New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  Rousseau’s belief in man’s natural goodness and in the inevitable corruptions of civilization as well as the modern concern “with the subconscious mind and anti-rational modes of understanding”19 inspired a kind of writing that emphasizes nature and freedom and that views instinctive and intuitive consciousness as a key to the deepest emotions. Artists who concentrate on the most crucial situations in life, writes Robert Goldwater, the author of the classic study of Primitivism in Modern Art, assume that “the further one goes back—historically, psychologically, or aesthetically—the simpler things become; and that because they are simpler they are more profound, more important, and more valuable.”20 Hemingway simplifies his early stories by presenting the events and omitting the explanation.

  Hemingway expressed his lifelong attraction to primitive people—for the values of northern Michigan over those of Oak Park—in stories about Indians and Negroes, boxers and bullfighters. Africans and Spaniards, and tough, stoical heroes like Harry Morgan and Santiago. This literary mode also influenced his speech and behavior and found expression in his public as well as his fictional persona. He boasted of Indian blood, Indian mistresses, Indian daughters, and liked to imitate Indian speech. Though his youngest sister exclaimed: “Prudence Boulton was a most unattractive little girl. I knew her and that Indian camp there smelled terribly,”21 Hemingway, in a rapturous passage that expressed his yearning for pure experience with instinctive people, claimed “she did first what no one has ever done better.”22 (In fact, his youthful sex life was severely restricted by his religious training, timidity, and fear of venereal disease; and it was the waitress, described in “Up in Michigan,” who did first what other women did better—after he had experienced more sexual experience.)23

  Hemingway had fifty-seven books on Indians in his library and was well read in anthropology. He owned Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915) and Sigmund Freud’s Basic Writings, which included Totem and Taboo (1913). 24 We do not know precisely when Hemingway first read Frazer. But, as John Vickery explains in The Literary Impact of ‘The Golden Bough,” “following its first edition [in 1890], Frazer’s ideas made themselves felt in nearly every area of the humanities and social sciences, including literary history and criticism. . . . Even before the artist actually picked up Frazer’s book, he could easily have had some idea of its basic concepts. . . . Throughout Frazer’s career reviews, summaries, and critiques of his work occupied extended space in numerous periodicals” like the Athenaeum, the Dial, and the Nation.25 During Hemingway’s teens, for example, the Chicago Evening Post printed a substantial essay on The Golden Bough.26 Eliot declared that The Golden Bough had influenced his generation profoundly,27 and Frazer’s book became intellectually fashionable and familiar after the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Both Pound and MacLeish—whom Hemingway met in 1922 and 1924—read Frazer. And in The Cantos and “The Pot of Earth” (1925) they used his “anthropological vision of the primitive past to crystallize the enduring dilemmas of the cultural present.”28

  Hemingway was also receptive to Frazer’s motifs and imagery and to his concepts of sex, superstition, and survival. Like Frazer, Hemingway believed that the primitive past influenced the psychology of the present, and Frazer confirmed what Hemingway already knew about Indians from observation and intuition. The anthropological material in “Indian Camp” is as well integrated and stylized as is Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” in The Tempest.

  Captain James Cook first used the word taboo—which is concerned “with specific and restrictive behaviour in dangerous situations”29—in his account of the Polynesians. Frazer beleives that taboos are “nothing but rules intended to ensure either the continued presence or the return of the soul. In short they are life preservers or lifeguards.”30 His ancient peoples, writes Vickery, “seek to endure by invoking myths of divine assistance and rites in which perfect performance assures divine conquest over enemies and hence human survival.”31

