Warren Bennett, “The Poor Kitty and the Padrone and the Tortoise-shell Cat in ‘Cat in the Rain’“
1 Gertrude M. White, "We’re All ‘Cats in the Rain,’" draws on Clinton S. Burhans, Jr.’s "The Complex Unity of In Our Time" and rightly attempts to locate her interpretation within the context of In Our Time:
The story, in short, seems less like the drama of a particular crisis in a particular relationship than a paradigm of man’s plight as Hemingway presents it again and again in his fiction: "the world as it actually is set against man’s expectations and hopes; and his consequent problems and difficulties in trying to live in it with meaning and order." ([Burhans, p. 326] White, p. 244).
2 The fact that George prefers to have his wife look like a "boy" is the first time the subject of androgyny explicitly appears in Hemingway’s fiction. It reaches its most complete exploration in the posthumously published The Garden of Eden.
3 I am indebted here to two of my seminar students, Linda Froshag and Teri Matravolgyi, who knew more about cats than I did. I also want to thank Professor Richard Davison, University of Delaware, for sharing with me the work one of his students did on the gene complement and chromosomes of tortoise-shell cats. Normal female cats have two X chromosomes; males have one, plus the Y chromosome that determines maleness. Male tortoise-shells, however, have an extra X chromosome. Thus their genetic constitution is XXY. The student concludes, "This animal, obviously, is genetically abnormal; hence, when it does occur, it is always sterile."
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969).
————. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters (New York: Scribner’s, 1981).
————. Ernest Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952).
Benson, Jackson J. “Patterns of Connection and Their Development in Hemingway’s In Our Time.” Rendezvous 5, no. 2 (1970): 37–52. Special Hemingway issue.
DeFalco, Joseph. The Hero in Hemingway’s Short Stories (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963).
Eliot, T. S. “The Burial of the Dead,” The Waste Land. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 59–75.
Hagopian, John V. “Symmetry in ‘Cat in the Rain,’" The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975). Hemingway, Ernest. “Cat in the Rain." In Our Time (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), pp. 91–94.
————. The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1954).
————. Cat in the Rain, ms. items 319, 320, and 321. The Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. All quotations from the manuscripts are copyrighted in the name of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.
Hovey, Richard. The Inward Terrain (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968). Lodge, David. Working with Structuralism (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
White, Gertrude M. “We’re All ‘Cats in the Rain.’” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual (1978): 241–46.
Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harcourt, 1966).
Kenneth G. Johnston, “Hemingway’s ‘The Denunciation’: The Aloof American”
1 "The total number of foreigners who fought in the International Brigade was about 40,000. . . . The United States contributed about 2,800. Of these, about 900 were killed.– (Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War [New York: Harper, 1961], p. 637).
2 Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 3931–1939 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 255.
3 In a talk on October 10, 1936, in Washington with newly appointed Spanish Ambassador, Senor de los Rios, "Mr. Hull stated that the United States had proclaimed a policy of aloofness in the Spanish situation and was using its moral influence and its persuasion to maintain effective this point of view." (Richard Southgate, "Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of Protocol and Conferences," in Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers 1936 [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954], 2:538.)
"Our policy," Hull later wrote, "had nothing to do with our views on the right or the wrong in the Spanish Civil War. We were not judging between the two sides. . . . Our peace and security required our keeping aloof from the struggle." (The Memoirs of Cordell Hull [New York: Macmillan, 1948], 1:483, 491).
4 "For the Republican government," declares Herbert L. Matthews, "the American embargo was a crushing blow, perhaps a decisive one." (Half of Spain Died: A Reappraisal of the Spanish Civil War [New York: Scribner’s, 1973], p. 177).
"If this loyalist government is overthrown," former U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson wrote in 1939, "it is evident now that its defeat will be solely due to the fact that it has been deprived of its right to buy from us and other friendly nations the munitions necessary for its defense." (Henry L. Stimson, "Text of Letter to Sec. Hull," New York Times, January 24, 1939, p. 6.)
In an article in Ken magazine Hemingway denounced the State Department for having done its "disgusting efficient best" to end the Spanish conflict by "denying the Spanish government the right to buy arms to defend itself against the German and Italian aggression." ("H. M.’s Loyal State Department," Ken, 1 [June 16, 1938]: 36.)
5 Hemingway to Ivan Kashkeen, Soviet translator and critic, August 19, 1935, in "Letters of Ernest Hemingway to Soviet Writers," Soviet Literature, no. 11 (1962): 162.
6 Hemingway, "The Denunciation," in The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p. 90. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text. The story first appeared in Esquire 10 (November 1938): 39, 111—14
7 Jackson, p. 7.
8 Jackson, pp. 5–6.
9 Theo Aronson, Royal Vendetta: The Crown of Spain 1829–1965 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 147.
10 Aronson, p. 183.
11 Aronson, p. 188.
12 Aronson, pp. 180–81.
13 Sir Charles Petrie, King Alfonso XIII and His Age (London: Chapman & Hall, 1963), p. 226.
14 Stimson, p. 6.
15 Matthews, p. 177.
16 Henry F. Pringle, "High Hat," Scribner’s Magazine 104 (July 1938): 17, 18, 20. Pringle lists The Spur’s circulation at 27,000, as compared to that of Good Housekeeping with 2,210,835.
