New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Perhaps Stein also suggested to Hemingway that he try for a kind of autobiographical realism in his writing; and the cantos (viii–xi) that Pound was then working on include not only that “factive personality,” Sigismundo Malatesta, but also fragments of speeches and of a letter once stolen from Malatesta’s mail. If Hemingway were writing from life, then it may be fruitful to consider the background, because both “Out of Season” and “Cat in the Rain”—for which he had taken notes shortly before writing “Out of Season”—seem to a great extent to be autobiographical stories; they both seem painterly arrangements, so to speak, of current experiences in Hemingway’s life.

  After spending Christmas and the early part of the following year (1923) in Chamby, Switzerland, Hemingway and his wife went to Rapallo, Italy, to visit Pound and Mike Strater.7 Again, in Rapallo Hemingway made notes for what was later to be “Cat in the Rain.” And the story seems close to life. For instance, Strater was then painting seascapes, and in the story’s opening paragraph we hear about painters working in Rapallo. And the short, blunt sentences of most of the opening paragraph seem comparable to the rough, textured brush strokes of a Cézanne painting. (Stein had made attempts to model fiction on modern painting, by the way, and Hemingway told her that in “Big Two-Hearted River” that he was trying to do the country like Cézanne.)8 The story itself has a painterly quality. “Cat in the Rain” is largely a matter of composition or arrangement, balance and repetition: a trip down and up the stairs, the story ending as it begins, two cats, two pairs of characters, etc. Physical posture is also important: we have six vertical figures (if we include the statue of the soldier on the war memorial) and a seventh figure reclining, the young husband. Also, in Rapallo Hemingway got his first look at T. S. Eliot’s new poem, “The Waste Land,” and we find in “Cat in the Rain” a restless, unhappy lady sitting at her mirror, as we do in the “Game of Chess” section of Eliot’s poem. In fact, the entire story seems to have a wasteland mood and theme.9 Carlos Baker says that Hemingway saw two cats playing on a green table in the hotel garden and wrote a poem about them which mocked Eliot’s poem and that the cats and table get into “Cat in the Rain.” The tall hotel owner seems drawn from life—he’s in the background of “Out of Season,” Hemingway told Fitzgerald. Hemingway also told Fitzgerald that the young man in “Cat in the Rain” was a “Harvard kid” that he had met at a conference the year before in Genoa—that is, the young husband (except for the college degree) in the story is like Hemingway, a newspaper correspondent.10

  From Rapallo Hemingway and his wife went with the Pounds on a walking tour of Piombino and Orbetello, where Malatesta (again, Pound was then working on the Malatesta cantos) had defeated Alphonse of Aragon in 1448. Hemingway showed Pound how Malatesta probably had fought there. And no doubt Pound filled him in on this remarkable Italian Renaissance figure, a soldier and patron of the arts.

  Then Hemingway and his wife went to Cortina. And there, as he said, after an unproductive day of fishing, he came in and quickly wrote “Out of Season,” which was “an almost literal transcription of what happened.” Like “Cat in the Rain,” it too is drawn from life (with the likely exception of the suicide).

  And “Out of Season” is, we notice, a story much like “Cat in the Rain.” In both stories we have a young couple not communicating very well (a lack of communication and mixed signals is general in both stories). Each story presents an unsuccessful quest, for fish, for a cat. Each story has, in addition to the young couple, an old man (the fishing guide in one, the hotel owner in the other) and a second girl (the girl at the Concordia who serves the marsalas and the maid with the umbrella). “Cat in the Rain” ends with the hotel owner sending a cat up to the young couple’s room; “Out of Season” ends with the young man about to leave word with the “same” hotel owner. It rains in one story and sprinkles in the other. Both stories take place on holiday at an “out of season” place.11 They both seem “Waste Land” stories (Peduzzi is a kind of aging, unsuccessful fisher king, a digger of frozen manure), with the hint of World War I hovering in the background (the war memorial, Peduzzi’s claim of having been a soldier and his military jacket). Also, the “young gentleman”—perhaps he too is a Harvard grad—of “Out of Season” may be a newspaper correspondent, like the young man of “Cat in the Rain” (the Harvard man Hemingway had met at the Genoa conference): he thinks about Max Beerbohm drinking Marsala, a fact that Hemingway had picked up at the Genoa conference a year before. In fact it may be the same young man (and young couple) in both stories, and the same quarrel being carried on. The similarity of the two stories again suggests that Hemingway was writing from life.

