In “The Light of the World” then, the minor Indian characters may be significant as people of darkness and cold who oppose the ironic white-light-warm imagery associated with knowledge and power but also conversely with confusion and the loss of spirituality. “Outside it was good and dark” whereas inside it is “crowded and hot . . . and full of stale smoke” (Stories, 385). The homosexual cook is repeatedly referred to as white in face and hands. The two “ordinary” whores, one of whom tells an outrageous lie, are peroxide blondes, whereas the three fat whores, including Alice who wins Nick’s sympathy, are all clad in “silk dresses that change colors” (Stories, 386), that is, shimmering, symbolically ambiguous, between light and dark. The lying peroxide whore tells a story full of blasphemies and repeated allusions to mythic gods with whom she associates the dead white boxer Stanley Ketchel who she claims was her lover. Ketchel was defeated unfairly, she says, by the black Jack Johnson—“‘That big dinge . . . the big black bastard. That nigger beat him by a fluke. . . . He was like a god he was. So white and clean and beautiful and smooth and fast and like a tiger or like lightning’” (Stories, 389).
At this point with the fantasy at its highest, the Indians leave for the cold and dark outside, and then Alice accuses the blonde of lying and gives her version of Steve Ketchel whom she claims to have loved, swearing to Jesus and Mary it is true. Just as Nick is beginning to feel attracted to Alice, wondering what it would be like making love to a 350-pound woman, his friend Tom (possibly also Indian) sees him looking at her and says, “‘Come on. Let’s go’” (Stories, 391)—let’s go out with the red Indians, leaving the warm, lighted, whited sepulcher for the cold and dark suggestive of a simpler, better alternative to the contradictions of that other world. It is a striking and typical contrast of decadence and the primitive.
“Fathers and Sons,” the last story in his collected stories, is also a Nick Adams story, but in it there is a chronological leap forward so that Nick is neither a child nor youth but a mature thirty-eight, with a son of his own to initiate. Biographical parallels continue, no doubt, but once again Hemingway twisted inchoate real life into a meaningful fiction by writing that his sexual initiation was with an Indian, and it was in “the forest primeval.” In language reminiscent of many other descriptions of a golden age or a sacred time and place, Nick remembers, “there was still much forest then, virgin forest where the trees grew high before there were any branches and you walked on the brown, clean, springy-needled ground with no undergrowth and it was cool on the hottest days and they three”—Nick and his Indian girlfriend and her kid brother—“lay against the trunk of a hemlock wider than two beds are long, with the breeze high in the tops and the cool light that came in patches, and Billy said”:
“You want Trudy again?”
[Nick] “You want to?”
[Trudy] “Un Huh.” (Stories, 492–93)
But the idyll is evanescent; Nick remembers his hypocrisy when he flew into a rage at learning that Trudy’s and Billy’s older half-brother wanted to sleep with Nick’s sister and Nick threatened to shoot and scalp him. The idyll and its recollection are also marred by other memories of his loved but foolish father—sentimental, betrayed, and at last a suicide. Nick’s own son, as if reading his mind, then asks what the Indians of Nick’s youth were like.
“They were Ojibways,’” Nick said. “‘And they were very nice.’” Nick then silently remembers how Trudy “did first what no one has ever done better” (Stories, 497).8 He also remembers both good and bad images associated with the Ojibways and rejects as unimportant the derogatory jokes about Indians, “Nor what they did finally. It wasn’t how they ended. They all ended the same. Long time ago good. Now no good” (Stories, 498).9
Nick does not want to be caught up in futile nostalgia. He wants to remember exactly how it was. It is another stage in his education. But at the same time he feels some good in the naive past which has been detrimentally lost. The ambivalence here could parallel the many other places where Hemingway bitterly recognized the evanescence of human affairs, especially love, or, if he knew of Trudy’s real-life counterpart’s suicide, a parallel to the suicide of his father, the other person most fully remembered and depicted in the story and also an actual suicide.
