New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  To this short list of lexical-riddle stories add “Big Two-Hearted River,” “In Another Country,” “Cat in the Rain,” “Wine of Wyoming,” “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “A Day’s Wait,” “Today is Friday,” and “A Canary for One,” which I take up with in reverse order. The lexical riddles in the last two are pushovers. The nearly missing word in “Canary” is “divorce,” in “Friday” the name of the man who “was pretty good in there today.” “Gentlemen” and “Day’s Wait” hinge on two boys’ lexical mistakes, the older boy’s notion that castration of his penis will cure his “awful lust,” the younger’s that temperatures are registered only in centigrade. In “Wine” the thin lexical riddle is a slogan between which and Prohibition lies the explanation for the Fontans’ deep disillusionment: that America is the “home of the free.” And underlying the behavior of the American wife in “Cat” is the easy-to-come-by lexical crux, “maternal instincts”: her wish for the cat in the rain is a substitute for the domestic maternity she longs for.

  A more complex lexical riddle is at work in “In Another Country,” for the narrator is preoccupied with his differences from “hawks,” who scorn his medals because he has not been combat wounded, and a martinet major, who scorns his conversation because he fails to speak grammatically. At the core of his preoccupation, however, is his puzzlement over the concept of bravery. He is certain that the bravery of the hawks is meritorious, for it is duly recognized with medals. But he also admires the major’s bravery in continuing with the nonsensical therapy and with living on in the face of his young wife’s sudden death. But whether the major himself signifies bravery is problematic; he may as readily signify a resentful survivor who displays peevishness and the pathos of failing to act on his belief of therapeutic futility. And the narrator’s fixation on this major as the centerpiece of a tale of recuperation may signify the narrator’s retrospective scorn for an allegedly brave man. As well may it signify the narrator’s self-pitying insinuation of why he has failed to become brave: a poor role model in the authoritarian major.

  Perhaps the best of the lexical-riddle stories is “Big Two-Hearted River,” pivoting as its psychological ramifications do on two words, “khaki” and “tragic.” When the narrator informs us that Nick tucks his sandwiches into a khaki, not a mufti, shirtpocket, he suddenly opens a seam in the controlled discipline of Nick’s fishing trip, letting up peep through the curtain just behind the story and glimpse the backstage scene of war—where khaki was not de rigueur until World War I—and the image of Nick in military uniform. And when Nick oddly regards fishing the swamp “tragic,” a word too heavy for an ordinary fisherman’s outing, then it is all but certain that Nick’s term signals some deep fear of experience. He dreads that some seemingly minor event—such as a snagged line or a hooked trout tangled in roots or grass—will trigger a loss of control that will so shatter his fragile, recuperating psyche as to allow the experience to tragically unman him.12

  Hemingway’s third epistemologic formula is extratextual reversal, most visible in “Fifty Grand,” “After the Storm,” and “My Old Man.” In these stories Hemingway sets into action a character whose occupation or easily labeled role calls up cultural expectations of stereotypical behavior, ones Hemingway partly honors (to keep the stereotype intact) but primarily subverts (to violate the typecasting label and to render freshly the individual behind the stereotype). And by invoking those stereotyped labels Hemingway also welcomes the moral prejudgments that conventionally accompany them so as to maneuver his textual materials and subvert those judgments. (These techniques are “extratextual” because they rely upon mental predispositions, cultural codes, and ideologies that readers bring to a text before they even begin to read it.)13 In “Fifty Grand,” for instance, Hemingway honors stereotypical expectations in characterizing his boxer: Jack Brennan is a hard-training, tough-talking champ who shows his fighting instincts when he realizes he’s been set up to win a fixed fight that he knows he should lose. But onto the label of “tough boxer” Hemingway attaches traits not common to the label: tight-fisted with his money, Jack is a worried family man, moody and brooding, unliked by those he works with, save the story’s narrator. And Jack is a thinker, rapidly calculating whether to allow the foul punch that will let him win his last fight but cause him to forfeit the money he stands to gain by losing.14 At story’s end Hemingway pinpoints the extratextual reversal by invoking a stock reaction to Jack’s conduct: moral contempt for returning the low blow that secures his bet against himself. Yet this reaction overlooks Hemingway’s craft in weaving the fabric of the story to reverse that judgment and find Jack morally commendable. His foul, that is, restores professional integrity to the sport he has given his best years to, ensures that a rigged fight will be spoiled, and sees that financial justice is done to his betrayers.

