville, Herman, 102 memoirs: disjunctures in time in writing, 131–32; Hemingway’s as fictional, 100, 130–31; memories of Paris expatriate community in, 142; memories vs. fictionalizing in, 131, 137–38, 142; similarity of Boyle’s and Hemingway’s, 130–32, 137–38 memory/memories. See also nostalgia: archetypes in, 107, 123–25; autobiographical, 151, 154, 156; centrality of, 151–52, 170; childhood, 6–7, 113–15; as co-option of history, 12; collective, 113–14, 119; control over, 6–7, 112, 153, 157–59, 207–8; dealing with bad, 153–55, 162–63; denial of, 155, 156; dreams and, 61, 65n5; effects of, 7–8, 12–14, 47, 59–60, 75–76, 100, 110; effects of subjectivity on, 131–32; efforts to forget, 158–61, 164n6; falseness of, 201; feelings and sensations and, 151–53; fictionalizing in memoirs vs., 131, 137, 156; fish symbolizing in “Big Two-Hearted River,” 172,

221 174; gender identity and, 6, 13–14; Green Hills of Africa constructed from, 100–103, 105; Hemingway inventing fiction from, 31, 33, 53, 97, 108, 150; Hemingway’s, 170– 71, 210–11; Hemingway’s use of, 37–38, 97; imagination in, 155–56; lack of control of, 155, 159; limitations of language for, 131; loss of, 206–8, 211, 211n2; narratives based on, 155, 163, 205; of Paris, 101, 142; perception and, 38–39, 153; persistence of, 150–52, 159–61, 163; in personal reconstruction, 6, 9, 14; of place, 75; realness in Afro-Cuban religions, 59–60; retaining experience through, 14, 100, 110; sense of self and, 5, 14, 154; sex linked to, 207–8; significance of read material on, 46–47; transformations of, 107, 113; of trauma, 18, 20, 22, 24–26; triggers for, 110–11, 114–15; uses of, 51–52, 172; writing and, 8–9, 172; writing’s dependence on, 172, 207–8, 211 Men Without Women, 72 Messent, Peter, 190 Michigan: effects of logging in, 76–78; Hemingway’s youth in, 77; stories about, 173–75 Mizener, Arthur, 163 Moby-Dick (Melville), 34 Moddelmog, Debra A., 5, 205 modernism, 128–29, 132; gender in, 130, 138, 142; marketing of, 139 Monk, Craig, 142, 143n2 Monroe, Harriet, 42 Montgomery, Constance Cappel, 72 Moorhead, Ethel, 136 mothers, 59, 167 A Moveable Feast, 4–5, 42; Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together compared to, 128–32; criticism of other writers in, 139–41; as fictional memoir, 127, 130–31, 142, 144n7; as guidebook to expatriate lifestyle, 86, 91; as guidebook to writer’s life, 90–91; Hemingway using trauma of lost manuscripts in, 18, 20, 24–26; importance of Paris in, 94n1, 135, 139–40; posthumous editing of, 5, 14, 143n5; writing style developed in, 3, 131, 143n6 “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” 53 mummification, 109–10 Murray, Margaret, 65

222 My Next Bride (Boyle), 138 “My Old Man,” 53, 175 Nadol, Roberto, 58 “A Natural History of the Dead,” 153, 196–97, 202n7 nature, 120; Green Hills of Africa as study of, 101–2; Hemingway using as theater of action, 102–3 New Masses, 98–99 The Nick Adams Stories, 33–34, 70, 78 Nobel Prize, 34 nostalgia: in “Big Two-Hearted River,” 170; in Death in the Afternoon, 187, 198–99; forms of, 200; Hemingway books as elegies, 171, 187; in Hemingway’s settings, 115; imperialist, 188; in A Moveable Feast, 94n1, 143n6; in The Nick Adams Stories, 33; in travelogues, 200 “Now I Lay Me,” 161, 184 Oak Park, Hemingway correcting Fenton on, 74–75 The Old Man and the Sea, 5, 160; Afro-Cuban influence in, 57–58; Afro-Cuban influence on Santiago in, 57, 65n3; dreams in, 62–64, 65n5; geography in, 60–62; importance of Manolin in, 64–65; lions as totemic for Santiago in, 58–60; Manolin in, 60, 64–65; as masterpiece, 34–35; memory in, 65n5, 156; Santiago in, 5, 164n7; Santiago on memory in, 156, 163; Santiago’s dreamtime in, 61–64; Santiago’s lost wife in, 58–59; Santiago’s worldliness in, 60–61; significance of baseball in, 59–60; significance of lions in, 58–62 “On the Quai at Smyrna,” 51–52 Ondaatje, Christopher, 114 oral tradition, influence on writing styles, 74, 81n2 Pages from the Book of Paris (Washburn), 83–84, 88, 91 Paris. See also expatriate community, in Paris; expatriate lifestyle, in Paris: Boyle rewriting McAlmon’s experience in, 127–28; Boyle’s return to, 137–38; Boyle’s vs. Hemingway’s experiences in, 129–31, 133–34, 136–37; Hemingway-inspired

