New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Up to now the story has been a straightforward tale of intrigue and love. We have learned that Enrique’s life is endangered, that he has enhanced physical senses, that a Negro is spying on him, that he has an alarming war wound, that Maria loves him, that her brother has been killed, and that Enrique believes all men are brothers: “Some are dead and others still live.” The information presented up to now is largely a survey of narrative essentials—who, what, where, when, why—set into motion; these are increasingly augmented by anguished speculation concerning the nature of war, the demands it makes upon the living, whether “war is worth it,” as Enrique claims it is. So far Hemingway has not directly stated a philosophical position; what the reader knows he must gather through nuance. However, Hemingway at last grounds the story on a position when he has Enrique respond to Maria’s troubled questioning:

  “There are no foreign countries, Maria, where people speak Spanish. Where you die does not matter, if you die for liberty. Anyway, the thing to do is to live and not to die.”

  “But think of who have died—away from here—and in failures.”

  “They did not go to die. They went to fight. The dying is an accident.”

  And a few lines later Enrique continues: “‘Some things we had to do were impossible. Many that looked impossible we did. But sometimes the people on your flank would not attack. . . . But in the end, it was not a failure.’”

  Enrique’s claim, a claim that directs the plot’s outcome, is that a life given in the defense of liberty is not without design. Though Maria’s brother and other men like him are the “flower of the party,” cut in bloom, they do not really die: nobody ever dies. That is why war is not a failure, why her brother’s death is not pointless. Maria does not answer him; a wind in the trees rises, “and it was cold on the porch.” The cold may be in Enrique’s heart as well, but he can summon sufficient compassion to put his arms around Maria, who has begun to cry. He tells her that they must “check all romanticism. . . . We must proceed so that we will never again fall into revolutionary adventurism.” Maria is not convinced. Breaking her silence, she accuses Enrique of talking like a book. “Your heart is a book,” she says further. To counter her accusation, to prove his humanity (she rejects the uncaged mockingbird as proof), Enrique invites Maria to touch his war wound. Its size and effect (“not out of any book”) cause her to scrap her antiwar beliefs and to accept Enrique’s proposition of a meaningful death realized by defending liberty. She asks to be forgiven. Enrique says that there is “nothing to forgive,” and they make love until real sirens, not a radio’s imitation, interrupt them.

  Enrique’s proposition, which Maria is persuaded to accept, seems set upon the story from outside. What Enrique says comes like a sampler motto suddenly introduced into the story. I do not question the veracity of his preachings, only the manner in which Hemingway presents them and their consequences upon the story. Despite the wound, the reader is not, I think, as convinced as Maria. The war wound, however horrendous and pathetic, does not invalidate her protests. It may even reinforce them. The wound provokes her compassion but certainly is not a cogent reply to her argument. “We must check all romanticism,” Enrique warns us, but Hemingway’s move is to offer a romantic cliché: the power of the ghastly wound to sway Maria and to pull Hemingway out of an artistic corner—namely, how to conclude the story. Because Maria accepts the death-in-war position, the plot, however well it forges a shape suitable for Cosmopolitan, nevertheless commits itself to an inevitability of clichéd form. Stale art possesses its own inevitability. Now that Maria has agreed with Enrique, the story predictably gives a demonstration of his thesis. The sirens come as no surprise to lovers or readers, nor do the actions that follow—the slaughter of Enrique, Maria’s capture and new confidence (her sentimental likening to Jeanne d’Arc), the Negro’s uneasiness. There are, of course, stories whose familiar order of elements gives pleasure, and some of Hemingway’s stories produce this pleasure—the deaths in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” to name works chronologically near “Nobody Ever Dies!” What is different with the latter fiction is the insistent propagandizing so blatantly introduced as part of the plot. An imposed credo, not an internal logic, dictates what will happen from the moment Enrique tells Maria that “Where you die does not matter, if you die for liberty.” We know now who will die next and why. The questions now become when will Maria and Enrique die and in what fashion? The reader must now accompany Hemingway through expected plot steps (the escape, the death, and the capture), symbolism (Jeanne d’Arc and Maria), and the mystical ending out of Hollywood (the nature of Maria’s “older magic”).

