One may regard with skepticism Hemingway’s repeated proclamations of self-disgust about the breakup, inasmuch as he was able so rapidly, in Carlos Baker’s phrase, “to siphon off his sorrow” in the form of this story.9 But it is Hemingway the artist and not Hemingway the man who must finally stand judgment, and on that basis he emerges in “A Canary for One” as a skillful craftsman in command of difficult and sensitive subject matter. What is more, he ended his story at the right time and in the right way. To reveal the separation earlier would have deprived the reader of the retroactive enjoyment that derives from the sense of discovery—discovery of the American lady’s persistently obtuse remarks, of the emotional deadness of the husband’s reactions to his surroundings, of the wife’s patient listening and pointed questions. Hemingway has done everything possible to lay a sound foundation for his “surprise ending.” His textual revisions, which may after all be “as important as those of Keats,”10 contribute brilliantly to that foundation.
El Pueblo Español: “The Capital of the World”
Bernard Oldsey
I don’t like writing like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.—Ernest Hemingway in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, August 25, 1960
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Capital of the World” is a relatively neglected piece of work. A quick check in Audre Hanneman’s bibliography and its supplement on Hemingway shows four to five times the amount of critical commentary on “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” as there is on “The Capital of the World.”1 Whether this is an appropriate ratio of response is a moot point, but it would appear that Hemingway’s story about Madrid has been strangely neglected and that it begs for further analysis, especially along the interconnected lines of theme, technique, and social commentary. In this story, in less than a dozen pages of print, Hemingway managed to compress the material of an ordinary novel into a restricted but brilliant picture of Spanish society, el pueblo español, right on the eve of the Civil War.2
The story first appeared, under the undistinguished title of “The Horns of the Bull,” in the June 1936 issue of Esquire. It thus stands in much the same relationship to the Spanish matter of Death in the Afternoon (1932) as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (August 1936, Esquire) and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (September 1936, Cosmopolitan) do to the African matter of Green Hills of Africa (1935). These three stories make fictive use of materials Hemingway developed in, respectively, his encyclopedic commentary on tauromachy and his early-day nonfictional novel on hunting in Africa. These also happen to be the last three short stories Hemingway ever wrote, unless one considers a few odd pieces like “The Old Man at the Bridge.” Moreover, they differ considerably from the author’s previous short stories, especially those done in the tranche de vie mode, like most of the Nick Adams pieces or, for example, “Hills Like White Elephants.”
One might make a claim for “The Short Happy Life” as an advanced form of narrative, since it contains more plot, more “mystery,” than the earlier stories. But at the same time it marked a return to what Hemingway had derided as the “wow ending.” From a technical standpoint “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Capital of the World” are the two stories that emerge as distinguished capstones to Hemingway’s career in this area of composition. Both of these works are compressed, or condensed, novels.3 “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” achieves its compression through the temporal shifts associated with Ford Madox Ford’s “time organ.” But “The Capital of the World” gets its compression by crosscutting from character to character, scene to scene, much as the movies do. “Crosscutting” is in fact a cinematographic term, although the technique itself seems to have stemmed from literary sources: pioneer movie-maker D. W. Griffith confessed to learning the method from reading the novels of Charles Dickens.4 Eventually, of course, the influence of literary works on film reversed itself, so that it became reciprocal, with novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (with its camera eye), and Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools standing as prime examples of the reverse swing.
