New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  41 Herrick, p. 259.

  42 Arthur Waldhorn, A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), p. 134.

  43 The coda’s manuscript and typescript have been described previously in notes 1 and 3. The following portions of the coda are transcribed in their entirety, copying verbatim Hemingway’s idiosyncrasies of style, spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing. Where Hemingway’s handwritten corrections to the manuscript are indecipherable, I have placed my best guess in brackets, and where his references are potentially obscure, I have provided footnotes.

  44 "The uniformity of their sex" refers back to "Regarding the sex of the dead it is a fact that one becomes so accustomed to the sight of all the dead being men that the sight of a dead woman is quite shocking" (DIA, 135). "The seeming unwillingness of many of them to die, even though unconscious and fatally wounded" refers back to the plight of the cat in the coal bin and the dying soldier in the mountain cave. "The consequent nervous effect on the surviving members of their species" refers back to "the just related anecdote" about the Italian lieutenant’s hysterical reaction to the dying soldier. Finally, "the matter of their progressive changes in appearance" refers back to "Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day" (DIA, 137).

  45 Northrop Frye, "The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire," in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 224.

  46 Ecclesiastes 3:20.

  47 "Late on a July afternoon in the summer of 1918": less than one week before Hemingway was wounded on July 8, 1918.

  48 "Fossalta di Piave": the "low-lying heavily damaged village" situated near an L-shaped bend in the Piave River, at this time the site of a major Austrian offensive. Hemingway would be wounded at Fossalta di Piave. See Baker, A Life Story, p. 43.

  49 "Back in the mountains" and "Schio": the mountains here are the foothills of the Dolomites, where Hemingway had been stationed at Schio, Section Four Headquarters of the American Red Cross. He doubtless still had friends at the Schio barracks, known aftionately to the corpsmen as the "Schio Country Club." Baker, A Life Story, pp. 41–42.

  50 "The Lido": a fashionable beach resort outside Venice.

  51 "The old outhouse": The outhouse, affectionately referred to as Hemlock Park, belonged to Hemingway’s parents’ summer cottage on Walloon Lake in Michigan. The outhouse’s nickname not only refers to its situation beneath the hemlock trees, but also constitutes a jest about the propriety of Oak Park, Illinois, where the Hemingway family maintained their year-round home. Hemingway’s sister Madelaine includes two photographs of the outhouse and the following information in her biography of Ernest: "This, our outhouse, had great distinction. It was decorated with deer antlers and had a fine assortment of magazines and catalogues. "Hemlock Park" was a fine retreat when undesirable jobs were to be done." See Madelaine Hemingway Miller, Ernie (New York: Crown, 1975), pp. 48–49.

  52 "St. Nicholas Magazine": A Victorian children’s publication subscribed to by Hemingway’s parents. See Sanford, p. 135.

  53 "I was an awful dope when I went to the last war. I can just remember thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team." Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, May 30, 1942, on Baker, A Life Story, p. 38.

  54 "The road between Grau and Valencia": Grau de Roi, France, where Hemingway honeymooned with Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927, and Valencia, Spain, where they toured later that summer. Perhaps Hemingway witnessed this incident in 1927. See Baker, A Life Story, pp. 185–86.

  55 Charles Yale Harrison, author of Generals Die in Bed, seems to have taken such criticism to heart. He composed a piece called "Story for Mr. Hemingway," Modern Monthly 8 (February 1935), pp. 731–37 and prefaced with a headnote quoting "A Natural History of the Dead" on Generals Die in Bed.

  56 For a medical discussion of the iodine’s probable effect on the lieutenant’s eyesight, see Susan F. Beegel, "Note in Answer to Query on ‘A Natural History,’" Hemingway Newsletter 6 (July 1983), p. 3.

  57 Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966).

  58 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 11.

  59 Ibid., p. 24.

  60 Ibid., p. u.

  61 Ibid.

  Hubert Zapf, “Reflection vs. Daydream: Two Types of the Implied Reader in Hemingway’s Fiction”

  1 Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (Boston, 1963), p. 31.