“Long time ago good. Now no good” echoes phrases he claimed to have heard from an old Indian and that elsewhere he rendered, “Long time ago good, now heap shit” (Letters, xii), a version that would have broken the elegaic tone of the passage in the story. Nick returns from his reveries to answer his son, “‘You might not like them [the Indians]. . . . But I think you would,’” just as Nick’s father had (Stories, 498). The story ends with the son persuading Nick to visit the grandfather’s (Nick’s father’s) tomb, to reverence the dead and the past.
At the time he began writing these Nick Adams stories, Hemingway had also been exposed to the nonsense in romanticizing primitives, playing at being an Indian or a black or a gypsy or some other supposedly innocent creature unspoiled by a mechanical world. Hemingway’s reaction to such romanticizing triggered the satirical attack on Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter in his The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race (1926).
For Hemingway it was one thing to cultivate instinct and suspect mind and quite another thing to generalize romantically, as he felt Anderson had done: “That terrible shit about the nobility of any gent belonging to another race than our own (whatever that is) was worth checking,” he had replied to Wyndham Lewis’ praise of The Torrents of Spring (Letters, 264). Later, Hemingway’s own extensive treatment of blacks in Green Hills of Africa would confirm his refusal to stereotype them as either noble or ignoble savages. Like the portrait of Bugs in “The Battler,” they would be individuated. In a satire like The Torrents of Spring, however, he stereotyped to the extreme in order to mock and correct the tendency to romanticize the primitive and, in the United States and Europe, ever since Columbus but especially since Rousseau, to romanticize American Indians. If, to Europeans and European-Americans, Indians were not “howling savages,” they tended to become “noble”—primitive innocents living close to a gentle Nature and uncorrupted by “unnatural” institutions of church and state. Hemingway was certainly exposed to and tempted by this anthropologically naive view that periodically in this country seems to charm persons with little or no direct experience of actual Indians, the vastly different cultures, languages, histories, and orientations of many different peoples all being lumped together into a hazy “Indianness.”
Hemingway’s antidote partly lay at hand in the summers of his youth when he came to know not “Indians” but Ojibways and Ottawas and, even better, the real-life counterparts of them that he imagined as individuals into his short stories.10 Furthermore, Hemingway’s primitivism was part of his artistic self-consciousness, which he shared with his generation of artists, and part of his disillusionment with the Western “civilization,” which had produced not only the bloodiest war in history but also technocracy, bureaucracy, and moral hypocrisy, all of which had a staggering impact on artists such as Hemingway whose values were in many ways conventional. As Malcolm Cowley perceived, Hemingway’s primitivism had nothing to do with romance, but was instead concerned with the substitution of the inauthentic for the authentic. Cowley was among the first to unlock stories like “Big Two-Hearted River,” reading it as “incantation” and “spell” and accompanied by other stories of animal and human sacrifice, sexual initiation and union, self-immolation, conversion, and symbolic death and rebirth. Cowley also saw that “Memories of the Indians he knew in his boyhood play an important part in Hemingway’s work” (xx). Of course there were to be other primitive models, and Cowley cites the Spanish as preeminent among the successors to the Indians of Michigan, as later does Leslie Fiedler. But they were first and they endured, later complemented by the Gypsies and peasants of Spain and the natives of East Africa.
Since the work of A. O. Lovejoy and Franz Boas, primitivism h
as come to be regarded as of two sorts, cultural and chronological, and Hemingway variously, at different points in his career, evidenced both varieties.11 Far from suggesting crudity and undevelopment, primitivism is a recurrent cultural phenomenon which places value on the simplicity of social forms and finds sophistication a companion of cultural degeneration and even evil. The cultural primitive then wishes to restructure society and all aspects of it, from art to family, along lines that are felt to be more natural and better suited for the capacities and desires of human beings. Industrialization and urbanization are developments judged to be, in varying degrees, inhuman and hostile to spirit and art. Chronological primitivism looks not forward to amelioration of the human condition but backward to some time in the past when the human condition was if not Edenic at least holistic and characterized by reverence for life, high moral purpose, humane dealings, and beauty. If cultural primitivism tended to be Utopian, chronological primitivism was Arcadian. In illo tempore there was a Golden Age once, never to be seen again. Camelots riddle our cultural landscapes.
