New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Hemingway recognized that it was possible for the writer to go even further in his abandonment of his humanity in favor of art if he manipulated other people so that he could use them as sources for his fiction. Richard Gordon of To Have and Have Not is such a writer. In a lengthy argument with Gordon, his wife Helen suggests that his sexual affair with the wealthy and exotic Helene Bradley is motivated by his curiosity: basically he is searching for new material. The ultimate insult that Helen can think of in her fight with Gordon is simply, “you writer.”17 Grebstein is correct when he asserts that Phil is “more culpable” than the woman in “The Sea Change” because Phil is motivated not by emotional attachment or something within his own sexual nature that he cannot resist but by a cool and detached intellectual certainty that he has more to gain if he lets his mistress go than if he convinces her to give up her lover and stay with him. Phil is overcome by the Faustian desire to barter his personal and human relationship with the woman in exchange for the chance to use her possibly tragic experience as material for his fiction. Little wonder that his voice changes to such a degree that he cannot recognize it as his own when he sends her away; he is aware of the depth to which he has fallen, the temptation to which he has succumbed, by sacrificing the relationship they share for his art. Underscoring his self-realization and the internal change which has taken place, Hemingway states that Phil “was not the same-looking man as he had been before he had told her to go” (400–401) and Phil says to the barman, “‘I’m a different man James. . . . You see in me quite a different man’” (401). Like Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth, Phil feels that his external appearance should reflect his inner corruption. While Phil feels perverted and dirty and comments that “‘vice . . . is a very strange thing,’” the barman, in a characteristic touch of Hemingway irony, sees only externals and assures him he looks “‘very well’” (401).

  Both literary allusions thus have a logical organic relationship to the story when the reader realizes that Phil is a writer. In fact the allusions work together, producing a tension that reflects the writer’s dilemma. Phil’s desire to embalm his mistress as a character in a literary work of art becomes so strong that his roles as man and lover are secondary to his role as an artist; in spite of his realization of what he is doing, at the end of the story he embraces the “monster of Vice,” perhaps even the “Extreme of Vice.” He has been seduced by the possibility that the product of the writer’s unprincipled violation of confidence can be something as “rich and strange” as the pearls and coral of Shakespeare’s own somewhat macabre sea change. The negative aspects of Pope’s words and the positive connotations of Shakespeare’s provide symbolic poles for the conflict and the nature of the artist. Both allusions are implicit in the words of Phil’s mistress: “‘We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve known that. You’ve used it well enough’” (400).

  Like Hawthorne characters such as Ethan Brand and Dr. Rappaccini, Phil is risking his integrity to achieve something he believes in totally. The story is open-ended: the reader cannot know whether the creative work of art will justify Phil’s sacrifice, whether Phil the human being will survive the ruthlessness of Phil the artist. But the implication of the title, with its suggestion of a miraculous transformation of corrupt materials, may be indicative of Hemingway’s own point of view on the nature of art and the function of the artist. Aside from possible autobiographical implications, ‘The Sea Change,” read as a writer’s moment of self-recognition, at the very least offers yet another aspect of Hemingway’s exploration of the writer and the demands of his art.

  Coming of Age in Hortons Bay: Hemingway’s “Up in Michigan”

  Alice Hall Petry

  In sharp contrast to the pantheon of Ernest Hemingway’s “bitch goddesses”—those women, tough of mind, body, and spirit, who compromise or destroy the lives of those around them—there exists a small company of female characters of a more tender sort: Catherine Barkley of A Farewell to Arms, Maria of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the patient and thoughtful Helen of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But perhaps Hemingway’s most touching portrait of a female character appears in one of his earliest tales: she is Liz Coates of “Up in Michigan,” written in December 1921, and printed in Paris in Three Stories and Ten Poems during the summer of 1923. What remarkably little critical attention “Up in Michigan” has received has tended to be of an oddly tangential nature. Historically, it is noted for being one of the few survivors of the infamous “lost suitcase” disaster of December 1922. Stylistically, it has usually been cited for its indebtedness to Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein,1 rather than for its intrinsic merits. But “Up in Michigan” is more carefully wrought than the rather pejorative label of “apprentice work” might lead one to believe. The primary sources of the story’s excellence are Hemingway’s sympathetic etching of Liz, the gentle, ingenuous kitchen maid whose sexual initiation he so graphically records, and his powerful depiction of the glaring disparity between male and female attitudes toward love and sex.

