A promising volume for the next decade.
Critical Articles
Winnowing out the articles since 1975 that have advanced criticism of the stories reveals that many of the best were those engaged in critical controversies over three crucial stories: “Big Two-Hearted River,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Nor is that surprising, for when good critics clash or even elbow one another, they usually have a firm critical stance, their arguments secure, and a keen eye for their worthiest opponent’s next move.
After reviewing the progress of the controversies over these three stories toward some momentary resolution—or their partisans’ exhaustion—I will survey, briefly, a miscellany of articles on stories that are perhaps less controversial or crucial, or seemed so until they elicited closer scrutiny from either traditional or contemporary critical disciplines.
“Big Two-Hearted River”
Most of the critical disagreements over “Big Two-Hearted River” may be traced back to Malcolm Cowley. He and Kenneth Lynn have argued for years over whether Nick is a veteran with a traumatic wound, as Hemingway proclaimed from the grave in A Moveable Feast, or a boy as badly wounded by family skirmishes. Lynn maintains that there is no overt reference to the war in the story, overlooking the story’s military imagery to discover other, as covert, allusions to Hemingway’s restive homelife (1987; in this collection).
But Cowley’s more telling remark was that many of Hemingway’s stories seemed like “nightmares at noonday,” and since then critics have divided on two major issues: first whether the terrain of the story is primarily inward or outward, passive and imagined or active and perceived; and second, whether the narrative is more a trying nightmare than a fulfilling dream. With the evidence of the dreamt streams in “Now I Lay Me,” some recent critics have claimed further that “the entire landscape of the story is a mental one” (Robert Gibb, 1979, 23), or that it is “essentially the same landscape [with] the same emotive and symbolic value” that is found in Hemingway’s work, from a 1922 Toronto Daily Star article to Across the River and into the Trees in 1950 (William Adair, 1977, 144). Some thirty-five years ago Philip Young did say that the story gives us both a world and a point of view, but he did not mean, as Gibb reads him, that the story gives us “a world as a point of view.”
As a rule, those critics more concerned with Nick’s character, his “inward terrain,” stress the concluding vision of the swamp and find Nick’s mental journey a fearful denial and a failure; while those more interested in the story’s narrative and the scenes of the day’s fishing find Nick’s decision not to fish the swamp a reasonable one and the trip to the river ending with some version of an achievement. This latter reading in part distinguishes the commentary on the story after 1975 from that before. These critics read the story, variously, as a culminating initiation predicted by Nick’s experience in ‘The Battler” (Frank Kyle, 1979), as a study of euphoria (Keith Carabine, 1982), even as a story patterned after a Romantic ode to joy (Howard Hannum, 1984). But, again, the most perceptive interpretation is Joseph Flora’s of Nick Adams as a young writer casting out for “the affirmation that an artist needs . . . to create work that will have a life beyond life” (1982, 175).
With the publication of the story’s original ending, titled “On Writing” in The Nick Adams Stories (1972), critics returned to Cézanne’s role as master to the apprentice writer and the analogies between the paintings Meyly Chin Hagemann identified in the rejected conclusion and this and other stories (1979). But, as Bernard Oldsey noted (1980, in Wagner 1987), it was precisely the example of Cezanne that persuaded Hemingway to reject the conclusion celebrating the master (1980). Whatever Hemingway learned from Cezanne, the evidence will always remain in the misty midregions of analogy. I still suspect that Hemingway knew that and in a repeated strategy portrayed himself at the feet of a master painter in order to deny his debt to other writers—even to literature itself—and it worked (1983).
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Of the two issues recently engaging critical commentary on “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” one, largely thematic, was favored until the mid-1970s and then was overshadowed by the second, largely textual. To that time almost all the criticism focused on whether the older waiter’s vision of nada entailed a desperate negation of meaning or a final but courageous affirmation in the face of chaos. Most critics took the latter view, and their position found persuasive support in Annette Benert’s nice perception that the older waiter was smart enough to “go one step beyond Beckett’s tramps,” to become “neither a hero nor a saint, but, to borrow from Camus, that more ambitious being, a man” (1973, 184, 187). Steven Hoffman concurred and advanced her argument with evidence drawn from the earliest of the Nick Adams stories to the latest set in Africa (1979; in this collection).