  In the section on “Tabooed Places” in Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, the part of The Golden Bough that clarifies the significance of Hemingway’s story, Frazer states that in primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by sacred kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by “girls at their first menstruation, women after childbirth, homicides, mourners, and all persons who have come into contact with the dead.” During childbirth “women are supposed to be in a dangerous condition which would infect any person or thing they might touch; hence they are put into quarantine until, with the recovery of their health and strength, the imaginary danger has passed away.” Frazer offers massive and far-ranging documentation—from tribes in Australia, Tahiti, and Manaluki in the South Pacific, as well as from the Sinaugolos of New Guinea, the Kodiak Eskimos of Alaska, and the Ba-Pedi and Ba-Thonga of South Africa—to illustrate the woman’s uncleanliness, vulnerability, and danger during her ritual confinement at childbirth. Frazer also explains that after their wives give birth, the warrior-husbands, who now have a greater reason for living, become more cautious and absorb the wives’ weakness: “The men become cowardly [and] weapons lose their force.”32

  Later anthropologists have developed and refined (instead of merely repeating, as literary critics tend to do) the ideas of Frazer. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl relates that the husband’s behavior is compounded by fear for his wife and the desire to protect others “from the evil influence which will emanate from her, especially from her blood.” He states that the husband associates the blood from his wife in childbed with the blood flowing from his own death-wound.33

  Charles Winnick’s explication of the concept of couvade—in which a man ritualistically imitates the symptoms of pregnancy and the moans during delivery—is crucial to an understanding of “Indian Camp” and explains why the husband joins his wife in ritualistic seclusion: “The imitation by the father of many of the concomitants of childbirth [takes place] around the time of the wife’s parturition. . . . The father may retire to bed . . . and observe some taboos and restrictions in order to help the child.” The father practices couvade, Winnick explains, in order to affirm his fatherhood, protect the child, and deflect potential evil from his wife: “The father asserts his paternity through appearing to share in the delivery. . . . The father simulates the wife’s activities in order to get all the evil spirits to focus on him rather than her.”34

  In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Mary Douglas follows Frazer and emphasizes the primitive belief in “horrible disasters which overtake those who inadvertently cross some forbidden line or develop some impure condition.”35 In the anthropological literature, as in “Indian Camp,” the pregnant wife is considered unclean, vulnerable, and in danger; the husband absorbs her weakness and associates her blood with his own death, practices couvade to protect his wife and child, and resents the intrusion of those who assist at the birth.

  In one of the Nick Adams stories Hemingway discusses the relation between imagination and reality and suggests that he knew enough about his father and the Indians to portray what he had never seen: “Everything good he’s ever written he’d made up. . . . Of course he’d never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that.”36 “Work in Progress,” the original title of the story that first appeared in Ford’s Transatlantic Review, not only imitates Joyce’s title for the serialization of Finnegans Wake but also ironically alludes to the woman’s pregnancy and labor. The story is carefully structured. The white men move from the idyllic to the brutal—the two dominant characteristics of the primitive world. They are ferried through the darkness and mist by their Charon-like rowers and conveyed to the smelly, secluded, and morbid world of the Indians. The Indian men and women are separated (with the exception of the husband and wife) before the intrusion of the white men. The three whites are balanced by the three Indians who help hold down the woman. The husband, who had cut himself with an ax thr
ee days earlier, is matched by the wife who is enduring her third day of labor. The husband’s second mutilation intensifies his first, the gash on his throat repeats the one on her belly. His straight razor (which would have been useful in the Caesarean operation) corresponds to the doctor’s jackknife. Neither George nor the husband has any real function, though both are implicated in the wife’s pain by her bite and her screams. And both deflate the doctor—one by mockery, one by suicide—after his successful delivery has physically deflated the woman. The inarticulate screams, laughs, smiles, gestures, and mute acts of the nameless Indians (none of whom speaks) provide a contrast to the ironic words of the doctor (“the screams are not important”) and of his son (“[It’s] all right”). After the birth Dr. Adams realizes it was a mistake to bring Nick, who had watched the delivery, but turned away from the afterbirth and the sutures.

