New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Thus, in a letter dated August 25, 1948, he informed Malcolm Cowley that he could now see that in the first war he had been hurt very badly in body, mind, and spirit and also morally, that “Big Two-Hearted River” was about a man who was home from the war, and that he, the author, was still hurt in that story. The real truth about himself, he assured Cowley, was that in the war “I was hurt bad all the way through and I was really spooked at the end.”20 And in another letter a few years later to the New York Times’s Charles Poore, he again characterized “Big Two-Hearted River” as “a story about a boy who has come back from the war. The war is never mentioned though as far as I can remember. This may be one of the things that helps it.”21 Private communications, however, were merely warm-ups for the gloss he offered the public at large in A Moveable Feast.

  The book was written between 1957 and 1961, during which time the author’s long debate with himself about self-destruction was moving inexorably toward violent resolution, despite his terrifying belief that suicide was a cowardly, unmanly act. In the wake of his death his enemies in the critical world took the same line toward it, as he had feared they would. To these commentators his life had ended with a whimper, not a bang. After 1930 he just didn’t have it any more, Dwight Macdonald fairly gloated in the pages of Encounter in January 1962, and by the summer of 1961—the critic savagely continued—the position was outflanked, the lion couldn’t be stopped, the sword wouldn’t go into the bull’s neck, the great fish was breaking the line, it was the fifteenth round and the champ looked bad, and the only way out was to destroy himself.

  Even a Hemingway fan like Norman Mailer felt moved to confess in a troubled essay in Esquire entitled “The Big Bite” that his suicide had been “the most difficult death in America since [Franklin] Roosevelt’s.”22 What made it difficult for Mailer was that in taking his life Hemingway had seemed to call into question all that he had represented. Consistently, he had presented himself as the champion of whatever endeavor he had undertaken; consistently, he had proclaimed that the great thing was to last and get your work done. How could such a life be reconciled with such a death?

  Mailer’s ultimate answer to this question was that “It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him. What is more likely the truth of his own Odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods. It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible that he carried a weight of anxiety with him which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.”23

  As a hypothesis, Mailer’s comment was marvelously suggestive and ought to have inspired searching examinations of the dynamics of Hemingway’s early life. But it did not. Old habits of mind prevailed. Fossalta had been the break-point in a gallant hero’s history. By seeming to imply in A Moveable Feast that “Big Two-Hearted River” was about a man who was doing his best to defend himself against memories of a dirty war, Hemingway himself helped to buttress that assumption.

  From “Sepi Jingan” to “The Mother of a Queen”: Hemingway’s Three Epistemologic Formulas for Short Fiction

  Gerry Brenner

  Of the very young Ernest Hemingway, Kenneth Lynn writes,

  The willingness with which the little boy played the part of his sister’s sister was more than matched . . . by the vehemency with which he fought it. Even minor frustrations of his will to be a boy could cause him to slap his mother, and one day he symbolically shot her. She called him her Dutch dolly, as was her wont, but this time the feminine epithet triggered an outburst of sexual rage. “I am not a Dutch dolly, I Pawnee Bill. Bang, I shoot Fweetee [Sweetie, Ernest’s early name for his mother].” . . . That his mother was delighted to hear him say he was Pawnee Bill was typical of the baffling inconsistency of her behavior. Could it be that she really wanted him to be a boy after all? By sometimes dressing him in pants and a shirt, she tantalized him into thinking so. To a lesser degree, Marcelline was similarly confused by the sexual signals emanating from her mother. For if Grace gave her “twins” identical tea sets, she also bought them identical air rifles.1

  Although Lynn melodramatizes the young boy’s “sexual rage,” he cogently observes Grace Hemingway’s inconsistent behavior, her mixed gender signals, and the confusion with which she early saddled her children. She got help, of course, from her husband. Clarence’s behavior also confused the children, plagued as it was by a long history of “a nervous condition,” chronic depression and paranoia.2 Between them the two parents wrought in their famous son confusions about his identity, his perceptions, and his understanding of the world he inhabited. Little wonder, then, that confusion resonates at the center of all his fiction, informing the puzzles that so beset him, and that he, in turn, exercised with imagination and creativity. Less wonder that Hemingway would repeatedly exercise that confusion—a common term for what an epistemologic philosopher would study as a problem in knowledge. Least wonder that repetitive exercising of confusion led to habitual routines, to a few epistemologic formulas, that facilitated his creation of flawed and flawless stories.

