New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Soldered on to this story of banality is the one-paragraph counterpoint describing the death of one of the greatest modern bullfighters, Manuel Garcia Maera, a modern-day primitive much admired by Hemingway for his “grace under pressure” and his skill in an art now turned into another popular pastime. Bullfighting had had its golden age. There were no heroes left. Progress was a myth. And perhaps Hemingway, like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, was borne back “ceaselessly into the past” even as he struggled on disillusioned, disenchanted, but with some degree of courage.

  References and allusions to Indians run throughout the public fiction and nonfiction and the private letters,, not as a major element, but perhaps as a trace element essential to psychic health. In the fiction the trace element of Indianness accompanies the theme of primitivism, a central and recurring idea of some complexity and of both personal and historical interest. We may understand both Hemingway and his time within the context of his writing about Indians and, more broadly, the primitivism of which they provided him both a paradigm and autobiographical, experiential material.

  III

  Story Interpretations

  Hemingway’s “Banal Story”

  Wayne Kvam

  “Banal Story” first appeared in the Little Review, the spring-summer issue of 1926,1 and after slight changes and additions it was reprinted in Men Without Women, published by Scribner’s in 1927.2 Perhaps because of its brevity and lack of plot, the story has attracted little attention among Hemingway’s critics. Those few who have discussed “Banal Story” have failed to penetrate its surface. Joseph Defalco, for example, states that Maera, as an archetypal Christ figure, is the focal point of the story: “The world will not accept true heroes for long, and when heroes die the danger to convention goes with them. In ‘Banal Story’ . . . the focus points to the addiction of people to unimportant tabloid romances while a singular event is taking place: the death of a hero.”3 According to Nicholas Joost, “Banal Story” is not a story, but a sketch which depicts “the banality and sterility of American life, as typified by the stories, editorials, and advertisements of the Forum. . . . Hemingway contrasts American life to life in Spain, as typified by his great Spanish culture-hero Manuel Garcia, the matador known professionally as Maera.”4 In his recent biography of Hemingway, Carlos Baker passes over the story, labeling it simply a “final tribute to the matador Maera.”5

  It is my contention that “Banal Story” is more than a tribute, a sketch, or a satirical attack on the Forum; rather, it is a carefully constructed parable that embodies an aesthetic theory, the same theory that Hemingway was to express in various forms throughout his career. A knowledge of the original version of the story and the subsequent alterations, which were made sometime between 1926 and the publication date of Men Without Women in 1927, aid one in piecing the apparently divergent parts together. (1) In paragraph three of the second version (214.15), “mused” was changed to “read,” thereby removing the narration from a free-flowing stream of consciousness and linking it concretely with the Forum, a prominent American magazine of the 1920s. (2) The introductory sentence of paragraph six (215.2) was changed from “His thoughts raced on” to “He read on”; thus the preceding statement—“I must read them”—is to be understood as a brief pause in the actual reading rather than an interruption in a thought process. (3) The next significant change occurs after paragraph eleven (215.25), where “It was a splendid booklet” is added. This informs us that “he” is still reading from the Forum. The irony in this statement becomes evident at the end of the story. (4) A final addition occurs at the end of paragraph eighteen (216.17). The statement “He laid down the booklet” separates the Forum material from the subject of Maera’s death which follows.

  The above alterations and additions clarify the two major divisions of the story. The first consists of paragraphs 1, 2, 9, and 19 (beginning, middle, and end); and the second of paragraphs 3–8, and 10–18. Paragraphs one and two introduce the “He” of the story (either Hemingway writing about himself or a fictional consciousness serving as a Hemingway spokesman) and offer a definition of life, followed by a definition of Romance. Paragraph nine links the beginning and ending of the story, the definitions of life and Romance with the account of death. Intervening are paragraphs 3–8 and 10–18, which illustrate the responses of the Hemingway writer, “he,” to the editorial policy and contents of the Forum. These two divisions establish the main conflict in the story—that between the true and false responses to life and death.