  “After the Storm” seems to portray little more than a waterfront tough. The unnamed first-person narrator is a barroom brawler, briber, and amoral opportunist insensitive to human calamity. He registers greed, not compassion, toward the woman trapped and dead inside a sunken liner, for he remarks only her floating hair and the rings on one of her hands. But in the last segment of the story Hemingway subverts the stereotype. His narrator uses one-fourth of the story’s length in an unexpected display of imagination, compassion, and empathy for the liner’s captain, a man who must have been taken completely by surprise by the liner’s sudden grounding and sinking in quicksand.15 As in these two stories, in “My Old Man” Hemingway invites us to view his jockey stereotypically: a weight-conscious, horse racing addict who so thrives on the shady world of the gambling racetrack that he thinks nothing of raising his son in its midst. And Hemingway invites us also to label the jockey a crook, for his son overhears two disgruntled bettors slur his father as one. But as I have explained elsewhere, the text fails to support such a label and challenges us to read over the son’s shoulder. By doing so we must reverse our judgment and recognize his jockey father as a man of integrity, an ethical maverick who has set out to dismantle the fixed racing world by buying and riding his own mount, thereby guaranteeing the uncertainty of a race’s outcome.16

  To this short list of textual-reversal stories I would add “The Revolutionist,” “The Undefeated,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In the first of these the discrepancy between the story’s title, which automatically evokes the stereotype of a credo-spouting firebrand, and its character—a shy, naive, art and nature lover—makes for a pure but unsuccessful example of this formula. Not so with the other three stories. “The Undefeated” appears to focus on the ineptitude of a has-been torero, best illustrated by his Chaplinesque efforts to kill his first bull, his sword springing up and bending from repeated attempts to dispatch the bull. But it is the animal’s anatomy that thwarts Manuel’s otherwise superb faena. The bull’s nearly impenetrable hump deprives Manuel of the finish that would reestablish him as a torero of exceptional artistry. Gored, his act of sitting upright on the operating table when his friend Zurito teasingly threatens to cut off his pigtail asks us to disdain him as pathetically vainglorious. But it also asks us to reverse our verdict, to respect him as justifiably proud of his professional standards and conduct, as someone who, even when seriously gored, will jeopardize his recovery rather than permit a slight against his professionalism. In “Old Man at the Bridge” an aged man will retreat no farther toward Barcelona to escape the fascist army’s offensive. Hemingway lets us identify the man as a pathetic quitter who warrants our scorn for failing to take heart on this story’s day of all days, Easter Sunday. But extra textual reversal calls for a view of him as a man of dignity, philosophically rejecting a life bereft of others to care for. Similarly the story welcomes identification of its other character, the reconnaisance officer. He talks with the old man but abandons him sitting in the dust, nudging us to brand him an inhumane professional, unwilling to neglect duty long enough to help this aged brother. But a reversed r
eading finds him a humane benefactor who displays consummate respect: he checks the vulgar impulse to meddle in the old man’s rendezvous with death.

  In perhaps Hemingway’s most label-laden story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” extratextual reversal seems strongly at work, even though Hemingway may have intended otherwise.17 As the one-hundred-plus items of criticism and scholarship on the story testify, the problem of fitting accurate labels to the story’s trio, especially its alleged bitch, is most vexing.18 Not the least of the problems is construing Margot Macomber’s act of adultery. Immoral and sinful by matrimonial and religious precepts, it is nevertheless the provocative action that propels Francis’s behavior from “boyhood” to “manhood” during the events of the single day that constitutes his short, happy life. And both because her adultery takes that impelling position in the sequence of Francis’s alleged maturation and because, as Wilson admits, “What’s in [Margot’s] heart God knows,” her adultery can be regarded as morally commendable. After all, “in her heart” she may have committed the act with the design in mind that it would result as it did, triggering Francis’s anger and the more assertive behavior that he evinces even before the activity which completes his transformation, the buffalo hunt.