The interaction between movies and print-fiction is clearly shown in Hemingway’s “The Capital of the World.” The story reads like an adaptation script for a film, and with a few directive phrases added, lining up photographic angles and distances, it could very easily be made into a shooting script. The following brief paragraph indicates the extent to which this is true:
[Shot i] Upstairs the matador who was ill was lying face down on his bed alone. [Shot 2] The matador who was no longer a novelty was sitting looking out of his window preparatory to walking out to the cafe. [Shot 3] The matador who was a coward had the older sister of Paco in his room with him and was trying to get her to do something which she was laughingly refusing to do.5
And this second paragraph is even more fully illustrative of the method:
[Shot 1] The auctioneer stood on the street corner talking with friends. [Shot 2] The tall waiter was at the Anarcho-Syndicalist meeting waiting for an opportunity to speak. [Shot 3] The middle-aged waiter was seated on the terrace of the Café Alvarez drinking a small beer. [Shot 4] The woman who owned the Luarca was already asleep in her bed, where she lay on her back with the bolster between her legs, big, fat, honest, clean, easy-going, very religious and never having ceased to miss or pray for her husband, dead, now, twenty years. [Shot 5] In his room, alone, the matador who was ill lay face down on his bed with his mouth against his handkerchief. (48)
The swift compression of these “camera shots” is immediately appreciable. And the way in which the writer presents the entire story of the woman who owns the Pension Luarca in one sentence, focusing on the “bolster” between her legs, is breathtakingly dramatic and satisfying.
Passages like these make one wonder whether Hemingway might not have outstripped fellow novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in writing for the movies had he the need or will to work for Hollywood as they did. Just a few years before writing “The Capital of the World” Hemingway did become involved with the movie industry, to the extent that the first in a long line of his works was made into a movie, A Farewell to Arms, produced by Paramount in 1932 and starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes.6 Just after “The Capital of the World,” Hemingway became as fully involved in movie-making as he ever would. Working with producer Joris Ivers, and scriptwriters Archibald MacLeish and Lillian Hellman, he wrote and delivered the voice-over commentary for The Spanish Earth, that clarion call for help which preceded For Whom the Bell Tolls and played to sympathetic audiences in Carnegie Hall and the White House.7
The movie that exerted the most important influence on “The Capital of the World,” however, was not one that Hemingway himself had a hand in but one that he learned from and reacted to. In retrospect this particular film can be seen as the very prototype of the kind of formula film that is constantly being produced, the sort of thing one has grown used to in movies like Airport, The Poseidon Adventure and Porter’s Ship of Fools, many of which are made from novels that have the formula built into their pages. The formula starts with the introduction of a series of characters as they enter a hotel, board a ship or airplane, or come together in some such fashion as to represent a microcosm of society, or a section of a given society. All of their stories and backgrounds are revealed in snippets, all intermingling eventually, until finally the ship lands, or the guests leave the hotel, and disbanding becomes denouement. Actually, the forgathering aspect of the formula reaches all the way back to Boccacio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.8
The prototype for this kind of formula film is the classic Grand Hotel. Vicki Baum’s popular novel about Berlin was published in 1929, translated into English in 1930, and made into a movie the same year as A Farewell to Arms, 1932. An international success, it starred not only John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, and Jean Hersholt, but more importantly
Greta Garbo. (It was Garbo’s second talking film, the one in which she first said “I want to be alone.”) Garbo—who is mentioned three times in “The Capital of the World,” and with special thematic emphasis in the final sentence of the story—represents more than a gratuitous link with what might be called Hemingway’s “Not So Grand Hotel.” The two sisters of Paco, the omniscient narrator says, have gone to a movie palace in the Gran Via to see Garbo in the movie adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. Crosscutting from their brother, who lies dying back at the pension, Hemingway indicates how they, like the rest of the audience, “were intensely disappointed in the Garbo film, which showed the great star in miserable low surroundings when they had been accustomed to see her surrounded by great luxury and brilliance,” as in Grand Hotel, where she plays the Russian prima ballerina, Grusinskaya.9
It is not hard to imagine how Hemingway used these contemporaneous materials. He obviously saw a way to use the Grand Hotel method in short form. In using Garbo so pointedly, he even drew attention to the work and technique he was improving on. Garbo was the epitome of glamour and illusion, a star starring as a star in Grand Hotel, a movie of high fashion and sophistication for its day. But Hemingway also saw Garbo’s value as an emblem of degradation and disillusion—‘tis pity she’s a whore in Anna Christie, a movie of the working class.10 Hemingway understood the emphasis placed on the concepts of virginity and whoredom in a country like Spain, a center of Mariolatry where women have often been placed into two categories: the good mother, sister, wife; and then all the rest—serving girls, foreign women. This latter category includes “las suecas” (Swedes, or, by extension, all leggy blondes) and “las putas.” It is “una puta,” or whore, that the cowardly matador would make of a serving girl, one of Paco’s sisters. “Not through you,” she defiantly answers, reminding him that “a whore is also a woman” (a fact she seems to forget when she sees Anna Christie later).
