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Ernest Hemingway and the doctrine of true emotion

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Ernest Hemingway and the doctrine of true emotion

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Content This dissertation has been
microfilmed exactly as received 6 7 -5 2 9 1
BENSON, Jackson Jerald, 1930-
ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND THE DOCTRINE OF
TRUE EMOTION.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1966
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, Inc.. Ann Arbor, M ichigan
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© Copyright by
Jackson Jerald Benson
1967
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ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND THE DOCTRINE
OF TRUE EMOTION
by
Jackson Jerald Benson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
September 1956
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U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y PARK
L O S A N G E L E S , C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, w ritte n by
..................J.ackson.Jeml.d.BeiLS.Qn..................
under the direction o f hxs.....Dissertation C om
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the G raduate
School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of requirements
fo r the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
g . , ,
Dean
Bate September,.. 1.9.66..........
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
..
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION .................................. 1
II. ROLES AND THE MASCULINE W R I T E R ............. 29
III. GAMES AND GAMESMANSHIP: THE CENTRAL
M E T A P H O R ..................................... 71
IV. FINDING THE RIGHT GAME . . . 1 .............. 97
V. LEARNING TO PLAY THE GAME W E L L .............. 141
VI. EMOTION AND HEMINGWAY'S USE OF IRONY .... 164
VII. SUFFERING AND IJDSS WITHOUT T E A R S ........... 201
VIII. THE FINAL INGREDIENT: MAN'S FAITH
IN MAN— THE PROFESSIONAL................... 238
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 286
11
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
"He gave emotion always and, finally, as he
steadily improved his style, he was an artist."
— Hemingway speaking of
the bullfighter Maera
Ernest Hemingway and his works have stirred debate and
sharp disagreement among readers, critics, and scholars for
many years, and because of the many ambiguities in both the
man and his work, they are very likely to be subjects of
controversy long into the future. It probably would help to
put Hemingway's accomplishments as a novelist into a better
perspective if his work were suddenly to go out of fashion
and remain neglected for thirty or forty years. Such a
thing is highly unlikely, however, and so I must take up the
burdens that other Hemingway critics have assumed, the bur
den of dealing with Hemingway's controversial public person
ality which is still so fresh in our minds, and the burden
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of assessing the deep passions that have been stirred to
praise and damn Hemingway's work as perhaps no other fiction
has been praised and damned in the twentieth century.
A survey of the huge mass of critical materials that
Hemingway's work has called forth over the years reveals
that a rather surprising amount of it can be placed in
either one of two general categories; (1) those commentar
ies that tend to see the man as a blowhard and bully and his
work as generally of minor importance with the exception of
a few short stories and his first major novel, The Sun Also
Rises ;^ (2) those commentaries that tend to see Hemingway
himself as rather modest and shy, painfully showing off to
hide his shyness, and his work as generally of major impor
tance. The first view looks at Hemingway's work as experi
encing a decline in writing power after the first important
novel; the second, as a gradual, although uneven increase of
writing power and depth of thought. It is most interesting ;
to see how often in the case of this particular writer the
^A typical statement of this point of view appears in a
recent book review (of A. E. Hotchner's Papa Hemingway) by
John Thompson, "Poor Papa," The New York Review of Books.
VI (April 28, 1955), 5-7. Thompson gathers together many
of the nasty cliches of Hemingway criticism and passes them I
off yet one more time— poor Papa. |
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man's personality seems to color the criticism of his work—
critics who dislike Hemingway, or what they know of Heming
way's life and character, dislike his fiction. It is also
interesting to see that those, like Carlos Baker and Philip
Young, who have apparently studied Hemingway's work most
extensively, are the critics who have the highest opinion of
his work. I too have found that the more I have studied
Hemingway's work, the more I have learned to respect him,
despite the fact that I began to examine his work thoroughly
from the point of view of one trying to show that Hemingway
was a sentimentalist (as everyone had told me he was) and a
fraud. The more that I read and reread Hemingway's work,
the more I began to disregard the many pat labels and snide
formulations that so many reviewers and critics had attached
to his works over the years.
What I have found in my reading of Hemingway is that in,
order to properly assess and analyze his work, one must look;
at it first from the point of view of what Hemingway was
trying to do. For he was an extremely serious and self-
conscious writer even though he did not make very many seri
ous public pronouncements about his own writing. Indeed, it
is my belief that Hemingway was so ambitious in terms of hisi
I
own accomplishments in fiction that it would have been
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impossible for him to seriously announce his intentions.
Instead, he joked crudely and self-consciously about beating
Mr. de Maupassant and fighting "two draws with Mr. Sten-
2
dahl." All those who have written penetratingly about the
work of Ernest Hemingway have taken it seriously and have
directed their attention toward what they thought Hemingway
3
was trying to do. Those, like Geismar and Kazin, who have
shown the least insight into Hemingway's work have failed
because they wanted to classify Hemingway and put his novels
into some kind of sociological or historical pattern of
their own. Hemingway, by no stretch of the imagination, can
be considered simply a "symptom of an age," or "a naturalist
of the twenties." Hemingway was one of those few artists
who had the power to originate and the courage to lead the
way. Such leadership comes only once or twice in a century.
No novelist, including Henry James, has been more conscious
ly involved in the literary process than Ernest Hemingway.
Dedicated, as he has said, almost from the beginning to
^Lillian Ross, "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?"
Hemingway; A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P.
Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. 23.
^Maxwell Geismar, Writers in Crises (New York, 1947),
and Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 1956).
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the art of fiction, Hemingway apparently very early saw as
his life's task "to write what hasn't been written before or
4
beat dead men at what they have done." Although throughout
much of his lifetime Hemingway saw himself in actual compe
tition with other writers, living and dead, his most press
ing battle, as we shall see, was not with the great accom
plishments in literature of others as much as it was with
that product of the abuse and deterioration of literature,
the cliche. It is significant for the thesis that I shall
develop here to note that Hemingway saw the cliché, both in
language and situation, as representing a loss of emotional
impact. Meaning in fiction was for him essentially defined
as "felt experience." To compete, to go beyond what had
been done posed the task of refreshing the power of narra
tive in order to affect the reader, to make his reading ex
perience akin to his living experience.
There is some reason to believe that Hemingway's con- :
cern with the expression of emotion in terms of the male
individual can be traced to the nature of the environment in
which Hemingway grew up (Oak Park, Illinois) and its con-
^Ernest Hemingway, "Monologue to the Maestro," Esquire.
IV (October 1935), 174b.
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trast with the world as seen through the eyes, variously, of
a young reporter in Kansas City, of an ambulance driver and
soldier on the Italian front in World War I, and the eyes of
a still young, but now experienced feature writer in Europe
and Canada. The trauma that formulated the young writer's
views of life and writing was not the sudden, single event
of being seriously wounded in war, as Philip Young has sug
gested, ^ but rather a gradual budding awareness of the sharp
contrasts between the narrow view of what life was supposed
to be, as apprehended in a particularly narrow Middlewestern
small town, and what life really was, as apprehended on the
larger scale by a man whose vocation both trained him and
gave him the opportunity to see well.
One of the impressions that one surely receives from
Charles Fenton's description of Oak Park in his critical
biography of Hemingway^ is an environment of rather severe
repression. By severe I do not mean to imply a concentra- i
tion camp atmosphere, nor do I suggest that there is any
evidence to indicate that Hemingway's psyche was more
^Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1952), Chapter III. ,
^The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early |
Years (New York, 1954). !
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severely affected by his childhood experiences than that of
other writers. I do wish to suggest, however, that Oak Park
was at the time of Hemingway's childhood a town that epito
mized American middle-class "gentility," and that a good
measure of this gentility was based on what we would nor
mally term female-inspired standards of conduct.
All of those aspects of masculinity associated with
aggressive male behavior were either held in abeyance or
transferred to other, more "appropriate" locations. It is
interesting to note that all the basic aspects of living—
birth, sex, and death— are discovered by Nick, the young,
semi-autobiographical protagonist of the series of Hemingway
short stories, in the Michigan woods ("Indian Camp," "Ten
Indians"), and that Nick's initiation to the masculine role
and male activities— hunting, fishing, drinking, and the
problems of courtship— take place in the woods also ("The
End of Something," "Three Day Blow," "Fathers and Sons"). ;
In a sense. Oak Park symbolized all those things in
American culture that make it impossible, especially for the
male, to express emotion and to achieve individuality. When
Krebs, in "Soldier's Home," returns to his town, he returns
to an atmosphere that he feels is emotionally and intellec- .
tually suffocating. The point of the story is not that war ;
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8 :
has ruined him for normal life, it is, paradoxically, that
he has found so-called "normal life" abnormal and unendur
able. When Ford Madox Ford spoke of the Midwestern youth
that "leaped" into the freedom of postwar Paris, I am sure
7
that he was not exaggerating. ,
Like Krebs, Hemingway left his small town for good.
First, after the war, he went to Chicago and Toronto, and
then to extended residence in Europe. When Hemingway did
return to the United States, it was usually to those areas
that in some way approximated the Michigan woods: Key West,
Wyoming, and Idaho. As he left town, Hemingway the writer
was pointing toward three major concerns— concerns that were
largely the result of the sharp contrast he had perceived
between the environment he grew up in and the world at large
which he had discovered as a young man: (1) a deep con
sciousness of emotion and a concern with its expression,
(2) a concern with the individual and with felt values as a |
I
matter of individual quest, and (3) a concern with male- '
oriented definitions of role and meaning.
One of the best metaphors for this tripartite concern
is that developed by Wright Morris in The Territory Ahead:
^As quoted in Geismar, p. 41,
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He [Hemingway] is still, like his master Mark Twain, a
boy at heart. While we pause to read what he has to
say he is already off for the territory ahead before
the world, or Aunt Sally, tries to civilize him. He
can't stand it.®
Like Mark Twain's Huck, Hemingway and the Hemingway hero
find themselves directly or indirectly living their lives in
firm opposition to Aunt Sally and the mores of respectabil
ity. Like Huck, the Hemingway hero is looking for a freedom
that is essentially the freedom to be emotionally honest.
It is not any wonder that Huckleberry Finn was the book that
Hemingway put at the top of his list of American fiction.
Huck's problem was very close to Hemingway's. Hemingway's
life as a writer came to be a journey too, where one did
one's best to discover what one "truly felt" rather than
what one was supposed to feel. "Discovering what one truly
feels" might well serve as an excellent statement of the
theme and central conflict in the bulk of Hemingway's fic
tion, and "communicating the felt experience truly" might i
well serve as an excellent companion heading in dealing with
his philosophy of composition.
This philosophy, or as 1 have termed it "Hemingway's
®(New York, 1963), p. 146. See also Young, Chapter VI.
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10
'cîoc'trine of true emotion," is best expressed in a much-
quoted passage from Death in the Afternoon;
In writing for a newspaper, you told what happened,
and with one trick or another, you communicated the
emotion aided by the element of timelessness which gives
a certain emotion to any account of something that has
happened on that day. But the real thing, the sequence
of motion and fact which made the emotion and which
would be valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and
if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me
and I was working very hard to get it.^
Emotion is central to the task that Hemingway defines for
himself, and it is my contention that any discussion of the
9(New York, 1963), p. 2. All quotations from Heming
way's works that follow in this study will be drawn from
the following editions (the date given is that of the print
ing) and will henceforth be documented by the page number in
the text. Except where noted otherwise, all books have been
published by Charles Scribner's Sons. Occasionally I shall
abbreviate the title of one of Hemingway's works; these
abbreviations accompany the following titles in parentheses.
The Sun Also Rises (N. Y., 1958), College Edition (S.A.R.)
A Farewell to Arms (N. Y., 1962), College Edition (F.T.A.)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (N, Y., 1960), College Edition
iRÆ. )
The Old Man and the Sea (N. Y., 1960), College Edition
(P.M.)
Death in the Afternoon (N. Y., 1963), Trade (D.I.A .)
Green Hills of Africa (N. Y., 1956), Permabook (G.H.A.)
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway; The First Forty-
Nine Stories and the Play "The Fifth Column" (N. Y.),
Modern Library (1st 49)
Across the River and into the Trees (N. Y., 1963), Trade
( ^ . )
A Moveable Feast (N. Y., 1964), Trade (M.F.)
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11
development of Hemingway's fiction must concern itself with
the ways in which Hemingway attempted to deal with and ex-
10
press emotion.
Two major patterns emerge from a study of Hemingway's
works in light of his doctrine of emotion. The two patterns:
are interconnected and both assume that Hemingway's work
progressed, rather than deteriorated, in writing skill and
in the development of his ethical philosophy. The first
pattern one detects by focusing attention on Hemingway's use
of emotion is the movement from a somewhat negative attack
on those emotional values in life and literature that he
felt were false, to a more and more positive affirmation of
those emotional values that he felt were lasting and valid.
Thus in his first major novel. The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway
has written what I believe to be a satirical comedy which
attacks various sentimental attitudes, particularly self-
pity. In his second major novel, A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway makes a transition, as does his protagonist,
Frederic Henry, from a negative view of life to a positive,
although limited, commitment beyond the self. Finally, in
^%emingway's statement, "The sequence of motion and
fact which made the emotion . . ." has often been compared
to T . S. Eliot's "objective correlative."
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12
his third major novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway
celebrates the greatness of man's spirit, a greatness that
can result from a man's general faith in man, maintaining at
the same time a convincingly realistic background as a con
text for Robert Jordan's demonstration of such faith. Since;
it is my contention that the unchanging circumstances of
man's condition which Hemingway was looking for involve the
same circumstances that lie at the heart of traditional
tragedy, one way of labeling this progression of emotion in
Hemingway's major novels is to say that the emotion progress
es from a context of satire to one of tragedy.
A second and connected way of viewing this progression
is in terms of the emotional condition of the protagonists,
which begins with the achievement of an honest commitment to
self in The Sun Also Rises, progresses to the achievement of
an honest commitment to another individual in A Farewell to
Arms■ and ends with the achievement of an honest commitment :
I
to mankind in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
I
Thus the structure of this study of Hemingway is pri
marily chronological and based on an examination of his
three major novels. However, in addition to the novels, I
have turned to Hemingway's non-fiction and short stories in j
i
order to discuss certain topics of special concern in regard;
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13
to the Hemingway doctrine, such as Hemingway's use of irony,
and have ordered the discussion of these topics in an
approximately chronological way according to their growing
importance in revealing Hemingway's development as a writer.
My major emphasis in this study will be on Hemingway's
works themselves. All other matters, whether of technique
or philosophy, will remain secondary to my purpose of bring
ing as much understanding as possible to the literary docu
ments by examining them in the light of Hemingway's own
criteria of emotional validity. Since emotion. like truth
or reality, is a term that expresses a concept fundamental
to human experience, it is a term that is probably not sub
ject to any sort of definition but an operational one. We
know what we mean, or think we do, when we talk about emo
tion . but we are only indirectly able to specify what it is.
Therefore, I shall depend a good deal on my discussions of
the stories and novels to provide a context as I go along
attempting to make the meaning of emotion increasingly
clear. However, it should be possible to make a few pre
liminary distinctions and suggestions at this point which
will be helpful in later chapters.
One thing that probably should be brought up immediate
ly and disposed of is the fact that many writers about
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14
literature, especially such writers today, apparently feel
that matters concerning emotion should be avoided whenever
possible. Although contemporary critics do not seem to
hesitate to use all the variously ill-defined vocabulary of
emotion while pursuing their tasks of description and analy
sis of literary materials, they have, on the whole, tended
to avoid any explicit discussion of emotion and emotional
values.
Insofar as this hesitancy is the result of the diffi
culty posed by the subject, it is understandable. But much
of the reluctance to deal specifically with the emotional
values of literature results from the fact that it is cur—
rently unfashionable to consider emotion as either discuss
able or even worthy of discussion. This point of view I
consider to be extremely unfortunate. The very peculiar
idea that judging a poem is "like judging a pudding or a
11
machine" is one of the more unpleasant offshoots produced
by the general scientific climate of our culture. Even more
unfortunate than the views of the logical positivist about
the mechanical nature of literature is his tendency to
K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The
Intentional Fallacy," Essays in Modern Literary Criticism,
ed. Ray B. West, Jr. (New York, 1952), p. 175.
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15
assume a dangerously exclusive pose. Like the political
ultra-conservative, he refuses to consider any other posi
tion than his own as legitimate. No one can argue with the
"scientific method" of a man who would attack the under
standing of a work of art the way he would attack the dis
section of a dead fish, but one can question his basic as
sumptions. If one holds the view that a man is ver] much
like a pudding, then I suppose that the experience held
forth to a reader by a great novel could be considered in
the same light, in terms of its consuming.
In this study I am concerned primarily with the quali
tative aspects of man's experience as expressed in litera
ture. Emotion is important in literature precisely because
it is difficult to measure. None of the great fundamental
qualities of man's experience is easy to define, easy to
measure, or easy to talk about, whether the quality be
truth, love, beauty, or happiness. It goes without saying
that despite these difficulties, such things as emotion must
be talked about because these are some of the most important
things after all. Broadly defined to include all of the
subjective aspects of man's mind and soul, emotion with
regard to art is that dimension which divides art from all
the other less inspired objects that surround man. In
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16
short, I believe, and I am convinced that Hemingway be
lieved, that emotion is not just an accidental property of
literature, it is one of its most essential and definitive
properties.