  The red men in the story are not idealized and the husband, who kills himself—ironically—after his wife has survived the ordeal and given birth to a son, does not exhibit the stoicism one expects from a young Indian. In A Farewell to Arms, by contrast, after the death of Frederic Henry’s baby and his wife in childbirth (based on the actual, rather than the imagined, Caesarean birth of Hemingway’s second son in 1928), Henry represses his feelings and shows no outward emotion. He orders the attendants out of Catherine’s room, shuts the door, and turns off the light. But “it was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”37

  Hemingway portrays, in the double climax of gory birth and savage death, in pure action without conscious thought, the husband’s fatal reaction to his wife’s agony, but not the wife’s reaction to the husband’s suicide. The passive tense of “His throat has been cut” suggests the passivity of the Indian.38 And Nick’s delusive intimations of immortality after his confrontation with death and return to the idyllic lake (the certainty and absolutism of “he felt quite sure that he would never die” reveal Nick’s naiveté) provide an ironic contrast to the soldier (an older Nick) in the bombarded trench at Fossalta, who fears and expects death and prays: “If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say.”39

  The crossing of forbidden lines in dangerous situations exposes men and women to contamination and evil that cause sickness and death. The Indian husband has remained in the room to affirm his fatherhood, to share his wife’s pain, and to protect his child. But the couvade (the hidden part of Hemingway’s iceberg) is not effective and the wife remains vulnerable. The white men, summoned by the desperate Indians but ignorant of their customs, not only violate the sacred confinement of the woman in childbed, but are forced to treat her brutally and to use a hook (as if she were a squirming fish) to sew up her stomach. The contrast between the squalid and the clinical shows that the Indians need the white man’s skill, but are also destroyed by it. The husband cannot bear this defilement of his wife’s purity, which is far worse than her screams. In an act of elemental nobility, he focuses the evil spirits on himself, associates his wife’s blood with his own death wound, and punishes himself for the violation of taboo. “Indian Camp” reveals that Hemingway—far from being the Dumb Ox—did not simply glorify the Indians, but based his story on profound understanding, gained from experience and from books, of their behavior, customs, and religion.

  Hemingway’s “The Killers”: The Map and the Territory

  Robert E. Fleming

  Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1927, has interested numerous critics over the years chiefly because Hemingway seems to have been developing a pattern with certain key details within the story, but the figure in the carpet has not been traced fully by any explication of the story. If it is read as the story of Ole Andreson, “The Killers” appears to be a pointless exercise in slice-of-life realism, for nothing really happens: two killers stalk Ole, set up an elaborate ambush in a lunchroom which he frequents, and then, when he does not appear at his usual time, they just go away. Furthermore, Ole does not even appear in the eleven-page story until the bottom of the eighth page. When he does appear, he assures Nick Adams that nothing can be done to save him and turns his face to the wall. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were the first to note, only if the story is correctly understood to focus on Nick Adams and his reaction to these events does it have a meaning: it is then “about the discovery of evil.”1 However, there remain a number of perplexing mysteries within the story even when its theme and protagonist have been agreed upon.

  In spite of the life and death situation that develops in “The Killers,” a good bit of the story is taken up with a number of petty details, as Edward C. Sampson noticed almost thirty years ago. The first scene takes place in Henry’s lunchroom, but the counter man is named George, and no Henry appears in the story. The lunchroom looks more like a bar, and indeed, “Henry’s had been made over from a saloon into a lunch-counter” (SS, 282). The second scene takes place in Hirsch’s rooming house, but when Nick addresses the lady who answers the door as Mrs. Hirsch, she tells him, “I’m not Mrs. Hirsch. . . . She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I’m Mrs. Bell” (288).

  At the very beginning of the first scene, the killers enter the lunchroom and attempt to order from the menu. Al orders a pork tenderloin dinner, but George tells him that “it isn’t ready yet” (279). He then orders a second item on the menu, and George again tells him it isn’t available. Dinners listed on the menu, he explains, are available only after six o’clock. When he looks at the clock, George reads the time as five o’clock, even though the clock reads five twenty. “It’s twenty minutes fast,” he explains (279). By this time the reader may feel that the story is akin to an absurdist drama, and in a sense this is what Hemingway presents.