17 Hemingway, "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio," in Winner Take Nothing (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), pp. 218–19.
18 Reports Hugh Thomas (The Spanish Civil War, p. 175): "No one said ‘adios’ any more, but always ’salud.’ A man named Fernandez de Dios even wrote to the Minister of Justice asking if he could change his surname to Bakunin, ‘for he did not want to have anything to do with God.’"
19 "I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace," Frederic Henry told himself after his desertion. (Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms [New York: Scribner’s, 1929] p. 252).
20 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner’s, 1935), p. 148.
21 The self-denunciation of Henry Emmunds was possibly intended as self-criticism by Ernest Hemingway. It does not escape the reader’s notice that his choice for narrator is an American writer with the initials H. E. Hemingway was a fund raiser, a propagandist, and a spokesman for the Loyalist cause. But he did not commit himself to battle. He did not join the International Brigades, and in October 1938, according to Carlos Baker, he "turned down an offer of a staff captaincy in a French outfit which was then being organized to help the Loyalists" (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story [New York: Scribner’s, 1969], p. 334). Although he was occasionally under enemy fire while on assignment—he worked on the filming of The Spanish Earth and covered the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance—he was, for all practical purposes, a privileged spectator of the war. He knew people in high places—ambassadors, generals,
politicians; he suffered no lack of food, liquor, money, vehicles, gasoline, chauffeurs, or companionship, male and female; and he was free to leave the war zone whenever he wished. He spent some eleven months in Spain covering the war, with interludes in Bimini, Key West, and Wyoming.
Henry Emmunds accuses himself of being motivated by "the always-dirty desire to see how people act under an emotional conflict, that makes writers such attractive friends" (p. 97). Hemingway, too, may have felt a sense of guilt for artistically exploiting the war. There is no question that as an artist he profited handsomely from the tragedy. The "Spoils of Spain" (Baker’s term) included six short stories, one play, and one novel. When Madrid fell on 28 March 1939, Hemingway was in Key West and some 15,000 words into his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls; he had already written the scene in which Anselmo denounces Pablo for putting "thy foxhole before the interests of humanity" (For Whom the Bell Tolls [New York: Scribner’s, 1940], p. 11).
Robert P. Weeks, “Wise-Guy Narrator and Trickster Out-Tricked in Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’”
1 In the comprehensive checklist of "Criticism, Explication, and Commentary on Individual Stories" in Jackson J. Benson, ed., The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), there are 229 entries for these four stories, each receiving approximately fifty entries. In contrast, "Fifty Grand" has only seventeen entries, of which only three are articles; the other fourteen consist of brief comments on the story in books on Hemingway’s work.
2 The first article published on "Fifty Grand," Charles A. Fenton, "No Money for the Kingbird: Hemingway’s Prize-fight Stories," American Quarterly 4 (1952): 342–47, approaches it primarily from a biographical point of view, placing it alongside Hemingway’s other boxing stories to show young Hemingway’s interest in the ring and, more important, his admiration for those boxers who combined courage and professionalism. P. G. and R. R. Davies, "Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’ and the Jack Britton-Mickey Walker Prize Fight," American Literature 37 (1965): 251–58, insists that central to an understanding of the story is the fact that Hemingway based it on "newspaper accounts of the welterweight championship fight between the champion, Jack Britton, and the challenger, Mickey Walker, at Madison Square Garden, November 1, 1922." Their assertion that the story is "only a slight reworking of existing materials" is greatly overstated, but the similarities in names, ages, and circumstances of the two contenders in the story and in the Britton-Walker fight make it highly likely that Hemingway did, indeed, make some use of that fight in the story.
Without mentioning the Davies’ article, Carlos Baker in Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969) asserts "Fifty Grand" is based on the Benny Leonard-Jack Britton welterweight championship bout at the New York Hippodrome, January 26, 1922 (Baker, p. 157). James J. Martine, "Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’: The Other Fight(s)," journal of Modern Literature 2 (1971): 123–27, dismisses Baker’s case by making use of the recently discovered first three pages of typescript of "Fifty Grand" that Hemingway deleted at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald. An apparent reference to the Leonard-Britton fight in the deleted pages makes it clear that that fight has already been fought. Martine concludes, "it is hard to imagine the Britton-Leonard fight as the source of ‘Fifty Grand’: a fighter does not go to camp to prepare for a bout he has already fought" (p. 124). Martine effectively scales down the Davies’ claims, then offers as a possible source yet another fight, the Siki-Carpenter bout that Hemingway attended, September 24, 1924, in Paris. He reasonably concludes that because it was "the greatest doublecross in fight history," Hemingway probably made some use of it as well as of the Britton-Walker fight—and possibly other fights as well—in creating "Fifty Grand."