I think it is a mistake, although this mistake is some
times inescapable, to talk about emotion existing in an
author, in the words of an author, or in a reader, as if
each brand of emotion were contained in a different kind of
bottle. Like truth, emotion has no substance of its own but
rather is a quality that humans, in a sense, attach to sub
stances, Metaphorically, emotion is the coloration, the
spice, the flavor of the food— but even this analogy is too
physical. A closer analogy to the operation of emotion in
literature would be to compare emotion to the "enjoyment
possibilities" of a plum pudding which are created by a chef
through his artistic combinations of food stuffs, each of
which exists dormant and as yet unrealized in the uneaten
pudding, and which blossom together into experience when the
pudding is consumed by the qualified diner.
There are two things that stand out in the above anal
ogy that are worth noting: first, "enjoyment" is a quality
that is carried through a relationship (cook, food, consum
er ) and this relationship is active and intradependent;
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17
!
jsecond^ "enjoyment" comes very close to what we call mean
ing . In regard to the first point, emotion in literature is
carried through an active and intradependent relationship
between author, text, and reader. Emotion is part of the
experience of reality that an author is attempting to com
municate; emotion is potentially the result of certain uses
of language ; emotion is part of the experience created or
recreated by the author's language; emotion is the way a
reader reacts to the words he reads, which reaction, in
turn, is dependent on the reader's relationship to his
reality.
In regard to the second point raised about the connec
tion between "enjoyment" and meaning. a pudding has meaning
to us insofar as "we like it," "we want it," "we will pay
money for it," "it makes us feel good," "it makes us happy,"
and we may express this meaning by smiling, laughing, eating
dish after dish of pudding, burping, or complimenting the
cook. Meaning in this sense refers to "how something af
fects nie or relates to me, " and is subjectively detectable
as a state of mind (how I feel) and objectively observed as
a behavioral response.
IP
Of considerable help to my discussion of the rela-
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18
Emotion is not meaning. but it is essential to it.
Both are "learned" and are dependent on a cultural context.
The social psychologist sees meaning as the cognitive re
sponse to a stimulus, and sees emotion as a response to the
13
cognitive response. I am not sure that this jargon is
very helpful in leading us toward an understanding of emo
tion, but it does help to suggest that since emotion is in
dispensably a part of any cultural pattern, there is the
possibility that an author can predict emotional response.
The ability of the artist to predict response (and thus
to communicate emotion) is probably partially intuitive (how
I feel, therefore how you feel) and partially statistical,
that is, the sum of samplings of reader responses to the
author's own and to other works of literature. Thus the
author may be said to be, hopefully, successfully analytical
of his own emotional responses and at the same time educated
tionship of emotion to meaning have been Chapters VI and VII
("The Development of Meaning" and "Meaning, Value, and Per
sonality" ) in Joseph Royce, The Encapsulated Man (New York,
1964).
^^Sidney M. Jourard, Personal Adjustment (New York,
1963), pp. 83-84. For a general review of the current
psychological work on emotion, see the "Introductory Essay"
by the editors, Warren G. Dennis, et al.. of the essay col
lection, Interpersonal Dynamics (Homewood, Illinois, 1964).
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19
beyond his own emotions to a more or less successful recog-
14
nition of emotional norms.
For communication of emotion to occur, therefore, or
for the artistic process to be completed, there has to be a
matching of the emotional values imposed by the author on
his material and the emotion-recognition-possibilities of
the reader. Roughly speaking, both author and reader are
operating under the same system of values, their emotional
"norms," and the author, having successfully recognized
these norms, is able successfully to embody them in lan
guage. However, recognizing these patterns of communication
alone is not enough to prepare us to deal with the problems
of artistic excellence, or more specifically, the honest and
dishonest uses of emotional values in literature.
If we were to compute artistic achievement merely in
^"On the basis of the present-day knowledge about emo
tion, it may be said that emotional habits are learned (not
inborn), and further, they are learned through the mecha
nisms of conditioning. identification, and socialization."
Jourard, p. 85. Complicating the author-reader relationship
in regard to the communication of emotional values is the
possible self-educative function of the art itself. Writers
such as Eliot, Joyce, and Kafka can be said to have broached
communication patterns with certain unique elements which
nevertheless were "self-educating" _so. that what was origi
nally seen as obscure has become more and more available.
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20
terms of the ability of the artist to match the emotion
structure of the greatest number of people, we would have an
index to popularity or a formula for the success of propa
ganda. It is possible that the emotional values imposed by
an author on his works may not honestly reflect his own
awareness of reality at all. Or the artist may be only
partially aware of reality, and not see it clearly; he may
be naive, drunken, psychotic, or stupid. Therefore we must
add a third factor to the writer-reader relationship and
assume the existence of a "reality-goal," rather than an
ultimate reality, which acts as a continuum for the value
perceptions of both artist and audience. When we talk about
"serious literature," we are making a declaration about the
intent of the author to reach as far along this continuum
as possible.
Hemingway acknowledges this reality-goal in the quota
tion from Death in the Afternoon recently cited. It is not
just a formula for communicating emotion successfully by
means of "one trick or another," which explains the success
of popular literature or journalism, that the serious au
thor must look for, but the successful communication of the
"real thing," the true thing, the thing that will be valid
always. More profoundly than it appears on the surface.
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21
'Hemingway has said in a few words what I have taken pages
to explore: that the center of literature is emotion (mean
ing, value) and that successful writing involves the suc
cessful matching of emotion-structures of the writer and
reader, and that the great or serious writer is the one who
not only communicates with his reader, but searches for that
which is eternally central to man's experience.
Implicit in Hemingway's statement in Death in the
Afternoon is not only his central concern as a writer with
his theory of composition, but a description of the progress
he himself made from an opposition to the sentimental struc
ture of emotion to the achievement of a nearly tragic struc
ture of emotion. The sentimental and the tragic suggest a
kind of emotional scale: at one end the sentimental predi
cates an essentially false use of emotion, and at the other
end the tragic predicates an essentially true use of emo
tion .
Although there are many difficulties posed by the his
tory of their previous uses, the concepts and the demon
strations of the tragic and the sentimental can be seen in
theory, at least, as relatively clear and uncomplicated.
Basically the sentimental is a gross form of emotional re
assurance. It tells us that everything is really all right
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22
and that suffering, although sad, is only temporary and not
really serious. It tends to measure all things in relation
to man's basic needs and holds that emotion as an end has
more value than the honesty of the means used to generate
it. For most of its audience to some degree, sentimentality
involves a condition of suspended disbelief used to gain
relief from reality. Characteristic of sentimental litera
ture is its ability to bring emotional benefits without
demanding emotional payment: emotions generated by senti
mentality flow toward the self rather than toward others.
Diametrically opposed to sentimentality in many re
spects is tragedy. Basically, it is a painful form of real
emotional shock. It confirms the basic negative experi
ences of life that make the positive values meaningful.
Tragedy demonstrates that man's ideals can never be totally
fulfilled and that evil exists, both inside man and outside
man, in other men, and in nature. Tragedy dramatically con
firms the irrationality of existence outside the realms of
moral order established by man's faith. Tragedy demon
strates that it is only the greatness of man's spirit and
the unlimited depths of his courage that enable him to con
front the eternal threat of suffering, sometimes without
apparent cause, and the eternal necessity and immediacy of
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23
death. Tragedy posits as its highest value the discovery
of reality, as well as the truth of man's condition and the
extent of man's power within that reality. The emotions of
tragedy flow outward from, never toward the self, and are
always, in one sense or another, "paid" for.
Tragedy effects the enlargement of man's soul; senti
mentality, the shrinking of it. The audience of the senti
mental in literature is fragmented into suffering individ
uals, whereas the audience of tragedy is bound together by
its awe of human potential in the face of unavoidable suf
fering .
We dislike sentimentality because it trades in the un
deserved pirating of emotional values, and because in order
to gain its emotion, the semblance of reality is distorted
and it presents a view of the world imposed on people and
things that arises from our needs rather than from our true
knowledge of things as they are. Sentimentality is a form
of egocentricity. Nature, for example, is beautiful not
because it is seen accurately as a combination of elements,
savage and gentle, soft and harsh, gigantic and trivial, but
rather, it is seen as beautiful because it can reassure us
and make us feel good if we are highly selective and create
our own nature. Or nature becomes sad because it is
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24
temporary— not that nature is really temporary in the larger
sense— and reminds us of our own mortality, so that we
grieve for our own death, our own gradual weakening. But
such grief is a pleasant form of self-deception; it is a
grief without a real recognition of decay or death. We
only tentatively accept certain symbolic implications of
death in order to milk them of their emotional values. As
I have said, in sentimentality we have the emotions without
really paying for them.
When we deal with the sentimentality of the "happy
ending," which involves the poetic justice of handing out
rewards and punishments according to a theory of "life as
we would like it to be," it is easy to see that the price
of emotion is not paid. The threatened disaster to the
identified-with protagonist has never had any real potency;
suffering,has been temporary, and always indulged in with
the certain promise of relief. The meaningful structure of
the world has been twisted. The author has let us fool our
selves and let us play "not for real," but at the same time,
although the rules of life have been changed, the author of
sentimental literature increases our pleasure by attaching
what might be called a "surface veneer" to reality; for the
better we can pretend that such a false picture is the real
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25
iworld, the more relief we find.
While the serious writer attempts to get as good and as
lasting an artistic representation of reality as possible,
the writer of sentimentalism is more likely to abandon com
pletely the artist's struggle to understand and render with
ink and paper the challenging puzzle of human experience.
Instead the writer of popular literature turns to the mani
pulation of formulas and becomes involved in a spreading
and self-perpetuating system of emotional "triggers." These
triggers are assembled from a whole system of convention
alized situations, events, and personalities which have been
divorced from reality and have received from popular litera
ture and mass media a cultural certification that enables
them to become a kind of "reality" unto themselves.
These triggers have lost much of their denotative con
tent and behave more like emotional signals. Squeeze such
a trigger, for example a conventionally deployed "crippled
child," and the tears flow much as Pavlov's bell drew the
dog's saliva without the food. For in the sentimental use
of the "crippled child," the food, the substance, is missing
too. The child is not an individual, real, rounded, suffer
ing— a child described and presented in such a way to de
serve our pity. On the contrary, the child is used in such
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2 6
a . way that our giving of emotion outward is not required.
All emotion is in a sense related to the self. But not
all emotion is ego-centered. The identification by the
audience of a sentimental work with a sentimentalized char
acterization is less a matter of empathy, the ability to
put oneself inside someone else's skin, than it is a matter
of using the literary character as a tool or emotional lever
to direct emotion unto the self. The ego-centered, non-
authentic attributes of the sentimental perceiver lead him
into an emotion structure of what might be called "pseudo
emotions . " I have paired off several of these with their
more genuine counterparts below as an illustration:
Emotions in Response to Emotions in Response to
Others Self
Love Need
Sympathy Self-pity
Anger Hostility
Popular sentimental literature abounds in love defined as
"wanting what you can't have" and then suffering because of
it. Heroines ever since Richardson's Pamela have suffered
one indignity after another in order to allow their female
readers to mourn the weaknesses of their sex and the cruel
ties of the world to women. Hostile young men in contem-
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27
iporary literature lash out against a world they never made.
Sentimentality has a long history and many conventions.
It can be associated with the courtly love tradition, the
medieval romance, the English sentimental novel, English
romantic poetry, with Gothic novels, plays, and poems in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and America, with
the nineteenth-century melodrama, the nineteenth-century
novel of sentiment, and, I am sure, other genres and types
besides those that I have named. In contemporary life,
sentimentality has proliferated into popular literature and
advertising media. Wherever it has appeared, however, it
has always centered its emotional values around injustice
to the self, manifested as self-pity, victimization, martyr
dom. These conditions almost always lead to that strange
and perverted mixture of emotion called "enjoyable suffer
ing."
The proliferation of sentimentality in our time has
had serious social consequences that are outside the scope
of this study, but this proliferation has also created tre
mendous problems for the serious artist in our society.
When almost every conceivable situation has been taken over
and made grist for the mill that produces a never-ending
stream of drama, fiction, and even poetry wherein most of
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2 8
the language and relationships between people are pressed
into a series of formulas, designed to produce entertainment
only as ego-directed emotional satisfaction, the serious
writer faces the incredible job of fighting a rear-guard
action by trying to avoid the boobytraps of a language made
almost denotatively sterile by cliches and sentimental
abuses, and at the same time forging a document that pre
sents an original vision of reality with the power to evoke
an honest emotional response. The serious writer's task,
in addition to the one just named, must be to try to free
himself from his own conditioning in order to perceive
reality.
These were the difficult tasks that Ernest Hemingway
set for himself; to free himself from unauthentic emotional
responses ("what one was supposed to feel"), to fight and
expose as dishonest and unreal the sentimentality he found
in life and in literature, and to find his own way to emo
tional honesty and to be able to express honest emotions
vigorously. How Hemingway set out to do these things and
how successful his solutions were are the subjects of the
following chapters.
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CHAPTER II
ROLES AND THE MASCULINE WRITER
Throughout his early career Hemingway labored hard to
bring freshness to his writing and to attack the reader's
perceptions as strongly as possible. Although biographical
portraits showing Hemingway shadowboxing and propounding a
philosophy of life in fight lingo may make us wince, there
is no doubt in my mind that Hemingway lived the role of a
fighter and that he fought his way day by day through life
until he finally thought he was beaten.^
He fought daily to bring himself to the writing table;
he fought word by word across the page to keep himself
straight; and in his room above the sawmill on the rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, he fought the usual cold, hunger,
and disappointment of the beginning artist, and later, the
^The most famous portrait depicting this is Lillian
Ross's "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" in the May 13,
1950 New Yorker.
29
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30
2
temptations of budding fame. He fought all those things
that would keep him from seeing clearly beyond what he was
supposed to see and feeling sharply beyond what he was sup
posed to feel. Most of all, he fought to get what he felt
was true down on paper.
He was hard on himself. In reading In Our Time and
The Sun Also Rises, one cannot help feeling the iron pres
sure in exertion behind the tough fibre of the prose. There
are certain passages like "Chapter V" from In Our Time or
the final episode in The Sun Also Rises, where every strand
is so well placed and balanced, where every molecule of the
prose is so hard and well-formed, that no alteration could
possibly bring improvement, no evolution in human affairs
3
could possibly decay its rightness.
Through his fiction Hemingway brought this toughness to
^The difficulties of these early years, as well as some
hints regarding the temptations brought to him by his first
successes, are contained in A Moveable Feast (New York,
1964).
^The last scene of The Sun Also Rises will be discussed
in detail at the end of the present chapter; "Chapter V"
from In Our Time will be discussed in my Chapter VII. In an
excellent statement describing the quality of Hemingway's
prose, Wright Morris has said, "Any man who has ever tried
to write will feel in this passage [from "Big Two-Hearted
River"] the line-taut passion of a man who would die rather
than cheat you with a cliche" (p. 142).
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3 1
bear on others. As Nick Adams is rocked by one disillusion
ing episode after another and as Jake Barnes is almost
destroyed by self-deception, the reader must see that here
behind his characters is not only a writer who is concerned
with keeping himself straight, but a writer, also, whose
theme is the emotional consequences of living by illusion,
and whose every artistic resource is employed to press the
reader to a sharper sense of the non-illusory world's jagged
edges.
It was, I suggest, from the disciplines imposed upon
himself that Hemingway's conceptions of fictional character
were formed. With only a few minor exceptions, his charac
ters are anchored to the struggle of the individual male to
be honest with himself. "What is moral is what you feel
good after" is far from the philosophy of the hedonist; it
4
is the granite-hard philosophy of the stoic. What do you
feel good after? You feel good when you open your eyes and
refuse to blink. You feel good when you keep yourself
^This statement from Death in the Afternoon (p. 4) is
a favorite shibboleth of non-critics in asserting Heming
way's "lack of moral standards." Alfred Kazin, whose com
mentary on Hemingway is the worst section of On Native
Grounds. finds the passage "giggly and a little frantic"
(p. 260).
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32
^straight and refuse to kid yourself. And you feel good when
you go all the way, right down to the end of the line, even
though the whole world may dump its garbage on your head.
Hemingway's life and art are joined together in the struggle
of the man who would feel good and who, without compromise,
would become both Man and Artist, these in the best sense.
Although generating from his own struggle, Hemingway's
choice of the male protagonist and the male point of view
was a particularly deadly weapon against sentimentality.
For it is the woman's point of view that has permeated the
sentimental mode in fiction since its beginnings with the
publication of Pamela. Throughout Western culture, and
particularly in the Anglo-American parts of it, the female
has become the sex whose role historically has allowed her
to express emotion and not repress it; emotion has been
made, in a sense, her territory. Woman has thus become
identified with most of the centers of emotional excess far
more than the man. Most often it is the woman who tends to
humanize pets, who looks at flowers as friends, who reacts
to loss or gain in an ego-centered way (as in Frost's "Home
Burial") and who is the victim, the martyr, the innocent.
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33
5
and the imprisoned.