  As is the case with Hemingway’s topical satire in The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises (also written in the mid-i92os), the satire in “Banal Story” loses much of its impact if considered apart from its historical context. To a new generation of readers unfamiliar with the Forum of the 1920s, the middle section of the story must indeed appear puzzling. According to the autobiography of Henry G. Leach, who assumed the editorship of the Forum in 1923, “In five years from 1923 to 1928, the circulation of the Forum increased from 2,000 to 102,000, which was in those days deemed satisfactory for an ‘intellectual periodical.’” Carl Sandburg, Leach proudly recalled, “was so generous as to call the Forum ‘the barometer of American intelligence.’” Known as the “magazine of controversy” in the 1920s, the Forum directed its appeal to what editor Leach felt was the thinking minority in the American populace. The major portion of each monthly issue was devoted to philosophical debates on the most controversial topics of the decade: prohibition, science vs. religion, the race question, sexual freedom, revolutionary trends in the arts, the population explosion, immigration, and the war debt. “Our editorial policy,” Leach stated, “was to keep the magazine objective and recognize that there are sometimes more than two sides to any problem. There is seldom a ‘yes or no’ and often a ‘both-and’ in public issues, and we usually presented more than just two facets of a contemporary issue. My personal formula for the Forum was that it should ‘encourage technological habits of thinking.’”6

  Although the Forum of the 1920s could be considered progressive, at least from an intellectual standpoint, its literary standards were decidedly conservative. In judging fiction for publication, “the Forum demanded,” according to Leach, “the three unities of plot, characterization, and style prescribed for the short-story of Poe and Hawthorne.” In addition, Leach required that each issue contain “some humor and some religion.”7 Since the Forum debates, advertised as “high adventures of the mind,” were seldom written in a humorous vein, it was the fiction which was often intended to supply a lighter side to the magazine. It is this combination of intellectual pomposity and critical naiveté in the Forum’s editorial policy that Hemingway is parodying in paragraphs three and four of “Banal Story.”

  To stimulate interest in the controversies sponsored by the Forum, Leach frequently posed a series of rhetorical questions in his editorial introductions. The following excerpt from the introduction to the March 1925 issue is a typical example:

  What constitutes a good poem? Is it merely a matter of opinion, of individual taste? Or are there standards which must be adhered to? By whom were they established? . . . To-day poetry is being written which does not adhere to the standards of the past: is it, then, to be banned? Or if we accept free rhythms and an absence of those conventions which formerly constituted good poetry, do we thereby repudiate the old standards as obsolete and unnecessary?8

  The questions in the middle section of “Banal Story” parody this stylistic mannerism, and nearly all of them have specific sources in the monthly issues of the Forum published during 1925.

  Corresponding to paragraph six in “Banal Story,” for example, are the following questions from Leach’s introductions: (1) May 1925: “the Forum professes to discuss in the coming years not only the mechanical means proposed to check war, but the substitutes that must be discovered for war if it is to be eliminated as a perennial purger of the human race. . . . If the Japanese are not to be decimated by war, where will they find
a place under the sun?”9 (2) September 1925: “How shall war be abolished? Can war be abolished? Ever? in our time? How can wars be made safer—not for the individual, obviously—but for mankind?”10

  The problem of shifting populations on an overcrowded globe, alluded to in paragraph seven of “Banal Story” by the question “Or will we all have to move to Canada?” was a familiar subject in the Forum. In the introduction to the May issue of 1925 Leach asked, “Can the waste places of central Australia and the Canadian arctic and the wet jungles of the Amazon be inhabited?” and “Will scientific agriculture and diet and housing make more room?”11 The first sentence of paragraph eight (“Our deepest convictions—will Science upset them?”) refers to another major concern of Forum contributors during 1925.12 In introducing a series of articles under the heading “Evolution and Daily Living” in the February issue, Leach wrote, “Science has of late been going the way of the agnostic and mechanist, forgetful of the mind, let alone the soul. . . . Some theologians, on the other hand, have made an equally sorry mess of it by blindfolding their eyes to science. The time has come for a reconciliation.13 Two months later (April 1925), Leach stated, “In bringing together the views of future-minded scientists and religious thinkers, the Forum is trying to plumb the depths of a spiritual reawakening that may help to fuse into effective meaning the chaotic mass of facts with which modern research has overwhelmed us.”14

