New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Page 36
The Hemingway hero, too, is caught in a dilemma, the poles of which are his loyalty to the causa and his personal admiration for Luis Delgado’s courage and style. His clumsy attempt at impartiality is simply an evasion of his larger responsibility if we take him at his word that he is “absolutely and always” loyal to the cause of the Republic. He admits as much when he accuses himself of “Pontius Pilatry” (97). His “neutrality” condemns the waiter to intense emotional and moral agony, and his old friend from the past to denunciation and death. It is quite clear that Henry Emmunds is a man of influence and could have spared his old friend’s life if he had but urged the waiter to remain silent. Four times the waiter appeals to him for advice, and four times Emmunds denies him forthright counsel. Instead, under the pretense of impartiality, he prolongs the agony and, word by contradictory word, sentences his old friend to death. (The scene in Chicote’s is not unlike that in a courtroom. The narrator is at the “bar” [90]; he sits on a “bench” [91]; he listens to the accusations and appeals of the old waiter; he observes the accused, who is also at the bar; and by his judicial attempt at “impartiality,” he helps to condemn this man to death. “You’re the judge of that,” he had said to Luis in the old days at San Sebastian, a remark prompted by Luis’s judgment that they did not know one another well enough for him to accept a personal loan [96]. Now, four years later, the narrator must judge whether or not his past friendship for Delgado is such that he can come to his aid.)
The narrator’s reluctance to denounce his old friend is understandable. Delgado exhibits traits which the Hemingway hero, wherever we find him, has unfailingly admired and/or aspired to: courage, zest, cheerfulness, a willingness to take risks and, when the gamble fails, to pay the piper uncomplainingly. The purpose of the flashback is to establish these qualities of character. At a pigeon shoot in the resort town of San Sebastian in 1933, Delgado, who “had shot beautifully but drawn almost impossible birds,” graciously pays a heavy gambling debt, “a good deal more than he could afford to lose that year.” “I remembered how pleasant he was and how he made it seem a great privilege to pay” (95). Then on the spur of the moment Delgado proposes they wager eight thousand pesetas, nearly a thousand dollars, on the flip of a coin. Again he loses, and again he pays without complaint, without bitterness. He politely turns down the narrator’s offer of a personal loan—“‘Don’t be silly, Enrique,’ he said. ‘We’ve been gambling, haven’t we?’” (96)—but accepts his offer of a drink. “So we had a gin and tonic and I felt very badly to have broken him and I felt awfully good to have won the money, and a gin and tonic never tasted better to me in all my life. There is no use to lie about these things or pretend you do not enjoy winning; but this boy Luis Delgado was a very pretty gambler” (96). Now, sitting at different tables, separated by the politics of war, they are both in Chicote’s drinking gin and tonic. And once again Delgado is gambling for very high stakes, this time truly for more than he can afford to lose.
Although the narrator repeatedly refers to Delgado as a fool, “The utter bloody fool” (91), it is quite clear that he admires the dashing courage of this enemy, although in the end he will betray him.
I would have given plenty not to have seen him in there.
Still, if he wanted to do an absolutely damned fool thing like that it was his own business. But as I looked at the table and remembered the old days I felt badly about him and I felt very badly too that I had given the waiter the number of the counter-espionage bureau in Seguridad headquarters. . . . I had given him the shortest cut to having Delgado arrested in one of those excesses of impartiality, righteousness and Pontius Pilatry.” (96–97)
For thirty pieces of silver Judas betrayed his Master to the chief priests and elders, who accused and denounced Jesus before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. For expediency’s sake Pilate betrayed Jesus to the multitude. Denying responsibility for the death of Jesus, Pilate “washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it” (Matt. 27:24). The narrator, too, believes he is innocent of the blood of the accused, guilty only of having expedited the arrest; but, by washing his hands of the affair, he has betrayed Delgado to the embattled Madrilenos, who shows no mercy to fifth columnists, traitors, and spies.
