3 Consider, for example, Chaman Nahal’s discussion of this ending in The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway’s Fiction (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), pp. 193–94.
4 "He Made Him Up: ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ as Doppelganger," in Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s "In Our Time," ed. Michael S. Reynolds (Boston: Hall, 1983), pp. 255, 256.
5 Hemingway’s Nick Adams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 181.
6 In Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 3917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s 1981), p. 133.
7 Possibly it was Gertrude Stein who alerted Hemingway to the problem with this ending. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she recalls that in the fall of 1924 Hemingway "had added to his stories a little story of meditations and in these he said that The Enormous Room was the greatest book he had ever read" [Nick actually says it was "one of the great books," NAS, 219]. It was then that Gertrude Stein had said, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature"—(New York: Random House, 1933), p. 219. Pointed out by Paul Smith, p. 284.
8 Hemingway’s Nick Adams, p. 189.
9 Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), p. 62.
10 In Our Time (New York: Scribner’s 1930). All references are to this edition and are designated IOT in the text.
11 Carlos Baker notes that during the decade when Hemingway wrote his first forty-five stories, "he was unwilling to stray very far from the life he knew by direct personal contact, or to do any more guessing than was absolutely necessary"—Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, fourth ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 128.
12 Kenneth Lynn traces this reading to Edmund Wilson’s "Ernest Hemingway: Bourdon Gauge of Morale" (1939) and Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Viking Portable Hemingway (1944)—Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 104—5. The most influential version of the war trauma theory of "Big Two-Hearted River" has probably been Philip Young’s interpretations; see especially his Ernest Hemingway (New York: Rinehart, 1952) and his Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, pp. 43–48. However, not all scholars hold with this view. Lynn, for example, argues that critics could see Nick’s troubles as war-related only by importing external evidence from Hemingway’s life into the story. Ironically, Lynn also uses Hemingway’s life to identify the nature of "the other needs" that Nick is escaping when he asserts that among those needs was Hemingway’s desire to get away from his mother (pp. 103–4).
13 See the Preface to The Nick Adams Stories, p. v.
14 "‘Big World Out There’: The Nick Adams Stories," p. 13.
15 I am not the first to argue that "Big Two-Hearted River" is as much a marriage story as a war story. See, for example, Flora, pp. 179–80.
16 "Ernest Hemingway as Short Story Writer," in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Benson, pp. 287‘88.
17 Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, p. 32.
18 Fitzgerald’s exact words are that the book "takes on an almost autobiographical tint"—"How to Waste Material: A Note on My Generation," Bookman 63 (1926): 264.
19 Meyers states that "Hemingway’s wound, far from being psychologically traumatic (as Philip Young has argued in an influential book), had an extraordinarily positive effect on his life," although he also proposes that after Agnes von Kurowsky jilted him, Hemingway probably "lost his perilous balance and began to suffer the delayed psychological effects of shell shock"—Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 35, 46. Lynn argues that Hemingway’s anxiety about his wounding in World War I did not occur until after World War II, when he was suffering deep depression and thinking of suicide (p. 106).
20 Hemingway, p. 160. Meyers simply states that the sense of loss was one of Hemingway’s great themes (p. 145).
21 Hemingway: A Biography, p. 182.
22 Hemingway, p. 10.
23 Nearly all of Hemingway’s biographers have emphasized his tendency to lie about his life. For example, Carlos Baker notes that this inclination began early: "Since the age of four he had delighted in tall tales, usually with himself as hero. Now that he was nineteen, the content had merely become a little more worldly"—Ernest Hemingway: A life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p. 56. Michael Reynolds states simply that Hemingway found that writing allowed him to "create his life exactly as he wished it to be, and eventually come to believe it"—The Young Hemingway (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 149.
24 "Punching Papa," New York Review of Books 1 (special issue, 1963): 13.
Ben Stolzfus, “Hemingway’s ‘After the Storm’: A Lacanian Reading”
Beegel, Susan. “After the Storm.” Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1988), pp. 69–88.
Brenner, Gerry. Concealments in Hemingway’s Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983).
Davis, Robert Con. “Introduction: Lacan and Narration.” Lacan and Narration: The Psycho-analytic Difference in Narrative Theory. Ed. Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 849–59.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vols. I–XXIII. Trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953).
Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Hemingway, Ernest. “After the Storm.” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), pp. 372–78.
————. Time 64 (December 13, 1954): 72.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).
————. Le séminaire: Livre II. he moi dans 1a théorie de Freud et dans 1a technique de 1a psychoanalyse. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1978). In the text references to this edition are listed as S-II.
Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway’s Reading, 1910é1940: An Inventory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Oddvar Holmesland, “Structuralism and Interpretation: Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’”
1 David Lodge, "Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text: A Pluralistic Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain,’" Poetics Today 1, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 5–22.
