The celebrity status of Ernest Hemingway, his flamboyant actions over a period of forty years in the public eye, his jealous attitude toward some of his fellow writers and friends have obscured for some critics and readers his real stature as a writer. Despite the skiing, boxing, deep-sea fishing, big game hunting, and bar room recreations, Hemingway was a serious writer and conscious artist. He had a clear vision of what he was doing, namely “to tell how it was to witness bullfights, to fish in blue mountain streams, to encounter violent death, and to confront the existential decisions of the 20th Century in a world where the agreed on moral and spiritual values had all but vanished. In seven major novels and fifty-five short stories he gives an answer to the question of how to behave in the face of the disorders and violent deaths which are the hallmarks of the 20th century. The Hemingway heroes are quintessentially American and true descendants of Natty Bumppo, Billy Budd, Huckleberry Finn, Christopher Newman, and the soldier in Red Badge of Courage. However, their end is tragic; unlike some of their progenitors there is no escape by “ggoing West. Life to Hemingway is inevitably tragic. In A Farewell to Arms, he gives his viewpoint succinctly:
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The word breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Hemingway is a realist in the American tradition of realism; but his realism is not the Fitzgerald ambiance of the Plaza Hotel and the society of Long Island and the Riviera, nor the social and economic consciousness of Dreiser and Steinbeck, or the guilt and Gothicism of the South in William Faulkner. Rather the Hemingway hero realistically confronts the basic questions of life and death, which he recognizes, and from which no escape is possible except a dishonorable one. Since the code of the hero is based on honor as well as physical and mental courage, then his only course of action is to meet his Fate with stoic dignity. The values he brings to life’s crises are those of the American frontier transmogrified into an American, pragmatic existentialism. He must make a practical decision and he must end with honor. Unlike many novelists Hemingway not only raises questions, but proposes answers. Professor Richard Chase has written: “The American imagination, like the Puritan mind itself, seems less interested in incarnation and reconciliation than in alienation and disorder. The Hemingway hero with his ode shows how to behave amidst alienation and disorder.
The subject matter with which Hemingway develops his viewpoint is that of pain, violence, violent death, or the imminence of death. In the 20th century with its almost continuous warfare, concentration camps, executions, and assassinations no themes are more relevant. In explaining his interest in the bullfight Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon: “I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death one of the subjects that a man may write. Violent death is not only prevalent, but preferable to natural death. At the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, wounded and waiting for the Fascists who will kill him thinks: “Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much it humiliates you. That is where you have all the luck, see? You don’t have any of that.?/font>
The galaxy of Hemingway heroes who face violent death includes soldiers, professional and amateur, bullfighters, big game hunters, deep-sea fishermen, boxers, and gangsters. Men of action, they are intelligent but not intellectual. Wrapped in codes and rituals which help sustain them, they are often afraid but overcome their fear. That is the paramount precept of the code, which, as Philip Young puts it, “in a life of tension and pain makes a man a man and distinguishes him from the people who follow random impulses, let down their hair, and are generally messy, perhaps cowardly, without inviolable rules for how to live holding tight. The rules, as Andre Mauris pointed out, are not conventional. They are those agreed upon by the group whether it be soldiers, boxers, or gangsters. As Hemingway said, “there is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply the standards that differ.?/font>
The honor demands loyalty to one’s friends as well as loyalty to one’s ideals, not the deals of false romanticism, the flaw in Robert Cohn which Jake Barnes despises, but ideals which embrace a realistic, even cynical appraisal of “how things are. During the disastrous retreat from Caporetto in A Farewell to Arms Frederick Henry thinks: “All I had to do was get to Pordenona with three ambulances. I had failed at that. All I had to do now was get to Pardenona. I probably could not even get to Udine. The hell I couldn't’t. The thing to do was to be calm and not get shot or captured.? Later when he is about to be questioned by the carabiniere, who are shooting officers they think are disguised in Italian uniforms, he notes: “I saw how their minds worked; if they had minds and if they worked. They were all young men and they were saving their country. He then dives in the river to escape and make his separate peace.