  This “internal logic” would ask for a different course of action, another ending. Though Hemingway apparently wants the reader to agree with Enrique, given the story’s symbolic ending, he bizarrely loads the case in the other direction. When Maria claims that Enrique’s heart is a book, her observation comes as no surprise because, with what has been told of Enrique, the claim is legitimate. We have no continuing evidence to the contrary. He is a man of physical sensitivity (his senses, the wound’s pain) and of some spiritual sensitivity (lets the bird free, is hurt by Maria), but likened to cool winds, and as he admits, he is without gaiety. A soldier becomes desensitized; that is in the nature of the job. Enrique does in practice talk like a book. Maria’s disillusion with war is met with bookish mottoes: one should discuss the living, not the dead. All men, dead or living, are brothers. “Where you die does not matter, if you die for liberty. The thing to do is live and not to die.”

  There is also a larger, subtler curiosity, another of the story’s elements that seems opposed to Enrique’s postulate. War is no longer absurd, a “failure,” as Maria says, when liberty is defended (so goes Enrique’s argument). It has aim. But we are told that a stupid decision has caused Enrique to be placed in a house that is not directly surveyed because of him; rather, it is watched for the weapons cache. “I should not be put in a house that is being watched for other reasons. It is very Cuban,’ Enrique says. Presumably the Negro watched the house before Enrique’s arrival. Cruelly, then, Enrique’s death comes as an accident, a joke which reinforces Maria’s claim that war is without meaning. It would be possible to read the story ironically as Hemingway’s adroit suggestion that war is indeed meaningless. Other Hemingway stories certainly would support an ironic reading. As the story stands, however, nothing happens to prove irony; in fact, the contrary belief, war’s meaningfulness, is shown by Enrique’s death, which war ennobles, and Maria is given self-understanding and confidence as she approaches her own death.

  The inconsistency is that the plot up to the philosophical revelation seems antiwar in tone. It “seems” so because nowhere is an avowed position declared contrarily; one learns by what the story suggests, that is, the stupidity which has placed Enrique in a watched house. Post-revelation (which Enrique has avowedly declared and which Hemingway then supports by the plotting), the story embraces a clichéd and illogical war stance. The writer’s imagination has thus failed to appreciate the implications of his material; Hemingway has grafted a convenient shape onto what he had brought to life in the story’s first half.

  The consequences show up first with the story’s grosser aspects, the imaginative failure that has allowed a prefabricated ending for the plot complete with hackneyed symbolism (Maria’s “face shining in the arc light”). They show up second in the story’s style and tone, a failure that has allowed style and tone to be ineptly wedded to the war philosophy. In short, style, tone, and philosophy have no organic connection.

  Hemingway’s stories routinely go about their business by working from nuances in style. His style has reason for being selectively tight-lipped: to provide possibilities for unspoken meanings that are partly the reader’s job to flesh out. Hemingway will drop hints, but much of what is meant falls on the reader’s shoulders. A story like “Nobody Ever Dies!” has the famous style as well as an out
spoken meaning, a meaning which seems self-contradictory and redundant. If the style is to cause the reader to fill in gaps, come to conclusions, then why has it been allowed to introduce naked, unequivocal meaning? Is it not the style’s duty to handle what the plot proposes, as though placed on a billboard? The story is clearly at artistic cross-purposes.

  One result of this corruption of style and tone is a swing toward parody, such as we find in a paragraph of passion that follows the lovers’ new mutual understanding:

  Then, in the dark on the bed, holding himself carefully, his eyes closed, their lips against each other, the happiness there with no pain, the being home suddenly there with no pain, the being alive returning and no pain, the comfort of being loved and still no pain; so there was a hollowness of loving, now no longer hollow, and the two sets of lips in the dark, pressing so that they were happily and kindly, darkly and warmly at home and without pain in the darkness, there came the siren cutting, suddenly, to rise like all the pain in the world. It was the real siren, not the one of the radio. It was not one siren. It was two. They were coming both ways up the street.

