New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Of course Margot Macomber shoots and kills her husband; of that there is no doubt. But no careful and unprejudiced reader should doubt that she did so accidentally. Here is the relevant passage, in which a buffalo charges at Macomber and Wilson:

  Wilson had ducked to one side to get in a shoulder shot. Macomber had stood solid and shot for the nose, shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof, and Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull. (135)

  No reader of any persuasion has ever doubted that Wilson did, indeed, duck aside for a shoulder shot; or that Macomber did, indeed, stand tall and shoot high; and no conceivable textual argument allows us to declare one, and only one, portion of the otherwise impeccable report unreliable. Equally nonsensical is the idea that a homicidal Margot had any need to shoot her husband at this moment. As John Howell and Charles Lawler put it, “if she had wanted her husband dead, the bull seemed about to do that job for her.”8 Of course Margot Macomber might be thoroughly stupid. But we have even Robert Wilson’s word on this subject: “She had a very perfect oval face, so perfect that you expected her to be stupid. But she wasn’t stupid, Wilson thought, no, not stupid” (107).

  In brief, Margot Macomber’s bad press stems from the critics’ desire to identify what they take to be Wilson’s ethical code with the valves of the story itself, a desire in pursuit of which they must turn the faceted narration of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” into a monologue. Carlos Baker in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist provides a paradigm instance of the assertion that the core of values in the story resides in Wilson, so that to read the story as his vehicle is to align oneself properly with Hemingway’s moral intention:

  Easily the most unscrupulous of Hemingway’s fictional females, Margot Macomber covets her husband’s money but values even more her power over him. To Wilson, the Macombers’ paid white hunter, who is drawn very reluctantly into the emotional mess of a wrecked marriage, Margot exemplifies most of the American wives he has met in the course of his professional life. Although his perspectives are limited to the international sporting set, the indictment is severe. These women, he reflects, are “the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory, and the most attractive, and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened.”9

  In Baker’s handling Wilson’s subjective and self-serving indictment of Margot and other women like her becomes an objective description that the reader should accept as true. For Wilson, in Baker’s account, is the yardstick figure, a fine characterization, the man free of woman and of fear, the standard of manhood toward which Macomber rises.10

  Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway is not the first study to call Wilson a brute, but it makes clearer than any earlier criticism Wilson’s motive for the accusation of murder by which he silences Margot at the conclusion of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”11 His purpose is to blackmail her into keeping quiet about the illegal car chase that preceded the buffalo kill. For in the excitement of the hunt Wilson has allowed a pursuit to take place by automobile, and Margot has recognized that this breaks the rules under which safaris are supposed to be conducted:

  “I didn’t know you were allowed to shoot them from cars though.”

  “No one shot from cars,” said Wilson coldly.

  “I mean chase them from cars.”

  “Wouldn’t ordinarily,” Wilson said. “Seemed sporting enough to me though while we were doing it. . . . Wouldn’t mention it to any one though. It’s illegal if that’s what you mean.” . . .

  “What would happen if they heard about it in Nairobi?”

  “I’d lose my license for one thing. . . . I’d be out of business.” (128–29)

  There is, however, even more going on here. Wilson’s recorded behavior puts in question not only his adherence to the laws of the hunt as the fraternity of white hunters has devised them. It shows that he is not nearly so skillful a hunter as he makes himself out to be—a point to which I will return. And it shows that making a coward into a brave man crucially involves, to Wilson’s perhaps rationalizing mind, the very motorcar whose use is illegal. Whether the use of the motorcar seemed sporting or not at the time becomes less important than that such use helped Wilson turn Macomber into a man. “Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now.” (132)

  In fact Wilson deploys more than one questionable tactic to help Macomber overcome his fear. He also deploys a gun so powerful that he himself calls it a “cannon.”12 And with this canon Wilson in effect kills every single animal that is killed in the story—although his killings are not done cleanly or well by any means. To demonstrate this point we will have to look closely at some passages in the text.

  Consider first the buffalo hunt whose action comprises the last third of the story. (In Aristotelian fashion we may divide the story’s action thus: beginning—the botched killing of the lion; middle—the repercussions of that killing on the party of three; end—the restorative killing of the buffalo.) Macomber downs one of three bulls, and Wilson tells him that he has succeeded in killing it. But Wilson is mistaken. His mistake, which the skillful hunter he is supposed to be would not have made, lulls all members of the group into a false sense of security that later allows the wounded but far from dead bull to make an unexpected charge and thus to become the indirect cause of Macomber’s death. This bull is ultimately killed, after Macomber is dead, by Wilson.