2 The terminology is discussed by Lodge, with references to relevant bibliography (p. 8).
3 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), p. 75.
4 Greimas’s terminology is discussed by Lodge, with references to relevant bibliography (p. 6).
5 The terms are discussed by Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London, 1975), pp. 213–14.
6 Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 358.
7 Carlos Baker, The Writer as Artist (Princeton, N.J., 1972), pp. 135–36.
8 John V. Hagopian, "Symmetry in ‘Cat in the Rain,’" in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, N.C., 1975), pp. 230–32.
9 Lodge, p. 6.
10 Hagopian, p. 231.
11 Lodge, p. 16.
12 Jonathan Culler, "Defining Narrative Units," in Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics, ed. Roger Fowler (Oxford, 1975), pp. 139–40.
13 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 163.
14 Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (London, 1963), pp. 18–20.
15 See herm and Hermes in Encyclopaedia Britannka.
Susan F. Beegel, “‘That Always Absent Something Else‘: ‘A Natural History of the Dead’ and Its Discarded Coda”
1 "A Natural History of the Dead" is not present in the earliest extant manuscript of Death in the Afternoon, now at the University of Texas in Austin. For a description of the Texas manuscript, see Matthew Bruccoli and C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., comps. Hemingway at Auction: 1930–1973 (
Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1973), p. 34, and Robert W. Lewis, "The Making of Death in the Afternoon," in Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context, ed. James Nagel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 31–52. I am indebted to Professor Lewis for sharing with me his firsthand knowledge of the Texas manuscript.
2 Folder 31, Ernest Hemingway Papers, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston: I am indebted to Jo August Hill, former curator of the Hemingway Papers, for her assistance with this material.
3 The coda is present with the original typescript of "A Natural History" as an additional four pages typed on legal-sized paper and accompanied (as the rest of the story is not) by a pencil manuscript (Folder 31, Hemingway Papers, J.F.K. Library, Boston). Yet while "A Natural History of the Dead" is present in the Death in the Afternoon galleys (Folder 49, Hemingway Papers, J.F.K. Library, Boston), the coda is not. All of this evidence suggests that Hemingway composed the coda as an afterthought while Death in the Afternoon was being typed, then discarded the material before sending the typescript to Scribner’s to be set in galleys. All citations from manuscripts of "A Natural History of the Dead" in this chapter have previously appeared in Susan F. Beegel, "Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1987), pp. 84–132.
4 Hemingway to Perkins, February 11, 1940, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters. 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), p. 501.
5 See MLA Bibliography (1933 to 1985); Audre Hanneman, Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) and Supplement (1975), and Jackson Benson, "A Comprehensive Checklist of Ernest Hemingway Short Fiction Criticism," in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), pp. 311–75.
6 John Portz, "Allusion and Structure in Hemingway’s ‘A Natural History of the Dead,’" Tennessee Studies in Literature 10 (1965): 27–44, and John A. Yunck, "The Natural History of a Dead Quarrel: Hemingway and the Humanists," South Atlantic Quarterly 62 (Winter 1963): 29–43.
7 Yunck, p. 33.
8 Hemingway merely omitted the intrusions of the Old Lady and added to his sentence on natural death from Spanish influenza. Writing to Arnold Gingrich about Winner Take Nothing on June 7, 1933, Hemingway announced that he would include "A Natural History of the Dead" in the volume "as it is a story and people might not have had $3.50 to read it in the other book [Death in the Afternoon]." Selected Letters, p. 393.
9 According to Michael S. Reynolds’ Hemingway’s Reading: 1910–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Hemingway owned and/or read the following works by these natural historians: Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789); Edward Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, A Familiar History of the Birds (1840); and W. H. Hudson, Adventures among Birds (1913), Afoot in England (1909), Birds in London (1898), Birds in Town and Village (1920), The Bookofa Naturalist (1919), Dead Man’s Pack, An Old Thorn, and Poems (1924), Far Away and Long Ago (1918), Hampshire Days (1903), A Hind in Richmond Park (1922), The Land’s End: A Naturalist’s Impression in West Cornwall (1908), The Naturalist in La Plata (1892), Nature in Downland (1906), South American Sketches (1909), and A Traveler in Little Things (1921). Although Reynolds does not cite Mungo Park, Hemingway’s quotation in "A Natural History of the Dead" is from the English explorer’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799). For a complete discussion of Hemingway’s allusions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural historians, see Portz, "Allusion and Structure."
10 Unless otherwise indicated, I have chosen to quote from the version of "A Natural History of the Dead" published in Death in the Afternoon. Variant readings in the Death in the Afternoon typescript and the Winner Take Nothing anthology will be described when relevant.
11 Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait (London: Putnam, 1962), pp. 29–30.
