New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  The coda’s opening sentence is a bit of literary splicing; its first four dependent clauses refer back to, and even echo, the language of earlier portions of the published story.44 So obvious are the echoes that even if the coda were discovered in a trunk, say, rather than the carefully cataloged Hemingway Collection, it could be identified as a fragment of “A Natural History of the Dead.” Such summarizing of material already discussed is monotonous and ought to be unnecessary to help the reader follow something as short as “A Natural History of the Dead.” But the need to splice implies that the rope has previously been severed, and the coda clearly represents an attempt to extend the interrupted satire.

  While “A Natural History of the Dead” begins by satirizing eighteenth-and nineteenth-century natural historians to prove the absence of God in nature and nature’s indifference to human suffering, Hemingway’s satiric conceit—the pseudoscientific exposition—cannot sustain the weight of his emotion. When Hemingway comes to the impact of the dying on the living, he has reached the limits of satire. “A Natural History of the Dead” neatly meets Northrop Frye’s definition of irony as satire that breaks down under the oppressive reality of its content.45 The jargon of early Victorian taxonomy cannot express the trauma death causes the living. Hemingway breaks from satirical exposition into fiction as naturally as an excited man struggling in a foreign tongue breaks into his native language. The coda attempts to mend this severance by returning the reader—after the fiction of the doctor, the lieutenant, and the dying soldier—to more satirical exposition, more cataloging of aspects of the dead.

  Besides endeavoring to return the reader to earlier material and thereby mend the broken illusion of a scientific narrative, the first sentence also contains a capsule interpretation of the dying soldier fiction. According to the coda, the anecdote’s “point” is “the seeming unwillingness of many of them [the dead] to die, even though unconscious and fatally wounded and the consequent nervous effect on the surviving members of their [the dead’s] species.” This interpretation of the fiction is only superficially pat. Hemingway’s complex pronoun reference in this sentence suggests that it is the dead who are unwilling to die, and the surviving members of the dead who are made uncomfortable by this unwillingness. Here a master stylist deliberately violates the conventions of English usage to give a startling significance to the deceitfully straightforward “which is of course [my italics] the point of the just related anecdote.” Just as the sound of the dying man’s breathing reminds the stretcher-bearers of their own mortality, Hemingway’s pronoun reference here reminds his readers of their kinship with those corpses swelling and changing color in the sun.

  The heavily subordinated opening sentence finally concludes by introducing a new subject for discussion: “the fact that the dead rarely retained any precious or semi-precious metals in their composition.” In yet another effort to splice this tail to the story’s body, Hemingway tells the reader that the new subject is related “in a way” to an old subject, the dead’s progressive changes in appearance. However, having introduced a new subject, Hemingway does not move on. He returns instead to old themes:

  Someone has observed our bodies are made from dust and return to dust and while this does not entirely agree with my own observation which has led me to the conclusion that our bodies are originally made from the elements contained in semen, a pleasantly viscuous [sic] liquid with an odor rather like that of a freshly caught barracuda, and have a tendency, if unembalmed after death, not to return to anything at all but rather to enter on a putrescance [sic] which, while highly attractive to the various carrion beetles and larvae of certain common insects, is moist rather than dry. But I would not care from my limited observations to dispute the possibility of an ultimate return to dust, granted the death of all the beetles and flies, and the possibility of a prolonged period of drought.

  Here Hemingway jabs at the phony neatness of the official Christian birth and death sketched in Ecclesiastes—“All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again”—and from his naturalist’s stance points out that we are made from semen and subject to damp rot.46 This portion of the coda recalls Hemingway’s earlier attack on the piety of Humanist critics, an attack that also emphasizes the indignities of sex and death and the vanity of denying them.

  After breaking from satirical exposition into narrative and then, in the coda, using repetition to return “A Natural History of the Dead” to satirical exposition, Hemingway breaks into narrative once again with the following sentence: “This is, however, beside the point of the absence of precious or semi-precious metals in the dead which was first drawn to my attention late on a July afternoon in the summer of 191847 when I was on the road from Fossalta di Piave48 to a place called Monastir, not to be confused with, Monastir in Serbia, on a bicycle to see some friends.” This time the narrative seems deliberately autobiographical rather than fictive. Hemingway tells the tale in the first person and inserts it into a book-length work of nonfiction also told in the first person. Surely coupling these facts with the wide publicity already given his war heroism and wounding, Hemingway could not have expected his readers to mistake for anyone else’s the following experiences along the Piave River:

  In the end of June on the lower Piave the grain is ripe and now in early July it was past the time when it should have been cut but there was no one there to cut it and, as I went along the road, I was thinking of this, noting how little actual damage the standing grain had sustained even though it had been fought through in the Italian advance to the river bank and thinking how, when boys, we had been pursued, caught and chastized by farmers for going through a field of standing grain just before harvest and yet here were fields of grain through which a battle had been fought and the grain only down in a few clumps and in single patches that marked the position of the dead and there were no farmers here to harvest it although the fighting had been over for some time and I was sure it was now too late to harvest the grain that year even if there had been no question of unexploded hand grenades and shells. It would shell out of the heads from overripeness. So as I went along, pushing the bicycle, since this road was too badly broken up to make riding pleasant, even though the fields this far back from the river were little marked, I noticed how the trees had been marked and splintered occasionally by machine gun fire and wondered when I would be back in the mountains and what would they be doing in Schio that night.49