Nick Adams’s thoughts in the idiom of an Ojibway, “Long time ago good. Now no good” (Stories, 498), perfectly if oversimply epitomize chronological primitivism. But what was the “long time ago?” While Hemingway was sometimes nostalgic for particular persons and activities from his past, he did not sentimentalize them, distorting them beyond recollection and reality. Indeed, as at the end of “Ten Indians” when Nick awakens, Hemingway gently mocks the idea of romantic love, one of the most enduring ideals associated with chronological primitivism. There seemed to be a tension that alternately drew and repelled Hemingway, who was sufficiently anachronistic for Scott Fitzgerald to cast him as a heroic medieval knight in one of his last unfinished stories, “Phillipe, Count of Darkness.”
One working title for his own Across the River and into the Trees had been A New Slain Knight (from the ballad “The Twa Corbies”). Throughout that novel the modern knight, U.S. Army Colonel Richard Cantwell, pictures himself, albeit often ironically, as a knight errant. His lady, Renata, he asks to run for Queen of Heaven, an allusion Hemingway used in other stories too as well as in letters to some of the women he admired. In an early story, “The Three-Day Blow,” he revealed a familiarity with the archetypal Tristan-Iseult love story which he often drew upon thematically. The title for A Farewell to Arms derives from the George Peele poem on the retirement of one of Queen Elizabeth I’s knights. Other such allusions and references to chivalry occur in his work, from In Our Time to Across the River and into the Trees.12 Two books published recently (1981) index the seven thousand volumes in Hemingway’s Cuban library and trace his extensive reading from 1910 to 1940 (Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading, and Brasch and Sigman). These works are signs of a thorough reassessment of Hemingway as neither a “Dumb Ox” nor a merely accidental cultural primitive, someone who has mindlessly adopted a fashionable cultural pose. Yet problems of definition continue: Jeffrey Meyers succumbs to Wyndham Lewis’s “Dumb Ox” view of Hemingway and subscribes to a stereotype of persons drawn to the primitive: Hemingway “outwardly suppressed the sensitive side of his nature and chose to cultivate a virile image [writing] about the Indians and violence of Michigan, rather than the stuffy culture of Oak Park” (7). A more telling misobservation is hard to imagine, with its suggestion that a sensitive person would opt for the “stuffy” and that a primitive would not be sensitive; yet the stance is prototypical. Lewis’s Paleface (1929), “blasting” primitivism and praising The Torrents of Spring, also seems a misunderstanding of Hemingway’s orientation. The superficial so-called primitivism and the easy patronizing of Indians and blacks from a position of privilege were what Hemingway parodied. However misguided, Lewis seemed to have thought he reversed his opinion of Hemingway when he later (in 1934) called him a “white version” of the Noble Savage. Some of these reassessments would make him out (if they were considered in isolation from other critical interpretations) to be a chronological primitive rather than a cultural primitive, and they place him among a group of other twentieth-century American writers who romanticized the Middle Ages. The name Henry Adams, the father of recurring protagonist Nick Adams, is the same as the name of the greatest of our medieval admirers. Mark Twain, James Branch Cabell, Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, among others, were drawn to the Middle Ages, as were lesser but more popular writers like Maurice Hewlett. Another contemporary, Willa Cather, found her golden age in spiritually rich but materially simple cultures like our pioneer past, the early days of French Canada, and the early Spanish-Indian culture of the Southwest—anything but the machine-driven, commercial, and tawdry world of the urban United States.
All of this suggests that if Hemingway was no Miniver Cheevy, he was writing at at time when the Middle Ages (for Henry Adams, notably the twelfth century) were much admired by many serious writers as an era of belief, value, beauty, and, above all, stability, whereas the twentieth century, especially since World War I for Hemingway’s generation, was an era of culture in crisis. And neither church nor country, religious nor secular values, survived those crises unshaken.
