New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  With an apology to those critics I may have missed or misconstrued, I think it obvious that Hemingway’s short stories, both the familiar and the neglected, still call for new forays to their approaches and heights from every critically intrepid generation, if only because they are still there. And it seems just as obvious that relatively few of the present generation of scholars have been emboldened or simply curious enough to try new ascents to that fiction.

  That neglect is all the more curious since those younger scholars have been so generously endowed with new resources—manuscripts, letters, memoirs—and challenged with a wealth of new biographies. It cannot be that those resources are too intimidating or that the several biographies have said it all. Can it?

  Or was the work in the decade before 1975 itself overwhelming? Certainly it engendered erstwhile and engaging hypotheses (the “code hero” was one) and attuned us to the fiction’s unspoken nuances with that singular “theory of omission” from Hemingway’s late memoir, but by now we should have come to recognize how such concepts may imprison as much as liberate the reader of Hemingway’s stories.

  Or, more recently, was it the light thrown on the novels that left some of the stories in the dark? Bright studies of A Farewell to Arms—from Judith Fetterley’s in The Resisting Reader (1978) to James Phelan’s in Reading People, Reading Plots (1989)—can persuade us to see Catherine Barkley one way or another, but once so dazzled we may confuse her after-image in those studies with the quite different features of the women in the stories, like Liz Coates in Hortons Bay, Jig in a Spanish train station, or Margot Macomber in Africa.

  Or all of this—the sometimes intimidating resources and biographies, the conventions of earlier criticism, and the priority given to the novels—may have been a matter of critical fashion. (I have it on good authority that the first Yale dissertation on Hemingway since Charles Fenton’s in 1952 was submitted in 1986, and although that says much about Yale, Yale says much about criticism.) If, in the old days, an ironic critical mode selected and celebrated ironic writers, it is understandable that a new generation of meta-critics interested in self-reflexive writers would have passed by a writer who seemed so certain of himself, so unreflective, such a dumb ox and never, well hardly ever, an old possum. Still, it is unfortunate that the most versatile and challenging decade of criticism since the 1940s has— with the exceptions recognized in this collection and Susan Beegel’s (1989)—largely overlooked the short stories of a writer whose fiction begged for that criticism from his inheritors.

  Three events of the 1980s bid fair to reorient criticism of the stories in the next decade. At the outset was the opening of the rich and various Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library. With the conference on that occasion and the organization of the Hemingway Society in 1980, the words—hundreds of thousands of them—were out for everyone. For a time, however, Mary Hemingway’s munificent gift caught the more conventional Hemingway critics unawares, for few were experienced in the practical matters of manuscript and textual studies or sensitive to the theoretical issues that mine that beguiling field.

  Then midway in the decade came the biographies: Peter Griffin’s and Jeffrey Meyers’ in 1985, Michael Reynolds’ the next year, and Kenneth Lynn’s the next. Each of them consulted the manuscripts, more or less; but only Reynolds, writing a literary biography, took the critic’s caution to date and place the act of writing so to sense that part of its meaning that may rest in its occasion. Both Meyers and Lynn are more conventional biographers and had little time for the development of Hemingway’s short story craft, and although Griffin included five unpublished stories from the early Chicago period, they were often misdated or misconstrued.

  Finally, three books appeared in 1989 that complement—and, of course, compliment—one another. Reynolds’ second volume of the biography drew on the extensive manuscripts of The Paris Years to argue persuasively that, for example, stories like “Cat in the Rain” and “Big Two-Hearted River” are more precisely reflected in Hemingway’s situation from March to July 1924 than the fishing trip of 1919 or Hadley’s pregnancy in 1923. Susan Beegel’s collection of new essays on Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction included several that consider the manuscripts as well and others that focus contemporary critical theory on those overshadowed stories: for example, Gerry Brenner’s semiotic analysis of “A Simple Enquiry” and Bruce Henricksen’s Bakhtinean analysis of the bullfight vignettes. And it is that sort of literary biography and criticism that my Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories intended to serve with its review of the manuscripts, its summary of the past criticism done well but sometimes overlooked, and its identification of some of the major issues that remain for the criticism to come, as come it must.