  Hemingway’s fixation on epistemologic puzzles and his discovery of the rudiments of a formula to which he would repeatedly return occur at least as early as his 1916 story for the Oak Park High School Tabula, “Sepi Jingan.”3 An unidentified boy records his encounter with Billy Tabeshaw, who tells him about being saved by his dog, Sepi Jingan, from certain death at the hands of a pike-pole-wielding murderer, Paul Black Bird. Paul, a “bad Indian” who could drink all day and get crazy but never drunk, had killed Billy’s cousin, a game warden. Although the sheriff failed to track Paul down, Billy succeeded. But Paul spotted his tracker, blindsided him with a blow to the head, and when Billy came to, stood grinning at him, pike-pole in hand, prodding and taunting, “cussing and pricking” Billy. While Paul toyed with his prey, Sepi crawled toward him and “‘[s]uddenly sprang like a shaggy thunderbolt,’” catching Paul’s throat in his “‘long, wolf jaws.’” Billy boasts of making “‘a very neat job’” of Paul’s death. He put Paul on the railroad tracks so that the “‘Pere Marquette Resort Limited removed all the traces.’” That caused people to conclude wrongly that Paul had lain down on the tracks in a drunken stupor.

  A small epistemological puzzle precipitates Billy’s telling his story to the narrator. In the story’s frame Billy lets his dog bolt out of Hauley’s store with a three-pound string of sausages. He pays for the sausages without reprimanding the dog. Billy’s Jack London-like indebtedness to Sepi for having saved his life, of course, solves that small puzzle. But as Hemingway would continue to do in more sophisticated ways later, here too he characteristically complicates the story. He adds other problems to invite discovery of stories within the dog-rescues-man story. Hemingway sublimates his childhood anger at being called “Dutch dolly” instead of “Pawnee Bill” by telling a story of the human penchant for labeling, for assigning names that, while serving as a form of epistemologic shorthand, nevertheless violate accuracy, complexity, truth, and knowledge. When Sepi flees from the store with the sausage, the clerk calls him “robber,” ignorant of Sepi’s lifesaving action and his private label as “hero” in Billy’s and, presumably by story’s end, in the narrator’s eyes. Likewise, since Paul’s mutilated body was found on or after the fourth of July along the railroad tracks, the narrator expresses the communal verdict that Paul was “a drunk who fell asleep on the tracks,” a label uninformed by the events that allegedly occurred. More, Hemingway lets readers conclude both that Sepi was the “avenging hero,” his jaws having dealt Paul’s death blow, and that Billy was an “innocent bystander.” But unknown is whether Sepi’s jaws were lethal or whether Billy had a hand in the revenge killing of Paul—whether Billy is a “murderer.”

  Hemingway’
s probing of oversimplified labels is reflected in Billy’s authoritarian judgments on tobaccos. The odors from six brands merit his censure: Velvet (like red hot pepper), Prince Albert (like cornsilk), Stag (like dried apricots), Honest Scrap (like burnt rubber hose), Giant, and Tuxedo. Only Peerless suits his taste. But Hemingway’s narrator does not share Billy’s taste, for Billy exhorts him, in the story’s penultimate line, “‘You take my advice and stay off that “Tuxedo”—“Peerless” is the only tobacco.’” Hemingway’s narrator may also not share Billy’s self-portrayal as shrewd justice-fighter. For at the end of Billy’s story the narrator refuses comment or response. To Billy’s invitation to respond, asking “‘Funny, ain’t it?’” the narrator offers nothing. Nor does he respond to Billy’s advice on smoking Peerless. Nor does he bid goodbye when Billy says, “‘Come on, Sepi.’” The narrator’s silence may signal yet another epistemologic puzzle, one that hinges on discovering yet another story within the story, the narrator’s response to Billy’s story. Does the narrator’s silence signify his contempt for Billy’s self-aggrandizement or scorn for what he may have decided is a tall tale that Billy has concocted in order to wow impressionable young boys? Or is the narrator so overawed by Billy’s story, so convinced of its veracity, so impressed with the secret story Billy has shared with him that he is rendered speechless? Or is the narrator staggered by the burden of now knowing who was responsible for Paul’s death, a knowledge that he must now guard, lest his spilling it to others cause problems for Billy?