As Ian Watt points out in his discussion of the begin
nings of the novel, it is the woman in Western culture who
has also supported the novel as a form because she has had
the time and money, and presumably because of her compara
tive isolation, the greater psychological need for vicarious
experience.^ Sentimentality might be said to be the vice of
emotional freedom, and woman, who made up most of the audi
ence for the novel, had through her preference and buying
7
power thrust the novel ever toward her vice. It is, of
course, woman who largely supported nineteenth-century melo
drama and who in the twentieth century has supported soap
opera on radio and on television.
It might even be said that there are really two narra-
5"Cultural role" is a self-stereotyping phenomenon.
For further discussion of the feminine role and sentimental
literature, see Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in
America (Durham, 1940) and Albert Ellis, The American Sexual
Tragedy (New York, 1962), particularly Chapter V, "Romantic
Love."
^The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, 1962), pp. 44-49,
148.
7
Hemingway was a writer who for the most part refused
to be "bought." When he needed money after his first com
mercial success with the sale of A Farewell to Arms, he
allowed himself to be bought on his own terms by a man's
magazine, Esquire.
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34
tive traditions in our culture, the masculine, which derives
from the heroic tale that glorifies male accomplishment in
hunting and in war, and the feminine, which derives from
courtly love conventions and glorifies the female and her
powers of generating emotion. By its very nature, the for
mer is likely to deal with emotions that arise from real
physical circumstances, while the latter is likely to deal
with the artificial stimulation of emotion; the former, to
deal with the thing or circumstance that arouses the emo
tion, and the latter, the quality or intensity of the emo
tion itself. In opposition to the feminine tradition, the
Hemingway doctrine is concerned with true emotion, that is,
with finding the "real thing" which can inspire an emotion
that will withstand all the withering forces that time may
n 8
apply.
Following the classic example set forth in Pamela. the
®The idea of dividing literature according to gender is
not, of course, new. Ian Watt, cited above, describes the
adaptation by Richardson of the courtly love tradition to
the novel in his chapter on Pamela. The war between the
feminine and masculine points of view as expressed in the
first novels is discussed in detail by Bernard Kreissman,
Pamela-Shamela (Lincoln, Neb., 1950). The widest division
in fiction is apparent in pulp, where on one side there is
True Confessions, which concerns itself with nothing but
"love," and on the other, Junale Stories or Wines. which
may include no women at all.
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35
Isentimental novel intensified the courtly romance concern
with feminine virtue, making it the springboard for the
generation of excessive emotion. For 200 years one harassed
heroine after another has vocally suffered the wiles and
brutality of the male's insatiable animal passions. Al
though its outrageous emotionalism may be humorous to some,
the fiction of sentiment has always taken itself extremely
seriously and has continually threatened subtly'to invade
9
and dominate the precincts of serious fiction.
Like Fielding, who launched his novel-writing career in
protest against the blatant falsity and emotionalism of the
first sentimental novels, Hemingway launched his own career
in protest of the emotional excesses and rampant self-pity
of his own time, first in a parody of emotionalism in The
Torrents of Soring and then in a satire of self-pity in The
Sun Also Rises. Unlike Fielding's, however, Hemingway's
attack was not directed at specific works as much as it was
at emotionalism in general and the entire "romance" attitude
toward life which had moved from literature to pervade the
entire cultural value structure. Love between man and woman
^See Brown, cited above (note 5). Like evil pretending
to be good in Milton's Paradise Lost, sentiment seems to
derive its power from pretending to be real.
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36
is one of the themes that recurs in every one of Hemingway's
major novels except the last one and is explored very speci
fically in a number of his short stories, and it will become
obvious as we examine these works in some detail that Hem
ingway was vitally concerned with reestablishing what he
felt were the proper roles of man and woman in their rela
tionship to each other. The courtly love-feminine tradition
demanded that the love object be removed; Hemingway insists
on close physical contact as a prerequisite to love. The
feminine tradition insisted that love be based on a "spirit
ualization" of the relationship, and on the emotions of
yearning or desire (which must remain unfulfilled); Heming
way depicts love as being founded on sexual intercourse and
requiring that satisfaction be given and gained. The femi
nine tradition rejects pleasure, for the "joy" of suffering;
Hemingway embraces pleasure as the substance of love (which,
although based on physical satisfaction, is given and re
ceived on many different levels). Furthermore, the feminine
tradition in literature (in conjunction with those other
cultural forces we term "feminism") tends to confuse the
roles of one sex with another, so that the man is the weaker
sex (i. e ., the "rake"), and the woman the stronger, the
woman the leader and the man the dependent. Hemingway views
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3 7
the roles of man and woman as given, deriving from biology,
and tradition more ancient and general than the feminine
^ 10
tradition.
In connection with this Hemingway counterattack, we
might note that the two favorite stereotypes of sentimental
literature have been the "martyr-victim" and the "all-wise
mother"— the women figures studiously avoided in Hemingway's
fiction. Instead of the "martyr-victim," Hemingway offers
the girl who frankly enjoys sex and who is genuinely able to
give of herself, ungrudgingly, without a sense of sacrifice.
The "all-wise mother" becomes the "all-around bitch," the
aggressive, unwomanly female.
^®The classic study of the courtly love tradition is
C. S. Lewis's The Allegory of Love (New York, 1958).
lljyiaria and Pilar, in ju'or Whom the Bell Tolls, might be
seen as exceptions to the above descriptions. Maria, how
ever, although victimized in a rather sensational way before
the novel's action begins, is not seen in the novel itself
in the role of victim. On the contrary, her role is that of
an emerging personality. Just as an unhealthy sex experi
ence has "killed" her, so does a healthy sex experience give
her back her life. A victim of mass rape, she loses her
identity; a recipient of an individual's genuine love and
concern, she regains it. She is a person of limited back
ground, but still a recognizable identity with needs and an
existence important to Jordan beyond his own life. Pilar,
of course, is a wise mother figure, but almost a reversal of
the expected "mother-knows-best" role in that she is crude
and profane and is on occasion also wrong. Furthermore,
throughout the entire novel she is guided by the wishes of
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38
This shift of emphasis to a sharply masculine point of
view has caused a great deal of hostility, not only among
women readers, but among critics, both masculine and femi
nine. Of a general nature have been the charges that Heming
way was anti-intellectual, that he was insensitive, that he
was an egomaniac, that he was concerned only with lust and
sensory satisfaction, and that he was purposely crude and
12
pornographic. I have even heard it suggested in conversa
tion that Hemingway must have been a homosexual to be "so
13
overly concerned with asserting his masculinity."
the male protagonist. It is significant for the thesis de
veloped by me in this chapter regarding role-confusion to
see that she becomes a man only by default when Pablo re
nounces his own manhood; when another man, Jordan, takes
over, she becomes a woman again. Although she remains ag
gressive and opinionated, she never becomes "mom"; Hemingway
is at great pains in reinforcing the idea that she is all
the while a lusty, passionate girl inside.
12it is not in my power, and possibly no one else's, to
list all the epithets directed at Hemingway and those who
have used them. The classic attack is that launched by
Wyndham Lewis in "The Dumb Ox; A Study of Ernest Heming
way," Kenvon Review. Ill (June 1934), 289-312. Among those
critics who have based their evaluation of Hemingway's work
largely on a dislike for what they feel is overpersonal and
anti-intellectual fiction, are Maxwell Geismar (see particu
larly p. 77), and Phillip Rahv, Image and Idea (Norfolk,
1957) (see particularly pp. 190-193).
1
^^The most ingenious attack.I have heard was launched
by a woman professor who proposed that since Hemingway (in
her opinion) had not written well in years and was an
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39
Whether Hemingway succeeded in moving closer in his
fiction to life as it really is (no matter what aspects of
life he chose to explore) does not seem to be at issue to
most of his critics. What is at issue becomes clear in the
more specific critical attack on his women characters, an
attack usually centered on the charges that his women char
acters are insufficiently developed (i.e., they should play
a more central role in his works) or that they are too much
like an adolescent's erotic daydream (i.e., they are evalu-
14
ated from a masculine point of view). This charge, which
amounts to a statement of preference or prejudice, cannot
really be answered, but when a critic like Leslie Fiedler
cries that "there are . . . no women in his books 1" we might
speculate just how much of this anguish is the result of an
examination of the works themselves in regard to any kind of
artistic criterion and how much is the result of several
alcoholic, and since his wife was a writer, it must have
been his wife who really wrote The Old Man and the Sea.
l^Typical of the latter charge is a statement by Rahv,
loc. cit.■ "Countess Renata [in Across the River and into
the Trees 1 . . . is not a recognizable human being at all
but a narcissistically constructed love-object . . . [be
longing] to the tradition of adoring and submissive [sic 1
Hemingway girls."
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40
15
centuries of conditioning by sentimental formulae.
Hemingway's emphasis on the masculine point of view is
easily the most characteristic aspect of his writing, and
although it is only one among many elements in his work used
to channel emotion into non-sentimental ( LI rections, it also
serves to unify them all. Firmly within the masculine
tradition are the self-reliant hero, the heroic encounter
within conventionally masculine settings, the lusty and
direct encounters with life, rather than intellectualiza-
tions of experience, the dramatizations of the circumstances
leading to emotion rather than the discussion of emotion,
the continual satirization of pretense and illusion, and
the emphasis on virile and direct language.
This approach may embody a superficial view of life,
but "Bravo'." we may cry instead of "For shame'." as we wade
our way through a history of fiction weighted down with
^^"Men without Women," from Love and Death in the Amer
ican Novel (New York, 1959) as reprinted in Heminowav; A
Collection of Critical Essavs. p. 86.
^^This tradition at the inception of the novel was car
ried on by the picaresque narratives, such as Nash's The Un
fortunate Traveller and Fielding's Tom Jones; today, such
picaresque novels as Heller's Catch-22 and Bellow's Hender
son the Rain Kina carry on the burden of the masculine tra
dition in the legitimate novel. It is interesting that
Hemingway never wrote a novel in this vein.
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41
drawing rooms, assignations, and hand-wringings. But it may
not even be true that simplicity and directness necessarily
involve simplemindedness. We shall see.
A good place to start looking to see whether simplicity
is equivalent to simple-mindedness is Hemingway's first
major novel. The Sun Also Rises, wherein he launches his
sharpest attack against the modern confusions of male and
female roles and his most sustained satirization of senti
mental illusion. It is true that there are many obvious
things about the book. One of them is that it is the story
of a male who becomes a man even though his male equipment
does not work, and a female who never becomes a woman even
though she is blessed with the best equipment available.
But there must be some things about the novel that are not
quite so obvious, for although this book has been one of
the most frequently glossed American novels, I do not think
that anyone has yet really touched on the spirit of the
novel as Hemingway surely intended it. This is probably
because so few people have given Hemingway credit for having
any sense. If one is of the opinion that Hemingway never
stood back from his experiences to make judgments about
them, but only reacted to and recorded his experiences like
a stimulated literate amoeba, then one is bound to feel, as
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42
most do, that this novel is some kind of historical docu
ment, a "journal of the lost generation," and that the hero
is merely some kind of projection of the author's ego*:
So it is that most critics have viewed the novel as a
contrast between an in-group (those who behave well) and an
outsider (he who does not behave well) in a time of moral
and spiritual chaos that requires the individual to define
his own values. Jake, the narrator (usually closely identi
fied with Hemingway's own point of view) is thought of,
despite a lapse or two, as being admirable in his stoic
acceptance of his sexual disability and its consequent emo
tional frustrations. He, along with his friend. Bill Gor
ton, his love interest. Lady Brett, and her fiance, Mike
Campbell (and a minor character, the Count) make up the in
group that more or less adheres to what has come to be known
as the Hemingway "code." At opposite poles on the behavior
scale outside the group, but connected to it, are Romero
the bullfighter, an almost perfect personification of the
code, and Robert Cohn, an almost perfect personification of
the code violated.
Further, the novel has been often seen as a kind of
modern "sexual tragedy" that symbolizes a general breakdown
of social order and cultural values (T. S. Eliot's "The
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43
Waste Land" is a frequently cited parallel). This is closer
to the spirit of satire in the novel. I would only differ
in declining to see the characters in the novel as sad; they
are certainly confused and they are certainly sad about
themselves, but to us they should appear to be rather fool
ish.
There is no doubt that they have their sexual problems.
Jake, like the Fisher King, is sexually impotent; Brett
assumes a male role in appearance, dress, and manner, and at
the same time behaves like a nymphomaniac (confusing?); Mike
Campbell, the fiance, is ignored while Brett, in love with
Jake, without any attempt at secrecy (she even shows Cohn's
letters to Mike) has affairs with Robert Cohn and then
Romero. Mike, in the meantime, continually makes lascivious
remarks to Brett in public, but remains impotently falling-
down drunk. Robert Cohn lives with a woman, Francis, who
dominates and maintains him like a mother. Bill Gorton is
a bachelor who plays the field, and the Count is a bachelor
who is "always in love." Other added touches of sexual
chaos are the presence of the homosexuals with Brett at her
initial appearance in the novel, and the joke engagement of
Jake early in the novel to a prostitute with bad teeth who
is later "taken up" by the homosexuals (and is almost danced
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44
to exhaustion as one homosexual follows another in a parody
17
of the courtship ritual). Finally, there is the super
irony of the confrontation of Jake, the impotent, and Brett,
the nymphomaniac.
There is, of course, a general validity in these con
sensus views of the novel's themes and structure, but as I
indicated a page or so back, there is in my mind a crucial
question concerning the assumed relationship of the author
to his characters in this novel. It is generally thought,
with few dissenters, that the author's sympathy is with the
"insiders," that is, he is actually predicating a code
through them that he endorses (and continues and modifies
18
in his fiction that follows The Sun Also Rises). This
l^Mark Spilka, "The Death of Love in The Sun Also Ris
es . " in Ernest Heminowav; Critiques of Four Ma~ior Novels,
ed. Carlos Baker (New York, 1962), p. 20. Spilka's article
is probably the best ever written on this novel, but he
takes Jake and Cohn much too seriously.
^^Robert Penn Warren, "Ernest Hemingway," in Critiques
and Essays on Modern Fiction, ed. John W. Aldridge (New
York, 1962). The basic essay on the Hemingway "code."
Warren, very properly, gives a great deal of emphasis to
discipline; I cannot agree, however, with the idea of Jake
and Brett as "initiates." The idea of the "code" has been
expanded and altered by many others; among the most inter
esting and complete re-examinations of the code is that pre
sented by Earl Rovit in his fine book, Ernest Hemingway (New
Haven, 1963); see his chapter, "The Code: A Revaluation."
For my interpretation of the code and why Hemingway formu-
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45
question of an author's "distance" is one that critics have
often run afoul of, particularly in dealing with contempo
rary authors whose physical presence so frequently compli
cates our thinking about Hemingway's work, making The Sun
Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls social or historical
documents that they were never intended to be, and probably
making Across the River and into the Trees a worse novel
than it is and The Old Man and the Sea a better one than it
is. A warning about the distance Hemingway may have from
his material in The Sun Also Rises might be taken by noting
the numerous satirical sketches he wrote as a journalist,
and, as I have already noted, the fact that his first pub
lished novel. The Torrents of Spring, was a blunt satirical
parody. Some hint might also be taken from the title of
the novel, a sardonic blast at those who take themselves too
1 20
seriously.
If, as I think, Hemingway does not back the in-group
lated it, see Chapter III.
^^See note 12 above. Particularly jarring is Rahv's
interpretation of Across the River and into the Trees, which
becomes very little besides an attack ad hominem.
P D .
I discuss the significance of the title later in this
chapter.
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4 6
land its behavior, the whole focus of the novel and its
structure changes. Jake becomes less admirable (as the most
admirable member of the group) and Cohn less a villain for
his violations of the group's sensibilities. Major and
minor characters alike (with the possible exception of
Romero, who assumes a special status that I will discuss
later) become possible objects for satirical scrutiny rather
than subjective projections of various Hemingway attitudes.
We might best look at the book as Hemingway's own ver
sion of the "Book of the Grotesque," for, like Anderson,
Hemingway treats his characters with a mixture of sympathy
and ironic detachment. There is no "norm" established in
the novel except by implication; essentially, a rainbow
pattern of abnormality is shifted back and forth to evoke a
number of ironic contrasts, one with another. Most of these
contrasts can be seen as anti-sentimental in nature. Rather
than a sad and desperate "sexual tragedy," this is really a
21
sexual comedy, wherein all the possible deviations from
the sentimental pattern of love are depicted alongside the
traditional-, sentimental patterns themselves (with a few
p 1
^^Note D .I■A .. p. 7. Hemingway sees comedy as a parody
of form, as something that pretends to be serious.
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47
ragged edges, it must be admitted). And all is presented as
realistically as possible, with perhaps the same rebellious
spirit that led Sinclair Lewis to depict the absurdities and
ironic contrasts of a different scene.
In The Sun Also Rises we have the extreme irony of a
man, Jake Barnes, who gains his wholeness by renouncing the
sentimentality that has really crippled him more than his
physical wound— the sentiment that leads him to propose that
Brett and he "just live together" to help ease his anguish
for her. We also have a man, Robert Cohn, who is led to
make a strutting fool of himself by engaging in the clas
sically defined ritual of sentimental courtship (even con
tinually pomading and combing his hair) with a girl who is
trying her best not to look like a girl and who has gone
beyond that kind of sentiment to a more immediately reward
ing state of continual self-pity and self-justified self-
indulgence .