  Unusually for Hemingway, the story is told essentially from Liz’s point of view rather than from that of the main male character, Jim Gilmore. Although this is Liz’s story, it begins—surprisingly but appropriately—with a description not of Liz but of Jim, the object of her infatuation and the agent of her downfall: “Jim Gilmore came to Hortons Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Horton. Jim was short and dark with big mustaches and big hands. He was a good horseshoer and did not look much like a blacksmith even with his leather apron on. He lived upstairs above the blacksmith shop and took his meals at DJ. Smith’s” (SS 81).2 The description deals entirely with simple facts of the sort which anyone in Hortons Bay might know about Jim, plus elements of his physical appearance. In short, all that is revealed about Jim are externals which tell absolutely nothing about Jim’s personality, values, or intelligence, those comparative abstractions upon which love, in the mature sense of the word, is to be based. What little more that we learn of Jim in the course of the story—that he reads the area newspapers, likes to fish and hunt, and drinks whiskey—still are external elements which do not flesh Jim into a man. By virtue of the paucity of information about Jim, then, Hemingway conveys the fact that we have no sense of Jim’s being worthy of the love of Liz or of anyone else, for that matter. In E. M. Forster’s phraseology, Jim is a “flat” character, and an entirely physical one at that.

  But it is precisely her limited and superficial knowledge of a man which would tend to generate infatuation in an inexperienced young girl, and in fact, in a passage redolent of the technique of Gertrude Stein in Three Lives and The Making of Americans,3 we learn that Liz Coates’ interest in Jim is indeed based upon such limited knowledge:

  Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his mustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were when he smiled. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith. She liked it how much D.J. Smith and Mrs. Smith liked Jim. One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny. (81)

  The compact little catalog nicely conveys the flimsy basis of Liz’s infatuation. Beginning with the general remark that “Liz liked Jim very much,” Hemingway elaborates the qualities which she finds so intriguing, often using the nongrammatical syntax associated with “puppy love”: “She liked it about his mustache.” Further, as Sheldon Norman Grebstein points out, the repetition of “She liked” conveys the obsessive nature of her passion,4 while at the same time suggesting the noncommittal quality of her interest: she “liked” aspects of him, but there is no indication at this stage that she feels her interest would, should, or even could develop into anything more than a rather distant infatuation. It is also significant that at this point in her life Liz still
looks to others for justification of her feelings: her liking Jim is condoned, as it were, by the approval of him by the people for whom she works (and whom she evidently perceives as parental figures), the Smiths. As the catalog draws to a close, we learn that Liz “feel[s] funny” about liking the hair on Jim’s arms and the whiteness of his upper arms—a part of his body not usually exposed. Hemingway is clearly indicating that her interest in Jim has a strong sexual dimension, but that she is not conscious of this; and, being unable to grasp the concept of sexual attraction, Liz also cannot articulate it: she “felt funny.”