index tourism in, 93–94; Hemingway using memories of, 33, 38–39, 101, 175; Hemingway’s complicated life in, 103, 173–74; Hemingway’s work ethic in, 136–37; importance in A Moveable Feast, 94n1, 135, 139–40; of Jake vs. Hemingway, 88; Left Bank in, 88–90, 95n11; as mythical, 139–40; of The Sun Also Rises, 33, 90, 95n8; walking the streets of, 132–33 Paris, loss of early manuscripts from, 18; effects of, 19–22; Hemingway attempting to rewrite, 23–24; Hemingway’s healing of trauma from, 24–26; response to, 19, 26n2 Paris of the Novelists (Maurice), 92 Paris on Parade (Wilson), 83–86, 88, 91 Paris with the Lid Lifted (Reynolds), 83–86, 89, 91 Parsons, Deborah, 133 past, 15, 73, 172; A Farewell to Arms as statement on, 150–51; Frederic Henry dissocating from, 154–55; memory and, 38–39, 53, 154; present and, 38–39, 53, 112; relationships to, 152–53; saving through writing, 174–75 Pentecost, John (“the Ghee”), 174 Percival, Philip, 104–5, 124 Perkins, Maxwell, 189, 191, 192 The Persistence of Memory (Dali), 149–50 Peters, K. J., 16n1 Pfeiffer, Pauline. See Hemingway, Pauline phenomenology, existential, 109 Picasso, Pablo, 38 Pisan Cantos (Pound), 38 Pissarro, Camille, 179 Poetry (Monroe), 42, 130 politics, Hemingway ignoring, 98–99, 100 Poore, Charles, 184n2 The Portable Hemingway, Cowley’s introduction to, 166–67 “Portrait of a Lady” (Eliot), 45–46 Pound, Ezra, 37, 86, 170; Eliot and, 39–40; Hemingway and, 42, 140; Hemingway’s criticisms of, 141; Hemingway’s respect for, 39–40, 41–42; imagism movement and, 38–39; influence on Hemingway, 39–42, 54; linked with Eliot for Hemingway, 41, 44; trying to help Eliot, 55n3, 141; The Waste Land and, 39, 49–50, 54n2, 55n3 present, Afro-Cuban religion’s focus on, 58

index Prin, Alice, 139 “Prose and Verse,” 47 Proust, Marcel, 4, 151, 159, 163n2 Quinn, John, 55n3 race, in The Garden of Eden, 204 Ramos, Miguel, 58 “Rapallo,” 44 readers: childlike state of mind of, 113; writers’ relations with, 9, 197 The Red Badge of Courage (Crane), 32 reflection, later works centered around, 3–4 religion: Afro-Cuban, 58–59, 61, 64–65, 65n2; alcohol in, 121; allusions to, 118, 121–22, 208–9; hunting as, 120; language of birds in, 119; in The Old Man and the Sea, 58–59, 64–65; in Under Kilimanjaro, 116, 118, 120–22 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust), 163n2 “The Revolution of the Word” manifesto, 138–39 Reynolds, Bruce, 85–86, 89 Reynolds, Michael, 4, 33, 163n2; on The Garden of Eden, 205, 211n5; on lost Paris manuscripts, 18, 21, 26n5 Ribot, Théodule, 156–57, 164n5 Ricouer, Paul, 109 The Rite of Spring, 38 Roe, Steven, 8 Roosevelt, Theodore, 100, 103, 106n1 Rosaldo, Renato, 188, 199 Rose, Gillian, 81n1 safari books: Green Hills of Africa as, 97–98, 100; Green Hills of Africa compared to, 105; Hemingway’s collection of, 106n1; Under Kilimanjaro as, 107–8 Said, Edward, 194, 201 Sauer, Carl, 81n1 Scarry, Elaine, 79 Schacter, Daniel L., 150 Scholes, Robert, 10 self, 11; efforts to reconstruct, 7, 9; fragmentation of, 4–5; Green Hills of Africa as study of, 101, 103–5; memory in formation of, 154, 163 self-analysis, later writing as, 3–4 Selous, Frederick, 100, 106n1