  This stream-of-consciousness account, more than a digression, is a successful effort to establish the story’s credentials and to make the reader experience the story through the narrator’s earlier self. The multiplicity of detail, painstakingly described, give the scene its compelling reality. As the young man pushes his bicycle by the Piave, the current of his stream-of-conciousness sweeps the reader up and along, and the reader experiences in the present a story told in the past tense. By reconstructing the scene and his youthful thought processes in some detail, Hemingway, and the reader with him, relive rather than remember death on a July afternoon near Fossalta di Piave.

  The encounter with death begins when the coda’s protagonist smells chloride of lime. However, he is still so innocent of horror that the smell of quicklime as yet only provokes a boyhood memory of reading in the family outhouse, rather, if the comparison is not too outré, as the smell of madeleines dipped in lime-scented tea returns Marcel Proust to the Sunday afternoons of his childhood in Combray:

  I had one great ambition; to go swimming at the Lido50 in war time and this now seemed steadily more difficult of attainment and I was going along the road which was now quite wide, riding the bicycle, since the shell holes here this far back from the river were large and easily avoided, looking at the road and enjoying the shade and not thinking at all when I smelled Chloride of Lime which in spite of all latrines, made me remember digging a deep pit in the sandy loam of Michigan to move the old outhouse51 where I had sat in high seated, unwindowed dimness, reading Montgomery Ward catalogues
and sometimes the bound volumes of the St. Nicholas magazine for the years 1885 to 1896.52 These last were forbidden to be taken there but you took the chance, of being caught when you went for this best reading time of all, and the smell of lime was when the good, smooth-seated weather-[?] backhouse was pushed over on its side and moved, the pit filled in, another dug and the house set up again. It was in the shade of two big hemlock trees and in the family, we called it Hemlock Park and now the smell of lime brought back the path smooth on the brown hemlock needle loam, the weathered boards of the fence and the pile of fire logs beside the gate and behind the fence the hemlock woods with fallen trees rotted dry on the ground.

  The present reality of war intrudes on this memory as, from his bicycle, the young man spots “a burial squad filling a long pit which had water in the bottom” and “in a moment” is “glad of what smell of lime there had been.”

  The imagery of this particular sequence, while it has a natural unpremeditated air, emphasizes yet once more a theme developed earlier in the narrative—the simultaneous decomposition of human bodies and human faith. Obviously this passage is meant to answer Bishop Stanley’s earlier question “Can no branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love, and hope which we, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life?” (DIA, 134). The coda to “A Natural History of the Dead” necessarily destroys that faith, love, and hope by reminding the reader that man’s destiny is no more than the destiny of excrement.

  When the outhouse revery is coupled with the wheat field sequence that precedes it, the discarded coda begins to develop yet another theme: the abandonment of childish beliefs and literature’s responsibility to foster that abandonment. The boy scolded and punished by farmers “for going through a field of standing grain just before harvest” learns, to his surprise, that men may fight and die in a field of wheat without doing it substantial harm. The grain is “only down in a few clumps and in single patches that marked the position of the dead.” The farmers who should harvest the grain and the soldiers who fought in it are vanished or dead, and the young man learns that human life is more ephemeral than ripe wheat. The child who sneaked St. Nicholas magazine into a Michigan outhouse to read in lime-scented solitude learns that there are other uses for lime and other purposes for literature. Like the published story, this portion of the coda suggests that Hemingway’s perceived purpose in “A Natural History of the Dead” was to correct the romantic boys’ story attitude toward war with accurate, brutally realistic reporting.

  For the coda’s protagonist, the narrator of “A Natural History of the Dead” as a young man, this process of education begins as he dismounts his bicycle, retreats to windward of the pit and its malodorous contents, and “observe[s]” the burial squad closely, “as a naturalist.” He soon learns the reason for the “absence of precious or semi-precious metals” in the dead:

  the notable thing about this burial was that the sergeant in charge pried open the mouths of the dead, which had been brought from the field and carried to the pit, when these mouths were not already wide and investigated the condition of their teeth. I got off the bicycle to windward of the pit and observed. The sergeant had taken no notice of me, he was evidently working against time, and I watched him pry out a filling with a trench knife, then use a piece of pipe to break out other filled teeth entirely, putting them in a German gas mask tin to be worked over later. When he saw me he stopped, then tried a grin to see if it would go off on a between men of the world basis, then when I turned away he said, “They’re Austrians. They’re all Austrians.”

  I said nothing and remounted the bicycle to ride on but I looked back and saw him after watching me roll away, turn and go back, to work with the remaining dead.