  The rather pathetic way in which Liz attempts to deal with her erotic awakening is made comprehensible by the information Hemingway provides about her. The reader has it on good authority from Mrs. Smith, “who was a very large clean woman,” that Liz was “the neatest girl she’d ever seen” (81). Liz “always wore clean gingham aprons,” and even Jim notices that “her hair was always neat behind” (81). The emphasis on Liz’s cleanliness and neatness serves, of course, to intensify the crudity of her seduction, but it also conveys the purity, the noncarnal nature of her impulses toward Jim. She is sufficiently young and inexperienced to perceive men in an entirely romanticized light—a tendency strikingly conveyed by her favorite preseduction activity: “From Smith’s back door Liz could see ore barges way out in the lake going toward Boyne City. When she looked at them they didn’t seem to be moving at all but if she went in and dried some more dishes and then came out again they would be out of sight beyond the point” (82). As the dish-drying suggests, Liz leads a decidedly prosaic life, but it is overlaid by a yearning for something beyond the village of Hortons Bay. The ore barges appeal to her inarticulate romantic nature, but of course they are as inappropriate a repository of her dreams as is Jim, who, by virtue of his occupation, is readily associated with ores. The ore barges also graphically suggest both the fact that she is maturing (like the movement of the barges, her sexual development is a continually on-going process which she barely perceives) and that her horizons are decidedly limited; and in fact Hortons Bay is as much a character in the story as is the heath in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. The village consists of “only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix,” plus a general store, a post office “with a high false front and maybe a wagon hitched out in front,” a Methodist church, the township school, and Jim’s blacksmith shop (81–82). Hemingway’s quick sketch of tiny Hortons Bay does much to explain Liz’s ignorance of male/female relationships—an ignorance so extensive that she does not recognize sexual urges when she feels them. In contrast, Jim comes “from Canada” (81), and by not mentioning a specific Canadian town, Hemingway imbues him with experience (after all, he at least has traveled) and a superficially attractive aura (technically he is a foreigner). The description of Hortons Bay also conveys the sad fact that Liz’s seduction probably will become known in such a small town, an insult to be endured with her injury.

  Part of what makes her seduction so insulting is that it literally is not what she had in mind. Her sexual urges, neither examined nor articulated, rather pathetically assume a domestic cast. As Jim and some friends prepare to hunt deer in the fall, Liz and Mrs. Smith cook food for them for four days, and Liz “wanted to make something special for Jim to take” (82). She does not do so, however—not because Mrs. Smith would disapprove, but because “Liz was afraid” (82). Both the reader and the effaced narrator share knowledge to which Liz is not privy: that what she fears is her own sexual being. As that being becomes more insistent, Hemingway begins to striate his text with highly sexual situations, diction, and symbols. Consider Hemingway’s description of her reaction to Jim’s absence on his hunting trip: “She couldn’t sleep well from thinking about him but she discovered it was fun to think about him too. If she let herself go it was better” (82). Hemingway has provided what is, in effect, a bedroom scene, which contrasts stridently with her seduction on the warehouse dock. Even the diction is the sort usually applied to coitus: “If she let herself go. . . .” Not surprisingly, “the night before they were to come back she didn’t sleep at all, that is she didn’t think she slept because it was all mixed up in a dream about not sleeping and really not sleeping” (82–83). Sleeping—that most innocent and most sexual of activities, depending upon context—is mentioned four times in one sentence, and as such beautifully conveys that peculiar limbo of an innocent person experiencing erotic impulses. Similarly, the jumbled quality of the sentence readily suggests Liz’s emotional turmoil. Her confused emotions lead, understandably, to vague expectations: “Liz hadn’t known just what would happen when Jim got back [from the hunting trip] but she was sure it would be something. [But] Nothing had happened” (83). As a virtual self-fulfilling prophecy, “something” certainly does happen later that day: the seduction. In fine her sense that something “would happen” is accurate; but her lack of experience with sexual matters has precluded the development of a sense of sexual timing. That coitus is in the offing is clear from Hemingway’s insistently sexual adjectives and even (taken out of context) his adverbs. Jim has killed “a big buck. It was stiff and hard to lift out of the wagon” (83, my emphasis). Likewise blatantly sexual is the fact that Jim has shot “a beauty” of a deer (83): “to die” is, of course, a traditional euphemism for an orgasm and guns are phallic symbols; and indeed Jim is destined to kill something “beautiful” in Liz. Hemingway’s use of sexual diction and puns is so blatant that it seems clear that the very title of the story is an obscenity.5