  The main sentence is the longest in the story. It falls into two parts. The first gathers Enrique’s sensations and tells us that this bout of lovemaking, the wound notwithstanding, delivers happiness; whereas the second tells us that before—with Maria?—there had been a “hollowness of loving.” That is, Enrique, a man with a cool heart, felt nothing before this moment. Now something has broken through, just as the wound broke through to Maria, and he can kiss her as she kisses him, “happily and kindly, darkly and warmly.” The sentence, with its accumulated impressions, its singsong and repetitive syntax, tries to suggest the lovers’ ecstasy. As their emotions wash over them, feeling washes through the sentence.

  We could break the sentence up as a poem to show this locomotion, as well as the characteristics of the language:

  the happiness there with no pain

  the being home suddenly there with no pain,

  the being alive returning and no pain

  there was a hollowness of loving,

  now no longer hollow

  and so on. Pet words skip through the sentence: no pain, no pain, no pain, without pain, like all the pain; being alive, being loved; hollowness, hollow; in the dark, in the dark. Some words are then joined, as in: without pain in the darkness. This flight of poetic prose is to be a correlative of their lovemaking. As the words rise into poetry, so do Enrique and Maria. The breathy, panting sentence, the story’s lone occasion of expansive prose, rather than gracefully apostrophizing these lovers, blasphemes them. Who can take them, lost in a froth of doggerel, seriously now? One can partly blame the sentence’s elements for the description’s defeat, too many repetitions, but the dialogue that prepares for the bliss has also been corrupted and thus gives the long sentence an unhappy, bathetic prelude that colors the reading of the sentence. Of the wound we are told:

  “Does it hurt always?”

  “Only when I am touched or jarred.”

  “Enrique, please forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive. But it is not nice that I cannot make love and I am sorry that I am not gay.”

  “And I will take care of you.”

  “No. I will take care of you. I do not mind this thing at all. Only the pain of touching or jarring. It does not bother me. Now we must work.”

  Enrique’s courage, far from earning our admiration, brings about giggles. He is too stoic, too blithe about his wound (“that grotesque scar from the wound the surgeon had pushed his rubber-gloved fist through in cleaning, which had run from one side of the small of his back through to the other”). His admission of lacking gaiety is funny for its stiff-upper-lip gawkiness, the humorless and somehow vaguely self-pitying delivery. These lovers seem to be in the process of translating from another language, of being cued from the wings as they speak their lines.

  My claim is not that the dialogue, word for word, is badly written. Following, for example, Maria’s entry into the house, it moves easily and with logic. What weakens the later dialogue is not Hemingway’s ability to record human speech as it is spoken, but the assembly of words and the task that it is asked to discharge. The use of words to service ideas taints their honesty. We cannot believe how the lovers talk because we cannot believe what they say. As soon as the dialogue rehearses bald philosophy, it begins to sound like parody. Style coupled with a premade, often incongruous set of ideas moves writing toward parody. A mock-up of Dr. Johnson’s sentences without direction may be entertaining but not parody. Join it with Marxist declarations or suppository advertising and the inclination for parody becomes irresistible.