The reference to the pieces of silver used in the gambling at San Sebastian enriches the imagery of the betrayal. They were “heavy silver five-peseta pieces,” “big silver” coins “with the profile of Alfonso XIII as a baby showing” on one side (95). This king did indeed betray Spanish hopes for peaceful evolution toward parliamentary democracy when he gave his support and blessing to the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923. With the rise to power of Primo de Rivera, declares Jackson, “Spain lost the considerable intellectual and slight parliamentary liberty she had achieved since 1875,”7 But the allusion to Alfonso’s babyhood suggests that the betrayal of Spain’s democratic hopes, which set the stage for the Spanish Civil War, began many years earlier. And the historians agree. During the regency of his mother Maria Christina, while Alfonso was a child, the conservative and liberal leaders made a mockery of the election process by agreeing in advance to a policy (turno politico) of alternating the two parties in power. “A two-party system involving fixed elections,” Jackson believes, “ultimately undermined rather than developed the sense of political responsibility in Spain.”8 The arrangement insured “the minimum amount of friction,” observes Theo Aronson, but “it was a policy of peace at any price, and sooner or later the price would have to be paid.”9
Alfonso, “always a man for risks,”10 serves as a counterpart to Luis Delgado. Like Delgado, he was a crack shot and spent many long summers in San Sebastian. He adored shooting, high-speed motoring, polo, any sport requiring speed and daring. “No amount of anxiety,” writes Aronson, “seemed capable of subduing his high spirits.”11 On his wedding day he narrowly missed death in his royal carriage when a bombing attempt was made on his life. Twelve persons were killed in the procession and crowd and over a hundred wounded, and one of the horses which drew the royal coach lay dead in the street. The king calmly switched to “the carriage of respect—the empty coach preceding the royal carriage”—put his arm around his bride-queen, kissed her, and then “in a loud, clear, deliberate voice, for all that stunned crowd to hear, he ordered: ‘Slowly, very slowly, to the palace.’” Remarked a British Colonel who had witnessed the assassination attempt, “I never saw such pluck.”12
Alfonso, moreover, at the time of his abdication in 1931, enunciated a policy of neutrality not unlike that pursued by the narrator in Hemingway’s story. “I could find ample means,” the king declared in his farewell manifesto to the Spanish people, “to maintain my Royal Prerogatives in effective resistance to those who assail them: but I prefer to stand resolutely aside rather than provoke a conflict which might array my fellow-countrymen against one another in civil and patricidal strife.”13
The betrayal motif, which surfaces rather late in the story, has a ripplelike effect which carries back to earlier sections. One now begins to understand why Hemingway identified his narrator as an American and why, at the beginning, he has him stop by the American Embassy. Through his denunciation of the aloof American, Hemingway is also denouncing the U.S. State Department policy of nonintervention. Henry Emmunds is seen implementing that policy, evading his rightful responsibilities, not on the international stage, but in a small Madrid bar. His visit to the Embassy is a reminder that the United States has also evaded its responsibilities to the duly elected government of Spain. At least that was Hemingway’s view, one shared at the time by many other Americans, including Henry L. Stimson, former U.S. Secretary of State. In a now historic letter written to the New York Times, Stimson urged the lifting of the arms embargo, pointing out that the act violated “longstanding principles of American international conduct.” The Loyalist government, Stimson reminded the American people, was recognized as “the true governmen
t of Spain” by the United States. “One of the most important rights which a state like Spain is entitled to expect from another government, which has recognized it as a friendly neighbor in the family of nations,” argued the former Secretary, “is the right of self-defense against any future rebellions which may challenge its authority.”14 Herbert Matthews, the New York Times correspondent who covered the Spanish conflict, often in the company of Hemingway, puts America’s evasion of responsibility into historical perspective: “The United States had never before denied to a legitimate government, with whom, incidentally, it had a Treaty of Friendship and General Relations,’ the right to buy arms.”15