Whatever the situation, whether it be stalking the wounded lion, waiting for the killers, resisting the oncoming Fascists, or succumbing to the final heart attack, the hero must in Dorothy Parker’s phrase exhibit race under pressure. Endurance, without complaint of physical pain, loss of love, loss of virility, physical disablement, or emotional and physic wounds is the answer. The Hemingway hero endures. Emerson wrote, not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. Hemingway does not attempt to solve this riddle, but he shows a course of action man can take in the face of a hostile and implacable Fate. If we follow this, we cannot be defeated. In Old Man and the Sea he writes: “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.?/font>
In addition to the code, Hemingway offers a moral and religious outlook which implicitly directs his characters. Although he is not a philosophical novelist in the sense that Sartre and Camus are, behind the actions of his characters lies a philosophy. His attitude toward nature forms a religion of symbolic significance. The mountains and the plain are loose symbols of what is good and what is bad. Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton spend their happiest days in The Sun Also Rises fishing in the Spanish mountains. Their descent to the fiesta in Pamplona brings them down to the disorder, brawling, drunkenness, and sordid sex affairs of Brett Ashley. At the height of the fiesta Brett is surrounded by orgiastic dancers who have adorned her with a wreath of arlics a pagan goddess in the center of a pagan ritual. In A Farewell to Arms “We lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. Across the plain march the soldiers with the leaves falling and the dust rising as the men will inevitably “fall in useless battle. When the Germans and Austrians break through the Italian front at Caporetto, the Italian army is driven down onto the plain where rain, mud, and death engulf them in disaster. To escape, Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley flee to the serenity of the mountains of Switzerland. Death, itself, is “true and “pure in the mountains. Robert Jordan awaits his violent end stoically in the Guadarama Mountains. In the Snows of Kilimanjaro, Harry, rotting and dying slowly from gangrene on the plain, dreams at the end that he is carried up beyond the snow line of Mt. Kilimanjaro “great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun. The symbolism is unmistakably clear.
The Hemingway heroes exhibit a healthy interest in normal physical actions. Eating, drinking, sex, and athletic endeavors are taken seriously as pleasures in life all too brief. From the spaghetti course, which everyone ate very quickly and seriously in the opening pages of A Farewell to Arms to the dinner in the hotel in Milan of oodcock with souffle potatoes and pures de marron, a salad, and zabione for dessert, with a bottle of Capri Bianca and St. Estapha, eating is viewed as a serious and enjoyable rite.
Drinking is equally normal. Excessive drinking which leads to brawls and disorder is often present but is nowhere condoned. Frederick Henry says to himself, “I was not made to think. I was made to eat, My God, yes. Eat, drink, and sleep with Catherine. Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and Into the Trees carefully orders Martinis made 15 to one, which he calls Montgomerys because in his opinion Field Marshall Montgomery never attacked the enemy unless he outnumbered them 15 to one. There are good drunks and bad drunks. In The Sun Also Rises Jake muses “Mike was a bad drunk. Brett was a good drunk. Bad drunks abuse other people. “CJohn was never drunk and Cohn was a bad, messy person. In A Farewell to Arms Frederick Henry, having fled the disorder and violence of the war, orders a few Martinis in the Grand Hotel in Stresa, and thinks, have never tasted anything so cool and clean. They made me feel civilized. The conclusion is not surprising; drinking is healthy, if handled correctly.
Sex, while it exists in Hemingway’s novels, is not a theme or subject of as great importance as violent death. His attitude is conventional. The ideal relationship is that of man and woman in love both physically and spiritually. Nothing could be more prosaic. This is the relationship between Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley, Robert Jordan and Maria, Henry Morgan and his wife, Colonel Cantwell and his Countess. Romance in Hemingway is fragile and inevitably crushed by the violence around it. If the hero is not killed by gunfire, the heroine dies from a biological accident in childbirth. As Catherine is dying in A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry thinks, but they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around long enough and they will kill you.
The “death of romance” in The Sun Also Rises only confirms his belief in the conventional relationship by proving it from another viewpoint. What is presented is the effect of violence of World War I. Jake stoically faces the impotence which is the result of his war injury. His frustration is increased because he is not “emasculated as a steer is emasculated” despite what the critics have usually assumed. In a rare interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway settled this question:
Who ever said Jake was “emasculated precisely as a steer?” Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them. The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not psychological and that he was not emasculated.
Jake faces this bravely, even cynically, but cries at night when he is alone. He says, “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” Hemingway brilliantly brings Jake into juxta-position with Lady Bret Ashley, another “mutilee de le guerre.” Her wound is psychic, rather than physical. The death of her first husband in the war, her hasty second marriage now disintegrating in divorce, has brought her to nymphomania and drinking. Her promiscuous physical affairs without spiritual love breed a frustration and unhappiness equal to Jake’s. She loves him; he loves her, but it is hopeless. At the end in a taxi in Madrid stopped by a mounted policeman directing traffic she says, “Oh, Jake we could have had such a damned good time together” to which he replies, “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”
The code dictates the same stoical behavior toward the after affects of violence as to the violence itself, while the theme of happiness as the result of physical and spiritual love, is proven in the elucidation of a situation in which it is forever impossible.
Hemingway’s themes, so germane to the 20th century, are presented in his justifiably famous style, often imitated (badly), but not surpassed in the use of the American idiom as a vehicle of great literature. The citation for his Nobel Prize in 1954 specifically mentioned “is powerful and style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration.” Often characterized as terse, concise, condemned, hard, simple, Hemingway’s writing is much more complex than realized on first viewing. Malcolm Crowley asserted that his “prose at its best gives a sense of depth and of moving forward on different levels that is lacking in even the best of his imitators, as it is in almost all the other novelists of our time.”
Hemingway himself was aware of what he was trying to do. In Death in the Afternoon he says,
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty… was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced… the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years, or with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.
