New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Verisimilitude was the effect Hemingway had been striving for, and achieving, since the early-twenties vignettes published as the inter-chapers in In Our Time, or perhaps even since the “Paris 1922” manuscript (Baker, Life Story, 119–20) or the Michigan “Crossroads” characters of 1919 (Griffin, 124–27). Whether the source was personal experience or inventive imagination, the intended artistic results were the same: actuality, presence, truth. And whether the story was “made up” or “really happened” was unimportant; the important effect was the appearance or “sound” of reality. Hemingway claimed, in fact, that “95 percent of The Sun Also was pure imagination,” a numerical analysis that will certainly amuse the historical or biographical reader of that notorious roman à clef. But Hemingway significantly modifies the sense of his claim: he continues, “I took real people in that one and I controlled what they did” (Letters, 400), colloquially but concisely defining his philosophy of composition. Although in virtually the same breath Hemingway says that “Wine of Wyoming” is one of the “absolutely” historical stories, historicity is not centrally important. The art of fiction, for Hemingway, was the creation or re-creation of experience, made so vivid and perceptible that the reader vicariously relived the event.

  This technique of invented or transmuted actuality finds its most widely recognized expression in Frederic Henry’s near-fatal wounding in the Italian trenches (A Farewell to Arms), Robert Jordan’s last moments in the Spanish forest (For Whom the Bell Tolls), or Santiago’s agony and endurance on the Gulf Stream (The Old Man and the Sea). The apparent tranquility of an afternoon with the Moncinis of Sheridan, Wyoming, differs in both subject and tone from those other dramatic moments of suffering and self-sacrifice, but the artistic goal is the same: to intensify representation into what Hemingway later enigmatically called “a fourth and fifth dimension” (Green Hills of Africa, 27).

  In “Wine of Wyoming,” the technique is applied to the domestic and business affairs of the Fontans—immigrants from the provinces of France—and their customers in the home-brewed beer and wine trade. The setting in the American West (which Hemingway was seeing for the first time in 1928)7 is mildly unusual but not exotic; the Fontans are fairly common folk, and the narrator is rather noncommittal. The ingredients seem far less promising as literary material than desperate outsiders of Paris or the Gulf or bullfighters or soldiers. Yet the episode at the Moncinis is unpromising material somewhat in the way that a solo fishing trip to the Fox River in Upper Michigan was unpromising. The story that resulted from that trip, a simple, systematic catalog of hiking, making camp, and catching fish, was “a story in which nothing happened” and was therefore “lacking in human interest,” according to the half-joking, half-serious 1925 opinion of Princeton University’s Dean Gauss and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Baker, Writer as Artist, 125). The story, of course, is “Big Two-Hearted River,” one of the most remarkable demonstrations of the relationship of surface and subtext in all of Hemingway’s writing and one of his best works of fiction.

  The primary narrative of “Wine of Wyoming,” the surface story, offers charm, local color, and a boyish delight in the minor crime of drinking illegal alcohol. Read only on this level, the story is a deft character sketch mainly of the talkative Mme Fontan who rattles on from incident to opinion to home truth in a non sequitur torrent of anglicized French. The humor falls short of hilarity, but it does justify Carlos Baker’s verdict that Hemingway has “unappreciated skills as a comic writer” (Writer as Artist, 141). But comedy is not Hemingway’s métier (though he does it with skill here and elsewhere), and a character sketch, however deft, is not the story’s only merit.

  The reviewers of Winner Take Nothing in 1933 disapproved of Hemingway’s “youthful Red Indian brutality” and demanded instead a “leap forward” or “triumphant advance” (Fadiman, 74–75). The few who diverted their attention from the volume’s tough, harsh “The Light of the World” or the ironic, parodic “A Natural History of the Dead” and were independent or original enough to appreciate “Wine of Wyoming” found in it what seemed the antithesis of Hemingway’s by then traditional approach. There is certainly the appearance of what Baker not inappropriately called “the championship of the normal and the natural which runs like a backbone through the substance of the tale he elects to tell” (Writer as Artist, 141). The Fontans are undeniably good and simple people trying to live a good and simple life in their new land. They make good beer and wine, and their illegal but ordinary business brings relaxation and pleasure to clients who value a good drink in good company. Nothing could be more “normal” than this. The generous, voluble Fontans in their cool and pleasant wine garden inhabit a world that seems completely different from the café of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

  But beneath the surface of the Fontans’ “simple . . . cleanliness and order” is a world surprisingly discordant and ungovernable. Their world fortunately lacks the horror of nada and the infinite despair held at bay only by order and light and warmth, but it is nonetheless a world where things go wrong, where hopes and wishes fail, and where calm order is always under threat.