  How to read the narrator of “Sepi Jingan” poses an epistemologic puzzle characteristic of much of Hemingway’s fiction. The invitation to assign a label to him—gullible or contemptuous narrator, Dutch dolly or Pawnee Bill—is the recurrent invitation to naive readers of Hemingway’s fiction: to resolve confusions, to minimize complexities, to shortchange truth, and to grasp at some certitude that will pass for knowledge. Yet the element fundamental to his short fiction, the alchemical ingredient that so frequently transmutes the materials of his art, is a confusion that bespeaks Hemingway’s epistemologic concerns. Whether he would call them by that highfalutin name or not, the heightened emotion and marked ambivalencies nurtured by his mother and father’s mixed signals and inconsistent behaviors provided Hemingway with the key to successful formulas for writing fiction that presumably works on the principle of an iceberg. Definitions of his three formulas and brief discussions of stories that fall under each may lead readers to better appreciate a revisionist reading of Hemingway’s long-neglected masterpiece, “The Mother of a Queen.”

  Admittedly, a number of Hemingway’s stories, even vintage Hemingway, depend primarily upon irony for their effects, stories like “Up in Michigan,” “The Capitol of the World,” “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “The Three-Day Blow,” and “Soldier’s Home.” But while irony is invariably an ingredient in his stories, a larger number of them depend primarily upon one or more of Hemingway’s three epistemologic formulas: textual perplexity, lexical riddle, and extra textual reversal.

  Textual perplexity is best seen in the Nick Adams on-the-road stories. Whether Nick eats a meal at the hobo camp of “The Battler,” sits in Henry’s lunchroom and stands in Ole’s bedroom of “The Killers,” or feels the tremors of huge Alice’s laughter and tears on the train-station bench in “The Light of the World,” Hemingway puts him into situations abuzz with perplexity. These stories, among which “Sepi Jingan” might be numbered, repeatedly poke a character into circumstances ripe for his initiation. But the circumstances so overwhelm him with mixed signals that he is struck speechless or regresses to some comforting nostrum that ill deals with the confusions at hand. The perplexing behavior of the boxers in all three stories—Ad, Ole, and Stan or Steve Ketchel—have Hemingway upping the ante with each story. Ad’s change from friend to foe over the matter of getting his hands on Nick’s knife gives Nick a sudden introduction to the world of a “crazy,” a punchy pug. But Ad’s reversal is small stuff compared to the dizzying information Bugs tells about Ad’s background and relationship with his sister/wife/manager. The incongruity of Bugs’s maternal protection of Ad, requiring as it does the thump of his blackjack, does little to allay Nick’s perplexity. Similarly the often-remarked mismatchings in “The Killer” find Hemingway at his formula, creating discrepancies between lunchroom name and operator, boardinghouse owner and manager, clock hands and actual time, ordered plates and taken plates. But the story’s major discrepancy hinges upon Nick’s perplexity at discovering that Ole Anderson, a man who has made his living as a fighter, will simply no longer fight.