  2 See especially Julian Smith, "Hemingway and the Thing Left Out," Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1970): 169–82. The connection between literary styles and certain kinds of reader-responses was investigated by Walter J. Ong in "The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction," PMLA 90 (1975): 9–21, where he comes close to the conception of an "implied reader" in that he discusses several writers, among them Hemingway, in the way they "fictionalize" the reader in their texts, that is, induce the real, historical reader to let himself become part of the fictional world, actively participating in its imaginative construction.

  3 Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), p. 192.

  4 See, for example, Raymond S. Nelson, Hemingway: Expressionist Artist (Ames, Iowa, 1979)

  5 See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). A useful introduction to Iser’s theory is his article "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," New Literary History 3 (1971): 279–99.

  6 This notion of "schematized views," as well as of the "indeterminacy" of literature, derives from Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological theory of literature: The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

  7 Iser, "The Reading Process," 282ff.

  8 Ibid., 292.

  9 See, for example, Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen: Husserliana, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1950), p. 73. Here the principle of reflection is formulated as the basic principle of human consciousness and knowledge. Engl, trans, Cartesian Meditations (Boston: Kluwer, 1977).

  10 For this term see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method: Basics of a Philosophical Hermeneutks (New York, 1975).

  11 Walter Schulz. "Anmerkungen zur Hermeneutik Gadamers" ["Notes on Gadamer’s Hermeneutics"] in Hermeneutik und Dialektik I, ed. R. Bubner, K. Kramer, R. Wiehl (Tübingen, 1970), pp. 305–16.

  12 Sigmund Freud. "Der Dichter und das Phantasieren" ["The Poet and Fantasy"] Sigmund Freud: Studienausgabe, vol. 10, Bildende Kunst und Literatur [Visual Art and Literature] (Frankfurt, 1969), pp. 171–79.

  13 Thus, for example, in Norman Holland’s 5 Readers Reading (New Haven, Conn., 1975), p. 127.

  14 Thus when N. Holland has the reader project any fantasy into the text "that yields the pleasure he characteristically seeks": Poems in Persons: An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature (New York, 1973), p. 77, or in David Bleich’s classroom experiments with his "subjective criticism," Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (Urbana, Ill., 1975).

  15 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), p. 4. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and are given in parentheses after the quotation.

  16 Beoncheong Yu, "The Still Center of Hemingway’s World" in Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda W. Wagner (East Lansing, Mich., 1974), pp. 109–31.

  17 Paul Goodman, "The Sweet Style of Ernest Hemingway," in Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism, pp. 153–60.

  18 "Big Two-Hearted River," The First Forty-nine Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1944), pp. 165–85.

  19 Ibid., p. 183.

  20 This shows that while Freud defines literature in undialectic opposition to reality, Hemingway dramatizes the collision between daydream and reality within the literary
work itself.

  21 "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," The First Forty-nine Stories, pp. 11–40.

  22 These problematical implications, especially with regard to Mrs. Macomber’s role in the story and to the male-chauvinist distortions created by Wilson’s simplistic "code," were first pointed out by Warren Beck in his article "The Shorter Happy Life of Mrs. Macomber," Modern Fiction Studies 1–2 (1955): 28–37, where he argues for a much more positive view of Margot Macomber than most critics before him. The article set off a controversy with Mark Spilka which continued over more than twenty years.

  23 The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner’s, 1952), p. 9.

  24 On pp. 16, 18, 20, 23, 30 of The Old Man and the Sea, this hope of a great fish is explicitly expressed.

  25 See the rebirth motif of Jake’s bathing in the sea at the end of the novel and Nick’s gradual, if slow, approximation of the deeper levels of reality in "Big Two-Hearted River."

  Nina Baym, “‘Actually, I Felt Sorry for the Lion’”

  1 Among essays making this point over the years have been: Mona G. Rosenman, "Five Hemingway Women," Claflin College Review 2, no. 1 (1977): 9–13; Linda Wagner, "Proud and Friendly and Gently," College Literature 7 (1980): 239–47; Charles J. Nolan, "Hemingway’s Women’s Movement," Hemingway Review 3, no. 2 (1984): 14–22.