The “ten pounds of fresh meat” which the narrator picked up at the Embassy provides the basis for further, albeit very subtle, criticism of U. S. policy. The narrator is spared the hardship of hunger in the besieged, food-scarce Spanish capital, and in the bar he claims exemption from the moral hardships. He is a well-fed American who enjoys a privileged position in the midst of the war. The fact that the meat is “wrapped in two envelopes which had brought copies of the Spur” (98) to the American Embassy supports this claim of privilege. The Spur, now defunct, was an American magazine of limited circulation exuding “an aura of wealth,” according to Henry F. Pringle, whose article on class magazines, entitled “High Hat,” appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in July 1938, just four months before the publication of “The Denunciation.” The pages of the Spur, Pringle said, were “littered with photographs of expensive ladies and gentlemen in riding clothes, articles on polo, tennis, golf, and yachting.” It advised the “well-dressed man” that his proper wardrobe would cost $7500—“and this without such plebian accessories as underwear, shoes, or hose.”16 The Spur’s appeal, quite obviously, was to persons of wealth and privilege, and in Spain most of them were supporting the Franco side. This “high hat” magazine and, Hemingway implies, the Embassy which subscribed to it were completely out of touch with the democratic People’s Army fighting for its very survival on the outskirts of Madrid.
The narrator’s encounters with the minor characters in “The Denunciation” keep alive the question of responsibility and duty. In a relatively minor episode early in the story, the narrator buys three Communist party tracts from an old woman and tips her generously. “She said God would bless me. I doubted this but read the three leaflets and drank the gin and tonic” (91). With swift strokes and a minimum of words, Hemingway conveys, seemingly without effort, a cluster of ideas. One quickly notes the irony of the situation, a religious believer selling the tracts of the party of atheism, infamous for its attacks upon the church. The old woman’s duty to God apparently takes precedence over her complete loyalty to the Communist causa. But Hemingway enriches the irony by making Emmunds purchase three tracts, probably to evoke the idea of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The “doubt” which the narrator expresses may very well extend beyond the old woman’s blessing to the very existence of God. Sitting beside a package of freshly butchered meat, reading his trinity of Communist leaflets, he is the very picture of the modern materialist. Marx claimed that religion was the opiate of the people but, as the Hemingway hero in ‘The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” acknowledges, “drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium.”17 Thus, the gin and tonic in Henry Emmunds’s hand is the final deft touch in this brief but telling comment on the spiritual condition of a man who no longer serves his God. Nor does he say “adios,” which means literally “to God (I commend you),” when he says goodbye on the phone to Pepe. Rather, as was the Loyalist custom throughout the war, he employs the word “salud,” meaning “salute” or “health” (100).18
The Greek soldier who joins the narrator at his table in Chicote’s serves both as a contrast and as a parallel to the American writer. John is a volunteer, a company commander in the XVth International Brigade; thus he has fully committed himself to the Loyalist cause, and as a commander he has undertaken very serious military responsibilities. Yet he has on two occasions acted irresponsibly. He must be held at least partly responsible for the death of four of his men; he had given them the all-clear signal when the enemy planes flew over: “Is pass the other three and I say to the company, ‘Now is hokay. Now is all right. Now is nothing more to worry.’ That the last thing I remember for two weeks” (93). The explosion of an aerial bomb killed his four men and buried him alive. John also recalls the time when he hired out at very high wages to dive in a harbor on the southern tip of South America, but he refused to carry on with his duties because of an encounter with an octopus. “So when I get up out of water they take off the helmet and so I say I don’t go down there any more” (95).