  The opening episode is a thematic statement of the story’s tension between order and disorder, satisfaction and disappointment, completeness and incompleteness. The unnamed narrator is relaxing in the shade of the Fontans’ back porch, about to drink the cold beer that Mme Fontan has brought from the cellar. A car arrives, two men get out, and one abruptly demands, “Where’s Sam?” When Mme Fontan replies, “He ain’t here. He’s at the mines,” the visitor asks with equal abruptness, “You got some beer?” Mme Fontan retorts, “That’s a last bottle. All gone.” Protesting “You know me,” the man asks again for some beer, but Mme Fontan maintains, “Ain’t got any beer.” The men leave, one of them walking unsteadily. Mme Fontan solicitously tells the narrator that he can drink his beer, which he had placed out of sight on the floor, and explains her actions: “They’re drunk. That’s what makes the trouble” (SS, 450). Later she confides to the narrator a shocking, amazing incident: “Americans came here and they put whiskey in the beer . . . Et aussi une femme qui a vomis sur 1a table! Et après eile a vomis dans ses shoes” (460). Her husband remembers the beer-and-whiskey drinkers and their girlfriends, and he sums them up: “‘Cochon,’ he said delicately, hesitating to use such a strong word. ‘C’est un mot très fort, . . . mais vomir sur 1a table’—he shook his head sadly.” The narrator, understated until now, agrees: “That’s what they are—cochons. Salauds.” Some of the customers who drink at the Fontans’ may be “pigs” and “dirty bastards,” but others are a better class of clientele. Mme Fontan is at pains to make the point that “Il y a des gens très gentils, très sensibles, qui viennent aussi.” On one beer-drinker, an army officer, her husband agrees: “C’est un original . . . mais vraiment gentil. He’s a nice fella” (461).

  The friendly and agreeable Fontans, who provide good beer and wine and companionship in a puritanically “dry” country, can’t comprehend the eagerness of drinkers who mix moonshine whiskey in well-made beer and thus intentionally make themselves so drunk that they vomit on the table and on their own shoes. “My God,” says the incredulous Mme Fontan, “I don’t understand that!” (460). What she doesn’t understand is the drinkers’ enthusiasm for extreme sensations and their unwillingness or inability to appreciate the moderate sociableness of drinking a product that she and her husband are proud of.

  The Fontans are abused and insulted not only by their rougher customers but by the Volstead Act enforcers. Arrested and convicted three times for violation of the Prohibition law, M. Fontan has been imprisoned and fined seven hundred fifty-five dollars for the crime of making and selling good wine and beer, for what was legal back in Lens and St. Etienne is illegal in Sheridan. The money for the fines came from the husband’s work in the mines and the wife’s earnings by doing washing; wine at a dollar a liter and beer at ten cents a bottle produce profit more social than fiscal.

  The discussion of the ha
zards of their trade leads the Fontans into conversation with the narrator about the upcoming 1928 presidential election. Naturally, the Fontans favor Alfred E. Smith—“Schmidt,” they say—a Catholic who favored repeal of Prohibition.8 Yet the Fontans can not fully believe that Smith, a candidate for the leadership of the country, is a Catholic, and they accept the fact only on the authority of the narrator. “On dit que Schmidt est catholique,” M. Fontan says. Mme Fontan responds with telling uncertainty, “On dit, mais on ne sait jamais.” And later: “Je ne crois pas que Schmidt est catholique. Did he ever live in France?” (457). Their doubt is not merely political naivete or lack of factual information. It is something much deeper, an insight about America that is anything but naive: “En Amérique il ne faut pas être catholique. The Americans don’t like you to be catholique,” Mme Fontan says, adding by way of sharp illustration, “It’s like the dry law” (457). The problem with America, as the Fontans had earlier said about their first impression of their new country, is that “II y a trop de churches.” Too many churches, like too many books, “c’est une maladie” (456).