  2 Mary Anne Ferguson, ed., Images of Women in Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973, 1977, 1981, 1985). "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is included in a section called "The Dominating Wife: The Bitch."

  3 The argument was first made by Warren Beck in "The Shorter Happy Life of Mrs. Macomber," Modern Fiction Studies l (1955): 28–37, but this essay was roundly attacked; reviewing the scholarship in 1968, William White concluded that the majority concurred that Margot Macomber "meant to kill her husband when she shot at the buffalo" (American Literary Scholarship! 1968 [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970], p. 113). Nevertheless, the issue did not disappear; the argument was revived by John M. Howell and Charles A. Lawler, "From Abercrombie & Fitch to The First Forty-nine Stories: The Text of Hemingway’s ‘Francis Macomber’" Proof 2 (1972): 213–81; K. G. Johnston "In Defense of the Unhappy Margot Macomber," Hemingway Review 2, no. 11 (1983): 44–47; and Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway (New York; Simon & Schuster, 1987).

  4 For the distinction between voice and focus, see Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980); for the idea of fiction as a field of multiple and often competing voices, see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). For the identification of the five points of view (which, following Genette, I would call foci) in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," see James Nagel, "The Narrative Method of ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’" English Studies 41 (1973): 18–27.

  5 The importance of embedded stories in a larger narrative as a redaction and intensification of the action is brought home to us by Tvetzan Todorov in The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).

  6 Page citations are to The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-nine Stories and the Play "The Fifth Column" (New York; Random House, 1938).

  7 Wilson and Hemingway are both quoted in Lynn: Wilson, p. 433; Hemingway, p. 432. For an excellent chronicle of Hemingway’s orchestration of his public image in the latter half of his career, see John Raeburn, Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

  8 Howell and Lawler, p. 224.

  9 Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 3rd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 187.

  10 Baker, 189–90.

  11 Surprisingly, however, Lynn writes that "Wilson instantly leaps to the conclusion that Margot has deliberately shot Macomber, and he thinks he understands why" (435–36). But the last pages of the story allow no entry into Wilson’s thoughts—they only tell us what he does and says. At an earlier point in the narration, when Wilson perceives Macomber’s new found bravery, he does not, in fact, imagine that Macomber will now leave his wife: what he thinks rather is that Macomber’s change "probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing" (132). Nor, for that matter, do his words to Margot, uttered in a "toneless" voice—"That was a pretty thing to do. . . . He would have left you too" (135)—imply anything about Wilson’s sincerity or lack of it. I assume that we are meant to believe that Wilson knows perfectly well that the killing was accidental.

  12 According to Lynn, the supposed real-life model for Wilson, Philip Percival, said that the rifle was so powerful that its use on safaris was unsportsmanlike and that therefore he never carried one (434).

  13 Howell and Lawler, p. 227.

  14 The paragraphs that follow are based on a transcript of a class hour on "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" conducted by an apprentice teacher in an introductory fiction course.

  William Braasch Watson, “‘Old Man at the Bridge’: The Making of a Short Story”

  I wish to thank the many friends and scholars who read this article at various stages along the way, but especially Carl Oglesby for a sensitive reading of an early draft and Tom Keily and Jim Hinkle for their encouragement.

  1 EH to Maxwell Perkins, February 1, 1938, Princeton University Library (PUL): Scribner’s Archive I (SA), Hemingway Correspondence, 3/18/311.

  2 EH to Perkins, March 19, 1938, written from Ill de France. "I hope to have several more [stories] by the time the book must go to press. Will that be July or August? Please let me know." PUL: SA, 3/18/318.