But that was long ago and far away. Here in Chicote’s harbor the narrator finds himself out of his moral depth, deeply troubled by the tentacles of responsibility which loom before him. The old waiter beckons him toward social responsibility; Delgado, toward private considerations. He is given a choice between two code heroes: the new socially conscious hero who places public interests above private ones, or the old individualistic hero who adheres to a private code of courage, pride, and honor. By his indecision he betrays them both. But he is uncomfortable in his “neutral” role, and twice—before he leaves Chicote’s and again at the end—he tries, too late, with an empty theatrical gesture to share responsibility with the waiter. One should view as suspect the reason he gives, that he “did not wish him [Delgado] to be disillusioned or bitter about the waiters” at Chicote’s before he died (100). His gesture, like all his earlier actions and statements, falls between the two codes; it satisfies neither. But it does reveal a vague sense of guilt for having sat by while an old man manfully shoulders an onerous duty, one which rightfully belonged to them both.
Hemingway is being muy delgado (“very subtle”) at the story’s end. The Spanish word delgado means “thin,” “delicate,” “tenuous”; the phrase hilar delgado means, colloquially, “to hew close to the line,” “to split hairs.” And that is what the narrator is doing at the conclusion of “The Denunciation”—splitting hairs. He tries to still his conscience by having Pepe tell the condemned man that he, Henry Emmunds, denounced him to the police. “Why when it will make no difference?” asks Pepe. “He is a spy. He will be shot. There is no choice in the matter” (99). But Henry Emmunds did have a choice, and the fact remains that he shirked his responsibility.
The Hemingway hero had announced a “separate peace” in 1918 in A Farewell to Arms,19 and Hemingway the man reaffirmed that private pact in 1935 in Green Hills of Africa: “If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young,” he wrote, “and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself.”20 The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, however, led to the reenlistment of both. But Hemingway and his hero, ever the individualists, continued to wrestle with the question of responsibility to self and to others.21 The attempt to resolve this question is at the thematic center of “The Denunciation.”
To Embrace or Kill: Fathers and Sons
Richard McCann
Fathers ought to avoid utter nakedness before their sons. I did not want to know—not, anyway, from his mouth—that his flesh was as unregenerate as my own . . . I did not want to think that my life would be like his, or that my mind would ever grow so pale, so without hard places and sharp, sheer drops . . . I wanted the merciful distances of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him.—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
The speaker of Joseph Lobdell’s “A Letter” begins, “I wanted to write a friend/ who also has a father who is dead.” The implied possession—of having a dead father as opposed to having no father at all—might also fit Hemingway’s “Fathers and Sons.” As Nick Adams travels back into his father’s country he is claimed by the past, a past which, like the father, will neither wholly die nor nourish him. In �
��Fathers and Sons” the past is as dark as the “black murk of the swamp” Nick crosses, an image which repeats in “Big Two-Hearted River,” yet it is also close and sensual, its very darkness presenting itself as an appeal. The story moves back through memory as darkness (the evening Nick drives through, the heavy trees of the small town, the swamp) but also suggests how memory might inevitably open into clarity and light. By traveling through darkness, Nick finally arrives into the deepest past, the past he would recover, a lit tableau in the woods. Though Nick does not live in the past, we discover how deeply it lives within him as he moves through the submerged layers of his own consciousness.
The landscape of “Fathers and Sons,” the northern Michigan of Nick’s youth, is heavy with the past. Everywhere it reflects Nick’s ambivalence. Though Nick feels that after fifteen “he shared nothing” with his father, his encounters with the “natural” world yield forth the father out of the past Nick yearns for:
His father came back to him . . . when he saw shocks of corn, or when he saw a lake, or if he ever saw a horse and buggy, or when he saw, or heard, wild geese. . . . His father was with him, suddenly, in deserted or in new-plowed fields, in thickets, on small hills, or when going through dead grass, whenever splitting wood or hauling water, by grist mills, cider mills and dams and always with open fires.
“Fathers and Sons” rises from such ambivalence, as do Nick’s memories. Nick reveals his deep love for “the last good country,” yet is an exile. He strives to create a distance between his old and new selves, his past and present, his father and himself, yet also strives to break that distance down. Twice he decides to think no more of his father, yet he cannot stop himself.