New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  In paragraph nine the writer’s mind suddenly jumps from the pages of the Forum as he hears in his imagination the sound of the axes of gum-choppers in “the far-off dripping jungles of Yucatan.” Why does Hemingway allow for this particular shift? There are at least three sources in the Forum of August 1925. Leach explained that “The cover design of the Forum, in use for eight months, was drawn by Alfred C. Bossom from old Mayan Indian motifs.” The August issue contained an explanation of the design by Herbert J. Spinden.32 This same issue featured an introductory poem “To the Mayas” by H. Phelps Clawson33 and an essay entitled “The Answer of Ancient America,” which dealt with the Mayan civilization in the Yucatán.34

  Unlike the scholars represented in the Forum, the Hemingway writer approaches the Indians of the Yucatan on the level of the immediate and the physical. The sensual experience of sound reminds us of his response to life in paragraph one, while the adjective “far-off” links the action of the gum-choppers with the sense of struggle that characterizes his definition of Romance in paragraph two. At the same time the introductory “And meanwhile” of paragraph nine links this thought with the one introduced by the parallel “And meanwhile” in the final paragraph of the story. In this paragraph the account of Maera’s death completes the writer’s response to life. As Hemingway was to write in Death in the Afternoon, “all stories if continued far enough end in death; and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you.”35 This is something which the Forum writers with their “warm homespun, American tales, bits of real life . . . all with a healthy undercurrent of humor,” have omitted.

  The writer’s response to death has none of the jealousy of Maera’s fellow bullfighters, who envied his skill and were secretly relieved at his death. As Death in the Afternoon was to make clear, the writer, or Hemingway in this case, was a great admirer of Maera for what he was as a bullfighter and as a man. He was aware of Maera’s prolonged suffering and his tortuous battle with death, neither of which could be recorded in a special newspaper supplement.36 The funeral mourners who sit out of the rain and lose “the picture they had of him [Maera] in their memories” by looking at colored pictures, are similar to the Forum writers, who substitute colored pictures of life for reality.

  The Hemingway writer, however, does not allow the picture in his mind to be distorted; his task is to capture what a photograph cannot. Hemingway expresses a similar idea at the conclusion of Green Hills of Africa. After the safari, P. O. M. complains that she can no longer remember Mr. J. P.’s face: “‘I think about him and think about him and I can’t see him. It’s terrible. He isn’t the way he looks in a photograph. In a little while I won’t be able to remember him at all. Already I can’t see him.’” Hemingway in turn responds, “‘I can remember him. . . . I’ll write you a piece sometime and put him in.’”37

  The one sentence of paragraph nine, then, carries a heavier burden in “Banal Story” than its length might suggest. Placed in the middle of the story, it serves to link beginning and end, the writer’s reaction to life with his reaction to death. It also illustrates how the response of Hemingway’s writer, occupied with what he can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, differs from the intellectual abstractions in the pages of the Forum. The writer’s definition of life in “Banal Story” is similar to the guerilla El Sordo’s definition in For Whom the Bell Tolls: “living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it, and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”38 Talking about life in purely abstract terminology, as did the Forum, is “talking horseshit.” As Hemingway explained to the Old Lady in Death in the Afternoon: “we apply the term now to describe unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over-metaphysical tendency in speech.”39

  According to Hemingway’s aesthetic, the ability to deal directly with physical sensations in writing is what separates the good artist from the poor. To re-create Navarra, for example, one would have to “make clouds come fast in shadows moving over wheat and the small, careful stepping horses; the smell of olive oil; the feel of leather; rope-soled shoes; the loops of twisted garlics; earthen pots; saddle bags carried across the shoulder; wine skins; the pitchforks made of natural wood (the tines were branches); the early morning smells; the cold mountain nights and long hot days of summer, with always trees and shade under the trees.”40 The same holds true for the painter. The reason Hemingway prefers Goya to El Greco and Velasquez, as he writes in Death in the Afternoon, is that “Goya did not believe in costume, but he did believe in blacks and grays, in dust and in light, in high places rising from plains, in the country around Madrid, in movement, in his own cojones, in painting, in etching, and in what he had seen, felt, touched, handled, smelled, enjoyed, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain-with, suspected, observed, loved, hated, lusted, feared, detested, admired, loathed, and destroyed. Naturally no painter has been able to paint all that but he tried.”441

  In The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway Charles Fenton records a statement which Hemingway made to a circle of friends in Chicago in 1921. Discussing the responsibilities of the writer, he stated, “‘You’ve got to see it, feel it, smell it, hear it.’”42 It is this dictum, developed in the form of a parable with a deceptively ironic title, that is at the core of “Banal Story.”