  As the very terminology of the story becomes coarsely sexual, Jim himself rapidly loses even the physical attractiveness which Liz finds so fascinating, although, significantly, she evidently does not perceive the loss. Even though Hemingway notes that “the men washed up” before dinner at the Smiths’ the night they returned from the deer hunt, it is doubtful that Jim has bathed for days, and it is mentioned that “all the men had beards” (83). Moreover, Jim has been drinking whiskey, some of which has run down his shirt front (83). At this point, his essentially hedonistic character begins to emerge under the influence of alcohol: “Jim began to feel great. He loved the taste and the feel of whiskey. He was glad to be back to a comfortable bed and warm food and the shop” (84). Not surprising for a man whose very livelihood involves animals and brawn rather than humans and brains, Jim is totally oriented toward bodily comfort and pleasure; under the circumstances of inebriation, Jim would naturally regard coitus as the next element in his catalog of physical delights, and at this point he goes—eyes shining and hair rumpled (84)—to seduce the kitchen maid. That he lacks any personal interest in Liz is clearly conveyed. From the opening of the story we know that Jim “liked [Liz’s] face because it was so jolly but he never thought about her” (81); likewise, whereas Liz found herself thinking about him “all the time,” Jim “didn’t seem to notice her much” (82) until, of course, he decided to engage in sexual intercourse. In effect Jim perceives Liz in exclusively sexual terms whereas Liz, due to her innocence, is conscious only of a nonsexual, romanticized attraction to him. The disparity between his fundamental disinterest in her as a person and Liz’s romanticized obsession with his exterior is underscored by the fact that when he sought her out in the kitchen, she was waiting for him—but not because she expected a sexual encounter; rather, she had been hoping for a peek at him as he left after dinner “so she could take the way he looked up to bed with her” (84). This pathetic, jarring juxtaposition of the innocent and the erotic is further conveyed by her confused reaction to Jim’s fondling her breasts. She was “terribly frightened” but thought “‘He’s come to me finally. He’s really come’” (84). Given her innocence, her thoughts sound derived from a Prince Charming fairytale, and in fact it is doubtful that she comprehended what “it” was when “something clicked inside of her” and “she wanted it now” (84). The disparity between Jim’s and Liz’s sexual experience and attitudes toward one another renders the seduction scene all the more painful. J
im uses a traditional “make out” line—“‘Come on for a walk’” (84)—to invite her outside to fornicate, and apparently Liz takes him at his word, for she grabs her coat (perhaps as the result of an instinctive—albeit ineffectual—impulse to protect and cover herself) and willingly accompanies him to the warehouse. Significantly, the moon—symbol of Diana, the protectress of chastity—is not out that night, and the physical environment through which Jim and Liz move (ankle-deep sand, cold, darkness) is stellar distances from what the romantic Liz would have wished for her first encounter with a man. That she does not resist Jim is attributable to her sexual ignorance: “no one had ever touched her” (84); she “was very frightened and didn’t know how he was going to go about things” (85); but even so “she snuggled close to him” (85). Jim’s lack of interest in Liz as anything but a sexual object—a fact transparent to both him and the reader, but not to Liz—is suggested by his being reduced to a “big hand” which pays no attention to her protests (85). It is his comparative sexual experience which makes plausible his failure to recognize that her statements—“‘You mustn’t,’” “‘it isn’t right’” (85)—are not stock phrases comparable to his “‘come on for a walk,‘” but rather genuine expressions of fear and doubt. As Liz is effectively immobilized by what Carlos Baker aptly characterizes as the attraction-repulsion phenomenon of sex,6 Jim declares, “‘You know we got to’” (85); and in fact Liz was, in effect, destined to copulate with him, in view of both her ignorance, vulnerability, confusion, and awakening sexuality, as well as Jim’s comparative experience.