But Hemingway’s flirtation with chronological primitivism in his interest in medievalism and his tendency to idealize the frontier past of America seem to have emerged later than his cultural primitivism, which was less consciously sought out and more naturally learned. In the 1930s he began to see America as spoiled, and except for The Torrents of Spring he never finished a novel set in it. In the 1940s he began his intensive reading in the Middle Ages. And in these years his writing that reflected this interest in medievalism (notably Across the River and into the Trees) diminished in quality. Only when he returned to the theme of cultural primitivism in The Old Man and the Sea were (for many readers) his talents again well engaged.
For primitives, a basic question is What is nature and the natural? For nature is superior and intrinsic and provides the norm and health, whereas custom, law, and the rational are contrivances that lead to a seeming order in which luxury and decorum or morality (strange but frequent bedfellows) rule. Ironically for chronological primitives, medieval Christianity seemed to partake of cultural primitivism, being anti-intellectual and Utopian, accepting the rule of grace, not mind. The two kinds of primitivism inevitably and repeatedly drew Hemingway and many of his contemporaries. Musicians like Debussy, Stravinsky, and Villa-Lobos, painters like Picasso and Klee, and writers like D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Jarry, and Antonin Artaud helped create a cultural context which provided part of Hemingway’s education, partly and to an important degree, in Paris, that most sophisticated of cities and locus earlier for the Indian-lover Rousseau whose primitivism was merely intellectual.
Thus, on the other side of chronological primitivism, manifested periodically and generally not well, was Hemingway’s cultural primitivism, part of the Zeitgeist but also (for Hemingway) reinforced by direct experience with primitives and rendered in realistic fiction. Unlike Robinson Crusoe or other “moderns” eager to escape nature and return to civilization, Hemingway and his other American predecessors like Huck Finn will “light out for the Territory”—Indian country—literally or figuratively.
One more particular example, the very short “Banal Story,” is slight, facetious, and melodramatic by turn, but nonetheless it provides a remarkably frank insight to Hemingway’s tough-minded disparagement of Romance (read “false primitivism”) and his sardonic recognition that ours is not a golden age but merely a brass age that sings a small paean to his anachronistic hero, the dead bullfighter Manuel Garcia Maera, one of the last of the great matadors. His passing brings relief to the lesser still-living fighters who will no longer be shamed by comparison with Maera. The chronological divide between golden and brass has been crossed. In contrast to Maera’s values, the first part of the story, as in The Torrents of Spring, describes and mocks the intellectual longing for the primitive. As with Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, who thinks he
will find happiness and perhaps “splendid imaginary amorous adventures . . . in an intensely romantic land” (9), the unnamed protagonist of the first part of the story seeks Romance vicariously through his writing and through reading The Forum, a popular magazine appealing to typical middle-class, middlebrow Americans, in turn flattering their pretentions and raising mindless questions about the future and the past.
Here again, as in Hemingway’s 1956 letter about East Africa and his initiation into the Kamba tribe, we find the banal President Coolidge and other deracinated patrons, sportsmen, and authors. “Our civilization—is it inferior to older orders of things?” The answer to the rhetorical question is an implied “Yes.” “And meanwhile, in the far-off dripping jungles of Yucatan, sounded the chopping of the axes of the gumchoppers”: this is an ironic illustration of the incursion of the banal and the destructive even into a jungle (Stories, 360).
The single reference to an Indian is to Pocahontas whom John Smith had converted into a princess and a lover, the archetypal dream of the dusky maiden who would bring primal joy to the white man longing to escape the enervation of civilization. She epitomizes a mockery of the cultural primitive’s beliefs converted into a red fantasy, and she also illustrates the foolishness of at least some chronological primitives’ beliefs when they are grounded in false history (an oxymoron?) and distortions of the past, for Pocahontas as she has come down to us in legend is a fabrication of John Smith, who was eager to promote settlement and investment in the Virginia colony. She is fairy sister to Odysseus’ sirens, Melville’s Fayaway, and hosts of other images in the fine and popular arts of Western civilization. “Live the full life of the mind,” Hemingway’s narrator mocks, “exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual” (Stories, 361).
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 29