12 Ibid., p. 32.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., pp. 38–39.
15 Ibid., pp. 32–33.
16 Sigmund Freud, "Reflections on War and Death," in Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 124.
17 After his wounding, nineteen-year-old Ernest wrote to his parents that "Dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death and I know." Hemingway to his Family, October 18, 1918, Selected Letters, p. 19. In Across the River and into the Trees, Colonel Cantwell recalls that "No one of his wounds had ever done to him what the first big one did. I suppose it is just the loss of immortality, he thought. Well, in a way, that is quite a lot to lose" (ARIT, 33).
18 In Winner Take Nothing, Hemingway revised this passage to amplify the grotesquerie of natural death: "In this you drown in mucus, choking, and how you know the patient’s dead is: at the end he turns to be a little child again, though with all his manly force, and fills the sheets as full as any diaper with one vast, final, yellow cataract that flows and dribbles on after he’s gone" (SS, 444–45). While recuperating from his war wounds in a Milan hospital, Hemingway tried to assist his nurse-lover, Agnes von Kurowsky, to intubate a critically ill influenza patient’s lungs. The patient died before they could begin. The incident is the subject of an untitled, unpublished Hemingway short story on American Red Cross Hospital stationery. See Peter Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 94–96, 240.
19 The typescript of "A Natural History of the Dead" reads: "A persevering traveller like Mungo Park or me lives on and maybe yet will live to see the death of Irving Babbitt or Paul Elmer More or watch the noble exit Seward Collins makes." See Folder 31, Hemingway Papers, J.F.K. Library, Boston.
20 In the typescript of "A Natural History of the Dead," this passage contains an additional sentence: "It may be when you come to die the articles you’ve written in a magazine will not help you overmuch and controversy suddenly will seem of not such great importance and afterwards you’ll stink the same as any mean inglorious Rousseau stinks unless they embalm you skillfully." See Folder 31, Hemingway Papers, J.F.K. Library, Boston.
21 See "Boston Police Bar Scribner’s Magazine: Superintendent Acts on Objections to Ernest Hemingway’s Serial, Farewell to Arms," New York Times, June 21, 1929, p. 2.
22 Robert Herrick, "What Is Dirt?," Bookman 70 (November 1929): 261.
23 Seward Collins, "Chronicle and Comment," Bookman 70 (February 1930): 645.
24 Ibid.
25 Paul Elmer More, b. 1864; Irving Babbitt, b. 1865; Clarence Hemingway, b. 1871; Grace Hall Hemingway, b. 1872.
26 Herrick, p. 259; Collins, p. 641.
27 Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women (New York: Norton, 1983), pp. 143, 197.
28 Herrick, p. 259.
29 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 21.
30 An exploding figure also occurs in the famous passage on abstract words from A Farewell to Arms; "the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it" (FTA, 185).
31 Robert Coates, Rev. "Death in the Afternoon," New Yorker (October 1, 1932), p. 62.
32 Baker, ed., Selected Letters, p. 381, fn. 1.
33 Hemingway to Perry, February 7, 1933, Selected Letters, p. 380.
34 Ibid., p. 381. Hemingway may be consciously or unconsciously paraphrasing Coates’s review, which preceded this letter.
35 Hemingway’s treatment of unrealistic war fiction is more extended in the typescript of "A Natural History of the Dead":
I recall reading in either some contemporary war correspondence or in one of the books published at the time a description of the dead in which the allied dead were described as all having fallen with their faces pointing toward, I believe, Berlin while the German dead lay in a variety of attitudes. There was also mention of the clean white bodies of these particular allied soldiers in contrast to the general soiled appearance of the French and German dead. Such an observer, if he were not
prejudiced, must have been remarkably fortunate in his opportunities for observation. I believe the passage occurred in a book called Living Bayonets but 1 may be mistaken. Folder 31, J.F.K. Library, Boston.
36 Hemingway, "Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter," Esquire (October 1935), rpt. in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), p. 219.
37 In Psychiatry and Military Manpower Policy (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1953), pp. 28–29, Dr. Eli Ginzberg observes that there is "some undertone of suicide in a great many of the combat neuroses." Hemingway purportedly experienced his first suicidal impulse during World War I as he lay wounded in a dressing station under heavy shelling. Describing the experience in 1919, Hemingway said that he "was surrounded by so many dead and dying that to die seemed more natural than to go on living: for a time he even thought of shooting himself with his officer’s pistol." Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), pp. 45, 571.
38 "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul; which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures; which rejoice exceedingly when they can find the grave?" Job 3:20–22.
39 "Then the Lord answereth Job out of the whirlwind, and said, ‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.’" Job 38:1–3.
40 Hemingway has in mind Francisco Goya’s series of lithographs—Los Desastres de 1a Guerra—depicting the horrors of Spain’s Peninsular War. Indeed, the nightmarish subject matter and dramatic contrast of light and darkness in this scene from "A Natural History of the Dead" deliberately echo Goya’s Los Desastres.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 63