  “This Is My Pal Bugs”: Ernest Hemingway’s “The Battler”

  George Monteiro

  The black traveling with the “battler”—Mr. Adolph “Ad” Francis, former champion prizefighter now very much down on his luck—is known only as “Bugs.” He is an ex-con, as is Ad. Indeed, it was in prison, Bugs tells us, that he first met Ad, looking him up on the outside after his own later release. He took to the little man, the beat-up fighter, liking him well enough to take over his care by becoming his companion in a world of drifters and marginal males. As he says to the young boy visiting this odd twosome in their temporary camp, “right away I liked him and when I got out I looked him up. He likes to think I’m crazy and I don’t mind. I like to be with him and I like seeing the country and I don’t have to commit no larceny to do it. I like living like a gentleman.”1 Bugs has worked out what is a routine but mutually beneficial relationship with the brain-damaged ex-con.

  What landed them in prison to begin with is of some importance. Ad was “busting people all the time” after his wife had left him, while Bugs was “in for cuttin’ a man” (77). We learn nothing from Bugs about his reason for cutting the man, but we do learn from Bugs that Ad’s marital problems might have had their source in certain bizarre circumstances stretching back to his time in the prize ring. The woman he married had been his manager, and it was always being “written up in the papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he loved his sister,” Bugs tells Nick, “and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of unpleasantness” (77). Nick remembers this much. But what Bugs goes on to say is unexpected: “Of course they wasn’t brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn’t like it either way and they commenced to have disagreements, and one day she just went off and never come back” (77).

  But then Bugs, who admits to having seen the woman a couple of times, slyly hints that there is a closeness in his relationship to Ad that might otherwise escape notice. “She was an awful good looking woman,” he admits; then he adds: “Looked enough like him to be twins. He wouldn’t be bad looking without his face all busted” (77). And a bit later, having enjoyed making this revelation, Bugs repeats it in different words: “She’s a mighty fine woman. . . . She looks enough like him to be his own twin” (78). Besides revealing affection and personal feeling, perhaps, these observations suggest that there exists a strong physical attraction between the two partners in this h
ome-making couple. To put Bug’s views of Ad’s good looks into perspective, we need only recall that the narrative tells us that he has a “mutilated face” (78), that in this “misshapen[ed]” face, the “nose was sunken,” the “eyes were slits,” and the lips were “queer shaped” (68). In fact, “Nick did not perceive all this at once, he only saw the man’s face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color. Dead looking in the firelight” (68). There is no indication given that Nick sees any beauty in Ad, but obviously, as we subsequently learn, Bugs does. Nor does Ad’s behavior serve to enhance his attractiveness, for even when he takes off his cap, he does so to call attention to the fact that he has “only one ear. It was thickened and tight against the side of his head. Where the other ear should have been there was a stump” (69). It is a subtle stroke on Hemingway’s part when later, as Bugs checks to see that he has not hurt him badly by “tapp[ing]” him with the blackjack, the narration tells us that Bugs “splashed water with his hand on the man’s face and pulled his ears gently. The eyes closed” (75). Note that Nick had seen that Ad had only “one” ear, but Bugs, ministering to the unconscious Ad, pulls gently at his “ears.” Bugs simply sees Ad differently and more attractively. Is it going too far to say that he sees him with a lover’s eyes? After all, he has just “tapped” Ad “across the base of the skull” with a “cloth-wrapped blackjack” (75) that Bugs seems to carry with him for just this purpose, explaining his actions to Nick: “I didn’t know how well you could take care yourself and, anyway, I didn’t want you to hurt him or mark him up no more than he is” (76).

  The received reading of “The Battler” views Nick as the key to the story’s motivation and purpose.2 Quite simply it is Nick’s reaction to what happens to him that is of primary importance to the way the reader focuses on the narrative. In this sense, even though there is no direct description of the emotions that Nick feels or any statement as to how and what such an encounter finally means to Nick’s emotional, psychological, or moral development, the reader is expected to acknowledge that some change has either occurred or, more likely, is occurring. Sent away from the warm fire in the clearing that belongs to Bugs and Ad, Nick climbs the embankment and starts up the tracks. That the whole experience has deeply impressed him we are to get from the simple statement that now follows—Nick “found he had a ham sandwich in his hand and put it in his pocket” (79). “Found,” of course, is the key word here, springing the larger meaning that the author wanted his tale to convey still another stage in Nick’s education.

  In 1925, shortly after he had written “The Battler” to fill out his collection of stories for the publisher Horace Liveright, Hemingway boasted to John Dos Passos—employing the tough-guy parlance he so commonly affected—of his “swell new Nick story about a busted down pug and a coon.”3 He had invented the circumstances, he insisted. But the principals—Ad and Bugs—are based on real-life prototypes, argues Hemingway’s biographer:

  The battler was a punch-drunk prize-fighter named Ad Francis, whose personality was based on two real-life fighters known to Ernest: Ad Wolgast and Bat Nelson. Ad Francis’s fictional companion, a polite and patient Negro named Bugs, was modeled on an actual Negro trainer who had looked after Wolgast in the period of his decline.4

  Perhaps Ad and Bugs were drawn from life, but I would look elsewhere for their prototypes. I would suggest the possibility that the principal sources of this powerful story are literary.