3 Fenton is first to link the high school story to "Fifty Grand," remarking merely that both dealt with boxing. Sheridan Baker goes somewhat further: "Hemingway has soaked up the lore, and some of the speech, of the boxing world, foreshadowing ‘Fifty Grand’ (1927) and, to some extent, ‘The Battler’ (1925)." See Ernest Hemingway: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1967), p. 8.
4 Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954) provides the earliest and fullest account of Hemingway as humorist, including his admiration of Lardner. See especially, pp. 26, 44, 81. Hemingway was referred to in the school paper, The Trapeze, as "our Ring Lardner, Jr." See Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, D.C.: Microcard Editions, 1971), pp. 33, 41, 57, 79.
5 Hemingway’s Apprenticeship, pp. 98–100.
6 "Ernest Hemingway, Literary Critic," American Literature 36 (1965): 433.
7 Baker, Hemingway: A Life Story, p. 166.
8 Baker, Hemingway: An Introduction, pp. 61–62.
9 "Fifty Grand," The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), pp. 313, 322, 323, 324, 326.
10 The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 3.
11 Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963), p. 61; Joseph DeFalco, The Hero in Hemingway’s Short Stories (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), p. 211. These misapprehensions of Jerry’s character and role are corrected in Sheldon Norman Grebstein’s careful analysis in Hemingway’s Craft (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973). He concludes of Jerry, "The I-witness of ‘Fifty Grand’ can be named an ‘almost-reliable’ narrator, dependable enough for the reader to accept his account as substantially true, thus assuring the story of its basically ‘realistic’ and ‘objective’ quality" (p. 60). It assures the story, as well, of its comic dimension, although Grebstein does not go into that.
12 "Fifty Grand," p. 326. Hemingway’s tendency to see boxers, especially second-rate ones, as machines is further evidenced in the original title, never used, of "The Battler: A Great Little Fighting Machine." See Baker, Hemingway: A Life Story, p. 141.
13 "Fifty Grand," p. 326.
14 Baker, Hemingway: An Introduction, p. 52.
15 Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), p. 331.
16 The language is not Faulkner’s but Baker’s; see Baker, Hemingway: A Life Story, p. 461.
Amberys R. Whittle, “A Reading of Hemingway’s ‘The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio’”
1 Varieties of Parable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 2–3.
2 Ibid., p. 7.
3 Ibid., p. 6.
4 Ibid., p. 3.
5 Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), pp. 66–67.
6 Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 1301.
7 These are described by Carlos Baker in Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), pp. 217–18.
8 The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), p. 473. All further quotations are from this edition.
9 Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1960), p. 37.
Pamela Smiley, ”Gender-Linked Miscommunication in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’”
Bateson, George, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972).
Dieterich, Dan. "Men, Women, and the Language of Power." Madison, Wis.: Women’s Studies Program Lecture, March 7, 1986.
Fletcher, Mary Dell. "Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’" Explicator 38, no. 4 (19): 16–18.
Goldsmith, Andrea. "Notes on the Tyranny of Language Usage." In The Voices of Men and Women, ed. Cheris Kramarae (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980), pp. 179–91.
Haas, Adelaide. "Male and Female Spoken Language Differences." Psychological Bulletin 86 no. 3 (1979): 616–26.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants." Men Without Women (New York: Scribner’s 1927).
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex
Which Is Not One (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1985). Johnston, Kenneth G. "Hills Like White Elephants: Lean, Vintage Hemingway." Studies in American Fiction 10, no. 2 (1982): 233–38.
————. “Hemingway and Freud: The Tip of the Iceberg.” The journal of Narrative Technique, 14, no. 1 (1984): 68–71.
Jones, Deborah. “Gossip: Notes on Women’s Oral Culture.” The Voices and Words of Men and Women, ed. Cheris Kramarae (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980), pp. 193–97.
Kennedy, Carol Wylie. “Patterns of Verbal Interruptions Among Men and Women in Groups.” Dissertation Abstracts International, 40, no. 10 (1980): 5425.
Kramarae, Cheris. “Sex-Related Differences in Address Systems.” Anthropological Linguistics 17 (1975): 198–210.
Key, Mary Ritchie. “Male and Female Linguistic Behavior: Review of Words and Men by Casey Miller and Kate Swift.” American Speech : A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 55, no. 2 (1980): 124–29.
Lakoff, Robin. Language and Woman’s Place (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
————. “Stylistic Strategies Within a Grammar of Style.” Language, Sex, and Gender: Does La Difference Make a Difference? ed. Judith Grasanu, Mariam K. Slater, and Lenore Loeb Adler (New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1979). Vol. 327: 53–80.
Miller, Jean Baker. Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976).
Neitz, Mary Jo. “Humor, Hierarchy and the Changing Status of Women.” Psychiatry 43 (1980): 211–22.
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