Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  1999

  Hemingway’s Expatriates

  A Way of Looking at the World

  There is surely no writer in the English-speaking world, born in the generations after Ernest Hemingway, who does not share this centennial celebration through having been influenced in some way by his work. I am of the first generation after his. On another continent, I grew up against a similar small-town background. The Middle West, USA, and a gold-mining town in South Africa shared something beyond their backwoods limitations: mine shallowly occupied by whites as opposed to indigenous Africans, his shallowly occupied by whites as opposed to indigenous American Indians, although in his environment the Indians were perhaps a ghostly rather than a material presence, and in mine the Africans were very much alive, a majority left out in colonialism’s double book-keeping of who counted.

  Both twentieth-century environments were at ‘the ragged edge of a newly formed and still forming cultural universe’;97 from there, he and I went different ways, I to enter through moving deeper into the reality of my own country, he through seeking reality in the moveable feast of the world outside.

  But in the craft with which I provisioned myself as a writer there were certain skills I learned from him and am grateful for, along with the invaluable workshop handed on by Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence and Eudora Welty. I am speaking of the writing of short stories specifically, and I am not referring, as every writer knows, to the amateur’s process of imitation. What a beginning writer learns from a master (of either sex) is the range of the imagination working upon life – what literature can go after, what is missed by those who do not have what Chinua Achebe has noted as the invisible ring around the eye that marks the writer.

  From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen, within myself, when writing, for what went unsaid by my characters; what can be, must be conveyed in other ways, and not alone by body-language but also in the breathing spaces of syntax: the necessity to create silences which the reader can interpret from these signs. Hermeneutics doesn’t belong in the locked cupboards of academic circles: it’s part of the illumination and pleasure of the reader, and Hemingway knew superbly how to bring it about. There is also, I believe, a misperception about his dialogue – it is not realistic but aphoristic, and there Beckett and Pinter are ones who came after and are a presence at the centennial.

  Something else I learned to consider – judiciously – for myself, from Hemingway, was the use of repetition: we need to coin another term to honour him, conveying repetition transformed in his hand as a special term for emphasis; used well, repetition becomes the Beethoven note, a knell laden with resonant meaning. Of course, like most of us fallible writers, even Hemingway, who used it with perfect timing, overdid it sometimes, parodying one of his own strengths.

  Then there is the power of the deliberate non sequitur. ‘And we went up into the town to the Plaza and those were the last people who were shot in the village.’ This is a quote from a novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls, but I would say it was learned from the way of telling Hemingway taught himself with the stories (I avoid the word ‘technique’ because writing is organic, it cannot be learned as a technique.)

  A short story succeeds, if it does, as a series or play of echoes. Its marvellously rigorous discipline does not allow for explanation, whether authorial or disguised through a protagonist. Beginning with the conjunction, the echoes in this non-sequitur sentence of Hemingway’s text sound back and forth through everything that has happened in the novel: the blessed banal continuity – and the horror of it – that life goes on with violence as something that can be measured in acceptance – they were the sum of it, the ‘last people’ to be shot – along with the daily round, up at the Plaza. The devastating reflection of how people are, what circumstances make of them, what they consent to become: all this is there. Tight-lipped? On the contrary, an oracle sounding back and forth.

  In the novels, Hemingway indulged luxuriantly in the soliloquy, particularly in For Whom The Bell Tolls, recycled from the authorial interventions of nineteenth-century novelists. To overhear what is going on in the head of Robert Jordan as a subtext to what we are experiencing with him, through him – and he is a character who buttonholes you like the Ancient Mariner and you don’t want to break free – is no contrivance. But the many pages of Pilar recounting, with dialogue formal between quotes, etc., the flailing of the fascists in a village, is a contrived set-piece from which a young aspiring writer such as I was would do best not to learn. Hemingway does it dazzlingly; but it is Hemingway, not Pilar, speaking. And he knows it; he gets round it by having Robert Jordan reflect: ‘If that woman could only write … He would try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it.’ Hemingway tried, and didn’t, because Pilar couldn’t possibly have remembered and reconstructed the experience in the imaginatively ordered way he allowed himself to present it.