Cohn thinks Brett is "awfully straight"! Even to the
layman, her initial appearance and entrance must suggest
more descriptive terms from abnormal psychology than any one
person really deserves: narcissism, masochism, sadism,
transvestism, are enough for a good beginning. Poor Cohn is
either killed or cured by his adherence to the gospel of
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4 8
romance; the novel does not specify which. But there is no
doubt that he is a humorous character and not a villain.
There is^ of course, a certain element of sadness in
the comedy of Cohn's slapstick blunders (knocking everybody
down and then trying to shake hands— it is really Chaplin-
esque), his posing ("I'm just worried I'll be bored" when he
goes to the bullfight), and the absurd contrast of his pea
cock preening and his doormat ability to be continually
stepped on. But like the circus clown or the Chaplin movie,
the sadness of Cohn's predicaments should not spoil the fun.
After all, like Rollo in the Katzenjammer Kids, "He only
brings it on himself."
As I say, aside from the absolutely convincing quality
of the characterization, the only reason I can think of for
the inability of so many readers to see the comedy here is
the tendency to take Jake, Brett, and company much more
seriously than the author does. The same type of character
as Cohn has been comic ever since Chaucer and Elizabethan
comedy. Cohn's name is really Sir Ernest Wishwash Love-
folly. Even Lady Brett, with her mixture of lust and self-
pity, has a distant relative in a character such as Field
ing 's Lady Booby.
Why should we take any of these characters and their
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49
so-called "code" seriously? Just because they do? That
should make it even more humorous. The self-pity satirized
in this novel is brought to the limits of realism. Mike,
Jake, Brett and Cohn absolutely wallow in it. The really
funny thing is that the "code" forbids the expression of
22
emotion. Jake lies down on the bed and weeps because the
dark is different from the daytime. You may be sympathetic
if you like, but the name of this particular black pit is
still self-pity. Mike is continually drunk; wallowing in
and enjoying his bankruptcy and his "lost" status, he sulks
and snaps at the first target of opportunity. The fact that
he really does nothing at all but sit down drunk or sleep it
off makes it seem odd that so many readers have become snap
pish along with him and would like Cohn "to go away, like a
good fellow." In the meantime, feeling particularly low,
Brett is informing her loved-but-cannot-have one, Jake, that
to make herself feel better (to hell with Jake, or Mike, or
Cohn or anybody) she has just got to have Romero. Nothing
short of this new toy will do the trick of temporarily
raising her spirits. So she makes Jake pimp for her (which
^^See Arthur L. Scott, "In Defense of Robert Cohn,"
College English. XVIII (March 1957), 309-314, for an excel
lent discussion of this point.
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50
is sad and acidly humorous— Jake is more like Cohn than most
readers are willing to believe) and take her back to destroy
the one symbol of clean honesty that Jake at the moment has
(she is completely unaware of Jake's emotional involvement
with Romero, as she is completely ignorant of, or chooses to
ignore, everyone else's emotions throughout the novel). The
"code" comes to resemble the structure of farce; it is
simply a self-delusion used to make oneself feel right while
doing the wrong thing. To herd together, to scapegoat
others, and to make it work on the basis of some set of
"principles" is a typical human technique for self-justifi
cation of pride and selfishness. That the code is such a
sham is one of the great ironies of Hemingway's treatment of
these characters.
In the center of the "in-group" barricade is, of
course, Lady Brett, who to a great extent is not only the
center of the conflict but the central character in the
novel. Since she is everything a heroine should not be,
with a vengeance, we might be justified in calling her, in
the current phrase, an "anti-heroine." Hemingway's point,
it seems quite clear to me, is that it takes much more than
a beautiful set of the right equipment to make a woman
(somewhat contradicting what is supposed to be Hemingway's
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51
attitude toward women). She is as she is, at least in part,
as a result of two devastating experiences with romantic
love— Hemingway's picture of Brett and husband on the floor
with a gun between them is a wonderful multiple irony.
Whatever led her to her previous experiences, she now has
obviously chosen to perennially play victim as an excuse to
give free rein to her irresponsibility. Her role as bitch-
goddess combines all of the sins of character that are basic
to sentimentality, and as such begins to formulate, in a
negative way, the real meaning-value structure that Heming
way starts to fictionally evolve from this novel to his
last. She is ego-centered, unaware, and uncommitted to any
sort of internal ideal relevant to the welfare of others.
In response to her negative challenge, Jake, Mike, and Cohn
(as well as Romero) all come to measure their manhood in
response to her as a kind of catalyst. And their manhood
is not measured by coiones (another misleading cliche of
Hemingway criticism), at least not in the usual sense of
this vague Spanish colloquialism, but on the basis of an
internal strength to maintain a truthful awareness of one
self and the strength to achieve a commitment to a valid
internal ideal.
That Mike and Cohn fail in these terms has, I think.
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52
already been demonstrated. Jake, however, is a developing
character whose awareness and commitment is shaky until the
end of the novel, where there is some evidence that he be
comes self-aware and really aware of Brett for the first
time. I have already spoken of the self-pity he is drawn
into in the first section of the novel where his intercourse
with Brett is largely that of trading sighs for what cannot
be. Book I ends with a fairly good summary of their previ
ous meetings:
"Oh, darling," Brett said, "I'm so miserable."
I had [Jake thinks] that feeling of going through
something that has all happened before. (p. 54)
When one reads at the end of the passage (p. 65), "The door
opened and I went up-stairs and went to bed," there is a
strong suggestion that there will be a repetition of the
suffering that Jake underwent the night before, after leav
ing Brett, only to have her come up to his apartment at
four-thirty the next morning, briefly parting from the Count
waiting in his limousine in the street below, to see Jake
and to report on her evening with the Count and his impres
sive $10,000 proposition. After she has left a second time,
even after coming face to face with what she really is, Jake
cannot lose hold of the sentiment that had gripped him
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53
before her appearance;
This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about.
Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping
into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a
little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy
to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but
at night it is another thing. (p. 34)
Jake's"feeling of going through something" that has happened
before and his suffering because of the way Brett steps into
the car are all elements of comedy— if we can keep our dis
tance .
As we all recognize, the night is a time conducive to
the illusions of sentiment, since it is a time when we are
cut off from the perspective that daylight often brings.
Our sensation of otherness is dimmed and our contacts with
others are limited or cut off entirely. Day is the time for
those who have at least some measure of awareness to measure
their feelings and values with the reality of things, and it
may be that those who build their daytime bridges to reality
with the strongest awareness are those least cut off with
the sentimentalities of the self at night. Thus it is that
a character in Hemingway's fiction may secure his stability
(as in "Big Two-Hearted River") or redeem his sense of pro
portion through contact with nature.
It is this function that the pastoral interlude in the
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54
first part of Book II performs for Jake. There is a sharp
contrast (akin to the contrast pointed out by Carlos Baker
between the priest's mountains and the narcotic, self-
23
indulgent cities of the plain in A Farewell to Arms) be
tween the clarity of the day experience on the Spanish fish
ing trip, and the confused chaos of the nightmare (it is
stylistically— and in terms of a weird, disconnected con
tent— a true nightmare) of Pamplona. In Pamplona there is
constant conflict of egos floundering about, creating fric
tion, betrayal, and degradation. In the mountains the char
acters feel free. Perfect harmony exists as Bill and Jake
share and give to each other. It is the only real demon
stration of "love" in the novel, and the fact that it comes
between man and man, rather than man and woman, does not
necessarily imply that Hemingway prefers men or that he
feels women can be dispensed with. Instead, it is a further
element of criticism directed toward the confusion of roles
and the corrosive power of romantic illusion which have
destroyed the simplicity and directness of the relationship
of man and woman.
^^Hemingway; The Writer as Artist (Princeton, 1953),
Chapter V.
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55
When the Englishman, Harris, comes, there is simply an
expansion of sharing. All three of the men are not only
intensely aware of their own and each other's well-being,
they are all committed to an internal ideal of behavior
based on their awareness. This is almost directly opposed
to the jealousy and strife in Pamplona, and significantly at
the center of all of the trouble is Brett, the woman who
refuses to accept her role as a woman. The only valid in
ternal ideal held by the group in Pamplona is the aficion
ideal held only by Jake, which Jake significantly betrays by
being seduced through his false sentimentalization of Brett.
He is overcome, despite the dirty role she wants him to
play, by feelings of yearning generated in a situation that
is a parody of courtly love. He cannot have her; therefore
he wants her. However, the lover here is not frustrated by
circumstances that have committed his loved one to someone
else (she is extremely available), but rather by his own
physical disability. A great love story is being enacted
by a man who has lost his maleness and a woman who dresses
and talks like a man and who is filled with lust. What is
more romantic than being asked to pimp for the woman you
have put on a pedestal? The power of self-delusion is
beautifully illustrated in the number of times Brett hits
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56
I Jake on the head with her velvet hammer only to have him
come back for more. Tristan and Isolde has been transformed
24
into a comic Punch and Judy show.
It is only after returning to nature once more in San
Sebastian to wash out his soul in the ocean and assess his
gains and losses that Jake, to paraphrase his previous
statement of philosophy, finds out truly "what he has bought
and what he has paid for" (p. 148). His illumination comes
after he receives a telegram from Brett asking him to rescue
her (she has cut off her affair with Romero) at a hotel in
Madrid. It is a summons to a task that is a hideous parody
of knight-errantry. Fair maiden, is really a whore, and the
castle she has been imprisoned in is a second-rate hotel.
The dragon who keeps the gate is an unpaid bill for two
weeks of adultery with a young squire half her age. Jake
sends Brett a telegram in return announcing his arrival
time, and with the bitterness of true self-perspective says
to himself:
That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl
p A
^^Robert W. Lewis in Hemingway on Love (Austin, 1965)
explores in great detail the courtly love pattern which re
curs throughout much of the early and middle period of
Hemingway's work. Lewis's book appeared after this study
was written.
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57
off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off
with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire
with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.
(p. 239)
"And sign the wire with love" is his realization of the
folly of self-indulgence, lack of awareness, and commitment
to an illusion. It is only by keeping this change in per
spective in mind that the full irony of the final scene can
be apprehended. Although remaining to a degree sympathetic
and loyal, Jake allows his bitter detachment to become more
and more obvious. The climax and point of the novel is that
Jake finally becomes his own man. No one should believe
that he joins together again with Brett, agrees with her
that she has "acted well," and goes off on the merry-go-
round once more. As far as Madrid is concerned, "all trains
finish there" (p. 240).^^
The elements of Brett's repetitions in the last scene
are interesting variations on the theme of egocentricity.
Her only real acknowledgment of Jake as a human being with
emotions comes toward the end of the scene, first with the
question, "You like to eat, don't you?" and next the
^^For the interpretation of this line and for the in
sight that this moment is the turning point for Jake, I am
indebted to Rovit, cited above, pp. 155-158.
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58
request, "Don't get drunk, Jake. You don't have to." In
context, both appear to be feelers toward confirming whether
the old sentimental magic is still working on Jake— "Am I
really tearing you up inside?" Until this point, she dis
plays a mixture of two emotions: self-pity for the loss of
Romero and self-righteousness for her sending him off. Her
most repetitive statement is that she is not going to talk
about it. She continues to beat the drum of her great love
and sacrifice on the brain of her companion, however, and
at the thought of how good it feels not "to be one of those
bitches that ruins children" (p. 243), she is overcome by a
sense of her own nobility and bursts into a fit of crying.
Now at this point the reader can join in her sense of mar
tyrdom, her faltering attempts to repress emotion, her
nearly unrecognized act of courage, her sense of the loss of
the one good thing that has entered her shattered life. If
the reader does, then he must view The Sun Also Rises as a
sort of sophisticated soap opera.The reader had better
look at the details of Brett's character and behavior as
Hemingway has drawn them. Then Brett's statement at the
26see Chapter I for a detailed discussion of these
attitudes.
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59
climax of her self-dramatization, "You know it makes one
feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch," becomes almost
comic except that the self-deception is so vicious and the
consequences of her self-deception so disastrous for others.
When she says further that "It's sort of what we have in
stead of God," Jake sums up her choice to be lost and to
glory in it when he replies, "Some people have God. Quite
a lot." But of course, God has never "worked well" for her;
how could He? So Jake suggests another martini as a more
acceptable alternative.
The contrast between Jake's state of mind and awareness
and Brett's is nicely set up in the last paragraph of the
novel. She is in a position of resting comfortably against
Jake in a taxi, while at the same time Jake perceives out
side that "it was very hot and bright, and the houses looked
sharply white" (p. 247). Brett's attention is still inward,
as reflected in her physical position, and her emotions
still directed toward pity for herself and what she cannot
have but wants: "Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had
such a damned good time together" (p. 247). And we know
exactly what a damned good time he would have had too. The
kind of good time he has already had, plus the happiness
given to Mike, and Cohn, and Romero. For of course it is
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6 0
not just Jake's incapacity to have sex that encourages Brett
i
to tromp all over him. To her, in the meantime, Jake is a
valuable piece of property, a sort of home base for self-
pity that she can return to when the loss of Romero, or
whoever it might be, has lost its poignancy.
However, Jake is no longer crouched into himself, as he
27
was at the table in Pamplona, there wallowing. He sees
the sharp white of the houses (a clarity of vision reminis
cent of the fishing trip and San Sebastian— but this time
in Brett's company) and the raising of the traffic police
man's baton (a gesture of discipline over the masculine sex
impulses— self-pity and illusion have been put in their
place). "'Yes,' I said, 'isn't it pretty to think'so?'"
(p. 247) are Jake's last words, and implicit in his tone
are the indications that the emotional price for such pretty
pretenses is far too high in terms of value received for him
to pay any longer.
In my mind, therefore. The Sun Also Rises is a novel
that is a satire of sentimentality wherein contrasts of
various levels of awareness are presented, and various types
^7pp. 222-223. Bill identifies the period at Pamplona
as a "wonderful nightmare," while Jake sits and gets drunk
but does not "feel any better."
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6 1
:of mistaken commitments are ironically and sometimes humor
ously used to make its point. It is an attempt to apply an
outside perspective to the internal vice of self-indulgence
and its consequent vice of irresponsibility. The author
tries to make this theme clear in his contrast of prologue
quotations: the "You are a lost generation" with "One
generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but
the earth abideth forever." The former quotation by Miss
Stein (as he notes in A Moveable Feast) irritated Hemingway,
and he tried to balance what he considered a glib slogan
with the quotation from Ecclesiastes. "All generations were
lost by something," he recalls thinking at the time (pp. 29-
30). There are always circumstances that can be used as
excuses for self-pity, but it is important to see that the
character most seriously crippled by circumstance in the
novel, Jake, is the character who emerges at the end as the
most clear-sighted. Jake learns the lesson that all Heming
way protagonists learn: to live with dignity requires that
a man be hard on himself. If a man is lost, it is because
he has lost himself by preferring illusion to reality, self-
deceit to self-honesty.
The battle that Jake fights with himself is only the
first of a series of battles fought by each protagonist in
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62
levery Hemingway novel that was to follow. With the possible
exception of To Have and Have Not, the internal struggle of
the male individual is so central to each novel that every
other element, whether it be structure, theme, character,
symbol or irony, must be considered as an extension of that
struggle. If there is such a thing as a "key" to the inter
pretation of Hemingway's work, this is it. Any interpreta
tion that attempts to ignore this struggle, and focuses
exclusively on the historical accuracy of the setting, or
the depth of characterization of the supporting roles, or
the pattern of symbol, runs the risk of being irrelevant.
For Jake, as for Frederic Henry, for Robert Jordan, Colonel
Cantwell, and Santiago, the essential thing is to "know one
self," and to "know oneself" is to discipline oneself toward
a solid basis for honest feeling. Unrelated to that effort
toward self-discipline, nothing matters.
In Hemingway's fiction the unit of ultimate moral re
sponsibility is the individual. The beam of his attention
is nearly always so sharply focused on the protagonist that
other people, singly or in groups, seem to exist only in the
reflection of his light, having their place only insofar as
they work for or against the moral achievement of the pro
tagonist. Seldom does Hemingway use the device of a
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6 3
multiple point of view, and usually, as in To Have and Have
Not. so unsuccessfully that we must assume that the author's
moral imagination can only operate as a projection of his
own condition, either as a projection of the failure to
achieve self-discipline ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro"), or
more often as a projection of the success in achieving it
("The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber").
Groups are only very dimly perceived in Hemingway's
work. They usually exist as forces, lacking definite char
acter or shape and therefore lacking specific responsibility.
And it is this inability to pinpoint, to locate the group,
to bring it to a face-to-face moral accounting that often
gives the group in Hemingway's work such an ominous cast.
"The army," "the Party," "the government" are nebulous
shadows in the mind of a Frederic Henry or a Robert Jordan,
threatening chaos, confusion, misunderstanding, red tape,
and waste. But worst of all, though groups present dangers
that can go so far as to bring the individual to his death,
they offer no redress, no target for retribution, and no
real opportunity for the individual to defend himself-.