  If we put aside for a moment our source of the exact sequence of incidents and attendant details in this story of the pathos and horror in a decidedly unorthodox relationship between two males and its emblematic meaning for a third male who, at story’s end, has not yet brought to his consciousness the full implications of what he has just experienced, we can see the employment of a dramatic structure growing out of a triangular male relationship that is not without precedent in classic American literature. The withholding from the reader of the true nature of the relationship of two males—one white and the other black—played out before the eyes of a third male who is, either by age or temperament, an innocent, is the basic structure of that most trenchant American parable of white-black relations, Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.”5 Recall that emblematic scene in which the great American naif, Amasa Delano, witnesses the black Babo’s ministrations to his captain, Benito Cereno, as he shaves him with a straight razor.

  Setting down his basin, the negro searched among the razors, as for the sharpest, and having found it, gave it an additional edge by expertly strapping it on the firm, smooth, oily skin of his open palm; he then made a gesture as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard’s lank neck. Not unaffected by the close sight of the gleaming steel, Don Benito nervously shuddered; his usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro’s body.6

  Moments later, Captain Delano notices that Benito Cereno is not completely in control of his emotions.

  Here an involuntary expression came over the Spaniard, similar to that just before on the deck, and whether it was the start he gave, or a sudden gawky roll of the hull in the calm, or a momentary unsteadiness of the servant’s hand, however it was, just then the razor drew blood, spots of which stained the creamy lather under the throat: immediately the black barber drew back his steel, and, remaining in his professional attitude, back to Captain Delano, and face to Don Benito, held up the trickling razor, saying, with a sort of half humorous sorrow, “See, master—you shook so—here’s Babo’s first blood.” (39)

  (Bugs, Mr. Francis’ friend, it will be recalled, was also a “barber” of sorts, having gone to prison for “cuttin’ a man,” that is to say, for drawing blood.) Only later does the good Captain Delano discover what the reader already knows: that the razor in Babo’s hand is a weapon, used in that situation to intimidate the imprisoned captain. In short, the relationship between the captain and his slave Babo is just the opposite of what it appears to be to the American innocent, who sees it even as Melville’s narrator does, even as is the relationship of Bugs to Ad—the expected relationship of black to white in America in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, in which the white dominates.

  Sometimes the negro gave his master his arm, or took his handkerchief out of his pocket for him; performing these and similar offices with that affectionate zeal which transmutes into something filial or fraternal acts in themselves but menial; and which has gained for the negro the repute of making the most pleasing body-servant in the world; one, too, whom a master need be on no stiffly superior terms with, but may treat with a familiar trust; less a servant than a devoted companion. (7)

  Indeed, even if it can not be said that “Benito Cereno” displays the theme of male sexuality as directly and to the extent that some of Melville’s other texts do, there is still something of the sort hinted at in this story of sailors long at sea. Actually, it might well be that the apparent relationship of the young black Babo to his master Benito Cereno, if not the true relationship, owes as much to the traditional lore about sailors at sea as it does to the prevailing power relationships on the typical slaver. It would not be wise to make too much of this or to try to explicate the matter in fulsome detail. But that something of Melville’s familiar theme of male sexuality—sometimes between a black and a white—characterizes Hemingway’s story seems to me to be totally admissible.

  In conclusion let me return to Hemingway’s narration at the point just after Bugs has assured himself that he has not hurt his friend, Mr. Francis, by once again striking him across the base of the skull. “‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I’m sorry, Mr. Adams.’ ‘It’s all right’”(75). Of course, the reader already knows, as Nick is just beginning to discover that there is something to worry about. That things are not all right. Then Nick looks down, sees the
blackjack and picks it up. “It had a flexible handle and was limber in his hand,” he notices. “Worn black leather with a handkerchief wrapped around the heavy end. ‘That’s a whalebone handle,’ the negro smiled. They don’t make them any more’” (75–76).

  That smile, I would venture, is Melvillean. It is the smile of a black who, too, would be seen as “less a servant than a devoted companion.”

  Preparing for the End: Hemingway’s Revisions of “A Canary for One”

  Scott Donaldson

  Old lady: And is that all of the story? Is there not to be what we called in my youth a wow at the end?

  Ah, Madame, it is years since I added the wow to the end of the story.—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)

  The trouble with “A Canary for One,” for many readers,1 is that it has a surprise ending, and while surprise endings may be all right for O. Henry, they seem all wrong for Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, if Hemingway ever wrote a story with a “wow” at the end, it is this poignant tale of a broken marriage whose final one-sentence paragraph, “We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences,” strikes with the force of a revelation. Yet if one rereads the story immediately, as Julian Smith has suggested,2 he will begin to see the groundwork the author has laid for this revelation. Furthermore, now that Hemingway’s working manuscripts are available for inspection, it is possible to demonstrate in some detail what he did during textual revisions to cushion the shock of his finish.