But by the later 1970s the controversy—for some instances, a polite term—over the attribution of the two waiters’ dialogue was about to become a critical field in itself. And deservedly so, for more than many specializations, it demanded of its candidates a familiarity with critical theory, biography, and textual studies, as well as a good share of common sense.
The story had been published in 1933 with the dialogue that attributes the statement that the old man’s “niece cut him down”—first to the older waiter who then attributes it to the younger one. No one seemed to notice that confusion for twenty-four years; arguments persisted for another twenty; and finally in 1977, Hans-Joachim Kann looked at the story’s surviving manuscript. Two years later Warren Bennett studied that manuscript in precise detail to conclude that the confusion originated in a series of revisions and was then preserved through two publications until Scribner’s, on the advice of some scholars, revised the dialogue in 1965.
But by then, a critical to-do: some critics called for the restoration of the original dialogue, some simply for the revisionists’ heads, and one discovered that Hemingway himself had told an inquisitive reader that the original dialogue seemed fine to him (George Monteiro, 1974).
For five years following Bennett’s 1979 article his major opponent was David Kerner. Kerner challenged his reading of the manuscript and argued that the convention of metronomic dialogue (alternating speakers indicated only by paragraphs) was countered by another long tradition of antimetronomic dialogue in Hemingway and others; and in two articles he compiled an anthology of examples (1979, 1985).
George H. Thomson, in an admirably conciliatory essay, tried to resolve the dispute, concluding that the original text was not corrupt, that the conversation may violate convention, and that, although “it requires some ingenuity of reading,” one can make sense of the 1933 dialogue (1983, 32–42). Kerner refused the overture with a reply in 1984, and Warren Bennett bided his time until 1990 with a long and persuasive counterstatement, that—is it too much to hope?—may settle the issue.
Although the controversy may finally rest on whether or not Hemingway nodded when he wrote and edited, it has raised more important biographical, critical, and textual issues than any other in the history of Hemingway criticism, and we are all indebted to those scholars who took a stand.
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
In 1980 William White compiled a “‘Macomber’ Bibliography” that included thirty-seven entries since 1975, and from 1980 on there have been some twenty more. As with “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” much of the critical interest in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” has arisen from a crucial ambiguity in the text. And that interest was largely inspired by two fine critics in a two-handed game that went on into the evening hours—Warren Beck (1955, 1975) and Mark Spilka (i960, 1976, 1984). Their initial articles, rejoinders, and later rebuttals were models of the best critical play, with most of the theoretical cards on the table. At stake was the character of Margot Macomber and the validity of Robert Wilson’s sense of her motives. In brief, Warren Beck argued that Margot shot her husband ac
cidentally and was stricken with grief, while Robert Wilson consistently misundertood her character and a good deal else. This revisionist reading challenged two stereotypes associated with Hemingway—the irredeemable bitch and the infallible white hunter (1955). Mark Spilka’s response challenged this with a persuasive phrase—a “necessary style,” the mark of an “author’s working vision of experience [that] persists throughout [his] whole production”—to support the more traditional view of Margot with, at least, a subconscious motive for murder, one correctly perceived by Wilson (i960, 287).