  After downing the first bull, Macomber shoots at the second. He hits the animal but does not drop him with the first shot, and then he misses with the second. Wilson shoots next and downs the animal for Macomber to finish off later. Both hunters at first miss the third bull, who runs away, but a second illegal car chase gives them a new opportunity. Macomber fires at the bull five times—five!—with no effect on the animal. “Then Wilson shot, the roar deafening him, and he [Macomber] could see the bull stagger” (127). That is, this bull too is downed by Wilson for Macomber to make a technical kill. Putting aside the first animal, then, we see that in the other two cases the bull is crippled by Wilson for his client to kill, but in no ethical deployment of language can one say that Macomber killed either of them. And, to iterate, neither did he kill the first one.

  Wilson killed them all. Wilson is a “white hunter,” a professional organizer and guide of private safaris. He “hunted for a certain clientele,” and has no hesitation in accepting the standards of that clientele “as long as they were hiring him” (125). Since from time to time the women on these outings make sexual advances, he carries “a double size cot on safari to accommodate any windfalls he might receive” (125). If money has corrupted both Margot Macomber and Francis Macomber, it has equally corrupted Wilson, who lives off them and their kind by catering to their illusions—the men’s that they are brave, the women’s that they are attractive. The phrase “hunted for” may be taken to have double reference—Wilson has hunted on behalf of his clients, and he has also hunted them, that is, they have been his prey.

  According to his interior monologue, Wilson accepts the standards of his clients “in all except the shooting.” “He had his own standards about the killing and they could live up to them or get some one else to hunt them” (125). These standards, as we see, include chasing buffaloes illegally and shooting them with megaguns so that the client can kill them without danger to himself. The illusion above all to which Wilson caters—the illusion that he in large measure creates—is that the safari is a dangerous exposure to wild animals and that real bravery is demonstrated by killing them. Margot sees through the illusion. “‘It seemed very unfair to me,’ Margot said, ‘chasing those big helpless th
ings in a motor car’” (129).

  With this view of Wilson as eliciting from his (male) clients the simulacrum of courage, and thus leaving them safely in possession of their illusions, we may now consider the killing of the lion, which is funneled to the reader through Francis Macomber’s perceptions as follows:

  He heard the ca-ra-wong! of Wilson’s big rifle, and again in a second crashing carawong! and turning saw the lion, horrible-looking now, with half his head seeming to be gone, crawling toward Wilson in the edge of the tall grass while the red-faced man worked the bolt on the short ugly rifle and aimed carefully as another blasting carawong! came from the muzzle, and the crawling, heavy, yellow bulk of the lion stiffened and the huge, mutilated head slid forward. (119)

  The lion, as segments of action represented from an interesting combination of lion’s and narrator’s point of view have made clear, is already virtually dead: “sick with the wound through his full belly, and weakening with the wound through his lungs that brought a thin foamy red to his mouth each time he breathed. His flanks were wet and hot and flies were on the little opening the solid bullets had made in his tawny hide, and his big yellow eyes, narrowed with hate, looked straight ahead, only blinking when the pain came as he breathed, and his claws dug in the soft baked earth. All of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush” (118). There is nothing in the story that equals the physical immediacy and power of this description, and it is, indeed, surprising that in the published criticism only Howell and Lawler identify the lion as the standard of true bravery in the story.13 At any rate, Wilson fires three shots into this animal’s head and face. Margot, sitting in the car, has “been able to see the whole thing”—both Macomber’s cowardly flight and Wilson’s killing (119). That these two acts are parts of a whole to her we realize when we recall her comment, recorded earlier, at lunch to Wilson: “I want so to see you perform again. You were lovely this morning. That is if blowing things’ heads off is lovely” (108).

  Now, if we move forward again to Margot Macomber who is sitting in the car during the buffalo chase, we see her in process of seeing that “there was no change in Wilson. She saw Wilson as she had seen him the day before when she had first realized what his great talent was. But she saw the change in Francis Macomber now” (132). What was it that Margot, the day before, had realized Wilson’s “great talent” to be? It was his talent for “blowing things’ heads off.” We might surmise that Margot sees in her husband the process of transformation into a man like Wilson. “You’re both talking rot,” said Margot. “Just because you’ve chased some helpless animals in a motor car you talk like heroes,” she says, including both of them in her assessment (132).

  If it is true that Macomber is becoming another Wilson, and that Margot is aware of it, then her attempt to save her husband from the buffalo at just that moment becomes a quixotic act that may even be called heroic. Certainly her interests coincide with those of the animals, not with men of Wilson’s sort. That in shooting to save her husband from the buffalo she has acted against her own interests is made clear by the story’s trick ending, and of course it is a trick, in the tradition of Guy de Maupassant, when the intended act backfires—one might say literally backfires—in every respect.