The results of this effort to get the sequence of action stated purely can be easily seen in the famous paragraph describing the execution of the cabinet ministers.
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired at the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.
The effect is that of Goya or Cezanne. “One thing at a time” is presented to the reader starkly without comment or interpretation. The “sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion” are valid fifty years after the writing.
The genesis of the Hemingway style must come from the instincts inside the writer. These and other influences, his reportorial work on the Kansas City Star, the examples and criticism of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, he synthesized into the style with which we are so familiar.
In 1905 Gertrude Stein published Three Lives, which was the beginning of her effort to destroy Victorian prose and syntax. The basis for this she explained in her lecture, “Composition as Explanation,” delivered at Oxford and Cambridge in 1926:
There is singularly nothing that makes a difference, a difference in the beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all like and everybody knows it because everybody says it.
This is the philosophy which is the foundation of much 20th century writing, and nowhere more than in Hemingway.
Among Gertrude Stein’s early discoveries was the use of repetition. “Once started expressing this thing,” she wrote, “expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anyone is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis…”
By the use of repetition the writer “insists” until the reader sees exactly what he wants the reader to see. In the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, which Carlos Baker calls, “The beautifully managed paragraph” we find “leaves falling,” “dust” from the “troops marching” repeated with the regularity of a drum beat. The many repetitions in Hemingway’s proses serve their purpose well; we see only what he wants us to see.
Another of Gertrude Stein’s “discoveries” seems to have been absorbed by Hemingway. During her famous haircut by Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein made the following observation: “I found that any kind of book if you read with glasses on and somebody is cutting your hair so you cannot keep the glasses on and use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something… So that shows to you that a whole thing is not interesting because as a whole well as a whole there has to be remembering and forgetting, but one at a time, oh one at a time is something oh yes definitely something.” The sequence of action in the execution of the cabinet ministers achieves much of its effect because it is “one thing at a time.” Hemingway, however, further refined this in his use of adjectives. In the fist paragraph of A Farewell to Arms we find: “In the bed of the river there was some pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.” Here are visual sensations presented in sequence, “pebbles and boulders,” then “dry and white.” The normal order in English is dry white pebble and boulders. The adjectives describing the water are placed after the noun and separated by “and;” no “blur” is possible. The extensive use of the “ands” in Hemingway is noticeable to any reader. In themselves they are unimportant but their purpose in giving “one thing at a time” is not.
In the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms we also have a sense of beginning again and again. The many sentences which begin, “There was much traffic… There was fighting… There were big guns… There were mists…” All these could be beginning sentences. They help in creating what Gertrude Stein called a “continuous present” and “beginning again and again.” This has a psychological effect on the reader even though he may be unaware of it, and aids in making the writing immediate and “valid always.” The highly praised narration and description of Hemingway, simple on the surface, is actually a highly complex arrangement of elements arrived at both instinctively and consciously.
Hemingway ventured to assert that he taught Gertrude Stein how to write dialogue, and certainly his dialogue is his. Uncluttered by adverbs, concise, even laconic, it reflects a true feeling for American speech. As a means of revealing the thinking and communication between individuals, it serves his purpose well. He takes care not to mix it often with his narration and description. The dialogue alternates with the prose descriptions in an almost imperceptible but continuous rhythm which moves the reader even forward. Although the influences of the Hemingway style was immense, authors following his style were not able to achieve the subtlety with which he handled the technical and artistic problem of rhythm in the novel.
Hemingway, then, had the artistic disposition and technical equipment with which to inform the great themes which he had presented. He is a 20th century exposition of the “tragic view of life,” a classic theme since the writings of the ancient Greeks. His heroes, however, are not “tragic heroes” in the Aristotelism sense, who fall because of some inner flaw; they are closer to the epic hero who is overcome by a stronger foe or some trick of Fate he cannot avoid. He shares with the Greeks the idea that this is the only life, that life is short, and that death is tragic. In grappling with his conviction that life was essentially tragic, Hemingway did not shirk his responsibility. Allen Tate has written, “For what is the poet responsible. He is responsible for the virtue proper to him as a poet, for his special arete: for the mastery of a disciplined language which will not shun the full report of the reality conveyed to him by his awareness.” Hemingway meets this criterion.
The awareness of Hemingway was of life and death. All else is subsidiary. Not for him was the illusion of Keats, beautiful as it is, whose moment of transitory ecstasy is romantically frozen and immortal on the Grecian urn. Hemingway is aware we are all hastening to the grave; the bravest, the fastest. Conscious of the “nada” of existence he is concerned with the form and style in which the journey of life is made. In a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway said, “There really is, to me anyway, very great glamour in life – and places and all sorts of things and I would like sometime to get it into the stuff. I’ve known some very wonderful people who even though they were going directly to the grave (which is what makes and story a tragedy if carried out until the end) managed to put up a very fine performance en route.”
That Hemingway was able to present this viewpoint with a fusion of the form and style of his writing, with the form and style of his heroes as they hasten to the grave may be his highest aesthetic achievement.
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