  That Hemingway, indeed, didn’t let Pilar tell it in her own idiom – the one he created for her throughout the rest of the novel – is an aside pertinent to a general question. At one time in the volatile attention of socio-literary criticism there was much discussion about Ernest Hemingway’s decisions in writing direct speech as translation from another language. We are not talking of the task of an interpreter sitting up in a box at a conference. We are talking of the liberties a writer may or may not take in inventing – no less – a language that is neither the original nor an English equivalent, since this last is impossible. The intention is to convey the mode of expression, the musical beat, the harmony and dissonance, the states of mind that are the integument of the language’s ancient formation.

  The first consideration must be how well does the writer know the original language? And my premise must be that Hemingway the linguist knew Spanish very well. It was the tongue of one of his two love affairs with the world outside his own – the other love affair I shall come to later.

  So the use of idiomatic expressions, which he often manages the best way, by giving them in the original, in contexts from which their meaning soon becomes clear, cannot be faulted. But for the flow of the speaker, all must be Hemingway’s own invention, based on his ear for the original, but surely influenced selectively by what he finds most attractive, subtle, coarse, not only in the language but his outsider’s version of the mind and spirit behind it.

  A piece of theatre. When he sets himself to convey this in English, he must make casting decisions, subconsciously and subjectively: whether it is a peasant, a fascist or a bull-fighter, speaking Spanish. What one could learn from him, here, was caution: to be less sure than he of the possibility of bringing off this doubly creative act: to accept its very real limitations. Much as I have admired what to me is his masterpiece in the genre of the novel, I am always aware that the virtuoso performance I am responding to so strongly is that of Ernest Hemingway in the hired peasant outfit of Pilar or Anselmo. If the liberty he has taken can have been part of his influence on literature in English, there are doubts about its legitimacy that have not yet been solved …

  ‘He made the English language new. He changed the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would write and speak … a certain way of looking at the world.’98

  This is Joan Didion’s claim, in a recent outstanding essay on Hemingway. I agree that he was one of those, in the English-speaking and writing world, who opened new spaces for the way it was possible to write – as for speaking, I should think that would apply only to his fellow Americans.

  It was James Joyce who made the English language new, with contributions coming from Ernest Hemingway and, some would say, Virginia Woolf.

  As for changing the way of looking at the world – I think we in the English-speaking and -writing countries need to ask ourselves what was happening in this way in other cultures, other uses of language and literature. Another anglophone writer and critic, V.S. Pritchett, no less, wrote of Hemingway: ‘He has defined for us the personality
of our own time.’99

  Whose time? Where?

  The way Hemingway may have defined ‘the personality of our time’, ‘changed the way of looking at the world’ cannot be claimed as that of the world: the world of the Japanese, the Russians, the people of India, the people of Islam … you name the global list. Let’s keep a sense of proportion in our cultural and linguistic places in the world, whichever these may be. Ernest Hemingway himself surely would have recognised the perspectives opened up by the newly ground lenses of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Yukio Mishima, and a handspan of poets from Apollinaire to Rainer Maria Rilke. His expatriate personality would imply a certain roving itinerary of reading.

  What do I mean by an expatriate personality?

  It becomes necessary to explore this in the tension between living and writing from which Ernest Hemingway’s work, like that of all of us, comes. And to do this I must go back to the similarity of early backgrounds between the Middle West of the USA, and the gold-mining town on the veld in South Africa. In both, Europe was the Mecca of culture for whites; in order to live the painter’s life, the writer’s life, the far-flung devotee yearned to go and become, there; kiss the Black Rock, receive the white ring around the eye. Hemingway wrote his Nick stories, his early truth in beauty wonderfully achieved, and received some recognition. But it was Europe that beckoned, Europe that counted; I don’t believe of him, as I don’t believe of us in South Africa, that it was so much the desire to broaden our experience as it was the idea to be recognised as a writer where to be a writer, an artist, was the highest calling, far above any of the commercial or professional activities recognised in what were, not long before, frontier towns. In the Nick stories, life vibrates; but for the writer – to borrow from Milan Kundera in a very different context – life was elsewhere.