  It would be helpful for those future critics to have an authoritative edition of the short stories—indeed, of any Hemingway work. With the manuscripts at hand for a decade now and the textual variants sometimes glaring, it is unfortunate that there is no scholarly, much less a trade, edition of the stories one can trust. “The Finca Vigia Edition” of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987) is more than complete, with sections of unfinished novels, the fables, and occasional pieces offered more as dubious relics than candidates for canonization. This edition faithfully recreates instances of faulty editing and, if the past is prologue, may have added some.

  So, to review that criticism of the stories since 1975 that has tried, in the old phrase, to “make it new.”

  Critical Books

  Five critical books published in the 1980s show varying degrees of promise for redirecting scholarship on the stories.

  Wirt Williams’ The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway (1981) is among them for its ranging study of the stories within various theories of tragedy—from Aristotle and Friedrich Hegel and A. C. Bradley to Karl Jaspers and Jean-Paul Sartre, with Northrop Frye an eminence among a variety of moderns like George Steiner and Murray Krieger. Williams considers all of the stories through the late 1930s and has read most of the earlier criticism with tact and diligence.

  If he finds all but “The Undefeated” from the first three collections “sub-tragic,” either for their “miniaturization” (“Banal Story”), their concern with the observer rather than the victim (“In Another Country”), or their shrouding of an invoked tragedy (“The Killers”), the stories are neither diminished nor dismissed for falling short of the classic notion. The representative moment occurs when Nick Adams defers the “tragic adventure” of fishing the swamp in “Big Two-Hearted River,” of which Williams writes that Hemingway might be admitting his reluctance to accept his “own tragic vision [and] to assume his robes as priest of tragedy” (38). To that mild reproof there is always the answer that when Hemingway did put on the priestly robes of any critical denomination, his short fiction often suffered.

  With the three stories of 1936—“The Capital of the World,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”—Hemingway “reaches the threshold of his final phase as a tragic writer” and crosses it into For Whom the Bell Tolls (124). All three stories approach the formal structure and emotional intensity of classic tragedy with characters who risk death in obedience to some primary drive and achieve something of a tragic transcendence.

  Others have conceived of Hemingway as a tragedian, but none with the complex theoretical structure or the panoramic compass of this judicious book.

  In the following year Joseph M. Flora gathered in Hemingway’s Nick Adams (1982) all the stories in which Nick, or a character with his familiar features, appears. That took some courage after the controversy Philip Young had occasioned with a similar strategy some thirty years earlier. Questions have been raised over Flora’s chronology for the stories or his missing the manuscripts, but none vitiates his interpretations of the individual stories, for the chronology is not essential and the book must have been near completion when the manuscript collection was formally opened.

  His strategy mixe
s conventional literary history and some biography, and for the sequence of stories he engages archetypal patterns and some telling, if rather simple, psychological readings. His brief introduction sets the stories in their literary traditions, and his literary analogues are gathered from afar: most often informative, at times decorative, the citations range, as in the discussion of “Big Two-Hearted River,” from Genesis through nine other works to Robert Frost’s “Directive.” But among them he finds James Joyce’s “The Dead” and recognizes the challenge that story must have set for the one Hemingway needed to end In Our Time.

  Two of his persuasive insights will serve to suggest the quality of his book. The fictional biography of Nick Adams places three of the late stories in an interesting collation: “A Day’s Wait,” “Wine of Wyoming,” and “Fathers and Sons.” To read these stories together is to recognize a late set of marriage tales informing each other as did the earlier set from “Out of Season” to “A Canary for One.” And in his remarks on the memory of Hopkins in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Flora writes that Nick views its bitter ending “with ironic amusement, seeing it as part of a story and himself as writer” (164). Nearly a throwaway line here, the insight informs some of the later stories—“An Alpine Idyll” for one—in which the real if unrealized story of Nick Adams is the portrayal of the narrator as writer. Others, like Robert Fleming, are elaborating on this suggestion and should return to Flora’s book for confirmation. For such perceptions any discomfort with the chronology is a small price to pay.