  And if both these stories are taken from the writer’s life, then Hemingway’s visit to Piombino (which came between his stays in Rapallo and Cortina) and perhaps the example of Malatesta may have some interpretive bearing on “Out of Season.”

  Malatesta, one-time captain of Venice, condottiere (not unlike the modern Arditi young Hemingway so admired), lover, and well-known patron of the arts, may have fired Hemingway’s imagination; indeed, he is a “romantic” and finally defeated figure somewhat like General Ney, another Hemingway hero.12 Perhaps Hemingway associated Peduzzi with Malatesta. Peduzzi, a former soldier, is now, like Malatesta, a man who has seen the final ruin of all his hopes; he is a man at the end of his luck, humiliated at the end of his life. (Hemingway’s penchant for silently evoking the reader’s pity also implies that the story is essentially “about” Peduzzi, not the young man and wife.)

  More important I think is the word “Piombino.” The word means plummet, plumb line.13 Perhaps lead, piombo, was got from the earth at Piombino. Be that as it may, landscape was always significant to Hemingway, in and out of his fiction; it’s easy to imagine him asking the learned Pound the meaning of “piombino” and “piombo” and getting in reply a long list of meanings (some of which are given below). As it turns out, the word piombo is associated not only with Malatesta (and the terrain of his battle) but with old Peduzzi too.

  As “cat” (and “kitty”) is repeated often in “Cat in the Rain,” so toward the end of “Out of Season” “piombo” (and “lead”) is used in rapid repetition: it appears nine times in less than half a page. It is likely that this repetition means something in addition to Peduzzi’s disappointment and excitement.

  The word has various meanings that may have some relation to the story: piombare nella miseria means to sink into poverty; a piombone is a lazy man; a piombonatore is a cesspool emptier (Peduzzi spades frozen manure); cadere di piombonatore means to fall suddenly, violently; piombo is a dressmaking term meaning to hang or fall; i Piombi (the Leads) is a prison in the Doges’ palace in Venice (the young wife mentions jail); piombo can mean both bullet and kingfisher.

  In the story, of course, it means the lead used to hang at the end of a fishing line (a small sinker). And it seems likely that the repetition of the word—like a splash of red paint on a gray canvas or a Stein-like repetition that calls for readerly attention—implies the hanging: Peduzzi (“ped” may imply “at the foot of”) hanging from a rope, as a lead sinker hangs from the end of a fishing line.

  Also, just before this repetition of the word “piombo,” the young wife mentions “the game police,” and the young man fears that a gamekeeper or a “posse” (a hanging posse?) of citizens may suddenly come after them. We hear about a high campanile (which would have a rope hanging from the bell) seen over the edge of a hill. We even get a sudden close-up shot of Peduzzi’s neck (after he finds that they have no piombo): “The gray hairs in the folds of his neck oscillated as he drank.” Seven lines later come the words “stretched out.” Perhaps we should also notice that at the story’s beginning Peduzzi is twice called “mysterious.”14 “Mystery” is a word Hemingway sometimes associated with his omission theory.

  So it’s a matter of words: “mysterious,” “posse,” “neck,” “stretched out,” and the suddenly and oft repeated “piombo,” a weight to hang at
the end of a line.

  Apparently this is why Hemingway thought that the story didn’t need the hanging (in the story). He thought it well enough implied that the “quite drunk and very desperate” and humiliated old man, whose mood quickly goes down, then up, and then down again near the story’s end (and down to rock bottom later when he is fired) hangs himself.