  The sickness of which the Fontans complain is intolerance, particularly, as Kenneth G. Johnston points out in an analysis of political commentary9 in “Wine of Wyoming,” intolerance for foreigners in America. The parallels between the Fontans’ disappointments and indignities and the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-alcohol prejudices against the Democratic presidential candidate are strong, as Johnston demonstrates in elaborating his thesis that the story is Hemingway’s criticism of the parochial, intolerant country he had come home to. In fact, the narrator himself claims to be Catholic (457), and his appreciation for a good drink is self-evident, traits that connect him with Smith and the Fontans. But when asked directly if Smith will be elected—as if he, a “real” American, despite his religion and his residence abroad, could foresee the future—the narrator answers simply “No” (458). The narrator’s monosyllabic wisdom, which indeed proved true, sets the prevailing tone of the story: failed hope, rejected optimism, alienation.

  The doomed Smith candidacy is not the only illustration of the Fontans’ problem. One of their sons is married to a lazy, two-hundred-twenty-five-pound wife, a native American “Indienne” who reads in bed all day, neither cooks nor works, and feeds him “beans en can,” yet “il est crazy pour eile” (451–52). The younger son Andre, a teenager “on the way to becoming Americanized” (Flora, 227), cadges a quarter for the movies but plans to pay the child’s fifteen-cent admission, not the full fee, thus saving a dime for himself.10 Andre also tries to take a rifle and go on a water-rat shooting expedition, but his parents forbid it, thinking that the boy and his friends “veulent shooter les uns les autres"; as his mother explains to the guest, “il est crazy pour 1e shooting” (456). And finally Fontan, trying to show his best hospitality to the appreciative narrator, finds himself locked out of his son’s house where the latest vintage is hidden. “Il est crazy pour 1e vin” (459), his wife says, but he suffers the embarrassment of not being a good host and the narrator is left without a taste of the wine of Wyoming—the wine that symbolically can’t be drunk, and ironically can’t even be got out of its secret hiding place, even though it can be seen through the window. Significantly, Fontan doesn’t have the key, and the neighbor’s key won’t turn the lock.

  The Fontans’ defeat is complete. Mme Fontan, who earlier had “looked like Mrs. Santa Claus, clean and rosy-faced and white-haired” (458), now lost “all the happiness from her face” (464), and Fontan, “incoherent and crushed . . . sat down in a corner with his head in his hands” (465). Sensing that they had overstayed their time and were intruding on the Fontans’ sad disgrace, the narrator and his companion leave, with a halfhearted promise to return two years later. Once away from the house, they realize that they “ought to have gone last night” (466), before the good times had turned bad. Wistfully, the companion says, “I hope they have a lot of good luck” (466). The narrator realistically responds, “They won’t . . . and Schmidt won’t be President either” (466).

  Driving out of Sheridan and away from the “ruined” (466) Fontans, the visitors admire the country, yet their thoughts return to their hosts:

  “It’s a fine country for 1a chasse, Fontan says.” “And when the chasse is gone?”

  “They’ll be dead then.”

  “The boy won’t.”

  “There’s nothing to prove he won’t be.”

  “We ought to have gone last night.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “We ought to have gone.” (467)

  On this note of pessimism and regret, the story about “cleanliness and order” ends.

  Though the story focuses on the Fontans and uses their misfortunes to express a mood of dissatisfaction with America, it also portrays a writer-narrator changing from a sympathetic friend who enjoys good wine to a pessimistic doubter who foresees a cold future in which the Fontans won’t have good luck and Al Smith won’t be elected president. What begins as a warmly comic character sketch ends with cool detachment. As Joseph M. Flora points out in an analysis of the story, its four distinct parts move progressively away from anecdotal description of the Fontans toward self-revelation by the nameless narrator himself. “Ultimately,” says Flora, “Hemingway puts the emphasis not on America, or the Fontans, but on the narrator” (234). The storyteller, who “is immediately established as ‘one of them’” (Flora, 224)—that is, he shares with the Fontans certain attitudes and values—has by the end of the story evaded his host’s invitation and made a promise that he probably won’t keep.