  “Light of the World” is the extreme version of textual perplexity. Not only is there perplexity over which whore Steve Ketchel loved, over which Ketchel the women debate, over which “god” their worship parodies, over which light the story refers to (the whores’ red, the cook’s white, or believers’ religious). But Hemingway also laces the story with the perplexities that accrue to his use of an extensive assortment of slang terms: dinge, mossback, C and M, stagged, interfere, sixty-nine, and the like.4

  To this short list of textual-perplexity stories I would add “On the Quai at Smyrna,” “Out of Season,” “A Pursuit Race,” “An Alpine Idyll,” “Homage to Switzerland,” “Indian Camp,” “Ten Indians,” “Now I Lay me,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” and “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” In all of these stories Hemingway confounds readers and seems resolved to puzzle them with riddles. Do the textual confusions in the dramatic monologue of “Quai” reflect a crazed or coherent narrator and point of view? Do the marital discord, town indifference, or dersision toward Peduzzi and the confusion over “daughter” and “doctor” in “Season” have any bearing on some action Peduzzi may take?5 Are the drug-induced lunacies about wolf, horses, eagles, and sheets by “Sliding Billy,” the bicycle racer in “Pursuit,” the stuff of synecdoche or of insignificant cameo? Are the innkeeper’s and sexton’s accounts of the peasant’s treatment of his wife in “Idyll” matter for morality or an alpine-high tall tale played on outsiders? Do the geographical dislocations in “Homage” present three different men or only one?6 Does the silence between Uncle George and the Indian husband of “Camp” expose the pair as gratuitous props or reveal an intimate relationship between them, the Indian woman, and the newborn infant?7 Do the textual innuendoes between the Garners and the verbal evasions of Nick’s father in “Ten Indians” mean to suggest that the father failed to spend a national holiday with his son because he was sexually interested in that tenth Indian? Do the repetitions and rememberings of the no-longer insomniac of “Lay Me” portray a recovered or a still psychically scarred battle victim, one whose equation of his war-wounding and the front-yard burnings of his youth explains his fear of marriage? In “Never Be” has the mentally recuperative Nick—who flips from reconstructing battlefield logistics to stream-of-consciousness maunderings to grasshopper lecturing—actually been ordered to visit the front lines to boost troop morale?8 And do the confusions of attributing dialogue to different waiters in “Well-Lighted Place” signal that we misread the story if we view it nihilistically, decoyed by its parodic nada prayers to miss its minimal but positive philosophic message?

  My condensations of the above textual-perplexity stories will understandably lead some readers to conclude that I deal from an old deck of ambiguities. But I mean for the shorthand condensations to suggest that the stories’ perplexities are more extensive than I can begin to indicate here. Indeed, as the criticism on the stories attests, imbedded in them are mystifications that mislead readers into misreadings, riddles that require readers to unravel what they read. And by creating such perplexity-encoded stories, Hemingway teases engaged readers into replicating the process that he—as Dutch dolly, Pawnee Bill, and other assigned or self-assigned monikers—went through to decipher the perplexities that confronted him.

  Hemingway’s second epistemologic formula is the lexical riddle, visible in stories like “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Sea Change,” and �
�A Simple Enquiry.” These pivot upon a lexical crux, the unarticulated or ambiguous words abortion, lesbian, and corrupt. Hemingway’s strategy here is to have readers so stew over the missing or ambiguous term that once they discover it or its meaning, they will feel they have solved the story and can mosey on along to the next one. But we long ago learned that the mystery of Jig’s operation, the lexical riddle in “Hills,” is a red herring; it distracts us from the significant decisions of whether to sympathize with Jig and scorn her insistent American man or to sympathize with him and feel disgust for her stubbornness and sarcasm.9 Similarly, upon discovering that the “girl” of “The Sea Change” is lesbian, we may understand Phil’s wrath and feel the story solved. But tucked beneath the lexical riddle is, on one hand, Hemingway’s sensitively sympathetic portrayal of a young woman who has just discovered her lesbianism and who is quite uncertain of how it will affect her future, and, on the other, his scornful portrayal of Phil’s incivility toward her and his defensive bluster and bravado before the barman.10 Once we realize that the major who questions his orderly in “A Simple Enquiry” does so to determine whether the orderly is a homosexual, it is an easy step to reconstruct the evidence to prove the major a homosexual too. But lexical riddles extend beyond just the word “corrupt” and invite a semiotic analysis to unravel the story’s complexities.11