Nearly every article since then has been drawn into that critical vortex—proving, of course, its centrality. Robert Stephens’ review of the earlier accounts of African hunting in Stewart Edward White’s The Land of the Footprints (1912) and the complex system of hunter and gunbearer codes supports the traditional view of the murderous Margot (1977). Joseph Harkey’s research in Swahili reveals that the word mkubwa, phonetically close to Macomber, has both the honorific sense of “‘sir’ with a high degree of respect,” and also its sneering opposite (1980, 346–47). Then Bernard Oldsey’s study of a variety of manuscripts concludes with an analysis of the story’s early drafts and lists of titles to demonstrate that, from the first, Hemingway kept “the case moot—in between involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder”—even though the suspect comment in “The Art of the Short Story” (then unpublished) upheld the latter verdict (1980, 131 in Wagner).
Mark Spilka’s most recent essay on the Victorian sources open to Hemingway finds intriguing parallels between the story and Frederick Marryat’s Percival Keene and The King’s Own; and for this story it includes no less than three instances in the former citing the lines from Shakespeare—“By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death”—a line so talismanic for Hemingway, Robert Wilson, and for many Hemingway scholars.
The line from Shakespeare nicely divides critics on their assumptions of relevant contexts. For the traditionalists the line is, as Wilson says, “damned fine.” And so it is in the context of Hemingway’s biography, for whether he learned it in school reading Marryat or in 1919 from Chink Dorman-Smith, he treasured it, and so it may confer authority on Robert Wilson’s sense of life (John McKenna and Marvin Peterson, 1981, 82–85). But the revisionists, reading the reference in its literary context (Henry IV, 2, III, ii), are reminded by Virgil Hutton that the lines are spoken by Francis Feeble (note the name) who is both a lady’s tailor and a fool (1964, 253–63). Something of that conflict over the priority of those contexts has divided Macomber criticism since 1975, for which two studies will be representative.
In “Margot Macomber’s Gimlet,” Bert Bender uses the sexual allusions in the story’s opening dialogue—the phallic gimlet against the lemon squash—to argue that Margot needs “to be dominated sexually, physically, psychically, and the quashed Francis” is not the man to do it. The “opening volley of off-color puns penetrates the story’s heart, where the arts of hunting, story-telling, and love lie grotesquely intertwined”—note the metaphors in the critic’s language—and it is necessary for Macomber to complete his education by recognizing “the primitive regenerative power in Hemingway’s male world of blood, violence, and sex.” Although Margot “might well have unconsciously shot at Francis, . . . it seems of little consequence,” for he has at last seen what lies at the story’s heart. Bender insists that his “purpose is not to defend Hemingway’s primitive sexist values” but to demonstrate how, given “what we know of his style and vision,” they are commingled at the center of this story (1981, 14–19). The question raised by this challenging essay is whether such a sense of Hemingway’s vision constricts the story’s meaning, or whether Hemingway, in a flash of creative insight perhaps as brief as Macomber’s, recognized a regeneration that transcends those primitive, sexist, and puerile attitudes.
In “The Education of Robert Wilson,” Barbara Lounsberry begins with Warren Beck’s portrait of the white hunter as an uncertain and ambivalent witness and adds that he is also, at three crucial moments, dead wrong on three matters: “his first assessments of Macomber’s courage, . . . the significance of his moment of cowardice, and . . . the nature of his relationship with his wife.” The story, then, interweaves three narratives of education: Macomber’s learning to face death with courage, Margot’s awakening to her husband’s moral transformation, and Wilson’s discovering “the ways of American life and death, cowardice and heroism.” For Lounsberry that last course requires the study of corruption and pretense, and that Wilson passed it in the essential last scene. Then, although he had “earlier scorned Macomber’s pleas ‘to pretend to ourselves [that the lion] hasn’t been hit’ . . . , [he] must now pretend that a lion of a man has not been murdered” (1980, 30–32). The burden of this essay rests on the assumption that Macomber was murdered and that by adopting the pretense of an accident Wilson is repeating Macomber’s earlier pretense about the wounded lion. But it is Wilson’s assumption that Macomber wished to pretend the lion had not been hit, when in fact Macomber was innocently unaware of the consequences of leaving it in the bush. Once those consequences are explained, he immediately understands. The two scenes are not morally equivalent, and one is left to wonder whether Wilson could ever learn anything as demanding as the short happy education of the Macombers.