  3 Hemingway’s decision to return to Spain appears to have been made almost as soon as the news from Spain reached him, for on March 9, the day the Rebel offensive began, he wired Perkins that it was "maybe necessary return Spain." (EH telegram to Perkins, March 9, 1938, PUL:SA, 3/18/315). On his feeling "like a blood shit" and on his efforts to wind up his affairs, see EH to Perkins, March 15, 1938, at PUL:SA, 3/18/316; and EH telegram to Rollin Dart, March 17, 1938, PUL:SA, 3/18/317. The sailing dates are from the New York Times, March 18 & 25, 1938. On Martha Gellhorn’s return to Europe, see an unsigned cable to EH, March 21, 1938, announcing an arrival in Cherbourg on March 28. I believe the cable is from Gellhorn. If so, she must have sailed on the Queen Mary, which left New York on March 23 and arrived in Cherbourg on the 28th. Sailing dates from The Times, March 23 & 29, 1938. (Unsigned cable among unidentified incoming cables in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library [JFK].) For his trip to the Spanish border, see Jeffrey Shulman’s article in the Hemingway Review.

  4 Whether Martha Gellhorn went into Spain with the others at this time is uncertain. The above mentioned cable indicates that a car was being shipped to France on April 1, but whether this is the car Hemingway took into Spain is not known. We know from other sources that Gellhorn was in Barcelona with Hemingway for much of this time, but Sheean, for understandable reasons of discretion, chose not to mention her presence in his book on these events. See Vincent Sheean, Not Peace but a Sword (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939): 235–42.

  5 Sheean, Not Peace, 236–41, says they arrived in Barcelona on April 1, but Hemingway’s authorization from the Spanish military to visit the Aragon front is dated March 31, 1938. (EH Spanish Civil War miscellaneous papers at JFK.) Sheean notes that Hemingway had a room waiting for him at the Hotel Majestic in Barcelona when they arrived that evening, something that a celebrity like Hemingway could have others arrange for him without difficulty. His departure for the front the next day with Herbert Matthews is inferred from a pencil notation of "Saturday April Second" on the second draft of his cable text for the dispatch of April 3 (ms 401, JFK). It had been a two day trip, and it is not likely he began the article before he and Matthews returned to Barcelona.

  6 EH, Dispatch 19, "Flight of Refugees," Hemingway Review (Spring, 1988: 68–70).

  7 For all the dispatches of the spring of 1938, see Dispatches 19�
�30, Hemingway Review (Spring 1988): 68–92.

  8 Ms 716 is an autograph note (AN), JFK. These notes are not identified as the field notes for the short story, but the description of the old man with steel spectacles and other similarities with the story leave little doubt as to what they are. Many of the details in these notes are confirmed by Herbert Matthews’s dispatch, datelined Barcelona, April 17 (New York Times, April 18, 1938: 1 & 5).

  9 See the field notes for Dispatch 19 in "A Variorum Edition of Dispatch 19," Hemingway Review (Spring 1988): 93.

  10 Field notes for Dispatch 21 (ms 455, JFK).

  11 Field notes for Dispatch 29 (ms 556, JFK).

  12 The cable is time dated by the Catalan censor in Barcelona: "autoriza 1a transmisió d’aquesta informació. Barcelona, 17 de abril del 1938, a 23:10" (ms 627, JFK). According to Martha Gellhorn and confirmed by Herbert Matthews, they would leave Barcelona at 4:00 or so in the morning, drive six hours to the front, spend what time they needed, and return the same day after another six or so hours of driving. How long they spent at Amposta is not known, but the field notes suggest it was not much more than a couple of hours. Allowing for twelve hours of driving and two or three hours of looking around, Hemingway could have been back in Barcelona by six or seven o’clock that evening. The cable was sent out just after eleven that night, that is, four or five hours after they returned. Hemingway must have written the entire story in this brief interval.

  13 These similarities between the story and the news dispatches led some critics to assume mistakenly that Hemingway originally sent out "Old Man at the Bridge" as a news dispatch, only later deciding that it was a short story. See William White, "Hemingway Needs No Introduction," in Ernest Hemingway, By-line: Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), p. xii. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), pp. 327–28 & 625, perhaps following White’s judgment. Carlos Pujol, ed., Obras selectas de Ernest Hemingway (Barcelona: Planeta, 1969), p. 103.