  Hemingway pursued it, and never really came home again, did he?

  The difference between him and the other most illustrious expatriates, Joyce, Mann, Brecht, and later followers such as Kundera, Achebe, Soyinka, Solzhenitsyn, is that they became expatriate through political persecution or revulsion against the particular regimes in their countries, and Hemingway had no motivation of either. What he did have, or rather developed, was the beginnings of a broader human consciousness beyond nationalistic operatives, good or bad: and he made his choice of one of the causes of justice that was threatened in the cultural Mecca of Europe.

  Why and how?

  I am not concerned with what Ernest Hemingway did or did not do, in his own body, his own person, out of his own courage, in the Spanish Civil War. What I follow with fascination in his work, in this geographical area of its scope as in others, is the fictional expatriate persona he so profoundly created there. Warner Berthoff says of Hemingway in his later writing life ‘he began making books out of activities and places he had elected for the sake of the pleasure he anticipated from them – Africa and the Caribbean, fishing and big game hunting’ and remarks that in these books there is a ‘palpable loss of control’.100 This is one aspect of the exposition of the persona – in decline, so to speak. But in the periods when there was full-throttle control, enormous writing skill, the expatriate protagonist Hemingway creates has become one for different reasons.

  I have cited a concern for human justice, to which Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls (a cult book for my generation, published when I was nineteen) takes up a cause at great risk of hardship and loss of his life. And yet Jordan, it becomes clear as one reads, is fighting this war for personal emotional reasons rather than a dedication to justice as the ethical base of humanity itself. Jordan fights in this war because of his exogamous love affair with the Spanish people; because Spanish people believe in the Republic as something worth dying for. There is an apologist tone when he comes – it always seems embarrassedly – to define ideological motivations. I quote: ‘He was under Communist discipline for the duration of the war [my italics], they were the only party whose programme and discipline he could respect. What were his politics then? He had none, now, he told himself.’

  And he doesn’t reveal what these were, before.

  Whenever he confronts revolutionary concepts, he does so in literary terms, thinks of them merely as clichés, not statements that, however banal-sounding, stand for convictions held. A kind of conservative individualism (there is another kind!) collides in self-satisfaction with the claims of the wider concern for humanity, however flawed that credo might be. I quote Jordan: ‘When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognised your own personal fallibility of that mutable substitute for the apostles’ creed, the party line.’

  The expatriate fights for a cause – in this case the Left – while retaining the unexamined values, the buried fears of ideological choices within him – he has no politics, he tells himself: neither the Communist one he serves under nor the Democratic one, accepted like church on Sunday, that he has turned his back on, at home.

  ‘I would rather have been born here.’

  Away; away from all the Midwests, urban or rural, of the world, which stand for what there is to be faced at home.

  ‘I would rather have been born here.’

  Thus Robert Jordan, in Spain, formulates perfectly the credo of the self-elected expatriate. It is also the credo of those others, men and women, who are created within that second love affair of Ernest Hemingway – both of which being the only kind I think it my business to be interested in – the love affair with Africa.

  Ernest Hemingway was in love with Africa. And as with others in such a state of emotion, in love with a woman or a man, he constructed for himself according to his own needs and desires something that had little relation to the reality of its object. I hope I won’t offend with heresy when I say that Hemingway never had both feet down on Africa. Never really was in Africa. For a country is its people; Africa is its people. Never really was there, if we are to read the novels and stories for which he chose Africa as one of those panoramic three-dimensional postcards where at first light the animals seem to leap out of the thorn bush. I am interested in how this illuminates the expatriate persona, in fiction as a way of looking at the world – something beyond an individual writer’s life and personal satisfactions.