Two real whores are introduced into the story toward the conclusion, and the hawk-faced picador emerges from a café with one of them eventually, even though the cowardly matador (having a bad day all around) had been buying her drinks all evening. According to Stephen A. Reid—who discerns an Oedipal pattern in “The Capital of the World”—even Paco’s mother is something of a whore. “Paco’s mother had no husband,” Reid declares, “and there was, presumably, no individual man among his mother’s lovers who stood strongly enough as a rival of him for his mother’s love.”11 Hence the bull becomes a surrogate father, and so forth, and Paco, according to this presumptive reading, becomes one of the most scorned objects in Spain, “un hijo de puta,” or whoreson.
If movies and women can be used to represent forms of illusion and disillusion, so can other elements in the story, which Hemingway once considered calling “The Capitol [sic] of Illusion.”12 Religion and bullfighting might be added to the long list of things that are considered the opium of the people. According to the Anarcho-Syndicalist waiter in the story, it is precisely these last two forms of beguiling illusion that are killing Spain, and so it is “necessary to kill the individual bull” and (shades of the war to come) the “individual priest” to get rid of “the two curses” (42). However, according to the two priests staying at the Luarca, it is the city of Madrid—as a center of bureaucratic power, the implication is—which is killing Spain. One of the priests sums up much of the theme of the story in this pithy complaint: “Madrid is where one learns to understand. Madrid kills” (45). The priests are bitterly disappointed about the amount of help they can get for their poor territory of Galicia (Pablo and his sisters are from the equally poor territory of Extremadura). If Hemingway’s early title had been slightly changed to “The Capital of Disillusion” it would have perfectly suited the condition of these priests. The little illusion they can summon up comes from the generous portions of unconsecrated wine they imbibe at the Pension Luarca.
What all of this makes clear is that “The Capital of the World” is a fictive anatomy of illusion-disillusion. It has a cast of twenty characters (if Garbo is counted), and with few exceptions they are graded on a basis of how much illusion or disillusion they represent, like the priests and the Anarcho-Syndicalist waiter. The three matadors at the Luarca, for example, stand among the thoroughly disillusioned: the sick one is coughing away his life with tuberculosis; the short one knows that his day as a novelty is over; and the cowardly one, who was once brave, has lost his courage through a particularly “atrocious” wounding. These toreros stay at the Luarca because it is a “good address” and because “decorum and dignity rank above courage as the virtues most highly prized in Spain” (39). At the same time they know their place in Spanish society, as second-rate bullfighters; along with the narrator they must know that “there is never any record of any bull fighter having left the Luarca for a better or more expensive hotel” (39).
Enrique—the dishwasher who is partially responsible for Paco’s death—is only “three years older than Paco,” but he has already taken his place among the disillusioned. In the priest’s phrase Enrique has “learned in Madrid,” and what he has learned is fear. “Miedo,” as he says to Paco. “The same fear you would have in the ring with a bull” (46). Paco’s own state of virginal illusion, and courage, is revealed in his thoughts: “No, he would not be afraid. Others, yes. Not he. He knew that he would not be afraid. Even if he ever was afraid he knew that he could do it anyway. He had confidence”(47).
