New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Although new to El Torero, he knew what he was about here. He experiences the afición (passion) for it; he acknowledges the underside of it. He employs a modicum of technical language and analysis and foreshadows the Romero-Belmonte corrida in The Sun Also Rises three years later. By implication the season (temporada) is 1923.

  Chapter IX (“The first matador got the horn”) appeared in the Spring 1923 issue of Little Review before he had ever seen a corrida de toros. (His very first was that summer in Spain.) Therefore, I tentatively conclude (1) that he describes a fight that never took place and (2) that he describes the same mythical fight in his dispatch to the Toronto Star Weekly, dated October 27, 1923. There are those who would disagree, but nowhere in José María de Cossío’s massive Los Toros: Tratado Técnico e Histórico (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, i960, 3 vols.) is such a corrida narrated, although Cossio does tell of the legendary Joselito (born José Gómez) killing six bulls on six different occasions in 1915 when he was just twenty years old.

  It is reasonable to assume that Chapter X (“They whack-whacked the white horse”) is a scene Hemingway witnessed with Hadley. Certainly the incident occurred long before the introduction in 1928 of the peto, the mattresslike covering to protect horses in the ring. It was an innovation Hemingway disapproved of and said so in Death in the Afternoon. Chapter XI (“The crowd shouted all the time”) similarly is another bit of action from 1923 and a sad one, for the torero is self-admittedly bad: “T am not really a good bull fighter!’”

  “If it happened right down close in front of you” opens Chapter XII wherein Nícanor Villalta Sérres executes a flawless kill with the estoque. He was one of Hemingway’s favorites that first summer in Spain. He nicknamed him “The Basque Telephone-Pole” and named his first son after him. The twenty-five-year-old Villalta was one of the best; in July he was awarded the coveted Oreja de Oro in Madrid, the supreme achievement in Los Toros. His unsurpassed killing (“the bull charged and Villalta charged [a un tiempo] and just for a moment they became one”) was to gain him thirty-two ear-trophies by 1931.7 Strange to report, though, that some of the details in XII seem to come from a corrida in which Chicuelo (born Manuel Jiménez Moreno) fought.

  Chapter XIII (“I heard the drums coming down the street”) and Chapter XIV (“Maera lay still, his head on his arms”) have as protagonist the then famous matador de toros Manuel García López known as Maera. In 1923 he was twenty-seven and was to have fifty corridas; many aficionados regarded him as the potential champion of them all, now that Joselito was dead, killed in the ring on May 16, 1920, and that Juan Belmonte had retired the year before. It is impossible to identify the soused Luis in XIII. His antics are indicative of the underside of El Toreo. But he was Mexican and therefore regarded contemptuously by Maera. A Mexican bullfighter had many obstacles to overcome in Spain. Much more to the point is the fact that not only is Luis drunk but “Everybody was drunk” going to the Champagne.

  That Chapter XIV is fiction is common knowledge. Maera did not die of a cornada (horn wound), did not die as Hemingway tells it. He died of tuberculosis on December 11, 1924.8 However, artistry triumphs. The bullfighting Chapters begin with a cornada and end with one, and Maera, inert in the sand awaiting the coups de grace of the horns, is no different from the Greek politicos, fallen before the wall of the hospital, or the bull after the kill.

  L’Envoi, Chapter XVI (“The king was working in the garden”), is the postscript. Hemingway never saw King George II who had ascended the throne of the Hellenes a year previous, nor did he ever see his queen, Elizabeth of Romania, great-granddaughter of Victoria. But his friend, Shorty Wornall, a movie-news cameraman, had, and he told about his audience with the royal pair in the palace garden (“She was clipping a rose bush”); and Hemingway expropriated the gossip for the Star Weekly, September 15, 1923. His picture of an affable, cynical, inept king, nice enough but no king, even though he considered himself to be “divinely annointed,” is not excessive.

  Colonel Nicholas Plastiras and his Revolutionary Committee, now in control of the government and distrusting the royal personages, had made virtual prisoners of them, confining them to the palace grounds. On December 18, 1923, at Plastiras’s “request,” George and Elizabeth went into exile, not to return for twelve years. “Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.” This is true. George wanted to go to California and observe agricultural methods in a climate and terrain very similar to Greece.