  But the success of “Short Happy Life” is not solely attributable to Hemingway’s use of extra textual reversal. The story also relies on a variant of textual perplexity. Rather than perplex his readers with the verbal confusions of his earlier stories, here Hemingway does it by skillfully disjointing the story’s narrative sequence with flashbacks and its point of view with shifts among the characters’ perspectives (excepting, of course, Margot’s). Impeding a reader’s full grasp of the story’s ethical issues, Hemingway once again underscores the epistemologic problems in a story. He uses similar strategies in other stories with overlapping formulas, as in, for example, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (with its flashbacks and dream flashforward) and “A Natural History of the Dead” (with its juxtaposition of mock essay and superb vignette). But the story that best shows Hemingway using all three epistemological formulas is his long-neglected masterpiece, “The Mother of a Queen.”

  By constructing a dramatic monologue in “The Mother of a Queen,” Hemingway imbeds textual perplexity in the discourse of the story’s narrator, Roger. Given his intention to denigrate Paco’s character, Roger makes himself vulnerable to the charge of unreliability, sowing skepticism in the reader toward his facts and impressions. For instance, was Paco responsible for having so poorly packed the six new fighting suits he bought in Spain that four were ruined by seawater? Or does the fault lie with someone else? Is Paco a profligate who freely spends money when women are around so as to fool them and others into thinking him a man? And is such behavior without effect on those who know much about him? Likewise, does Paco give his desperate townsman fifty pesos, posing as benefactor, as “the big, generous matador with a fellow townsman?”19 Or is this, too, Roger’s version, his impression? Roger’s unreliable textual authority is clearest in his boasting that he is better than Paco in everything. While it may be true that Roger is a better driver of Paco’s car than Paco is, surely his “everything” cannot include bullfighting. Such an overgeneralization must give a reader pause, may even cause a reader to wonder if it is fact that Paco was unable even to read and write.

  Another textual perplexity dwells in Roger’s preoccupation with business, a word that recurs frequently in the four-page story. While Roger faults Paco for not taking care of the business of burying his mother in a permanent plot and for not managing his cash box and paying his debts, there is question of just what kind of business manager Roger is. Paco instructs him to get from the cash box fifty pesos and to give them to the townsman, indicating that Roger has the key to the box. But what kind of a business manager can Roger be if he has the key and access to the over 600 pesos he claims Paco owes him? Just what is his business with Paco if he refuses to take what’s rightfully his, having paid bills on Paco’s house out of his own pocket while Paco was on his trip to Spain? Moreover, what is Roger’s business in telling this small tale of character assassination? His narrative indicates that the event he tells of happened at least two years before his telling: after he left Paco, he remarks that he had not spoken to Paco “until this year.” But Roger’s excessive detail and obsessive need to so totally disparage Paco reveals his biographical snippet to be reaction formation. His business, that is, is to conceal his attraction to Paco and, thereby, to deny his own latent homosexuality. The durability of his grudge against Paco and the heat with which he tells it to his listener indicate the feelings of a rejected would-be lover who still winces from memory of his failure to win the affection of a desired object. Were there no such “sexual” injury, Roger could tell the story quite briefly in general details.