  What we have with “Nobody Ever Dies!” is a queer entity whose parts fit slickly together to make a handbook’s schematic whole whose gears mesh; yet a whole that is disappointing and not true. The disastrous crippling may be that the story advances by formula and not the spontaneously selective inspiration that produced “Big Two-Hearted River.” Hemingway’s decision to push the story in the direction it follows is, as Baker says, to choose a sentimental ending, one that is easily located and snapped into place. The cool wind, the mockingbird, the Negro, the wound, the martyr’s death—have we not seen these elements before in other Hemingway? Placed at the disposal of mottoes, they carry no weight and could have been chosen from a parodist’s wicked catalog of what you need to do Hemingway. There may be a line which great writers occasionally, unintentionally, cross—a line which separates sublime from ludicrous, which divides original from parody. The slightest miscalculation can shove a writer, unawares, over the line. Beerbohm’s genius was to recognize where to place this marker, and then to sketch in, from the other side, his perverse and witty mirrors. “Nobody Ever Dies!” is the occasional example of Hemingway’s stumbling—the wobbling across the border into parody, so that the result, seemingly ordered as well as any other Hemingway story, nevertheless is a parodist’s naughty dream, a perverse mirror of the real thing.

  Hemingway’s “Out of Season”: The End of the Line

  William Adair

  In A Moveable Feast Hemingway said that the first story he wrote after “losing everything”—that is, after most of his story manuscripts had been stolen—was “Out of Season” and that the “real end” of the story (based on his new theory of omission) was that “the old man hanged himself” after the story’s conclusion.1 But the statement hasn’t met with universal belief; it’s been argued instead that Hemingway is creating a fictionalized version of his past.2 To some extent he probably was, but I want to suggest that he was telling the truth when he said that the real end, the omitted part, of the story was that the old fishing guide hanged himself.

  In a December 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, written almost two years after the completion of “Out of Season”—a story composed during a holiday in Cortina, Italy—Hemingway said,

  When I came in from the unproductive fishing trip I wrote that story right off on the typewriter without punctuation. I meant it to be a tragic [sic] about the drunk of the guide because I reported him to the hotel owner—the one who appears in Cat in the Rain—and he fired him and as that was the last job he had in town and he was quite drunk and very desperate, hanged himself in the stable. At that time I was writing the In Our Time chapters and I wanted to write a tragic story without violence. So I didn’t put in the hanging. Maybe that sounds silly. I didn’t think the story needed it.3

  It seems incredible of course that Hemingway wrote a story and that during the writing, or immediately afterward, his fishing guide of that afternoon hanged himself and, further, that this became what the story was “about.” But even if we assume that a hanging didn’t take place (then, and as a consequence of Hemingway’s complaint to the hotel owner), this isn’t enough to invalidate his statement that the Peduzzi of the story hangs himself or that the story is “about” Peduzzi and is an early attempt at the omission style of composition.

  Perhaps Hemingway
had heard a story about a village drunk losing his job and hanging himself. (Other of his short stories and many of his vignettes were based on stories heard.) Or he might have imagined the hanging after reporting the old man. So if he considered it part of the story—and I see no good reason to doubt that he did—then it’s something he must have known or imagined before writing the story, not something that happened then.

  Nor does Hemingway’s remark to Fitzgerald that the story doesn’t need the hanging suggest that it was a dramatic afterthought and not originally in the story. The comment implies instead that the hanging is something that can be omitted yet felt by the reader. (Indeed, we may think that a story like “A Canary for One” might have been better if its punch-line ending had been omitted. And if the war had been mentioned in “Big Two-Hearted River,” it would have reduced that story to a kind of clinical illustration of war trauma.) So it’s omitted—but it’s a rare reader who “feels” it.

  Also of interest is Hemingway’s comment to Fitzgerald that he was trying to write a tragic (he uses the word loosely) story without violence. Hemingway had written to Gertrude Stein about this time telling her that he was following her advice about writing and asking for more help.4 And it’s likely that she discouraged him from writing stories violent and shocking—pictures inaccrochable or unhangable, as we hear in A Moveable Feast (15). Also, Hemingway had recently been visiting Ezra Pound, and as a Pound critic puts it, Pound often “scolded that part of Hemingway that seemed eager for violence.”5 So that Hemingway was trying to write a tragic story with no violent, dramatic action in it—the marital tension and its omitted source hardly seems enough for a story, unless the omission was of something major—makes good sense.6