  The second sentence of paragraph eight in “Banal Story” echoes Leach’s introduction to a series of anthropology studies under the general heading “What is Civilization?” which the Forum initiated in January 1925: “The Editor is setting out upon the impossible adventure of discovering civilization. He has been told that twentieth-century America, for all its radio and its bull markets, is not the be-all, nor the end-all of human life. Is it possible that men have already known better ways of living in the past and that we their descendants have recklessly obliterated the highroads they have built to happiness?”15

  Hemingway was not only parodying Leach’s stylistic mannerisms and the technological habits of thought which he sought to promote, but also the format which the Forum debates followed. Leach outlined this format in his introduction to the April 1925 issue:

  The Forum believes that the best way of dispelling the ignorance and the bias that obscure these tremendous issues is to present in juxtaposition, the interpretations—no matter how divergent—of writers who have devoted to them the most earnest consideration. Steel and flint are hard and useful per se, but only when they come into sharp impact do they strike off the incendiary spark of truth.16

  The parody of this formula in “Banal Story” is two-fold. As we have already noted, the structure of the story itself follows the Forum pattern. Divergent interpretations (those of the Hemingway writer as opposed to those of the Forum) of “tremendous issues” (life and death) are juxtaposed. More specifically, Hemingway is reducing the formula to the level of the absurd in such examples as the following. In paragraph ten of “Banal Story” he borrows the title of a Forum article, “Big Men—Or Cultured?”17 and proposes to answer the question according to Leach’s formula of juxtaposing opposites: “Take Joyce. Take President Coolidge.” The remainder of the paragraph follows the same pattern. The author of the article “Big Men—Or Cultured?” was a Yale student voicing a protest against the spirit of “be a big man or bust,” which he felt had invaded the Yale campus. Hemingway asks, “What star must our college students aim at?” and answers with another set of opposites. Doctor Henry Van Dyke, whom the Forum advertised as “philosopher, poet, essayist, spiritual teacher, and master teller of tales,”18 is placed between two prominent American prize fighters of the 1920s, Jack Britton and Young Stribling.

  The rhetorical question which introduces paragraph eleven refers to Arthur Hamilton Gibbs’s novel Soundings, serialized in the Forum from October 1924 through April 1925. Nancy Hawthorne, the heroine, is an eighteen-year-old English girl whose mother died at her birth and whose father attempts to raise her alone in the small village of Brimble. One night Curly, a village boy, kisses Nancy and she becomes restless, bringing “both father and daughter to the tardy realization that she is grown up.”19 As a result, Nancy’s father decides to send her off to the Continent alone, to make the “Soundings” of life for herself. The novel, as one might suspect, is mawkishly sentimental. Nancy’s hero is a major in the United States Army, who after “strafing the Huns” returns to her to live happily ever after, and the virtuous, strong-minded girl is rewarded with marriage and children. Soundings is an example of the fiction which the Forum advertised as “bits of real life.” Holding the heroine Nancy Hawthorne up as a model for young girls to follow, is as false, Hemingway is saying, as substituting “some humor and some religion” for a realistic depiction of death and tragedy. The next statement, “It was a splendid booklet,” then, is to be understood as sarcasm on the part of the writer as he pages through the Forum. The paragraph which follows is a return to the parody of editor Leach’s formula for problem-solving, illustrated in paragraph ten.