When, on occasion, a group does become positive and tan
gible, it takes its immediacy and force from the personality
of the male protagonist as its leader, becoming really an
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6 4
extension of his character, as the guerrilla band in For
Whom the Bell Tolls becomes a positive force under the
leadership of Jordan in direct contrast to the ineffective
amorphousness of the Republican Army.
Despite the needling Hemingway received throughout his
career from the Marxist critics and others about his so-
called narrow range of vision (his failure to be "really
serious" in his fiction about politics, economics, or social
caste), he apparently realized very early that the materials
most organic to the human condition were extremely simple,
and the more simple and basic they were, the more likely
they were to hold true (D .I.A .. p. 2). A key part of this
realization was that meaning and value must be considered
in terms of the individual, not in terms of the role of
generations, classes, political parties, or social move
ments. Hemingway was certainly anti-Marxist: almost
everything in his work points to the idea that joining to
gether with other men in mass movements tends to dissipate
the energies of the individual, rather than making the ef
forts of the individual count for more. It may be that for
a moment in his career Hemingway himself was uncharacter
istically carried along by the group. Brought to life in
the middle of the great depression, Harry Morgan, in To Have
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55
and Have Not, may mumble at his death, "A man alone ain't
got no bloody f ing chance," but Jake Barnes, Frederic
Henry, Robert Jordan, Colonel Cantwell, and Santiago give
the world another message: anything a man does, anything a
man really does, he does from the courage of his own breast.
There is no help— no cavalry over the hill, no god in the
machine, no salvation in membership.
Hemingway also discovered that if individual conflict
were made clear enough in one's writing, the reader could
find a significant meaning for himself (the truly felt ex
perience) to a much greater extent than if the author took
an exterior overview. In addition, Hemingway avoided what
he called "judging" and attempted to present the individual
consciousness dramatically, allowing the reader as much as
possible to know Hemingway's characters as one would know a
person, through what they say and do. Beyond this know
ledge, the reader is able to know the protagonist as the
reader would attempt to know himself, through what the pro
tagonist selects to see and what he thinks about.
It is because of this approach, the dramatic presenta
tion of the individual, that Hemingway's protagonists have
been called passive (they are often primarily receivers,
being immersed in the experience itself) or non-thinkers.
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5 6
lit is not that they do not think— Robert Jordan has been
charged with thinking too much— but that they perceive and
transmit what they have selected to perceive and what is
thus characteristic of their condition. They argue with
themselves in a basically emotional rather than a philo
sophical way, dramatizing the conflicts that their percep
tions have brought them in opposition to their commit-
28
ments. Hemingway's approach has also led to the charge
that characters other than the protagonist tend to be flat
and ill-developed. This charge can be answered by pointing
out again that by perceiving with an individual protagonist,
other characters must be subordinated to the individual's
selective consciousness of them. It is odd that this li
cense cannot be granted to Hemingway, since it is not at
29
all uncommon in fiction for writers to use such a focus.
Hemingway's point of view, whether technically that of
the first or third person, is established as a projection.
^®See Hemingway's discussion of Huxley's charge con
cerning the anti-intellectual quality of Hemingway's charac
ters and Hemingway's answer, D.I.A.. pp. 190-192.
^^This is certainly common in the center-of-conscious-
ness approach used by Henry James, for example; and no one
can say that in The Ambassadors any of the characters are
developed beyond what they are (often very fragmented) in
the perception of Strether.
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67
artistically formed, of what the author a male and an
individual, and what the author knows. in the complete sense
of the word. Yet the protagonist whose center of conscious
ness dominates the story is not the author himself. What
Jake sees, for example, is a reflection of what Hemingway
is as a person, and what he has seen, and the way he has
seen it; yet Jake is a separate created entity whose vision
is colored by his own given emotional identity.
Although we must never confuse the artist with his
creation, each protagonist is, nevertheless, a kind of sur
rogate artist, functioning as Hemingway the artist is func
tioning: he is attempting to know a part of reality truly
and well as a result of achieving emotional honesty. The
emotions of the protagonists create values, which in turn
create meanings. The battle of the self (the focus of The
Sun Also Rises) is prerequisite to the achievement of valid
and meaningful relationships between people (A Farewell to
Arms) and to valid emotional commitment to other men (For
Whom the Bell Tolls). Hemingway's concern with overcoming
a false, and achieving a true emotional structure within the
individual does not mean, as some have insisted, that he
ignores the importance of social responsibility. It is
rather that he understands very well that the true and
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68
valuable society begins with the true and valuable man.
Supporting roles in Hemingway's major novels lead first ta
the individual in support of or in opposition to his search
for truth, as Miss Van Campen in A Farewell to Arms stands
in opposition to Catherine's attempts to lead Henry to a
fuller understanding of the nature of love, or as the major,
Rinaldi, and the priest lead Henry to a fuller understanding
of the nature of war. Second, certain emotional commitments
flow from the individual to the characters or society that
surrounds him as a function of the relative success of his
search, as Henry, while becoming more firmly aware of the
nature of war and love, becomes more firmly committed to
Catherine.
It is understandable, therefore, that in Hemingway's
works certain supporting roles tend to recur, with many of
the same general characteristics on each appearance as a
result of performing, roughly, the same general functions
in regard to the protagonist. Among these is the "tutor" or
"professional," who functions as a teacher or model to help
the protagonist achieve awareness or worthy commitment, such
as Romero, who provides an example of a thoroughly honest
and courageous commitment to the thoroughly unsentimental
and manly profession of bullfighting; and the foil, who
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6 9
provides examples of conspicuous failure in awareness and/or
commitment, such as Cohn (or as Pablo in For Whom the Bell
Tolls). Further, there are the contributing characters, who
are characters from whom the protagonist does not learn—
although he may do so to some extent— as much as he finds
rapport with them. This latter group includes the "good
women," such as Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms,
and masculine friends, such as Bill Gorton in The Sun Also
Rises and Rinaldi in A Farewell to Arms.
But though the protagonist may get some help on his
moral journey, and though he may form attachments that are
worthy of his commitment, he is ultimately alone and ulti
mately responsible. Except for Nick Adams, Hemingway's
protagonist is essentially without family, and except for
brief periods, without home and comfort. There is no church
or permanent shelter for blessing, no country or community
that surrounds him with a strength beyond his own strength.
Though he may strive all his life with every fibre of his
being to love or to make love possible, when love is in
sight, it is snatched away from him. All things that are
good are temporary; all things that threaten destruction
and death are permanent. Knowing these things, it is the
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70
Hemingway protagonist's lot to fight anyway. He may not
win. But he will fight.
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CHAPTER III
GAMES AND GAMESMANSHIP:
THE CENTRAL METAPHOR
Death in the Afternoon, a volume I have already quoted
from extensively, is the document that sets forth most com
pletely Hemingway's concepts of writing and of art in gener
al. An extremely personal book and an irritating one for
many readers, it was probably written, at least in part, to
irritate and provoke its audience. Ostensibly a primer and
guide book on bullfighting, it also contains a number of
observations, reminiscences, and anecdotes. There is, how
ever, a characteristic that ties all the various anecdotes
together: everything is strongly directed against senti
mentality. ^
^Of the three major, short-story-like anecdotes in the
book, two are primarily about homosexuality, and the third,
"A Natural History of the Dead," is a bitter parody of na
ture sentimentality. These excesses, plus a dwelling on the
slang term for sexual intercourse and a definition of the
71
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72
Hemingway could not have picked a country, Spain, or a
spectacle, the bullfight, less endemic to the American emo
tional climate. Even today (D.I.A. was written in 1932),
the bullfight has few American devotees. It is essentially
a ritual of death, a subject, as Hemingway points out, that
2
the modern Anglo-Saxon spends his entire life avoiding.
Our obsessions with delicacy and cleanliness, and the heavy
veneer of sentimentality with which we mask our own barbar
ism and cruelty, make it impossible for most of us to appre
ciate the frank confrontation of basic elements that lie at
the heart of the bullfight, at least as an ideal.
In the arena in Spain, Hemingway found himself about as
far from the province of Aunt Sally as a Midwestern American
boy could put himself. And for a writer who read very lit
tle criticism and who wrote almost none, how fitting it was
that he chose to go where he could experience an art form
in order to study art. Hemingway states his reason for
term "horseshit," would lead one to believe that Hemingway's
problem in writing in the direct first person is not ego
mania, but an overeagerness to attack respectability. A
sort of parody reversal of Aunt Sally appears in the person
of the "Old Lady" who, unlike the New Yorker's shockable
"Old Lady from Dubuque," is rather humorously unaffected by
Hemingway's cure for sentimentality.
2p.I.A.. pp. 264-265.
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73
studying the bullfight in these terms:
The only place where you could see life and death, i.e.,
violent death now that the wars were over, was in the
bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where
I could study it. I was trying to learn to write com
mencing with the simplest things. (p. 2)
Death on the battlefield had changed, as the saying goes,
the boy to a man. Now the man looked toward death and vio
lence as a way of finding himself as an artist.
What do you feel when you watch a bullfight? Hemingway
found that true or false emotion is produced depending on
whether the bullfighter really puts himself in danger or
fakes it. He found that in bullfighting as in literature,
if the members of the audience "prefer tricks to sincerity
they soon get tricks" (p. 163). If you see the "real
thing," you know it is real by the way you feel while watch-
3
ing it. There is that faena
that takes a man out of himself and makes him feel im
mortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy,
that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious
ecstasy; moving all the people in the ring together and
increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds, carry
ing the bullfighter with it, he playing on the crowd
through the bull and being moved as it responds in a
^The last act of the fight which includes a series of
passes with a small cape over a pointed stick called the
muleta and the actual killing.
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74
growing ecstasy of ordered, formal, passionate, increas
ing disregard for death that leaves you, when it is over,
and the death administered to the animal that has made
it possible, as empty, as changed and as sad as any major
emotion will leave you. (pp. 205-207)
The effect described here is very close to the emotion
of tragedy as set forth by Aristotle in the Poetics. a
closeness that is obviously not an accident. We might also
note the similarity in the increasing disregard for death
as shown by the bullfighter for his own life and the in
creasing disregard for the consequences of his commitment
shown by the tragic protagonist. Like the bullfighter who
becomes increasingly more involved in the emotions of his
situation, the tragic protagonist becomes more and more
emotionally entangled in his course of action. With each
step, the tragic protagonist pushes himself closer and
closer toward the disaster that the audience knows is, as is
the killing of the bull, inevitable.
Predictably, the artist who was always hard on himself
was aiming for the most difficult literary goal of all,
tragedy, which many critics thought impossible to write in
the modern age and which few critics thought had ever been
4
achieved in fiction. But this artist approached the
will discuss the problems of "modern" tragedy within
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! 75
problem in a different way. Rather than working through
tragic literature and theory to his goal, Hemingway was
looking for first-hand experience; his idea was to start as
close to the "real thing" as possible and find the essential
ingredients for himself. Although the bullfight is in it
self a performed art, it offers the unique aspects of real
danger, real violence, and real death. Traditional and ex
tremely formalized, the bullfight offered the perfect oppor
tunity for the artist to explore what he was most interested
in, the interrelationships between human behavior, rules of
conduct, and human emotion.
For despite the scoffing of those who prefer to think
of Hemingway as a retarded sophomore,^ E. M. Halliday is
the form of fiction in Chapter VIII. For the difficulties
facing the modern writer of tragedy, see Joseph Wood Krutch,
"The Tragic Fallacy," in Tragedy: Plays. Theory, and Criti
cism. ed. Richard Levin (New York, 196 0).
^Dwight Macdonald: "A professor of English in North
Carolina State College recently called Hemingway 'essential
ly a philosophical writer.' This seems to me a foolish
statement even for a professor of literature. . . . A feel
ing that loyalty and bravery are the cardinal virtues and
that physical action is the basis of the good life— even
when reinforced with the kind of nihilism most of us get
over by the age of twenty— these don't add up to a philoso
phy," in Against the American Grain (New York, 1962), p.
171. Although not footnoted, I assume Mr. Macdonald is re
ferring to the words of E. M. Halliday in "Hemingway's Ambi
guity: Symbolism and Irony," American Literature. XXVIII
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76
more accurate than not when he classifies Hemingway as
basically a philosophical writer. The whole of his fiction
is firmly directed toward the ultimate questions. But what
is often exasperating to the academician is that Hemingway
disregards the intellectual solution; he neither looks for
it nor pretends to present it. Frederic Henry's discussion
with himself about the fate of the ants on the burning log
produces nothing very profound in the way of ideas, but the
experience itself is a profound one for Henry, and in the
context within A Farewell to Arms, it can be profound also
for the reader.^ One finds out about life, its purposes and
rules, by living it. And this is the reason, also, why one
writes fiction, rather than sermons or essays. Since it
becomes Hemingway's position that the meaning of life can
only be found in the experience of living and that all other
considerations outside or beyond that experience are mis
leading or irrelevant, finding and abiding by the rules for
living become in themselves the goals or purposes of life.
With such an emphasis on "rules," it is perhaps most
helpful to our understanding of Hemingway to think of him
(March 1956), 1.
Gp.T.A.. pp. 327-328.
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77
as a "moralist." On the basis of his writing, there is no
doubt that while he rejected the standards of his home and
birthplace, he never rejected the energy toward proper con
duct that characterized the atmosphere in which he grew up.
He knew after his experiences as a reporter in St. Louis and
as an ambulance driver under fire in Italy that the rules of
conduct he had inherited were not appropriate to the world
as he found it outside of Oak Park. He was already familiar
with the ethical axioms given for the world as it should be;
now he was looking for a way of living in the world as it
really was. Having what might best be called a "pictorial
imagination," that is, having a tendency to view life
through sensation, Hemingway spent the moral energy of his
heritage the only way he could: he sought to find organiza
tion in his sensations, an organization that could be pic-
torially understood and communicated. In other words, he
was searching for a metaphor.
There is no way of telling exactly when it was that
Hemingway found the metaphor he was looking for. It is only
clear in his work, from The Sun Also Rises to Death in the
Afternoon, that he was drawn more and more to the metaphor
of game until, with the publication of the latter work, he
made his choice public. It is very likely that Hemingway's
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7 8
choice of the game metaphor simply grew and in its initial
adoption was unconscious. It was a metaphor that involved
situations that he had lived with since a boy, situations
that involved ideas about conduct which remained true for
him after he had become a man. This was the one part of
his heritage that Hemingway kept, the experiences of the
Michigan woods, what his father had taught him, and what he
had learned for himself. It may be that it was while he
wrote his Künst1erroman. the Nick Adams stories, that Hem
ingway realized that within the experiences of hunting and
fishing, and experiences like them, he had something he
could hold on to, enlarge upon, and build upon. If there is
a "code" in Hemingway's work, this is its origin. If there
is a "code," then it is contained in and carried on by the
"game metaphor."
The importance to this study of Death in the Afternoon
is that it is a report of the artist's conscious research
into the game situation for use in his writing, as well as
being the expression of a hope, tragedy, for its future
development. If he could but find the simple basic things
that lay behind the tragic drama of the bullfight, perhaps
he too could produce that "major" emotion in his own art
and obtain the ultimate emotional effect that any work of
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79
literature can aspire to. It was a strange solution, but it
really cannot be termed a simple-minded one. More than one
academically oriented investigator has found the game meta
phor not only useful, but more appropriate than any other
7
approach in explaining human behavior.
Although it is a special kind of game, bullfighting has
a great many things in common with games in general, and
almost all the sports that Hemingway was interested in could
be or have been classified as games. They all have rules,
goals, and an element of risk and competition. They all
have strong pictorial elements; apparatus, costume, jargon,
and setting. They all contain rich metaphorical possibili
ties in that each creates a small, independent world of its
Today in the social sciences, two languages compete
for primacy; the language of the 'game' and the language of
the 'myth.' Game languages follow the model of the physical
sciences by defining all terms operationally and in formal
terms. '. . . Analysis of social interaction is made in
terms of moves and countermoves. . . . In all these fields
the trend toward miniature systems is indicative of the
model of a tight situation, rigidily defined, where individ
uals can be assumed to conform to a set of rules which can
be completely specified,'" from Dennis, p. 18 (including a
quotation from K. W, Back, "The Game and the Myth," Behav
ioral Science. VIII (1963), 68). See the discussion of
games by Timothy Leary, "How to Change Behavior," in the
Dennis collection cited above. Also, Eric Berne, The Games
People Play (New York, 1965), and Anatol Rapoport, Fights.
Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor, 1960).
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80
jown with its own laws, its own tribal customs, its own hier
archy of participants, its own set of conflicts and emo
tions, and its own set of rewards and punishments. It is
easy to see by now that by "game" I am not referring to
"play," but to activities that for the participants and
g
spectators are serious and significant.
The game metaphor is not employed by Hemingway in
everything that he writes, but the game situation is central
to each of his novels written after The Sun Also Rises and
9
to many of his short stories. Viewed as a whole, the game
metaphor can be seen as a distillation of all the elements
of games that Hemingway found a particular attraction for,
and in such a distillation we will find the recurrence of
all the attitudes we have already discovered to be charac
teristic of Hemingway's work. He was attracted to particu
lar games first, because of their masculinity and second,
because of their violence and elements of real risk.