  And the story’s final words (“I will leave word with the padrone at the hotel office,” the young gentleman tells Peduzzi), words that lead to the suicide, give us an ironic ending, for the word left with the hotel owner has quite a different effect than the young gentleman imagines—as the cat sent up to the room by the “same” hotel owner in “Cat in the Rain” has a different effect than he supposed it would.15

  Perversion and the Writer in “The Sea Change”

  Robert E. Fleming

  Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sea Change,” first published in 1931, has been one of his least popular stories among critics. Carlos Baker accorded only half a paragraph to the story in The Writer as Artist and referred to it in Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story as a “curious story, a lesser twin to ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’”1 While Philip Young made several perceptive points in his book-length study of Hemingway, among them discussions of the two literary allusions in the story, he did so primarily in footnotes, as if “The Sea Change” did not merit extensive treatment.2 But “The Sea Change” is considerably more important in the Hemingway canon than has heretofore been recognized. A coherent reading of the story requires the correct interpretation of the two literary allusions; an understanding of the interaction, even tension, between the allusions makes it clear that Phil, the male protagonist of “The Sea Change,” is a writer and that his perversion is more degrading than the lesbian tendencies of his former lover. Phil wants her to come back and tell him “all about” her sexual experiences not just to satisfy his morbid curiosity but to furnish the material he needs for his writing. Hemingway is dealing with meanings of “perversion” in a way that recalls a key idea of Hawthorne: “The Unpardonable Sin might consist in a want of love and reverence for the Human Soul; in consequence of which, the investigator pried into its dark depths, not with a hope or purpose of making it better, but from a cold philosophical curiosity,—content that it should be wicked in what ever kind or degree, and only desiring to study it out. Would not this, in other words, be the separation of the intellect from the heart?”3

  Several prevalent misreadings of “The Sea Change” arise from critics’ emphasis of the passage Phil attempts to quote from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man: it reads

  “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

  As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;

  Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

  We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

  But where th’ Extreme of Vice, was ne’er agreed.4

  Following Philip Young’s lead, Joseph DeFalco centers his interpretation on this passage, arguing that Phil is in effect stating his willingness to embrace the vice that he has previously hated. DeFalco suggests that the relationship between Phil and the young woman “has been unrecognized vice,”5 based on her remarks to Phil: “‘We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve known that. You’ve used it well enough.’”6 DeFalco takes this statement to mean that “the woman has appealed to [Phil] on the grounds that he too has perverse tendencies.”7 However, if Phil is a writer, as suggested by other elements in the story, her comment makes much more sense: He has used “all sorts of things” in human nature to enrich his writing.

  But the sexual motif has found continued favor with critics. J. F. Kobler is willing to go further along DeFalco’s line of reasoning to state that Hemingway is sympathetic to homosexuality in the story. The change that takes place in Phil during the course of the discussion seems to Kobler to be the result of capitulation to homosexual tendencies in himself: “There can be no question that he is moving toward a homosexual affair. He is about to embrace that which he earlier categorized as a vice.”8 Yet even Kobler finds it hard to believe that his single experience with lesbianism should have unleashed homosexual tendencies in Phil. Sheldon Grebstein seems on far safer ground when he observes that the ending of the story “implies a general perversion of character, a deduction supported by the story’s conclusion which hints at the man’s degradation. By permitting the girl’s adventure, he is more culpable than she in living it.”9

  That homosexuality should be viewed not as Phil’s own vice but as an effective metaphor for a writer’s perverse willingness to use others for the sake of his art is suggested in an alternate ending for the story Hemingway discarded in favor of the existing conclusion. Among the manuscript versions of the story is a fragment in which Phil moves to the bar after his female companion has left the cafe; in view of his own recent conversion, Phil asks the bartender for the kind of drink that a “punk” might order.10 As in the beginning of “The Light of the World,” Hemingway uses the slang term “punk” to mean homosexual. This discarded ending might seem to support Kobler’s contention that Phil has indeed been converted to homosexuality, and it is probably for that very reason that Hemingway omitted it; another explicit link between Phil and homosexuality might mislead the reader into taking literally an allusion intended to be a metaphor for what Phil has discovered himself to be, an exemplar of the “Extreme of Vice.” Thus, Hemingway does not so much condone the lesbian affair of the woman as imply that the man’s vice is a worse evil; the ending he chose emphasizes Phil’s feelings of guilt rather than his sin. The specific nature of that sin is most clearly suggested by the title.