  Roger’s identity as latent homosexual opens the door on the lexical riddles in the story. His use of “queen” and “sweetheart” to label Paco a homosexual, of course, poses problems for readers unfamiliar with the slang terms, for little in the story shows Paco’s behavior as exclusively homosexual. Nevertheless, Roger’s derisive indictment of Paco appears to have its root in Paco’s sexual deviation, which partly explains why Roger expresses such hostility toward Paco. But that hostility points as well to the other lexical riddle in the story, “mother.” Given Roger’s attention to Paco’s disrespect for his dead mother, the mother of the story’s title seems to refer to Paco’s mother. But it refers equally to Roger, whose behavior throughout the story resembles some angry and domineering mother.20 He nags Paco about sending the money to give his mother a permanent burial. Much as though Paco’s inaction disrespects Roger more than Paco’s mother, Roger gets upset when Paco fails to see the matter and berates him, asking Paco to identify the kind of blood he has, indignantly declaring that he wishes Paco not to speak to him. He keeps close count of Paco’s finances, tallying up Paco’s earnings, as some grasping mother might ride herd over a child’s savings account. And Roger, like a stay-at-home mother, whines that while Paco was off “playing” in Spain, she stayed home and paid the house bills, “‘and you didn’t send any money while you were gone and I paid over six hundred pesos in my own money and now I need it and you can pay me.’” Paco’s gravest wrong in fussbudget Roger’s eyes may be his neglect of those seven new fighting suits he had made in Spain. So poorly had he packed them that on the return trip saltwater ruined four of them. Naughty boy, to be so careless of his clothing! That Roger equates himself with mothers is revealed in his insult to Paco, allegedly telling him to his face in the presence of others, that he never had a mother—according to Roger the most insulting thing to tell another Spaniard. By reproaching a wayward male who neglects to properly respect a mother’s values, Roger reveals that his outrage at Paco is fueled by Paco’s having treated him as an unvalued mother.21

  Paco’s violation of Mother Roger’s values leads to the story’s dominant epistemologic formula, extra textual reversal. By making Paco a matador, Hemingway assigns him a most flagrantly labeled role, one that in his canon calls up predictable cultural expectations of stereotyped behavior: valor artist, man who lives his life all the way up, emblem of a culture’s deepest traditions, exemplar of machismo, and so on. But none of this matador’s actions or statements bear upon that conventional role. Anathema to it, Paco exhibits neither the pride nor domination that a story about a bullfighter would seem to call for; nor does the story highlight Paco in the ring where his abilities might radiate forth, as do Manuel’s in “The Undefeated.” By adding to the mixed signal of an unprepossessing matador the label of homosexual, Hemingway creates a character with a thoroughly mixed pair of roles, a fundamental clashing of stereotypical responses. We may incline to see Paco conforming to a homosexual stereotype because of Roger’s coloring of the facts and impressions he gives. But Paco’s behavior and statements are not those that exclusively characterize him as a stereotypically limp-wristed, speech-affected gay—not, say, th
e Robert Prentiss of The Sun Also Rises. Indeed, when Roger offers to take care of the payment of Paco’s mother’s grave after Paco had received a second notice, Paco commands Roger to stay out of his business, that it is his business and that he will take care of it. And when Johnny-one-note Roger harps again on Paco’s lack of filial respect, Paco emphasizes that he is quite happy with what has become of his mother, that Roger is incapable of understanding his happiness. A fundamental difference of values, it seems clear.

  At the end of the story Paco shows goodwill toward Roger, offering his hand in friendship and stating that he has learned from people of Roger’s bad-mouthing him, of “unjust things” Roger spreads. To Roger, of course, such civility is unheard of and must reveal Paco’s thorough perversion. For that statement and Paco’s failure to respond manfully to Roger’s insult—that Paco never had a mother—are proof in Roger’s mind that Paco is a queer: “There’s a queen for you. You can’t touch them. Nothing, nothing can touch them. They spend money on themselves or for vanity, but they never pay. Try to get one to pay.”

  The oddity of Roger’s conclusions surely remark discrepancies in his labeling Paco a queen. After all, the resistance to being “touched,” the motives for spending money, as well as the failure to pay a debt—these have little to do with being a homosexual. While Roger believes that Paco’s behavior issues from his identity as a homosexual, his belief hides behind bluster, as indicated by his reccurrent question about the kind of blood that flows in someone like Paco. Roger, of course, can ask such a question, one that finds Paco an epistemologic puzzle. But rather than accept the uncertainty and complexity of Paco’s identity, he takes shelter in cheap labels.