Q
By "play" I mean that we should not regard games in
this context as necessarily juvenile or insignificant.
(Even "play" as normally thought of, like "joking," can, of
course, express our most deeply felt attitudes.)
^Hemingway's first extensive use of the game metaphor
comes in A Farewell to Arms. As I shall attempt to show,
Hemingway's use of the game metaphor becomes increasingly
more extensive with each novel.
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81
Activities such as hunting, fishing, boxing, and bullfight
ing are by tradition kept pretty much within the province of
the male, and through the violence, suffering, and death
inflicted upon man and, even more seriously to some observ
ers, upon animals, they are strongly antithetical to femi
nine sentiment.Third, Hemingway was attracted to games
because they are formalized, that is, they center attention
and time on the prescribed performance of certain acts that
lead to a prescribed goal. But most of all, games can place
equal or greater emphasis on technique for the accomplish
ment of the goal than on the goal itself.
Although there are differences between the various
games and sports Hemingway showed an interest in, and al
though these games and sports are employed as subject matter
in a great many different ways in his writing, there is one
great appeal that they would have to a man who was so great
ly concerned with honesty, and it is this appeal that uni
fies and identifies their metaphorical use: games and
sports provide a strict code against which behavior can be
easily measured.
l^Hemingway discusses the sentimentalization of the
animals used in the bullfight, D.I.A., pp. 5-9.
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8 2
Unlike life, wherein the rules seem to be often shift
ing and turning, where there is hypocrisy that sets up one
set of rules for appearances and another for real behavior,
and where the winner is often the person who can cheat with
out being caught, the rules in games and in sports are spe
cific, rest on a character goal almost unique in our day to
games, honor, and in many cases rest on self-judgment and
self-enforcement for adherence— that is, in many games and
sports the umpire is the participant himself. Activities
like hunting, fishing, and bullfighting are carried on with
out a human opponent; they are essentially played against
oneself. The conflict between man and beast is often
dwarfed by the internal conflict within the participant im
posed by the hardships of the code he must force himself to
abide by.
If the stakes are high enough, as they can be in hunt
ing or bullfighting, the temptation to cheat in one way or
another can be overwhelming, as it is to Macomber, in "The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," to run from the lion
he has wounded rather than to follow the rules by going into
the bush to finish him off. On the other hand, the sense of
honor of the participant may be so great that like the bull
fighter, Manual Garcia, in "The Undefeated," he may lose
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83
his life in solitary pursuit of his commitment even though
he knows beforehand that an honorable performance will
probably cause his death. Although, like Garcia, the winner
may take away from his victory nothing more tangible than
his honor, it is the most important thing he can preserve;
it epitomizes the meaning of his life and for the observer
it can represent the meaning of being a man.
For Hemingway, the well-worn motto "It's how you play
the game" is all-important. His emphasis on means rather
than ends is an idea significant and profound enough in its
implications for our world and its problems to alone support
a lifetime of literary effort. This is Hemingway's answer
to the question; "How does one become a Man or an Artist?"
In Green Hills of Africa, his fictionalized account of an
African safari he had taken, Hemingway tells himself re
peatedly during the hunting episodes that if he doesn't kill
cleanly he will quit hunting. When at the end of the hunt
ing he is again bested by his competitor-friend Karl, Pop,
the white hunter, puts the perspective (as a tutor should)
of competition back where it belongs as an internal conflict
when he says, "You can always remember how you shot them.
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8 4
11
That's what you really get out of it." In the same book
he puts writing into a similar area of internal integrity
when he proposes that a fourth or fifth dimension can be
achieved in prose provided the writer has "an absolute con
science as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to
prevent faking" (p. 19).
Individual behavior is the focal point of the value
structure that Hemingway induced from games: it does not
matter how others behave or what they think of your behav
ior; if you behave well, you will know it and that is
^^The Green Hills of Africa might be proposed as Hem
ingway's personal testing ground for the game fundamentals
he apprehended in the bullfight, thus underlining his con
stant attempts to integrate his life and art to personally
certify the "truth" of the material he used in his fiction.
This connection is implied in the discussion by W. M. Fro-
hock in The Novel of Violence in America (Dallas, 1958), pp.
181-182. Particularly interesting is the passage from
G.H.A. cited by Frohock where Hemingway apparently inadver
tently switches from hunting imagery to bullfight imagery
during a time of hunting crises.
A somewhat similar emphasis on internal integrity and
internal conflict is expressed by Thoreau in his Journal:
"The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but
for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead
language. I pray for such inward experience as will make
nature significant" (V, 135), and "Men commonly exaggerate
theme. . . . My work is writing, and I do not hesitate,
though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried
by ordinary standards; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing,
the life is everything" (IX, 121). The Journal of Henry D .
Thoreau■ ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston,
1949) .
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85
enough.. How the code of behavior specifically operates
through the game metaphor in terms of the individual is the
subject of Death in the Afternoon, It is our guide book,
but since it is also written within the game metaphor, we
must find its values for ourselves and certify them by
applying them to Hemingway's other works. We will do this
briefly here and in a more extended fashion for each of
Hemingway's major works later. The value system that Death
in the Afternoon predicates can be summarized as follows:
1. Commitment to an ideal of behavior while pursuing
a goal that must be held more important than achieving the
goal itself.
2. Honest seIf-judgment of one's adherence to the
rules.
3. Awareness of the rules and the game situation.
4. Skill to perform well that comes from awareness,
experience, and inborn talent.
5. Courage enough to take the risks involved in genu
ine awareness and commitment.
To take these items one at a time, the commitment to an
ideal of behavior which is at the root of man's continual
internal conflict can be seen in the bullfight as the bull
fighter performs, despite danger, to the full extent of his
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86
capability. This "sincerity" versus various "tricks" is
12
emphasized throughout Death in the Afternoon. It is this
drive toward the ideal which conflicts with the constant
temptation to weaken, to lie to oneself, or to self-justify
any deviation from the rules, that is the basis of the tur
moil in the minds of Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls and
Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. As each protagonist
faces the crucial challenge of his life, he must keep him
self thinking "straight" to perform the task the way it
should be performed.
Honest self-judgment is therefore immediately involved
in the pursuit of an ideal of behavior. In terms of the
bullfighter, self-honesty is best expressed in terms of his
honor. When honest with himself, as well as courageously
committed to risk, he must pursue his commitment as abso
lutely as "the standard meter in Paris." He does not lie
to himself, nerve himself up, or promise himself a more
honest performance next time. He pushes himself to the very
edge of disaster and performs with the best grace that
12pp. 54 (writers' faking), 91, 163, 193, 200, 210,
223— among the more specific references. The whole book,
however, is really about the opposition of "sincerity" to
"faking."
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8 7
circumstances permit, and he does this on his own judgment,
as Romero does in The Sun Also Rises, despite the adverse
13
judgment of the audience. On the one hand, "too much
honor," as Hemingway notes fatalistically, "destroys a man
quicker than too much of any other fine quality" (p. 258).
On the other hand, to complete the terms of the conflict,
once the bullfighter's honor is gone
you cannot be sure that he will do his best or that he
will do anything at all except technically fulfill his
obligation by killing his bull as safely, dully, and
dishonestly as he can. Having lost his honor he goes
along living through his contracts, hating the public
he fights before, telling himself that they have no
right to hoot and jeer at him who faces death when they
sit comfortable and safe in the seats, telling himself
he can always do great work if he wants to and they can
wait until he wants. (p. 91)
This monologue very nicely states the conflict that is in a
way basic to the fabric of all of our lives, just as it
does, dramatically heightened by the danger of death, the
conflict faced daily by the performer. Here, contrary to
the code, the performer has given in to self-pity, has sen
timentalized himself as a victim, and rationalized the loss
of his behavior ideal. It is something we are tempted to do
every day in many small ways; we will behave as we should
13s.A.R.. pp. 217-218
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88
(and we can if we want to) tomorrow; if we do not do our
best now, it is not our fault.
With the bullfighter, as well as with Jordan and Santi
ago, self-honesty is also a matter of pride. It is not the
arrogance of the bullfighter's public mask, but the self-
contained pride that leads him into his greatest dangers and
greatest triumphs ; it is a pride in knowing well, as Jordan
does, what one must do, figuring closely the chances, as
sessing the conditions, and succeeding even when the odds
are against one, succeeding as Belmonte did even when con
stantly in the territory of the bull.
Awareness is the necessary consciousness of the game
that Hemingway is referring to when he predicates the per
fect bullfighter as being both "cynical and devout." The
fighter such as Belmonte can maintain a certain inner in
tegrity and at the same time perceive all of the real as
pects of the bullfight game, its exploitation of personnel,
the possible non-understanding audience, the bribery of the
picadors by the horse dealers, and all the other implicit
rituals and values that may increase his risk or endanger
his success. If one is involved in a game so large or so
complex that the situation cannot be judged accurately, one
can, like Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, lose one's
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89
moral identity and become a pawn in someone else's game. If
one is in a game but does not recognize its existence and
implications, one can be rendered helpless, as are the
characters in The Sun Also Rises. To use Jake's terms, they
simply do not know what it is they are buying and what it is
they are paying for. Blinded by their own needs, their game
might be called the "ego game," which is, without awareness,
the most dangerous game of all: you are very likely to win
14
yourself, at the expense of having lost everything else.
Skill, as I indicated above, is intimately connected
with honor and pride. Partly a matter of inborn talent
which produces the really great bullfighters, Maera, Jose
lito, and Belmonte, it is also a matter of performing to
the very limits of one's capabilities, of having the pride
thaf will not allow one to settle for less:
But it is pride which makes the bullfight and true
enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.
Of course these necessary spiritual qualities cannot
make a man a good killer unless the man has all the
physical talent for the performance of the act; a good
eye, a strong wrist, valor, and a fine left hand to
^^Leary, p. 501: "The failure to understand the game
nature of behavior leads to confusion and eventually to
helplessness," and p. 502: "It's hard for Westerners to
back away and see the artifactual game structures. We are
so close to them."
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9 0
manage the muleta. He must have all of these to an ex
ceptional degree or his sincerity and pride will only
put him in the hospital. (p. 233)
The alternatives are clear. One can have pride and skill
and perform well; or, one can have pride alone and end up in
the hospital, as does the unskillful Garcia in "The Unde
feated." But the story of Garcia makes it quite apparent
that in Hemingway's opinion it is better to have pride with
out skill than skill without pride.
Skill is also a matter of awareness and experience.
The skillful professional in Hemingway's fiction is one who
always knows what the situation is, what the stakes are, and
what alternatives are open to him. Other games, such as
blowing up a bridge or catching a marlin, do not require
such a delicate or rare combination of talents as the bull
fight. A Santiago is a master fisherman not so much from
talent as from patient years spent learning his vocation.
More important even than talent is the willingness to learn,
the openness to experience, the kind of humility before the
world that only the right kind of pride can bring.
Tying all these qualities together is courage, the
deep-seated kind that accompanies skill and pride and know
ledge, not the artificial nerving of oneself: "Nerved-up
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9 1
■bullfighting is sad to watch. The spectators do not want
it. They pay to see the tragedy of the bull; not the man"
(p. 167). Courage is a kind of secret and mysterious in
gredient; it "comes such a short distance; from the heart to
the head; but when it goes no one knows how far away it
goes" (p. 222). And when it goes, all is lost, for it is
not enough to have skill and knowledge without it:
Bullfighters stay in the business relying on their know
ledge and their ability to limit the danger and hope
the courage will come back and sometimes it does and
most times it does not. (p. 222)
Unfortunately, all the other ingredients may be at least in
part a matter of will or choice, but the glue that ties them
together is a matter of what is given or not given. Man can
look for courage and hope that he will find it.
It may be, as many claim, that Hemingway erected this
value system because of a cultural vacuum, a vacuum some
literary historians point to as a result of the disillusion
ment following World War I and the cynical settlements that
scuttled the Wilsonian rhetoric of the war. Other literary
historians point to Hemingway's need to erect a personal
value system as being part of a pattern that has involved
all serious American writers due to our lack of traditions,
a lack which has put our culture in a continual "frontier
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9 2
situation" wherein each individual must find his own stan
dards of conduct. The existentialists, many of whom have
come close to claiming Hemingway as an associate member of
that loosely organized school of thought, point to the
historic, gradual decay of our belief in God. They see the
necessity for individually determined conduct as springing
from the dehumanization of general values through the sub-
15
stitution of scientism for God.
I disagree. The causes of chaos may be justly predi
cated, but Hemingway's reaction to the chaos has been false
ly interpreted. Hemingway did not feel the need to build
so much as he felt the need to perceive. He did not seek
to build his own unique value structure by which he judged
his characters and their behavior and presumably, thereby,
convince his readers that here was a personal code worth
living by. On the contrary, the chaos caused problems of
perception, and Hemingway, as his declared purpose for
attending the bullfight would indicate, felt it was his
task to penetrate beyond the surface confusion of modern
^^For Hemingway's relationship to the existentialists,
see William Barrett, Irrational Man (New York, 1952), pp.
44-46, 283-286; and John Killinger, Hemingway and the Dead
Gods (New York, 1965).
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93
life to find the basic values that had always remained at
the heart of our civilization. Speaking as a matter of em
phasis, we might say that for Hemingway the artistic prob
lems posed by modern culture were primary: to see, to feel,
to organize, and to communicate a sense of life was prelimi
nary to any statement about life's meaning.
I think Hemingway viewed himself as a kind of artistic
explorer into the fundamentals of living. Contrary to com
mon belief, what he was concerned with was not something
new, but something old— how could he hope to write what was
to be always true if he could not first discover what had
always been true? He found the elements of what he felt
were the basics of meaningful human behavior in games, which
brought into sharp focus all those elements in daily living
that appeared so diffuse. A metaphor emerged that helped
him organize his own thinking about his experience, that
provided a setting-structure for much of his fiction, and
that evolved gradually into a basis for his attempts to
reach tragedy in fiction.
Death in the Afternoon reveals that Hemingway was work
ing toward tragedy on two different fronts at the same time.
First, it was the problem of finding out what the funda
mentals of behavior, conflict, and emotion really were ("the
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9 4
simplest things"), clearly apprehending them; life itself
was tragic, in other words, if we could but see it as it is.
Second, it was the problem of finding a method of transmit
ting these discoveries as honestly and effectively as pos
sible. Thus we see his keen interest in the formal aspects
of the bullfight as an art form; its seriousness, order,
and dignity. We also see him in Death in the Afternoon
classifying various situations in the bull ring as leading
to comic, ironic, or tragic effects.As we shall see
later, it is the code that I have shown as being derived
from the bullfight and inherent in the game situation in
general which enables Hemingway to formalize contemporary
events in such a way as to give them the "distance" neces-
17
sary to evoke the tragic emotions.
The critic who has best perceived this basic truth
about Hemingway's search for tradition is Sean O'Faolain,
who in his book The Vanishing Hero makes his point this way
(referring to several examples of description from Heming
way's first two novels):
IGpp. 5-10, 159, 164, 206-207.
discuss this matter at length in Chapter VIII.
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9 5
These are not "accidental trappings of time and place."
They are things that are always true, everywhere. They
are generally true, not true in a particular time and
place. Always Hemingway seeks for these universal
things. . . . I place Hemingway, in his own modest way,
in the great and now almost defunct classical tradi
tion.
It may be that one reason Hemingway so disliked T . S. Eliot,
the self-proclaimed redeemer of tradition and the universal,
was that he felt Eliot's adaptations of traditional mater
ials were simply tricks (by a man he looked upon as too
sterile himself to ever directly discover the essentials of
life)^^ used to fake a discovery of reality. Tradition, in
the Hemingway sense, was not found in the past, to be bor
rowed from or revived, but implicit in the present. Tradi
tion as a survival of universal truths was to be arrived at
not by decoration, but by an honest and thorough-going
realism— penetration, not emulation.
Discovery of the fundamentals of human behavior in
games, of course, is very much like discovering them in
surviving folk materials or myth. One major difference,
however, is that since many of these activities, such as
hunting, fishing, and bullfighting have remained primarily
18(New York, 1957), p. 142.
19See pp. 139-140. D.I.A.
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9 6
;in the province of the adult male, their roles, rituals, and
rules have not atrophied through popular treatment. Games
have remained vital and vigorous in contemporary experience
despite the frequently outraged voice of sentiment which
will always condemn many of these activities as barbaric and
primitive. Perhaps they are, or perhaps it is that they
underline situations and traits that are too characteris
tically human and real to be palatable.
We turn now to Hemingway's first extended use of the
game metaphor. Whereas Jake in The Sun Also Rises is a
study of a man's struggle to gain awareness and self-hones
ty, Hemingway's next protagonist, Frederic Henry, is a study
of a man who struggles to gain awareness and finds it only
when he finds a worthy commitment. An exploration into the
problems of gamesmanship, A Farewell to Arms focuses on
Lieutenant Henry's attempts to discover the full implica
tions of two culturally defined activities, war and love,
that he is only partially aware of as games. His problem,
in short, is finding the right game to play. With this
novel, Ernest Hemingway turns from satire to a story of
significant loss.