  By the time the narrator and his companion leave, the “exuberant humor of the work’s earlier sections” has become “the sadness of the concluding episode” (Grebstein, 67). The thematic focus and narrative point of view have shifted from an outward direction (the narrator describing the Fontans) to an inward reflection (the narrator revealing himself). “The story’s irony,” Sheldon Norman Grebstein says, “apprehended simultaneously by the narrator and the reader, is that a seemingly trivial decision (breaking a promise in a small social occasion) can cause irreparable damage to a fragile relationship and produce strong moral consequences” (64). In this sense the point of “Wine of Wyoming” is not—or not only—to demonstrate a theme similar to that of “Cross-Country Snow,” an expatriate’s unhappiness with his return to America. “Wine of Wyoming” may be “Hemingway’s international short story . . . his most Jamesian” because it juxtaposes the values of two cultures (Flora, 224), but even more importantly it reiterates an established Hemingway theme, the dominant theme of Winner Take Nothing: the ironic, if not tragic, outcome.

  If “Wine of Wyoming” is about the “sweet and generous natures” of its main characters the Fontans, as an early reviewer said, it is about sweetness and generosity undermined by failure and repaid in despair. And if it is about “cleanliness and order,” those traits are only a momentary stay against chaos, as they are in the far more famous “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” a story also from the early thirties, published under the same descriptive title Winner Take Nothing.

  “Wine of Wyoming” differs superficially from other, more typical stories of Hemingway from the period 1925–33, but structurally and aesthetically it is consistent with his work of that time. Missing from it are the characters and events that offended critics whose tastes were formed, evidently, in a gentler era, and who peevishly asked Hemingway to abandon his “consummate reporting of a highly masculine and often brutal world” (Kronenberger, 6) in favor of a new departure into a less melodramatic, less violent world. “Wine of Wyoming” is in fact less overtly violent and dramatic than, for example, “Indian Camp,” but like that early story, also set in an isolated American locale, “Wine” depends for its sense and force not on surface events but on a powerful undercurrent of unstated attitudes and unvoiced conclusions.

  Even the early reviewers of Winner Take Nothing knew that “Wine of Wyoming” was different, but they seemed not to know wh
y. If they praised it, they praised it perhaps for the wrong reasons: for the warmth of the Fontans, for the charm of local color, for the apparent absence of the author’s most provocative traits. Later, the topical allusions to a presidential election and cultural criticism of American life drew some attention. But the consistency of vision went unnoticed. Although in this story the means of expression differ somewhat from those of earlier work, the dominant tone continues Hemingway’s view of the postwar world: loss, alienation, regret, mortality. Even in the trivialities of life in Sheridan, Wyoming, the story reiterates the inevitability of suffering and destruction.

  Hemingway promised Perkins a “1st flight story,” and he was right. “Wine of Wyoming” exhibits all of the Hemingway structural and stylistic hallmarks—strength of characterization, lucidity of plot, realism of dialogue (even in Anglo-French)—and it confirms once again the central Hemingway credo that, as he said in 1929, while this story was evolving, “The world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially” (A Farewell to Arms, 249). “Wine of Wyoming” is not then an oddity to be set apart from the mainstream of Hemingway’s work. It is consistent with the art, the viewpoint, and the attitude of his best.

  IV

  An Overview of the Criticism

  A Partial Review: Critical Essays on the Short Stories, 1976–1989

  Paul Smith

  Any review of the criticism of Hemingway’s short stories written in the last thirteen years must be partial, if only because it doubled the number of critical studies in the preceding baker’s dozen. At times, of course, some of that criticism since 1975 has doubled the work done earlier simply by repeating it, and so this review will be partial in the second sense of limiting its consideration to that criticism which, to my mind, has advanced or reoriented the study of Hemingway’s stories.