223 sex, in The Garden of Eden, 204 sexual identity. See also gender identity: danger of transexuality and, 204–5; Hemingway’s, 167–68 sexuality: as dangerous, 195; effects of experimentation with, 6–7, 10; killing of elephant as parody of, 11, 13; memory and, 207–8; tourism allowing, 93–94 Shakespeare & Company, 86, 140–41 Shenton, Edward, 104 Shklovsky, Viktor, 111 slavery, influence on The Old Man and the Sea, 58 Smith, Bill, 169–70 “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 202n10 social issues, 98–99, 138 Spain, 194, 198 Spanier, Sandra, 138 Spilka, Mark, 205 Starobinski, Jean, 201 Steffens, Lincoln, 19 Stein, Gertrude, 128, 182; circle around, 46, 130, 140–41; on Hemingway, 94, 130; Hemingway’s relations with, 41, 130, 140–41; Hemingway’s writing and, 50, 166; writing by, 44, 127 Stewart, Susan, 194 Stoneback, H. R., 72–73 “A Story to Skip: A Badly Organized Story of No Importance,” 164n6 “The Strange Country,” 21–25; Helena in, 21; Roger in, 21–24 Stravinsky, Igor, 38 Strong, Amy Lovell, 211n1 Strychacz, Thomas, 8–9, 194 suicide: Hemingway’s, 69; in original ending for The Garden of Eden, 15, 210 The Sun Also Rises: allusions to Eliot in, 45–46; Bill Gorton in, 45–46, 170; Brett in, 92–93; Death in the Afternoon as parallel to, 187–88; expatriate lifestyle in, 83, 86–88; as guidebook, 83, 86, 88, 90–91, 93–94; Hemingway inventing from experience and imagination, 32–33; Jake Barnes in, 46, 84, 152, 161; Jake as bullfighting aficionado in, 90, 188; Jake’s cab ride in, 92–93; Jake’s expatriate lifestyle in Paris in, 86–88; Paris of, 87–89, 95n8; Robert Cohn in, 46; success of, 45, 139; on writing, 90–91

224 Svoboda, Frederic, 77 symbolism: of elephants, 205, 208–10; Hemingway denying, 35; of “shore,” 160 Tal, Kalí, 20, 26 “The End of Something,” 72–74; Marjorie in, 72–74, 78–80 This Quarter, 136, 166 Thoreau, Henry David, 101–2 thought: centrality of, 151–52; danger of loss of, 163; denial or distrust of, 155; efforts to control, 157–62, 164n4; by “Hemingway Heroes,” 152 “The Three-Day Blow”: Bill in, 170 Three Stories and Ten Poems, Pound’s influence on, 39 time, 150. See also past; disjunctures in writing memoirs, 131; fluidness of, 61, 63–64; questioning of chronological, 163; thought to be inapplicable to modern life, 149–50 To Have and Have Not, 34 “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell), 43 The Torrents of Spring, 41 tourists, 83; decline of bullfighting and, 188, 190, 199; Hemingway-inspired, 93–94; Paris expatriate lifestyle and, 84–87, 89; sexual behavior of, 93–94 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), 47 trauma, 162; Hemingway using pain in writing, 18; loss of early Paris manuscripts as, 20–22, 24–26; memory of, 22, 24, 26, 150, 153–54; theories of, 19–20, 25 travel, by expatriates, 86 travelogues: Death in the Afternoon as, 187–90, 201; on expatriate lifestyle, 86–87, 89, 91; as experiential guidebooks, 83–85; Green Hills of Africa as, 97–98, 100; in Madame Bovary, 91–92; A Moveable Feast as, 91; nostalgia in, 200; The Sun Also Rises as, 83, 88, 90, 93–94; timetables in, 87; Wilson’s, 94n3, 94n4 Trogdon, Robert, 201n2, 202n6, 202n9 True at First Light: Hemingway using trauma of lost manuscripts in, 18, 20, 22. See also Under Kilimanjaro Tuan, Yi-Fu, 81n1, 115 Turgenev, Ivan, 46–47

index Ulysses (Joyce), 164n3 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Caruth), 19–20 Under Kilimanjaro, 23, 163n2; allusions in, 116–17; animal world in, 117–18; archetypes in, 123–25; as autobiographical fairy tale, 114, 119; as creative nonfiction, 107–9; Debba in, 121–22; as existential phenomenology, 109; as fairy tale, 114, 117–22, 125; landscape elements in, 114, 116; magic/supernatural in, 120–22, 125; narrator’s status in, 119–21, 123; Nguili in, 121; as prose poetry, 110, 112–13; secrets of fiction writing in, 111–12; setting attached to unconscious childhood memories, 114–16 Valdes Fernandez, Maria Caridad, 58 Van Doren, Carl, 99 Varsava, Jerry, 5 Vickroy, Laurie, 25 Villarreal, René, 58 violence, in Hemingway’s writing, 197 Von Franz, Marie-Louise, 109–10, 115, 117, 121, 124 Von Kurowsky, Agnes, 33 Waites, Elizabeth, 153–54 Walker, Al, 174 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 128 Wall, Cheryl, 92 Walsh, Ernest, 130, 136 war, 172; effects of, 4, 167; efforts to forget, 156, 158–62; Hemingway’s experience of, 167–68; memories of, 150, 153, 155; in “A Natural History of the Dead,” 196–97 Washburn, Claude, 88, 91, 95n12 The Waste Land (Eliot): allusions in, 43–44, 48–49; Hemingway’s allusions to, 45–46, 205; influence on Hemingway, 37–38, 40, 42–44, 54; In Our Time compared to, 51; lack of unified narrator in, 53–54; Pound editing, 37, 39, 41, 54n2, 55n3; seen as memoir, 47, 49–51 “A Way You’ll Never Be,” 184 Weber, Ronald, 196, 202n10 Weeks, Edward, 99 “What the Thunder Said” (Eliot), 50–51