  Before the incident with the lion, Margot Macomber has not been hostile to hunting: “‘You’ll kill him marvelously,’ she said, ‘I know you will. I’m awfully anxious to see it’” (112). She comes to hate hunting when she sees what it consists of. She sees that Macomber, with Wilson and his gun behind him, is never in any real danger. And she sees that what is a matter of life and death for the animal becomes a wasteful war game for men. The story quietly endorses her judgment by giving the lion himself the last word on his wounding and death:

  That was the story of the lion. Macomber did not know how the lion had felt before he started his rush, nor during it when the unbelievable smash of the .505 with a muzzle velocity of two tons had hit him in the mouth, nor what kept him coming after that, when the second ripping crash had smashed his hind quarters and he had come crawling on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed him. Wilson knew something about it and only expressed it by saying, “damned fine lion.” (120)

  Macomber knew nothing about the lion; Wilson knew something, but a good deal less than he thought; Margot knows almost everything. But Margot does not recognize, it seems safe to say, that she too, in relation to these men, is in the situation of the lion—imaged as dangerous, but in fact helpless. I am not saying that Margot “should” have let the buffalo kill her husband, nor do we know what would have happened if she had held her fire. Strictly speaking, we cannot even speculate on this matter since these are not real events and since they are narrated to the end of this conclusion and no other. The point is that whatever she does, Margot is as “buffaloed” as the buffalo. She has an illusion of power which she exercises in occasional infidelities to her husband, but such exercises rather than freeing her deliver her from the power of one man to the power of another. Yet when she acts for her husband instead of against him, she is no better off.

  I offer this approach to “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” on behalf of its readers, not its author. Classroom observation has shown me that students who are not constrained by the need to anchor an interpretation of the story to known (or supposedly known) facts about Hemingway’s life or to reigning interpretation do indeed see the story as a larger, albeit confusing, structure in which Wilson occupies only a point.14 “Does Margot Macomber kill her husband?” a teacher asks. “Wilson thinks she does” is the cagey answer. But is Wilson right, the teacher pursues. “It says”—it, not Hemingway—“that she shot at the buffalo,” the students respond. The teacher’s attempts to define Wilson’s values as the moral center of the story elicit scattered counterevidence of his inconsistencies. Nobody much likes Wilson. “Well,” the teacher concedes, “it’s true that intentionally or not, Hemingway at times does undercut his point—whom can you like in this story?” Silence. Then, a woman student speaks up:

  “Actually, I felt sorry for the lion.”

  This is going too far. The teacher responds, too quickly to have reflected on what he’s heard: “Now you sound like Margot.”

  Here, then, a male in authority silences a woman by, in effect, assuming Wilson’s voice and casting her in the role of Margot; if we are not sure whom to care for in the story, it is at least sure that we may not care for her. The story’s plot is reenacted, in a nonfatal but deeply political fashion, right in the classroom. This woman in resisting the interpretation of the story that allows Wilson to bully us was not resisting or misreading the story so much as she was remaining sensitive to the many voices that spoke in it. The teacher’s ire reflects the discomfort of the enfranchised when the silenced really talk.

  But the lion, and Margot, do have voices in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and whatever Hemingway himself came eventually to say about the story, the attentive reader should hear them. Otherwise, reading “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” becomes an episode of forced indoctrination into a dominant male ethos whose hypocrisies and inconsistencies the story presents for our consideration.

  Historical-Biographical Analysis

  “Old Man at the Bridge”: The Making of a Short Story

  William Braasch Watson

  Writing a Story Instead of a Dispatch

  When Ernest Hemingway returned to Spain for the third time at the beginning of April 1938 to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), he was not, in all likelihood, expecting to do much writing other than his newspaper work and a biweekly article for a new political magazine called Ken. The reason would have been obvious to any newspaperman. The Rebel forces under General Francisco Franco had broken through the Republican lines on the Aragonese front in the second week of March, and by the end of the month, when Hemingway arrived in Spain,
they were threatening to split the Republican zone in two and to bring the civil war to a rapid end. The front lines were changing dramatically almost every day, requiring that correspondents like Hemingway get as close to the action as they could and file their dispatches as quickly as possible. Hemingway may not have been the professional correspondent that Herbert Matthews of the New York Times or Henry Buckley of the London Daily Telegraph were, but he took his responsibilities seriously and worked hard at his job. He was also experienced enough to know that he would be kept too busy to write any fiction.

  And yet that is what he wanted most to be doing. The previous February, shortly after getting back to Key West from his second visit to the war, Hemingway had written Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, that he wanted to stay home and write some stories, even though the war was still so close to him that writing about it was difficult.1 Plans were already under way to bring out a new collection of his short stories in the fall, and he was hoping to add a few more before the book went to press later that summer.2 But the war in Spain disrupted his plans, just as it had in the fall of 1936 when he was trying to finish To Have and Have Not.