Nina Baym confirms this revisionist reading of the story, and in an anecdote that makes us wince, shows how the stereotypical roles of men and women that perplex this story are at times acted out when we teach our students (1990, in this collection).
Once again, an encounter between two master critics on a controversial story has directed others to a reconsideration of our critical assumptions about this man and his work and the living issues the story enfolds.
Other Stories—Other Articles
A survey of the best criticism of the other stories suggests that it began in the late 1970s with some exemplary work in the traditonal modes, was challenged in the early 1980s with the new textual studies, and in the following years was informed by a variety of essays with contemporary critical perspectives.
The term “traditional” is obviously not meant to slight earlier criticism—one could do worse than join Brooks and Warren, Crane or Spilka—but rather to identify those critics who draw on the best formalist criticism, in the most tolerant sense of that misunderstood movement, and demonstrate its continuing validity. I think of Paul Witherington’s brief but compelling study of the dramatic changes in the narrative voice in an overlooked story, “On the Quai at Smyrna” (1978); of Paul Jackson’s meticulous analysis of the complex structures in “Out of Season” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1980, 1981); of Colin Cass’s original discovery of the act of perception as the controlling metaphor in “In Another Country,” a discovery nicely supported by the manuscripts of that story and one that links the story with Hemingway’s other self-reflective tales of the narrator narrating his tale and recreating himself (1981); and of Richard McCann’s essay on “Fathers and Sons,” deftly weaving the appropriate archetypal and psychoanalytic theory into a precise stylistic and rhetorical analysis of one of Hemingway’s most difficult stories (1985; in this collection). Then John Hollander’s essay on “Hills Like White Elephants” is another of those with winning eloquence; it traces with a poet’s hand Hemingway’s own poetic process to recreate the riddling image of those white hills, and it leaves us with a sense of criticism as moving, in its own right, as the story itself (1985).
There are signs of a new critical interest in studies of the Spanish Civil War stories. From the publication of The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969) until 1975, only three critics afforded the stories any serious attention: Julian Smith read them for their religious allusions and Martin Light for their narrator (both in 1969), and in 1972 Linda Wagner wrote on the narrative and thematic elements that mark them as exercises leading to For Whom the Bell Tolls. That the stories were otherwise neglected may be
pardonable, for after Hemingway’s achievement in a little more than a decade from 1924 to 1936, these stories are reminiscent of his Chicago fiction thirty years earlier.
But for the few fine moments in “The Denunciation,” “The Butterfly and the Tank,” and “Under the Ridge,” and for the evidence of an unrealized experiment with a set of stories sharing a locale and a narrator, a writer divided by his politics and his art in this tragically divided country, these stories deserve their recent studies, and more. Jay Gertzman began with the counterclaims of art and morality in “The Denunciation,” and Wayne Kvam found those claims complicated in the writer-narrator of “Under the Ridge” in 1979. Allen Josephs returned to the stories to demonstrate how closely they record Hemingway’s own shifting loyalties and served not so much to prepare as to purge him for the writing of the Spanish novel (1989, in Beegel).
The new textual studies that drew on the stories’ manuscripts and published variants began with Scott Donaldson’s essay on “Canary for One” in 1978 (in this collection), a year before the “Clean, Well-Lighted Place” industry was established and raised the primary question of the relevance of manuscript or published versions to established notions of a final text, much less a final reading. But even then Donaldson’s sense of the various manuscript endings illuminated the story and its sad occasion and set a standard for later critics. Robert Fleming used the variant endings of “The Sea Change” to argue for the complexities of the resolution of its drama (1986; in this collection); as Warren Bennett did for the conclusion of “Cat in the Rain” (1988; in this collection). Their work and that of their colleagues cited earlier has enlivened criticism of the stories, but it still faces the demanding theoretical questions raised by Hershel Parker (1984).
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 52