Hemingway did not change the title of the story to “The Capital of the World” until the Spanish Civil War had broken out. The story first appeared under the new title with the publication of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories in 1938. By that time Madrid had become something of a capital of the world: all eyes were focused on it as the center of conflict between fascist and antifascist forces. Then, too, provincial youths like Paco always see the capitals of their countries as the grand omphalos of the universe. There is a kind of universal naiveté and provincialism that makes youths think that Paris, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Warsaw—each in its own right—is truly the capital of the world. A young American antecedent of Paco’s—Hawthorne’s Robin Molineux—thinks Boston is the hub of the universe, and in his concept of himself as a “shrewd youth” matches Paco for simplicity and innocence.
Several commentators have talked about the theme of “The Capital of the World” in a rather simplistic way. As one puts it, “this story advances the mordant conclusion that to be brave, good, and innocent is to be unfit for life.”13 As another says, in complementary manner, “the theme is the necessity for disillusion.”14 Hemingway himself, however, is not far from suggesting in the story that Paco is a “smart lad, to slip betimes away.” This is his athlete dying young, one who will not know the suffering and frustration of the other characters in the story: “The boy Paco had never known about any of this [what has gone on about him in the pension] nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day or on the other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. . . . He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions”(51).
The very last sentence of the story brings theme and technique into mutual focus: “He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.” The Spanish translator of this story, in a i960 edition of Hemingway’s “Relatos,” brings the word disappointed under the rubric of illusion-disillusion. As he translates the final sentence it comes out with a peculiarly Spanish emphasis: “Tampoco tuvo tiempo para desilusionarse por 1a pelicula de Greta Garbo, que defraudo a todo Madrid durante una semana” [Nor did he have time to disillusion himself with the movie of Greta Garbo, which defrauded all Madrid for a week].15
It has become a cliché that the thing left out is what characterizes a Hemingway short story, which may be true for most of his stories but not “The Capital of the World” (nor for that matter “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”).16 Nor is “The Capital of the World” a typical Hemi
ngway story in the sense of being fully rendered, with little or no auctorial commentary and exposition. Quite the opposite—here Hemingway wrote omnisciently, from the beginning anecdote, or “chiste,” to the final editorial commentary of the last sentence. His “writing like God,” which he would carry through in For Whom the Bell Tolls (the last half of which is dominated by the movielike crosscutting),17 produced one of those fictive examples of “sabiduria,” or folk wisdom, typical of Spain. “La vida es una lucha,” Spanish folk say [Life is a battle]. Or, simply, “La vida es sueno” [Life is a dream]. What Hemingway says thematically in “The Capital of the World” is equally simple, but balanced, bivalent: “La vida es ilusión—y desilusión.” The trick is to find a good balance between the two (as does the woman who runs the Luarca and, to a lesser extent, the middle-aged waiter).18 Otherwise you find that the world has very suddenly severed your femoral artery, or you yourself reach for a shotgun.
The Poor Kitty and the Padrone and the Tortoise-shell Cat in “Cat in the Rain”
Warren Bennett
Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Cat in the Rain,” first published as an integral part of Hemingway’s In Our Time, is a story that has never been given much critical acclaim. Scholarship has generally approached it as a story of “marital dissatisfaction” (Hovey, 10) and Philip Young groups it with four other stories about “couples under the spell of disenchantment”: “Out of Season,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Canary for One,” and “The Sea Change” (Young, 178). Other commentators reduce the artistic value of the story by assigning it a biographical function. Carlos Baker says that “Cat in the Rain” is “derived from a rainy day [Ernest] spent with Hadley [in] February at the Hotel Splendide in Rapallo” (133), and the characters in the story are derived from “[Hemingway] and Hadley and the manager and chambermaid” (107). Jeffrey Meyers says that the story is based on “the disintegration of [Ernest’s] marriage to Hadley” (144). “Cat in the Rain,” however, is more than a story of marital dissatisfaction, and it is more than a disguised autobiography.1 It may be one of Hemingway’s best stories, subtly executed and powerfully suggestive in its characterization and imagery. This interpretation will consider three facets of the story: the function of the padrone in relation to the function of the husband, the function of the “poor kitty” (93) as an image in relation to the wife, and the significance of the tortoise-shell cat as an ironic image crucial to the story’s resolution.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 33