  It was planned for 1924.

  He never made it; the political climate was unseasonable.

  Time-and-history in these sixteen Chapters begins in a garden in Mons and terminates artistically in a garden in Athens; begins with the Tommies shooting Germans and ends with George II saying that Plastiras “did right . . . shooting those chaps,” that is, the six Greeks in Chapter V. The decade begins with death and ends with death, but as George so cheerfully puts it, “‘The great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself.’” He was “frightfully” accurate and “frightfully” lucky. Luckier by far than the bulls, the horses, the Greeks, the Hungarians, the Germans, the bullfighters, the Italians. “Geue peace in oure time, O Lorde”; so goes the beseechment in Edward VI’s First Prayer Book. The only problem is that there is no peace In Our Time, nor is there a “separate peace” unilaterally declared by Nick Adams as he sat against the wall of the church. “‘Only, let the story end as soon as possible,’” pleaded Demetrios Gounaris before he was shot down. The only problem is that story as time-and-history never ends; for, indeed, time as defined in the commencement of this article is “the system of those relations which any event has to any other as past, present, or future,” and Ernest Miller Hemingway knew it, young as he was.

  Appendix

  Interchapters:

  IV, III: August 23, 1914; Mons, Belgium

  I: Late September–early October 1915; Champagne, France

  VIII: November 19, 1917; Kansas City, Missouri

  VII: June 16, 1918; Fossalta di Piave, Italy

  VI: Early July, 1918; Fossalta

  XV: April 15, 1921; Chicago, Illinois

  II: October 16, 1922; Eastern Theatre

  V: November 22, 1922; Athens, Greece

  IX-XIV: Summer 1923; Spain

  L’Envoi: August 1923; Athens

  “Long Time Ago Good, Now No Good”: Hemingway’s Indian Stories

  Robert W. Lewis

  Primitive simply means first, earliest, original, basic. Historically it refers to a way of life prior to civilization—that is, the city-state—but to evoke it now is . . . to temporalize the essence . . . the fuller human nature, the first nature, to which we aspire.—Sherman Paul, In Search of the Primitive: Rereading David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, and Gary Snyder

  Ever since Ernest Hemingway’s childhood contact with neighboring Ojibway and Ottawa Indians at the family summer home in northern Michigan, Indians played a role, often small but sometimes significant, in his life and writing. Two of his first stories, written in high school, were about Indians: “Sepi Jingan” is about two Ojibways, and “The Judgment of Manitou” is about two trappers, one white, and one Cree. Melodramatic and youthfully morbid, they nonetheless marked the beginning of his career in fiction and his lifelong interest in Indians.1 This interest stemmed from both the Anglo-American fascination with the Noble Savage and other “primitive” people and his own father’s “white Indian” ways. As a young man Clarence Edmonds Hemingway had spent some months (Leicester Hemingway says three, Peter Griffin two) at “a mission school for the Dakota Sioux” (Griffin, 6), “absorbing nature lore and gaining a great admiration for Indian ways” (Leicester Hemingway, 20), a feeling that he passed on to Ernest as he took him on visits to his Indian patients in Michigan and as he taught him his highly developed hunting, fishing, and other outdoorsman skills.2 In 1916 Ernest also claimed Billy Gilbert as his “old Ojibway Pal and woodcraft teacher” (Griffin, 10, 15, 23). Other influences in these formative years were at hand in domestic Oak Park, su
ch as the impact on the young Hemingway of Theodore Roosevelt’s widely publicized African safari, the new Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago with its Hall of African Mammals, and the “African passion” that swept Oak Park because of its churches’ interest in African missions and its role in helping present the African section of the Chicago Exposition of 1913 (Reynolds, 1986, 228–32). 1f wild America were vanishing, there was yet another continent about which the boy could dream and in which the man could later adventure.