  The “sea change” of the title, as Philip Young pointed out so long ago, alludes to “Ariel’s Song” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.11

  The sea change of “Ariel’s Song” is a transformation of decaying human materials into bright coral and rich pearls. Surely if Phil is undergoing a change from heterosexual to homosexual, Hemingway could have used such a title only to underscore the most bitter irony, for his attitude toward homosexuality is, from first to last, anything but understanding. Even Kobler briefly notes Jake Barnes’ attitude toward the male homosexuals who are with Brett Ashley when she makes her first appearance in The Sun Also Rises. Jake says, “somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.”12 Other unsympathetic depictions of homosexuals appear in “A Simple Enquiry” (1927), Death in the Afternoon (1932), “The Mother of a Queen” (1933), and A Moveable Feast (1964). It seems unlikely that a writer who otherwise presents such a monolithic viewpoint should alter it in one short story.

  Since the change from heterosexual to homosexual is unlikely to be considered positively, and since the title is unlikely to be applied only with such distorted irony, Hemingway must mean that something “rich and strange,” something of value, was to grow from the perversion of Phil’s former lover as well as from the ruins of their blighted relationship. The explanation of how this change is possible is not readily apparent in the text of the story; the key to the connection between the title and Phil’s ultimate recognition of his own perversion is, in fact, “the thing left out” of the story in accordance with Hemingway’s theory of constructing his stories on what he termed “the principle of the iceberg.”13 The importance of the omission was emphasized by Hemingway himself in an essay written in 1959: “In a story called ‘A Sea Change,’ [sic] everything is left out. . . . I knew the story too too well. . . . So I left the story out. But it is all there. It is not visible but it is there.”14 The omission that provides a logical connection between the title of the story and its ending—as well as explai
ns the puzzling details—is Phil’s occupation.

  Identifying Phil as a writer of fiction causes the details of the story to fall into place. First of all, if Phil is a writer, “Ariel’s Song” reads perfectly as a description of the creative process of transforming life or reality into something more enduring, more beautiful—art. An author takes the materials of life, which he may obtain through a sort of heartless observation of fellow human beings and even of himself, and transmutes them, if he is lucky, into something that is indeed “rich and strange.” Morley Callaghan reports that Hemingway told him during their apprenticeship on the Toronto Star, “even if your father is dying and you are there at his side and heartbroken you have to be noting every little thing going on, no matter how much it hurts”; at about this same time, Hemingway also told Callaghan, “a writer is like a priest. He has to have the same feeling about his work.”15

  A second reason why it is logical to assume that Phil is a writer is that Hemingway so frequently uses writers as characters in his fiction, which contains a whole gallery of authors treated rather unsympathetically. In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes is an unpretentious journalist who is contrasted with writers such as Robert Prentiss, Braddocks (Cohn’s “literary friend”), and Robert Cohn himself, who maybe capable of using his “affair with a lady of title” in some future book.l6 Hubert Elliot writes about a life he is too timid to experience in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” and the ruined writer Harry, of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” has made a living by prostituting his own vitality, first for readers and then for a succession of wealthy wives. Mr. Frazer of “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” is an ineffectual observer who is contrasted with the Mexican gambler who lives by a code, as the phrase-maker apparently cannot. Although there are some positive examples of writers as well, from Bill Gorton of The Sun Also Rises to Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway more often than not depicts authors unfavorably or at least ambiguously.