  The attack on the Forum’s editorial policy continues in paragraph fourteen. “Think of these things in 1925,” rather than “feel” or “experience” these things, corresponds to Leach’s promise of the “high adventure of the mind.”20 The question, “Was there a risqu” page in Puritan history?” possibly relates to an article “In the Wicked Old Puritan Days,” published in the Forum American Series in April 1926.21 The question, “Were there two sides to Pocahontas?” is another playful treatment of the Forum debates. “Did she have a fourth dimension?” a question added after the first printing of the story, could refer to Leach’s introductory statement in the August 1925 issue. Here the editor wrote “that civilization is a multiplication of so many factors that it will be differently defined by every mind that attempts an analysis. It belongs to the ‘fourth dimension’ terms that baffle the average understanding.”22

  The sources for paragraph fifteen of “Banal Story” (“Are modern paintings—and poetry—Art? Yes and No. Take Picasso.”) can also be found in specific issues of the Forum. In June 1925 Leach wrote, “Music has long claimed the right to be abstract as well as to imitate nature; but can painting and sculpture also break away altogether from illustrating things as they are, and claim to be pure art?”23 Following was a debate entitled “Is Cubism Pure Art?” Walter Pack contributed the first article, “Picasso’s Achievement,”24 and Alfred Churchill countered with “Picasso’s Failure.”25 The topic was introduced again at the end of the July 1925 issue when Leach reprinted letters from the readers under the title, “Pure Art? Or ‘Pure Nonsense’?”26

  The first sentence of paragraph sixteen—“Have tramps codes of conduct?”—likely refers to the article “Tramps and Hoboes,” by Towne Nylander, published in the Forum in August 1925.27 “Send your mind adventuring,” the next sentence of the paragraph, was one of Leach’s favorite mottoes. In the December 1924 issue, for example, Leach wrote, “Send your mind adventuring! is the invitation of the December Forum.“ Introducing an article by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, he added, “Stefansson carries the mind adventuring to the Orient by short cuts through the air across the Arctic ice. And the adventure of the mind is continued in other articles.”28 In the following issue, January 1925, Leach announced: “Send your mind adventuring! is the invitation of the Forum for the new year, the fortieth of its life as a magazine.”29

  The two concluding paragraphs of the Forum section of the story imitate Leach’s manner of editorial advertising and are intended to be read ironically. Paragraph seventeen parallels the introduction of a new serial to appear in the Forum of May 1925: “Readers of the Forum have learned to expect a serial of wit and charm, rich in situations, brilliant in character development, challenging in thought.”30 Paragraph eighteen echoes Leach’s statement in the December 1924 issue: “Other journals may follow other high adventures—sex, success, travel—but for the Forum we modestly announce the high adventure of
the mind.”31

  Serving as a deliberate contrast to the responses to life offered by editor Leach and the Forum are the writer’s responses to life and death, arranged at the beginning, the middle, and the end of “Banal Story.” With this contrast in mind, we can follow the shift in tone which occurs in the middle section. In the first two paragraphs the writer is responding to the immediate, the commonplace and physical; therefore, he is emphatic (“How good it felt!”) and colloquial (“Mascart had knocked Danny Frush cuckoo”). Turning to the Forum in paragraph three, Hemingway imitates the formal diction, the logical, abstract approach to experience, and the Socratic method of debate which the Forum prided itself upon.

  Life that concerns the Hemingway writer is demonstrated in paragraph one. Life, “he” proclaims after rising from his writing table, consists of that which one perceives with one’s senses, whether it be in the tasting and smelling of an orange, seeing the snow turn to rain, or feeling the heat of the stove on one’s bottom. The writer’s definition of life also includes romance, but this is not “the Romance of the unusual,” which the Forum promises will intoxicate the minds of its readers, but it is the romance of everyday struggle encountered by people of all countries and all educational levels. Not limited to the writer’s immediate environment, it is the romance that one might find recorded in the daily newspaper: a boxing match “Far away in Paris,” a heavy snowfall “Far off in Mesopotamia,” or a cricket match “Across the world in distant Australia.”