index “Who Murdered the Vets?” 99 Williams, Michael, 78 Williams, Terry Tempest, 70, 208 Williams, William Carlos, 129, 136 Wills, Gary, 154 Wilson, Edmund, 72, 167; on expatriate community, 94n2, 94n3; on Green Hills of Africa, 99, 101 Wilson, Robert Forrest, 83–85; Paris on Parade by, 86, 88 Winner Take Nothing, “A Natural History of the Dead” in, 202n7 The Witchcult (Murray), 65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 108, 110–11 Women of the Left Bank (Benstock), 143n3 Woolf, Virginia, 210 World War I: efforts to forget, 156, 158–62; Hemingway’s experience of, 167–68; memories of, 150, 153, 155 World War II, 3–4, 172 writers: Boyle on community of, 138–39; as congenital liars, 108; expatriate, in Paris, 42, 86–87, 89–90, 92, 127, 135; Hemingway’s criticisms of other, 101–2, 140–41; relations with readers, 9, 197; responsibilities of, 197–98 writing: “Big Two-Hearted River” as meditation on, 170, 172, 183–84; bullfighting as analogy to, 173, 190–91, 197; for communication vs. private language, 110–11; dependence on memory, 31, 172, 207–8, 211; digesting life as requirement for, 33–34, 177; effects of place on, 135–36; equated with life, 23, 26; expatriate lifestyle in Paris vs., 132–33, 135; financial and cultural rewards for, 9–10; fishing as metaphor for, 176–78, 183–84; getting closer to experience, 33–34; guidebooks to life of, 90–91, 142; Hemingway playing with starving artist image, 133–35; Hemingway’s aspirations for, 170, 175–76; Hemingway’s fiction vs. nonfiction, 31, 196; Hemingway’s goals in, 80, 91; Hemingway’s journalism vs. fiction, 22, 32, 34; Hemingway’s sense of vocation, 132–33,

225 175–78, 181, 183; Hemingway’s work ethic in, 135–37; Hemingway using pain and trauma in, 18, 25, 209–10; limitation of language and, 187–88; made up vs. actual in, 31, 175; oral tradition vs., 74, 81n2; sources of art and, 35; “true” vs. “trick,” 177; uses of, 4, 9, 10–11, 20, 22, 172, 174–75 writing style, Hemingway’s. See also allusions: aggressiveness of, 197; allusions in, 47–49, 55n4, 116–17; analyses of, 3, 166–67; associations and juxtapositioning of images in, 51–52, 54; called Byronic, 99; characters (see “Hemingway Heroes”); compared to Cézanne’s style, 178–82; conversational, 110, 195; criticisms of, 99, 189; defining by negation, 45; details in, 115; development of, 3, 32, 131–32, 143n6; Eliot’s influence on, 37–38, 42–45, 43–45, 47–49; evocativeness of, 97, 116–17; experiments in, 44, 99, 192; fiction techniques in nonfiction, 107; first-person, 99, 108, 113, 119, 176; iceberg theory of, 45, 132, 198; inclusion of violence, 197; influence of oral storytelling on, 74; landscapes in, 70, 72–73, 98–100; language games in, 110–11; layering of scenes and stories in, 38, 113, 192; maxims about, 45; narrator’s reconciliation of opposites in, 124; as nostalgic, 200; as observer, 101, 132, 140; posthumous editorial changes to, 5; Pound’s influence on, 39, 41, 54, 141; pronoun use in, 198–99; of prose poetry, 110, 112–13; repetition in, 50, 74, 211n7; secrets of, in Under Kilimanjaro, 111–12; sense of place in, 72–73, 75–77; significance of characters’ reading material, 46–47; similarities to Eliot’s, 46, 49–50; simplicity in, 34–35, 170; theory and practice of omission in, 132, 180, 202n8; use of direct vs. indirect statements in, 32–33, 71; use of titles and epigraphs, 46; using images from other people’s memories, 53 Young, Philip, 150, 167–68, 184n2, 200