  Indians were important characters in a number of the Nick Adams stories like the early “Indian Camp” (1925) and the later “Fathers and Sons” (1933), stories which also depict chronological opposites, the youth and the maturity of Nick Adams himself. In the neglected but successful satire The Torrents of Spring (1926), Indians are important foils to the white characters Yogi Johnson and Scripps O’Neil. But because Hemingway set no other novel of his in Indian country,3 as characters Indians are absent from his long fictions and his nonfiction books except as recollections or as allusions. Such memories and references are still frequent enough to keep the connection of his Indian-consciousness constant: for instance, in Death in the Afternoon, a bullfighter is described as looking like an Indian; El Sordo in For Whom the Bell Tolls looks Indian but fights a last stand reminiscent of that of George Armstrong Custer (a historical battle elsewhere often alluded to by Hemingway); and in a later, unpublished story set in World War II, “Indian Country and the White Army,” Hemingway (along with other U.S. personnel) perceived the fighting in the hedgerows and woods near the Siegfried Line as similar to Indian warfare in the early years of the American colonies and republic.

  Furthermore, Hemingway at times seemed to want to perceive himself as “Indian.” As an infant, “His first doll was a rubber papoose . . . and his second a white Eskimo” (Baker, 3). Growing up, “he was constantly aware of [the Indians’] presence, like atavistic shadows moving along the edges of his consciousness” (Baker, 13). Without any basis other than his own sometimes comic imagination and wishful thinking, he would claim to strangers and friends that he was one-eighth Indian (tribe often unnoted).4 Even his much younger brother Leicester admiringly reported the disinformation as the truth in his biography My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (277). At times Hemingway would jokingly adopt a kind of stage-Indian dialect, making himself into a white Indian, to the embarrassment of some admirers and to the delight of some critics. Lillian Ross transcribed this dialect in her New Yorker “profile,” and neither she nor Hemingway thought it was done maliciously. He continued on occasion to use what he termed his “Choctaw lingo.” Similarly, he affected the lingo among his friends in Sun Valley, Idaho, referring to them as “a fine tribe,” following or wishing to follow Indian custom when hunting or burying a friend, and calling his mistress “squaw” and himself an “old Indian” and identifying himself with the Shoshone of the region.5

  More serious and more significant in establishing this persistent cross-cultural orientation and affinity are the references and allusions to Indian culture in his work; even in works not set in Indian country or featuring Indian characters, their culture was alive and at hand for Hemingway. For example, when Robert Jordan is alone in his sleeping bag recalling the smells he loves, one of them is the “Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets” (FWBT, 260). The thought is coincidental, but it is part of a pattern in which Hemingway’s characters and his own personas recognized their formation as being based partly but importantly on Indian culture. Another small note from the same novel alludes to the tribalism that is the dominant social organization of Indians. Wondering about the strangeness of Gypsies, Robert Jordan thinks, “Nobody knows what tribes we came from nor what our tribal inheritance is nor what the mysteries were in the woods where the people lived that we came from” (FWBT, 175).6

  But in his fiction, and notably in some of the Nick Adams stories and the satire The Torrents of Spring, he most directly wrote about Indians. “Indian Camp,” one of Hemingway’s first stories, and “Fathers and Sons,” one of his last, provide interesting ground for examination of his use of Indians and the theme of primitivism. In the former story Nick Adams as a boy accompanies his father (a medical doctor), his uncle George, and two Indians to an Indian logging camp where a woman is suffering greatly in childbirth while her husband, badly wounded by an ax, lies in the bunk over hers and helplessly listens to her screams. Working with only a jackknife and using fishing-line leaders as thread, the doctor successfully delivers the baby by Caesarian section assisted by the uncle and witnessed by the boy in the bad-smelling shanty. Then the doctor turns his attention to the wounded father: “‘Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs,’” he adds in another cliché that ironically proves prophetic (Stories, 94). The desperate father is found to have slit his throat from ear to ear during the operation. The boy witnesses this discovery too, and then the whites reverse their Stygian journey and leave the camp.

  In this tale of initiation to the elemental acts of birth and death, Hemingway plays with and presents both stereotypes and individuation. On the one hand, the doctor repeatedly refers to the mother as an Indian “lady” while the narrator always uses “woman.” When in her pain she bites the restraining Uncle George on his arm, he cries out, “‘Damn squaw bitch!’ and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him” (Stories, 93). The all-business doctor contrasts with Uncle George who earlier had patronized the Indians (Stories, 91). Far from being noble exemplars of courage and endurance living in pristine nature, real Indians are men and women much like all others, and individuals among them can scream and laugh and die desperately. In the series of stories in which he figures, it is Nick’s first lesson.