  Gerry Brenner’s Concealments in Hemingway’s Works (1983) is largely devoted to the novels and nonfiction but notes almost all the stories, sometimes in a passing sentence or long footnote that reads like an outline for an intriguing critical essay—indeed, some have become articles since then. Although his method is somewhat ecumenical—here and there formalist and generic—his best insights derive from Freudian psychology. His work is original in several ways: it challenges the received psychobiographical notion that only Hemingway’s mother licked him into shape, with a persuasive consideration of the influence of both his father’s imposing strength and his humiliating weakness. This work, too often passed by, is an exemplar that offers a hard lesson to other critics, especially the biographers, whose armchair analyses show so little familiarity with the classic texts of psychology. And its range is wide both in its review of earlier criticism and attention to the hitherto neglected fiction: the analysis of the omniscient perspective in “A Natural History of the Dead,” for one, brushes aside all the misconceptions of that work to demonstrate its affirmation of Hemingway’s fierce humanism.

  It is no surprise that some critics have been discomfited by this book without denying its validity, for few have attended to the way Brenner, in something like a sleight of hand, turns psychological criticism away from the fiction and toward his scholarly audience to draw their attention to their own “defense mechanisms” and to the way this fiction overcomes them through its affirmation of life in the pursuit of its own “esthetic ecstasies” (93–106).

  The fourth book is Susan Beegel’s Hemingway’s Craft of Omission (1988). Although the old saw in her title might have restricted her analysis of the manuscript examples of the three stories (“Fifty Grand,” “A Natural History of the Dead,” and “After the Storm”), these chapters illuminate them, trace their biographical and historical origins, and show with critical acumen how the manuscripts may direct and correct their interpretations.

  The manuscripts of “Fifty Grand” clarify Hemingway’s turgid relationship with Scott Fitzgerald, and this chapter, read with Scott Donaldson’s “The Wooing of Ernest Hemingway” (1982), brings to the surface the story’s involuted origins. The chapter on “A Natural History of the Dead” uses a discarded coda to demonstrate how this seeming mongrel of a narrative illustrates Hemingway’s close engagement with the issues of his time. The chapter on “After the Storm” is a model for the study of sources—who now has time to read Coast Guard dispatches or Lloyd’s Register? It considers the intricate revisions through several drafts of a story for which there was an array of newspaper accounts and a Key West version of Conrad’s Mariow (Bra Saunders) at hand. These revisions represent important evidence for the understanding of the midpoint in Hemingway’s development as a writer of short stories and his craft of omission, addition, or whatever.

  Joseph M. Flora’s latest book, Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction (1989), is something of a miscellany that surveys settled territory rather than striking out in the directions his first book discovered. That the book seems intended for students may or may not excuse this backtrailing. The better part of it begins with the stories of the late 1930s and approaches its author’s earlier standard with the Spanish Civil War stories. The review of the two African stories rests heavily on the Jeffrey Meyers and Kenneth Lynn biographies and rather too lightly on the essential work of Warren Beck, Mark Spilka, Robert Lewis, and Max Westbrook. Flora’s synoptic view of the Spanish Civil War stories returns to those insights he first offered with the late marriage tales, and his serious consideration of the late stories published in the Finca Vigia collection again illuminates each story with its counterparts or contemporaries.

  If the book’s later chapters forward criticism of the stories, the last half of the book is padded, first, with an excerpt from Hemingway’s preface to The First Forty-nine and a version of “The Art of the Short Story” from the manuscripts, and, second, with four brief passages from familiar critical works and one long passage that finds analogues and metaphors for Hemingway’s style in Ethan Frome and the values of the efficiency movement in the history of engineering.