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CHAPTER IV
FINDING THE RIGHT GAME
Although A Farewell to Arms may not be Hemingway's best
hovel, it certainly holds a crucial position in the develop
ment of Hemingway's thought. The Sun Also Rises, as fine a
novel as it is, represents essentially a negative point of
view; it was conceived as a refutation and executed as a
satire. A Farewell to Arms, on the other hand, moves in a
positive direction. Although the novel could be character
ized as a purgation in the sense that its subject matter
recounts some of the most traumatic experiences of Heming
way's own life, the recounting is distinctly meditative as
Frederic Henry, the novel's protagonist, tells his story in
retrospect and attempts to reconstruct from his experiences
a meaningful pattern.
The general pattern of Hemingway's novels and the
position that A Farewell to Arms occupies within that pat
tern can be best put into focus by a brief comparison of
97
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9 8
jHemingway ' s work with the work of Albert Camus. The two
writers have much in common, particularly in that both have
been associated with existentialism (Camus, of course, much
more than Hemingway), both were consciously concerned with
finding a modern formula for tragedy that could be expressed
in fiction,^ and both tended to employ in their fiction a
very simple and direct style, often depending on irony and
imagery to carry theme rather than complex verbal formula
tions . Most pertinent to our attempt to put A Farewell to
Arms within its proper context, however, is the fact that
both writers display a very similar progression of thought
as they move from one novel to another throughout their
careers, and the fact that central to both progressions are
the ethical concepts we have already referred to as aware
ness and commitment.
In Camus's novels, as in Hemingway's, we can perceive
three distinct levels of ethical development, from the least
desirable to the most desirable. First, there is the
Many of the connections between Hemingway and Camus
are explored in John Killinger's Hemingway and the Dead
Gods. Camus's concern with the creation of a modern tragic
form ("a great modern form of the tragic must and will be
born") is quoted in Charles I. Glicksberg, The Tragic Vision
in Twentieth-Centurv Literature (Carbondale, 111., 1963), p.
52.
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99
condition of being unaware (primarily of oneself— the "self
deceived" ). The second condition is that of being aware (of
knowing oneself clearly and honestly and of forming a com
mitment to be oneself). Awareness in contrast to a social
background of unawareness is the subject of Camus's first
novel, L'Étranger.^ Meursault, the central character, is
essentially aware and grows in his awareness; his self
honesty, however, cannot be tolerated by the unaware, by the
self-deceiving people about him whose identities have been
completely swallowed up by the host of social myths that
they have given themselves over to. To use the terminology
developed in the last chapter, Meursault has achieved almost
totally objective game-consciousness, whereas those around
him are convinced that the various game aspects of culture
are naturally established "givens." Having shot and killed
a man, Meursault is brought to trial. The circumstances of
the killing are ambiguous, but they quickly become irrele
vant. He is sentenced to death "in the name of the French
people," whoever that might be, largely on the basis of his
not showing the proper grief (a grief that he did not feel—
he failed to "play the game") at his mother's funeral.
^Albert Camus, The Stranger (New York, 1959).
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100
I During the course of the trial one ironic contrast
after another between Meursault and his captors proclaims
the outrageous absurdity of the "conventional." One such
scene finds Meursault being interviewed by the emotional and
pious magistrate who is determined to break down Meursault's
"callousness" and lead him to repentance. The magistrate
brings out a crucifix at one point in the interview and then
asks Meursault if he believes in God. When Meursault re
plies "No/' the magistrate plumps down in his chair indig
nantly and declares that such a response is unthinkable (a
marvelous way of putting it).
All men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of
this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt
it, his life would lose all meaning. "Do you wish," he
asked indignantly, "my life to have no meaning?" Really
I couldn't see how my wishes came into it, and I told
him as much.
While I was talking, he thrust the crucifix again
just under my nose and shouted: "I, anyhow, am a Chris
tian. And I pray Him to forgive you for your sins."
(p. 86)
At the end of the interview, the magistrate declares that
Meursault is unbelievably "case-hardened," since all the
other criminals have wept "when they saw this symbol of our
Lord's suffering."
As we have seen. The Sun Also Rises is also a novel
about awareness and self-deception. We have seen also in
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101
ithe Hemingway novel the same emotional self-righteousness
in defense of an ego-centered value structure. Brett and
Cohn, among others, sob and rant in reaction to any threat
to disturb the world as they wish to see it. The irony in
The Sun Also Rises is less overt than in L'Étranger. since
throughout the Hemingway novel one form of self-deception is
usually pitted against another. But at the end, in the con
versation between Jake and Brett, we find a similar kind of
contrast between the clear and objective view, demonstrated
by Jake, and the "happily" self-deceptive view, demonstrated
by Brett. Also, the sensory clarity of Jake's perceptions
parallels Meursault's.
It is in Camus's second novel. La Peste, that we find
the emergence of the third and most advanced condition of
being, commitment. Concerned with the means and not ends,
with the now and not what could be, Camus finds in La Peste
that life can have meaning for the individual despite the
chaos that surrounds him if he is committed to behavior that
is based on his consciousness of the welfare of others.
This transition in thought from L'Étranger to La Peste is
nicely stated in a passage from Camus's essay, L'Homme
révolté: "In absurdist experience, suffering is individual.
But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins.
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102
;suffering is seen as a collective experience. . . . I rebel
3
— therefore we exist." The plague in the novel is repre
sentative of all disasters, natural as well as man-made,
that man is constantly heir to. These are beyond any cause
and effect rationale, as the priest, who must have a ration
ale to survive, finds out. Instead of scurrying like rats
into solitary holes of self-concern, several men at the core
of the novel find happiness in an active battle against the
common threat. A small island of purpose is established on
the sea of irrationality; "Showing more animation, Rieux
told him that was sheer nonsense; there was nothing shameful
in preferring happiness. 'Certainly,' Rambert replied.
4
'But it may be shameful to be happy by oneself.'" As in
Hemingway, the winner may take nothing except what pleasure
he can achieve by behaving well.^
^Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1958), p. 22.
^Albert Camus, The Plague (New York, 1950), p. 188.
^George Santayana in his essay "The Nature of Beauty"
points out that when an abstract principle (such as Heming
way's "behaving well") becomes independent and acquires in
trinsic value, it becomes a moral superstition. But Heming
way, of course, does not substitute (in Santayana's phrase)
"an abstract good . . . for its concrete equivalent." Hem
ingway's behavioral imperatives do not advocate a fanatic
adherence to principle apart from specific circumstances.
Note my discussion of Jordan's adherence to ideals in Chap-
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1 0 3
In Hemingway's second major novel, A Farewell to Arms,
we find a partial parallel in development of thought to the
transition just described in the work of Camus (a parallel
made complete in the third major novel, For Whom the Bell
Tolls). The protagonist, Frederic Henry, is a man who, at
the beginning of the novel, is buried in self. Losing his
illusions by a sudden shocking immersion in absurdity, he
turns to find a meaningful commitment outside himself. Un
like the more complete commitment of Robert Jordan (his
successor), Frederic Henry's involvement and consequent
risk is relatively small, his tragedy more limited. But his
involvement is a step along the way to the more profound
commitments of Hemingway's later protagonists.
An American ambulance driver on the Italian front dur
ing World War I, Lieutenant Henry finds himself disconnected
from the war and from most of his companions. Although in
a position to be called on to risk his life, he has little
sense of actual danger; he is almost as uninvolved as Meur
sault:
Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war.
ter VIII of this study. Santayana's essay may be found in
Essays in Modern Literary Criticism, ed. Ray B. West, Jr.
Note particularly p. 92.
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1 0 4
I It did not have anything to do with me. It seemed no
more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies.
(p. 37)
The war itself seems more like a charade than a grim, real
istic eruption of violence. The Italians retreat from a
position and then lose a mass of men recapturing the same
territory. The Austrians too seem to be less than entirely
serious when they bombard the town in which Henry is sta
tioned, not "to destroy it but only a little in a military
way" (p. 5).
Being an American among Italians, Henry is in fact a
stranger, a spectator of the smaller games like the baiting
of the priest in the officer's mess and of the larger game
of war, which is an incomprehensible series of events, not
all of them man-made, but all of them having for Henry the
detached quality of a nightmare horror: "At the start of
the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came
the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven
thousand died of it in the army" (p. 4). The war has its
horrors, but they are the horrors of faraway events dimly
pictured in a newsreel. Henry is committed, however, to
doing what he considers a worthwhile job, but even the idea
of his making a contribution proves to be illusory. He
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1 0 5
thought that the smooth functioning of the business of his
ambulance section "depended to a considerable extent on him
self" (p. 15). He found out on returning from leave that
"evidently it did not matter whether I was there or not"
(p. 15).
He is a man without personal connections as well. When
the priest asks him whether or not he loves God, he replies
"No" and the priest continues
"Do you love Him at all?" he asked.
"I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes."
"You should love Him."
"I don't love much." (p. 72)
Then the priest defines love. It is not, he says, what
Henry does on leave or at the government-provided whorehouse
at the front; rather, the priest says, "when you love you
wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish
to serve" (p. 72). Here the priest defines a commitment
beyond oneself, beyond the unfeeling, unattached condition
of Henry at this point in the novel, a commitment Henry will
achieve later with the English nurse, Catherine Barkley.
But for the present, love to Henry is but a sub-game,
a role defined by the larger game of war. Henry must take
the soldier's motto of loving them and leaving them:
I knew that I did not love Catherine Barkley, nor had
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1 0 6
any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge,
in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like
bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or
playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the
stakes were. It was all right with me. (pp. 30-31)
Henry defines himself well as a man so cut off from real
participation in anything that he must pretend there are
stakes, no matter what the pretension may be, so that some
sort of artificial sense of life can be generated. Rinaldi,
the Italian doctor who is Henry's only close friend, con
firms Henry's inadvertent self-diagnoses. We are alike, he
says, "you really are an Italian. All fire and smoke and
nothing inside. You only pretend to be an American" (p.
66).
The emptiness on the inside parallels the abstract,
dream-like world of the outside. Nothing at this point has
meaning or makes any connection between the inside and the
outside except immediate physical sensation. Following his
thoughts about pretending at love as one would play bridge,
Henry insists that Catherine kiss him. There follows a
paragraph of several pertinent contrasts:
We kissed and she broke away suddenly. "No. Goodnight,
please, darling." We walked to the door and I saw her
go in and down the hall. I liked to watch her move.
She went on down the hall. I went on home. It was a
hot night and there was a good deal going on in the
mountains. I watched the flashes on San Gabriele, (p. 32)
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1 0 7
Catherine has recently lost to the war the man she was going
to marry. She has been deeply affected emotionally and her
sudden outbursts and changes of behavior cause Henry to
think of her, rather dispassionately, as "a little crazy."
It is obvious to the reader that she is extremely vulnerable
and a good deal more involved in the relationship immediate
ly than Henry is. In the paragraph cited above, her emo
tional withdrawal from a situation that she knows she is
already committed to contrasts sharply with Henry's casual
impersonality. As a matter of fact, all Henry's perceptions
of different things have here, typically, the same flatness.
Catherine's leaving, his enjoyment of her walking, his going
home, the heat of the night, and even the distant manifesta
tions of the war are all of the same distant cloth. The
two major aspects of life during the course of the novel,
love and war, are lumped together in the same package with
trivialities. It is ironic that two such conflicting human
manifestations should have such equal impotency. Later,
during the course of an after-dinner wine party at the
officers' mess, the same flatness of perception is rein
forced with the significant exception of the direct physical
sensation of the wine:
The priest was good but dull. The officers were not
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1 0 8
good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine
was bad but not dull. It took the enamel off your teeth
and left it on the roof of your mouth. (pp. 38-39)
There is some irony in the fact that the dullness of his
general opinion of things while intoxicated matches almost
exactly the dullness of his perception of things while com
pletely sober.
Lieutenant Henry's lack of awareness is again rein
forced in his relationship to the priest, but is also given
further dimension. It is the priest who perceives Henry's
capacity for commitment, "to do things for . . . to sacri
fice for . . . to serve" (p. 72). And when Henry insists
that he does not love, it is the priest who insists "you
will. I know you will. Then you will be happy" (p. 72).
Then in terms that echo Hemingway's statement about intui
tively recognizing the "real thing" in watching the bull
fight, the priest tells him that with this kind of happiness
"you cannot know about it unless you have it" (p. 72). But
this early in the game, regardless of his capacity for com
mitment, Henry prefers to insulate himself or immerse him
self in sensations. Rather than the cold, clear and dry
mountains where the priest invites him to go and stay with
his family during Henry's leave, Henry instead goes
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1 0 9
to the smoke of the cafes and nights when the room
whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it
stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that
was all there was . . . and the world all unreal in
the dark . . . sure that this was all and all and all
and not caring. (p. 13)
It is the priest also who sees that even after Henry is
wounded, the reality of the war has not yet penetrated his
consciousness. Henry is wounded, but for him it is some
sort of impersonal accident (at least he thinks of it as
such)— just something that has happened to him. "Still even
wounded," the priest says on his visit to the field hospi
tal, "you do not see it. I can tell" (p. 70).
What is Henry's trouble specifically? What is it that
he does not see, even though he has suffered mutilation and
pain and has witnessed death? The best way to approach an
explanation of this is to point out that there are two basic
contrasting thematic centers in the novel from which all the
other many contrasts spring. The first, as I have already
noted, is the obvious contrast between the nature of war and
the nature of love. The second contrast, less frequently
noted, is that between the mass and the individual. It is
Henry's task in this novel to find himself as an individual.
(A good term coined by William Barrett for this task of
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110
6
modern man lost in a mass society is self-finitization.)
Thus, as I shall go on to explain, when Lieutenant Henry
does find his commitment or ideal of behavior, it is one
anchored outside himself and to the welfare of a single in
dividual, Catherine, rather than to the more general commit
ment, as in the case of Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls,
to the welfare of mankind. To find himself, his "we, " to
use Camus's term, must involve a joining to another single
individual.
What Henry apparently does not see is that war is a
destroyer of love through its fundamental irrational vio
lence, and war is a destroyer of the individual through its
obliteration of the individual's dignity and importance.
The priest calls attention to the former in trying to get
Henry to see what love is as compared with the lust that
accompanies war (Rinaldi calls the girls at the Villa Rossi
"war comrades," they have become so familiar), and the
priest calls attention to the latter by pointing to the
dignity of the individual as found in his home province of
^P. 271. "If, as the Existentialists hold, an authen
tic life is not handed to us on a platter but involves our
own act of self-determination (self-finitization) within our
time and place, then we have got to know and face up to that
time, both in its threats and promises."
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Ill
ithe Abruzzi. In the Abruzzi "it is understood that a man
may love God. It is not a dirty joke" (p. 71). The point
is that at the beginning of the novel Henry's even perfunc
tory commitment to the war has robbed him of both his capa
city for love and his capacity to act and react as an in
dividual— but he is unaware of this.
War is a particularly good controlling metaphor for all
those things that we have come to associate with "mass man,"
the bureaucracy, the indifference, the brain-washing and
propaganda, the tyranny of an overgroup devoted to the
"abstract good" (and sanctified by that devotion)— in short,
all those things that are accepted as normal in wartime
(particularly in the modern mechanized warfare that com
menced with World War I), all these are the very things that
are the substance of the nightmare societies pictured, for
example, in Orwell's 1984. in Huxley's Brave New World, or
perhaps even more to the present point, Kafka's The Castle.
It is ironic that it is so difficult for us or for Henry to
perceive this effect: the worst thing about war, even more
terrible than the physical suffering, because it is more
subtle and insidious, is that the individual (and along
with the individual, morality and responsibility) is lost
and that his loss serves little purpose except to feed
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112
irrationality. All who have been in the army of any country
know that the first abiding principle of service is the loss
of individual volition, a literal beating down of identity,
a submersion into the general, and an unquestioning sub
mission to the impersonality of "orders." Very quickly the
soldier loses his name; his identity is his uniform, rank,
and serial number. The soldier memorizes his serial number
and his rifle number and then he is told, "Your rifle is
your best friend, take care of it and it will take care of
you." The soldier must quickly bury what awareness he is
possessed of or go mad watching the waste and stupidity.
Those who give strange, incomprehensible orders anonymously
in the name of some "staff," or "corps," or "department"
seem to have lost all direct contact with immediate reality,
and the individual "hurries up and waits" to the tune of
some mad piper who wants holes dug for no apparent reason in
a place with no name and then filled up again at three in
the morning.
These are the elements that surround Henry, although,
because he is an officer and is with a support unit, they
are not quite so obvious to him or to the reader. Henry is
not unconscious of some of the inconsistencies of the war at
the beginning of the novel, but their emotional impact on
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1 1 3
Ihim is negligible. He tends to wonder a good deal about
what is going on and what will happen in the war, and it is
interesting to see how often his speculations are made in
terms of individuals, Napoleon, or Napoleon contrasted with
Vittorio Emmanuele (pp. 36, 118), or in terms of armies or
parts of armies considered as individuals with individual
traits and weaknesses. But throughout the part of the novel
concerned with the war, we can observe the growing frustra
tion of an individual attempting to assess the incompre
hensibility of madness acted out on a mass scale, a madness
so overwhelming in its scope that it is beyond the grasp of
the individual caught up in the web; "Perhaps wars weren't
won any more. Maybe they went on forever" (p. 118). When
Henry is in the hospital, he finds that the only meaningful
reading is the baseball scores; the other game has no score.