  Yet apart from that conventional understanding of ‘Indian Camp,’ the boy is not learned enough to see the irony in the facts that his father is, like the Indians, a good woodsman, but unlike them he comes, the new “medicine man,” from a wholly different culture, one that plays at being primitive but that is in fact sophisticated. In another ironic allusion the gift of tobacco in early Indian-white parleying and trading is echoed in skeptical Uncle George’s giving cigars to the two Indians who accompany the whites to the camp. Perhaps one final allusion is again reversed and ironical: Indian youths sought their initiations through a vision, while Nick resists an understanding of life and death in what, for the reader at least, is a waking nightmare.

  Other stories importantly involving Indians include “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” in which an Indian teases Dr. Adams into a rage and thus can forego sawing some logs he had agreed to saw in payment, the doctor says, “‘for pulling his squaw through pneumonia and I guess he wanted a row so he wouldn’t have to take it out in work’” (Stories, 102). The Indian is not a guileless child of nature but instead is “a half-breed and many of the farmers around the lake believed he was a white man” even though he lives with the Indians, is married to one, and speaks Ojibway. Is it because he is both “very lazy but a great worker once he was started” and he is clever that makes the stereotyping farmers believe him to be white? (Stories, 100). In fact, in a letter from Dr. Hemingway to Ernest, Carlos Baker found confirmation of such an actual event as the confrontation described in the story and identification of the real Dick Boulton as a mixed-blood Indian (Montgomery, 66). Although other details in the story were imagined, the ethnography was apparently drawn accurately from life.

  In “Ten Indians” Nick Adams appears again, returning to the northern Michigan summer home from a Fourth of July celebration. He and his friends pass nine drunken Indians along the road, and when he reaches home, his father tells him about a tenth Indian he had seen that day, Prudence Mitchell, a girl whom the adolescent Nick has been courting. He is grieved to learn that she was making love in the woods with another man, and he goes to bed thinking his heart is broken. But “after a while he forgot to think about Prudence and finally he went to sleep. . . . In
the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken” (Stories, 336). Thus another phase of initiation for Nick ends with a bittersweet joke about another cliché, that of romantic love. The association is significant in that Nick’s disillusionment is related to both the errors of stereotyping erotic behavior and racial identity.

  In “Now I Lay Me” we learn that Nick’s father had a treasured collection of Indian axes, knives, arrowheads, and pottery that his mother thoughtlessly destroyed. The implication is that the son like the father valued the culture from which the artifacts came. Similarly, in “The Last Good Country” the idyllic flight from authority of Nick and his younger sister is to an Indian lair in Michigan. They are guided to it by Indian signs, they live off the land like Indians, and they have acquired the Indians’ intimate knowledge of the last good country, which is primitive, Edenic, and Indian. Nick even says that he should have been an Indian, a wish sometimes reflected in Hemingway’s letters and conversations (NAS, 111).

  Close reading of another Nick Adams story, “The Light of the World,” elevates the Indians in the barroom from wooden, unspeaking background details to figures who underscore an important theme. Furthermore, there is external biographical information indicating that Nick’s young companion Tommy is an Indian.7 Elsewhere (notably in A Farewell to Arms and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”) Hemingway had established patterns of imagery in which coldness is associated with goodness. Light-dark imagery (as in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and this story) is less clearly associated with the conventional symbolic pattern in which light is knowledge or goodness. The “Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is an artificial refuge, and, in the stories of his wounding and his subsequent fear of the dark (“Now I Lay Me” and “A Way You’ll Never Be”), Nick knows that the need to have a light on at night is unnatural. This pattern is repeated in “Big Two-Hearted River” where Nick is at once afraid of, yet drawn to, the darkness of the swamp. The traumatic wounding has temporarily reversed the natural pattern. When he is recovered, he will again be able to go to the dark as to the primordial.