  Two other books published after 1975 deserve mention, even though both are in different ways reissues. Joseph DeFalco’s The Hero in Hemingway’s Short Stories (1963) was republished in 1983, and it rewards a second reading if we recall that it was the first to appear in the decade after Philip Young’s survey of the fiction (1952). DeFalco’s employment of archetypal and psychological patterns in 1963 made Young’s book seem tame, and for its daring alone it should be reconsidered.

  The other is Kenneth Johnston’s The Tip of the Iceberg: Hemingway and the Short Story (1987), which collects his earlier articles, most published since 1975 and somewhat revised in the light of more recent criticism. Johnson is a graceful writer, has consulted the manuscripts and the critical canon, and offers new perceptions of a variety of stories—his study of “The Denunciation” is a notable instance (1979; in this collection).

  Critical Anthologies

  Four collections of critical essays on Hemingway have been published since 1975, with diminishing returns for the short stories until the boom of 1989.

  Michael Reynolds’ edition of Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1983) balanced a dozen articles from the 1960s and earlier against others written since the 1970s, of which three were written for the volume. Of the latter group three were bibliographical and textual studies that reaffirmed the need for scholarly editions of Hemingway’s works (two by E. R. Hagemann and one by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian on In Our Time chapters); one extended the range of influence on Hemingway to Henry Fielding (Nicholas Gerogiannis on ‘The Battler”), and mine questioned the validity of the “theory of omission,” given the evidence of the manuscript of “Out of Season.” Reynolds’s introductory essay, “Looking Backward,” offered a valuable study of the popular models Hemingway imitated in the short fiction of his Chicago years.

  James Nagel’s edition of the papers from the Hemingway Society’s 1982 conference included my study of the manuscripts of “Ten Indians” and Max Westbrook’s restoration of the family portraits of Grace and “Ed” Hemingway. With the unpublished family correspondence, he offered a less scarified image of the couple than that in their son’s stories—giving heed to the biographers to come.

  Linda Wagner’s Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism (1987) reprinted Westbrook’s essay and Bernard Oldsey’s origin
al study of the manuscripts of three stories, “Indian Camp,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

  Although these last two collections were either limited to conference papers or committed to a wider prospect of the fiction, they seemed an omen of a dwindling interest in the stories. Then came the year of the stories, 1989.

  Susan Beegel’s latest book, a collection of original essays on Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction (1989), offered a model anthology. A bright and original introduction surveys some of the reasons for the neglect of that fiction—some only recently collected, others edited with an Olympian insouciance, and all upstaged by the “The Killers’ Clean, Two-Hearted Camp” and those big novels, all during a time when criticism with a pursed morality favored the “herioc pathos” of a man’s struggle with a fish but was not amused by those stories so perfectly dubbed, in this feisty editor’s phrase, as Hemingway’s horny dwarves (15).

  Once into the collection there are headnotes for each selection that not only prepare the reader for what is to follow but also place and tactfully modify each essay with a brief summary of its antecedents. Any collection seeking twenty-five original essays will have to settle for some fillers, but this one has fewer than most. Again, it includes Brenner’s and Henrickson’s essays at semiotic and dialogic analysis to unfold the complexities of some of the unsung stories and vignettes. Several of the essays do as well in the more conventional critical modes: Phillip Sipiora’s rhetorical analysis of “My Old Man,” Bickford Sylvester’s exploration of the archetypal wasteland motifs in “Out of Season,” H. R. Stoneback’s study of “Wine of Wyoming,” the latest in a persuasive series of articles arguing for the abiding influence of Catholic thought on the fiction, and Robert Gajdusek’s sensitive reading of the metaphoric patterns in “An Alpine Idyll.” Finally, a good number of these essays are, in the best sense, stylish. Michael Reynolds’ on “Homage to Switzerland,” for one, has a graceful wit that delights us as much as it persuades us to see the story as an absurdist fiction inspired by contemporary accounts of Einstein’s theories of relativity.