  The stunning, ruthlessly ironic story ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ does not take place in Africa but in marital hell; the expatriate persona, male and female, carries this hell with him or her wherever they go, the venue only brings it out like sweat. That’s what ‘Africa’ is there for.

  I would not go so far as to quote from a Hemingway text, as some have done, that it is a place to ‘work the fat off’, a gym for the soul, for in that process there could be implied some sort of commitment to what those onlookers, the people, the Africans – nameless most of the time under the generic of nigger or native – are engaged in striving for: their liberation from the status of onlookers to the world of foreign power which determines their lives; some sort of commitment to the people’s freedom like Robert Jordan’s commitment to the Spanish people against fascism.

  But the expatriates in the Africa narratives are not aware of the rising sense of counter-identity in the impassive face of the gun-bearer as he hands over the white hunter’s weapon, the subservience veneering the certainty that it will not be long before the power of the gun will be in black hands.

  ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, one of the greatest short stories ever written, paradoxically has nothing to do with Africa; it is about death. It is the creative apogee of the painful, fearful exploration of the meaning of death that is the reverse side of Hemingway’s two love affairs, the preoccupation with death – one of his major themes – that has been so often projected, in his fiction, upon the Other: the agony of the bull, the matador gored in the belly, the big fish struggling on the hook, the wounded Spanish partisan shot in mercy, the peasant Anselmo left behind at his own request, to die, the splendid lion – like the bull, man’s innocent adversary – with
half its head blasted away. The expatriate experiences death through these projections: now, at last, it comes to him – and it is a chosen death because it is an expatriate death, it happens elsewhere. ‘I would rather have been born here.’ I would rather die here.

  I find it distasteful, to say the least, that one could think of approaching the unfinished novel Truth at First Light, as some seem eager to do, with the motive of ‘finding out’, deciding whether or not the experience of the particular expatriate hero in this novel that Ernest Hemingway so much wanted to write is intimately Hemingway’s own. It does not matter a damn in the achievements of Hemingway as one of those who has written our century, whether or not he slept with a Wakamba girl. It is an insult to his lifelong integrity to his art to regard his work in this shabby, prurient way.

  Again, what matters to literature is to find whether, in the persona of the expatriate character, sleeping with the girl was just another service, part of the package deal the white client buys, another kill along with so many heads of this beast, so many skins of that, or whether it is the beginning of something new to him, some late-come realisation that all the gun-bearers and room boys, campfire cooks, and all those women and children viewed as a frieze among their huts, are, like this single girl, part of himself, of the human family, in which there are none who can opt out by expatriatism and leave behind the black men and women and children of home – America – while taking into his arms just one of those whose ancestors were shipped on the Middle Passage.

  Toni Morrison has written with ominous measuredness: ‘My interest in Ernest Hemingway becomes heightened when I consider how much apart his work is from African-Americans.’101

  Mine becomes heightened when I consider how far it is from Africans, and when I consider the revelation of the expatriate persona that can come only in the long reach of fiction. How there, the intuitions of imaginative power overcome self-protective inhibitions and justifications; how that persona assumes in a symbolic embrace of acceptance what he has evaded in his own country, his own society – that portion of the world primary to his being. The white hunter-writer did not have to go to Africa to recognise the existence of blacks as integral to his own existence, they were there where he came from, back in America. He did not have to wait to become aware – and only as a possibly bothersome interruption, by a straggling Mau-Mau raid, of the pleasant round of hunting and drinking and reading Simenon – of the revolt of blacks against racist domination gloved as patronage. The revolt was rising back in his natal United States of America. Hemingway’s titles were always brilliant, and in this case, what belonged to one novel is strangely apposite to the situation in another. To Have And Have Not: this perfectly expresses the embrace of the black girl by the expatriate persona.