  Confronted with the sergeant knocking gold teeth from corpses and with the sergeant’s tentative grin, to see if it would go off on “a between men of the world basis,” the young Red Cross corpsman must reassess his Oak Park idealism.53 “In those days my conscience was very active,” the older and wiser narrator recalls, and his younger self thinks about the incident for a long time that evening, endeavoring to decide whether to report the sergeant. Finally, after lengthy questioning and some complex moral equations, he realizes that if the sergeant is robbing the dead for personal gain, the war is robbing the dead for public gain, and that the Oak Park notion of patriotic and morally upright behavior is purest hypocrisy. Having understood that the sergeant’s actions, albeit illegal, are nevertheless consistent with the morality of the public and its war machine, the corpsman cannot report him for punishment. By deciding not to report the sergeant, the corpsman has decided not to participate in the war machine’s hypocrisy. Like Nick Adams in In Our Time, he has made “a separate peace” (SS, 139). The ending of the sequence paraphrased in the preceding paragraph is psychologically revealing. The middle-aged narrator admits that as a young man he “did not state the problem so clearly and simply” as he has stated it in this story, thirteen years after the fact. Rather he “lay awake and thought awhile” about what he “had seen” and whether he should “do anything.” Hemingway then says that “thinking about whether I should do anything was soon over,” but the implication of the parallel structure (and of this detailed recollection thirteen years later) is that thinking about what he had seen was not soon over. This early experience of death and man’s inhumanity was more bewildering to a teenager lying awake in wartime Italy than to an adult rationalizing in peacetime America. It might be one of the nightmare recollections that made Hemingway an insomniac for years after the war and that keep Nick Adams awake in “Now I Lay Me.”

  The coda’s narrator next denies that he is much impressed by “so called” horrors, but then contradicts himself by going on to describe two of the “greatest horrors” (no “so called” this time) he can recall.

  And as for thinking about what I had seen; I have never been much impressed by horrors so called, due perhaps to a great curiosity which forces me to look at them closely whereupon the horror is difficult of persistence [sic] and the greatest horrors I can recall are, first a child being lifted with his legs dangling oddly after being run over by a bus on the stone road between Grau and Valencia54 and an old man in Madrid struck by a motor car and fallen from his bicycle, his bicycle broken and twisted, his glasses broken and dust and dirt in the places where skin had been scoured from his face, his hands and his knees. I suppose I must have turned away from both of these since I remember them with no element of the grotesqueness that replaces horror when the object or occurrence is closely observed.

  Although the narrator says that had he carefully observed these incidents, a sense of grotesquerie would have replaced the sense of horror, he again contradicts himself. Would a man who had averted his gaze from such scenes have such flawless recollection of their details? Indeed, the narrator is not certain he turned away; he only says “I suppose [my emphasis] I must have turned away.” These incidents are horrific to the narrator, and to the reader as well, precisely because they have been closely observed and described.

  The passage never resolves these internal contradictions. In it Hemingway seems to be wondering aloud to himself why his memories of violence persist so clearly, some with and some without an attendant sensation of horror. He seems to want to deny that he is impressed by horror, yet his entire literary output belies him, and the impressions of horror crowd onto the pages even as he denies them. The passage seems to be a moment of spontaneous and ultimately unresolved self-analysis.

  The final paragraph of the coda provides an alternative ending to “A Natural History of the Dead”:

  Now, as I write, years after everything is over, I think this is perhaps, enough about the dead. There is no need to continue and write an accurate observation on a friend dead, a dead lover or a dead parent since a writer can deal at length with these in fiction rather than in natural history, an ill enough paid branch of writing, Is [sic] it not so, Hudson? So perhaps the inspiratio
n from the moss flower of extraordinary beauty is to be derived not from the dead themselves, too big for their uniforms in the heat, but from the contemplation of the sergeant at work on them. Let us learn from observing the industrious sergeant, let us take inspiration from the sergeants [sic] researches, who knows how profitable the dead may be if we live long enough? Who knows how much gold may be extracted from them? Ah, Mungo Park, You [sic] should have seen the dead. You should have seen them Bishop. All of you naturalists should have seen the dead. You should have seen them.

  By cynically equating his own profession with the corpse-robber’s, the narrator further underscores the hypocrisy that would have been involved in his reporting the sergeant. Writing about the dead, Hemingway acknowledges, is profitable, but more profitable when the treatment is fiction, a romanticized vision of war, than when it is natural history, an unflinching stare at the realities of violent death. The authors of books like Generals Die in Bed, the passage implies, profit by stealing the dignity of truth from the dead, as surely as the sergeant profits by bashing out their gold-filled teeth.55

  This unpublished ending to “A Natural History of the Dead” is a “bookend” conclusion. It closes the story by returning it to its opening question (“let us therefore see what inspiration we can derive from the dead” [DIA, 134]) and answering it ironically. The coda’s ending returns the reader to Mungo Park’s rhetorical question (“Can that Being who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings of creatures formed after His own image?” [DIA, 134]) and answers by suggesting that God does not exist and mankind is without compassion. The corpses swelling in the sun cannot have been formed in a divine image and suggest the absence of God in nature, while the industrious sergeant at work on them demonstrates that man himself can not only look with “unconcern upon the situation and suffering” of his fellows, but even profit from their tragedies.