  Misunderstandings and false impressions continue to appear throughout the story. Al orders ham and eggs; Max, the second killer, orders bacon and eggs. When the orders come, and George is unsure which man ordered which meal, Max reaches for the ham and eggs to make George think he has made a mistake. The two men ask George if they can get anything to drink, and when he offers a list of soft drinks, Al replies, “I mean you got anything to drink?” (280), indicating that he means something alcoholic. As in the case of the menu and the clock, communication has broken down. Hemingway’s authorial description of the two killers extends the series of false impressions. The two men, dressed alike in derbies and tight overcoats, look like “a vaudeville team” (285) as they leave the restaurant, even though the reader now knows they are hired killers whose stylish coats conceal weapons. The banter that the two killers engage in as they set up the ambush furthers the vaudeville image: the mixture of insults and bad jokes sounds a good deal like the “patter” that might be expected of a third-rate team of burlesque comedians. Other details contribute to the sense that Hemingway is emphasizing false impressions. Al, positioning Max and George at the lunch counter to allow the most efficient field of fire for his sawed-off shotgun, is described as being “like a photographer arranging for a group picture” (283).

  Sampson’s article correctly lists most of these “mix-ups” in the story, but asserts that their purpose is to convey the fact that “individuality has been lost, people have accepted their positions as agents of other people, . . . and even murder has become like everything else, mechanized, routine, efficient.”2 While this conclusion would embrace several of the discrepancies in the story, it would leave more than half of them, including the incorrect clock and menu and the ironic description of the killers, unaccounted for. However, when the story is placed in the context of the Nick Adams series of stories, the discrepancies and confusing details take on a more specific and purposeful meaning than any critic has suggested.

  Read in terms of Nick’s background, events of the story teach Nick that a great disparity exists between the normal signposts in life and the features of the real world to which those guides refer. S. I. Hayakawa has used the
metaphor of a map versus the territory it describes in discussing the difference between the world one experiences at firsthand, or the “extensional world,” and the world as one learns of it from peers, teachers, history, folklore, and literature, or the “verbal world”:

  Now this verbal world ought to stand in relation to the extensional world as a map does to the territory it is supposed to represent. If a child grows to adulthood with a verbal world in his head which corresponds fairly closely to the extensional world that he finds around him in his widening experience, he is in relatively small danger of being shocked or hurt by what he finds, because his verbal world has told him what, more or less, to expect. He is prepared for life. If, however, he grows up with a false map in his head—that is, with a head crammed with false knowledge and superstition—he will constantly be running into trouble, wasting his efforts, and acting like a fool. He will not be adjusted to the world as it is; he may, if the lack of adjustment is serious, end up in a mental hospital.3

  The stories in which Nick Adams had appeared by the time Hemingway wrote “The Killers” had shown Nick in the process of shedding whole volumes of false knowledge. “Indian Camp” proves that neither medical science nor Nick’s father holds all the answers about life and death. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” again undercuts the power of Nick’s father, denies the Victorian notion of family structure in which the father was the head of the family, and, as a minor point, notes the difference between Dr. Adams’s implicit acceptance of the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” and his willingness to appropriate logs that have been lost by a lumber company. “The Battler” stresses the difference between the stories written about a major sports hero and the real man he has become. In “Ten Indians,” the story that Hemingway finished on the same day he finished “The Killers,” a younger Nick labels the way he feels about the loss of his Indian girl friend by using a characteristically romantic term: “My heart’s broken. . . . If I feel this way my heart must be broken” (SS, 336). “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow” show Nick’s own failure to love the way a romantic hero might: his love (or something) for Marjorie seems composed of nine-tenths inertia and one-tenth physical attraction. Finally, “Chapter 7” of in our time depicts the gritty reality of modern war, as opposed to the glory of war in fiction. It is interesting that, as Hayakawa suggested might happen, Nick does temporarily lose his sanity in two later war stories, “Now I Lay Me” (1927) and “A Way You’ll Never Be” (1933).