In a passage invariably quoted from the novel, Henry rejects
the jargon of war which is used to anesthetize the individ
ual to the "sacrifices [which] were like the stockyards at
Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except bury it"
(p. 185). Like the baseball scores, "finally only the names
of places had dignity" (p. 185).
But all these reactions of frustration reflect the
turmoil of an individual still committed to the proposition
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1 1 4
that there is meaning somewhere in the pattern, although it
may be unavailable to him. Before the attack in which the
enemy shelling is to wound Henry and take him away from the
front for several months, he crouches in a bunker with his
ambulance drivers waiting for the time that they will be
needed. The drivers talk about the coming attack. One
notes that there aren't enough troops for a real attack;
another suggests that "it is probably to draw attention from
where the real attack will be" (p. 48). Do the men who are
going to participate in this pretense know they are going to
be bait? "Of course not," another replies, "they wouldn't
attack if they did" (p. 48). Then the drivers turn to a
discussion of various troops that have refused to attack,
including the story of a "big smart tall boy" who is allured
by the glamour of the crack troops, the granatieri. enough
to join up to show off to the girls and to associate with
the carabinieri (M.P.'s), who later shoot him for not at
tacking when he is ordered to. Not only is he shot, but
his family is deprived of their civil rights and the pro
tection of the law— "Anybody can take their property" (p.
49). At this point one of the drivers tells Henry that he
should not let them talk this way. But Henry does not mind
as long as they "drive the cars and behave" (p. 49). His
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attitude of commitment to the absurdity contrasts sharply
with the awareness of the ambulance driver Passini in the
exchange that follows:
"I believe we should get the war over," I said. "It
would not finish it if one side stopped fighting. It
would only be worse if we stopped fighting."
"It could not be worse," Passini said respectfully.
"There is nothing worse than war."
"Defeat is worse."
"I do not believe it," Passini said still respect
fully. "What is defeat? You go home." (p. 50)
When Henry continues to insist that being conquered is
worse, Passini makes the same charge indirectly that the
priest is to make later in the hospital: "There is nothing
as bad as war. We in the auto-ambulance cannot even realize
at all how bad it is. When people realize how bad it is
they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy.
There are some people who never realize" (p. 50). Many,
including Catherine and later Rinaldi, "go crazy," but
Lieutenant Henry is not to find this same depth of emotional
realization of the war until he becomes personally involved
in the absurdity of the bridge.
For the Hemingway protagonist, even though there may be
a particular moment or recognition (as we see in Jake Barnes
following the arrival of Brett's telegram or in Frederic
Henry following his escape from the bridge), the recognition
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I
itself involves such a fundamental change in outlook and
behavior that it must involve a deep emotional recognition
and not a mere superficial acknowledgment of changed circum
stances. Such a recognition rests on a rather intricate
pattern of emotional preconditioning, much of which, because
of Hemingway's dramatic treatment of emotion, is implicit in
his fiction and requires the participation of the reader to
complete the entire pattern.
Although often left unconsidered, Hemingway's treatment
of his protagonist's responses creates several problems for
the interpreter. Therefore, before pursuing Frederic Hen
ry's experiences prior to his moment of recognition any
further, it is necessary to stop and examine this pattern of
technique and the interpretative difficulties of tracing the
protagonist's emotional progress.
As I have already pointed out, the center of Heming
way's aesthetic theory rests on "true emotion," which he
feels can only be achieved if the emotion is produced by the
circumstances of the fictional situation itself rather than
having been tacked on to the situation in some fashion by
the author. Part of Hemingway's technique in dramatically
evoking emotion is severely to limit labeled emotional re
sponses and the discussion of emotion. On those very few
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1 1 7
!
occasions when explicit mention of emotion is made, it is
made in one of two ways. The first way is primarily a re
port of an emotion as a physical state. This report is
limited by kind to the negative emotions, such as anger and
depression, and never includes such "soft" emotions as af
fection, compassion, or gratitude. Such reports are never
needed to convey the emotion to the reader, since how the
protagonist feels has been made clear by what he has said
or done in the drama of the situation; such reports are used
instead for narrative purposes. Two parallel examples can
be found in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In the first case, Frederic Henry declares in his mind, "I
was very angry" (p. 211) even though it is sufficiently
clear from what he says to his companions that he is angry
about the failure of the Italians to stop the German ad
vance. Similarly, in the latter case, Robert Jordan men
tions rage several times to himself and to Maria even
though, again, it is sufficiently clear from the situation
and from his train of thought that he is enraged. (Pablo
has just made off with the detonators, caps, and fuse— pp.
369-370). In both cases, however, the emotion is noted so
that having been explicitly recognized by the protagonist,
the emotion can be shown to be overcome.
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On other occasions, a simple and direct report (such as
"Now I am depressed myself," by Henry to the priest, p. 179)
becomes an element employed in dialogue to communicate, a
subject under discussion, but is again not required to help
the reader perceive what has been made clear dramatically.
Other reports of a more direct physical nature, such as
Henry's statement to Catherine before leaving her to go to
the front, "I feel hollow and hungry" (p. 155), may be in
terpreted as having emotional connotations as well as physi
cal denotation, but they are sufficiently ambiguous to es
cape classification as emotional labels per se.
These reports, which as we have seen are of little im
portance in revealing anything new about the protagonist's
emotions, might be said to occur on the narrative level of
emotional consciousness. Much more important, although
equally rare, are the explicit inclusions of emotion on what
might be called the expositional level. These include re
ports of complex emotional formulations by the protagonist,
such as the description or discussion of an attitude or an
explanation of an emotion. Three such sections in A Fare
well to Arms are probably the most quoted segments of the
novel. When Hemingway does allow his protagonist to make
this kind of emotional clarification, it is probably because
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1 1 9
it is impractical, or perhaps impossible, to convey this
information to the reader in any other way. Yet the infor
mation itself must be of extreme importance to force the
author to break his general practice. The three passages in
A Farewell to Arms are those wherein (1) Henry explains how
he feels about his relationship to Catherine; he does not
love her; it is just a game, (2) Henry explains why he is
embarrassed by "the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice
and the expression in vain," and (3) Henry, after jumping
from the bank near the bridge, explains why he feels he has
no more obligation to the war.
With such limited direct empirical evidence of emotion
al reaction, how is it possible to trace the protagonist's
emotional progress, to determine the impact of any specific
event on the protagonist, or, indeed, to be certain that
there is impact or progress at all? To deal with the last
problem first, it may be that the protagonist seldom re
ports emotions, but this does not mean that he does not have
them. In the same way, the reader may seldom overhear the
protagonist define or discuss his emotional position, but
this does not mean he does not do so at other times or that
his position may not be reached on some level of conscious
ness other than the verbal. As readers we cannot discuss
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120
iwhat is not there, and yet I think it is a mistake in the
criticism of the Hemingway novel to assume that because im
portant parts of the protagonist's consciousness are repro
duced for us, that these are necessarily representative of
his entire consciousness. Some evidence for the fact that
the protagonist's thoughts are not presented to us in their
entirety is given in a statement by Henry to the priest
during their meeting following Henry's return from Milan:
"'Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never
think about these things. I never think and yet when I
begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind
without thinking'" (p. 179).
Insofar as judging the impact of any single episode or
insofar as attempting to trace the development in attitude
of the Hemingway protagonist, we must rely a good deal more
on indirect evidence and our own reactions as readers, than
we need do in those more common circumstances where either
the narrator or the protagonist frequently takes stock of
the emotions or attitudes involved and where reactions are
labeled in some way. One such labeling device common to
fiction is the use of dialogue tags which express a condi
tion while identifying the speaker. Hemingway uses this
device very infrequently, substituting either "he said" or
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121
no tag at all. Although tending to make the dialogue flow
more naturally, it is sometimes difficult in long passages
to figure out who is talking to whom at a given moment in
the middle.
There are basically two approaches that we can use to
trace the protagonist's emotional condition: the one in
volves attempting to relate the episode to theme or to the
outcome from the point of view of the protagonist; the other
involves attempting to evaluate the impact of the episode on
the protagonist in terms of its impact on the reader. In
regard to the first approach, the mere selection for de
tailed treatment of an episode would, for most novels, be an
indication of its emotional relevance. This is even more
certain in A Farewell to Arms than it might be ordinarily,
because the narrator who is making the selection is Frederic
Henry, the protagonist, telling his story in retrospect.
The main thing in question during the first half of the
novel is what is Lieutenant Henry's attitude toward the war?
Initially committed enough to volunteer for service with a
foreign army, later committed enough to defend the necessity
of continuing to fight, and at the end of the section, dis
illusioned enough to desert permanently and without reserva
tion, Lieutenant Henry creates the outlines of a pattern
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122
against which the emotional value of each event can be
measured.
As for the second approach, since, in Frederic Henry,
Hemingway has created a kind of receiver-transmission sta
tion whereby emotional responses are created in the reader
on the basis of the data sent, special attention must be
given to the determiners of response: the emotional affec
tiveness of detail, devices to gain emphasis, indicators of
tone. Analysis of these ideas can help us to follow the
protagonist's state of mind and help us to determine the
circumstances leading to a change in the protagonist's atti
tudes. We should not forget that Frederic Henry is a devel
oping character and the very purpose of his story is to
create in his "listeners" a sense of "how it was" so that
his change of commitment becomes understandable. The tell
ing of his story is really an appeal to our sympathy and
participation. An emotional map has been laid out before
us; it is our task to follow it as alertly and sensitively
as possible.
Beyond the problem of technique, one further question
remains to be settled: could it be that Frederic Henry's
change of commitment is prompted by nothing more than his
treatment at the bridge? Lying on the hard floor of a
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1 2 3
flatcar that is taking him away from the war and toward
Catherine, Henry has time at last to think over what has
happened. At the bridge the battle police, the carabinieri.
have roughed him up and, because of his accent, have put
him in line to be shot as "a German in an Italian uniform"
(p. 224). Now, he thinks "Anger was washed away in the
river along with any obligation. Although that ceased when
the carabiniere put his hands on my collar" (p. 232). Is
this, then, the cause? No, I think not. Like an artist
viewing his own work, Henry is incapable of assessing all
of the ingredients that have led to his change; nothing but
the experiences themselves will suffice as an explanation.
As we shall see, this incident at the bridge is no more than
the catalyst that prompts him to act on a commitment already
subconsciously made.
We might recall that Passini, before being killed at
the time Henry is wounded, pointed out how people, when they
find out how bad the war really is, "go crazy." As I have
said, both Catherine and Rinaldi come to know "how bad it
is" and both go a little crazy. Now it is Henry's turn. It
would have been stupid to stay and be shot, but what pre
vents him from making his way back to the comparative sanity
of his own unit? After all, what he goes through at the
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1 2 4
bridge is just an ugly episode, a terrible mistake— or is
it? Apparently deep inside Henry feels that this experience
is not a quirk, but somehow represents the real character of
what, up to now, he has been committed to.
The story of Lieutenant Henry's discovery begins with
his being hit by fragments of a trench mortar shell. Before
that, he was a "nice boy," as Catherine calls him, who ar
gued that "defeat is worse" than war and who thought of the
war as no more dangerous to himself "than war in the mov
ies." But when he is hit, he finds that he is really in the
war after all;
I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I
felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out
and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went
out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and
that it had all been a mistake to think that you just
died. (p. 54)7
He is not dead, but any doubt that may remain about how
close death has come to him is erased when he turns to the
7
The stylistic technique here demonstrates an interest
ing attempt to reproduce the emotional impact of an experi
ence. The passage is similar to the much-criticized inter
course passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls where the rhythm
and repetition of carefully selected words ("now") are used
to reproduce a very difficult to describe emotional state.
In both cases a very short period of time is extended and
given the "eternal" quality that periods of heightened emo
tion frequently have.
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1 2 5
;man next to him in the bunker. When Henry touches him, he
screams and then biting his arm, the man pleads deliriously
for the pain to stop, until he dies. Reaching down to ex
amine himself, Henry puts his hand on his knee: "My knee
wasn't there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my
shin" (p. 55), The terror and shock and suffering are re
lentlessly conveyed by the realism of the detail. The ef
fect on Lieutenant Henry's over-all attitude is never di
rectly stated. It is, if stated at all, best phrased by
Colonel Cantwell in another novel. Across the River and into
the Trees. who suffered the same kind of wound under similar
circumstances in the same war:
Finally he did get hit properly and for good. No one
of his other wounds had ever done to him what the first
big one did. I suppose it is just the loss of the im
mortality, he thought. Well, in a way, that is quite a
lot to lose. (p. 33)
It may be, therefore, that Lieutenant Henry has lost what
Colonel Cantwell has called his "immortality." He has vol
unteered to serve in a war without really knowing the
stakes, the price he may be called on to pay. Commitment is
morally less significant without a true sense of the risk
involved; one is not really putting anything on the line if
one thinks one is never going to lose. Nor is one really
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1 2 6
I " alive" without risking something. Like so many young men,
Henry is unaware because he is wrapped up in himself— bored.
And the young are bored when everything comes too easily;
"you don't appreciate," the older generation cries, and we
never do until we become losers. It is interesting to see
that the wounding draws Henry into a game that he has been
playing with one hand tied behind his back, but for Nick
Adams the big wound takes him out of the game: "Rinaldi.
. . . You and me we've made a separate peace," and the un
named protagonist of "In Another Country" is another Heming
way character in the same war who is taken out: "We only
knew then that there was always the war, but that we were
not going to it any more" (1st 49. pp. 237, 367). But Henry
has to go back, for he has a great deal more to learn about
the war game before he is through with it. For Nick and the
other protagonist, withdrawal is an accident; for Henry, it
must involve a decision.
There are several ironic contrasts implicit in the
story of Henry's wounding that are of some help in assessing
its impact. Henry and his men are non-combatants who are
waiting to perform an act of mercy in carrying the wounded
to medical help. Instead of this, Henry ends up being car
ried in an ambulance himself, suffering the discomforts (the
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1 2 7
pain, the bumps, the slowness, and the hemorrhage of the man
in the stretcher above him) of one of the men that, not
knowing what it was really like, Henry would perfunctorily
transport if not himself wounded. The shells coming in from
the Austrians are indiscriminate; they do not seek out the
infantryman and leave the ambulance driver unharmed (just as
when someone shells a city, he does not neglect the women
and children and select only the soldiers or arms factories
to destroy— a stupidity, as Passini would term it, which
only makes sense in a pattern of stupidity). Henry is seri
ously wounded, not in the process of attacking, but in the
process of eating. And of course, it is Passini, who so
hates war, who is killed. These ironies may raise certain
questions in Henry, at some level of consciousness, just as
they most certainly do in the mind of the reader: what kind
of game is this? Who understands the rules and the objec
tives that demand such a risk and such a price? Fittingly,
Henry's first step to full awareness comes with the shock of
physical sensation. He has become personally involved on an
indisputable level of consciousness, like it or not. The
next level involves a fuller realization of what war can do
to others.
Henry's period of convalescence at the American
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1 2 8
ihospital in Milan is primarily the story of his increasing
attachment to Catherine Barkley. His contact with the war
is a meager one, established through the newspapers and one
or two conversations with other soldiers. At his distance
from it, the war seems to take on less clarity than ever.
The Italians are losing tremendous numbers of men in their
offensive, and even if they go on to capture Monte San
Gabriele, there are "plenty of mountains beyond for the
Austrians" (p. 118). He meets a British major on somebody's
staff who declares that "it was all balls." At headquarters
"they thought only in divisions and man-power. They all
squabbled about divisions and only killed them when they
got them" (p. 134). Again, Henry encounters the contrast
of the mass with the lost individual. As an individual
having been touched personally by the war, Henry is now able
to stand back in an ironically impersonal perspective and
get a dim glimpse of the entire meat grinder. Finally it
gets to the point, as I said before, that the baseball news
is all Henry can read, even though he does not have the
slightest interest in baseball (p. 136).
One other indicator of Henry's growing disillusionment
during his stay at the hospital is the satirical treatment
of Ettore, the "legitimate hero" who finds the war game
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1 2 9
îvery satisfying, Henry runs into Ettore and several other
acquaintances at a bar while killing time away from the
hospital waiting for Catherine. Ettore responds to the
baiting of his companions, including Henry, who ask him all
the right questions: "How many [medals] have you got, Et
tore?" "How many times have you been wounded, Ettore?"
"Where were you wounded, Ettore?" These are questions that
probably have been asked and answered a dozen times before,
as we can induce from Catherine's label of him as a "bore,"
and from Hemingway's wonderful touch of including Ettore's
name at the end of almost every question that leads him on,
to provide just the right tone of mockery, a mockery unper
ceived by Ettore but available to the reader.
Ettore seriously recites his entire repertoire of
accomplishment yet one more time with continuing and un
diminished enthusiasm. He's got five medals and. Oh Boy,
aren't they great for making the girls think you're fine.
But wound stripes are better: "Believe me, boy, when you
get three you've got something," (p. 121) and he goes on to
show his scars and describe the circumstances in detail.
He points out that the "real pros" touch their stars, as he
does, whenever anybody mentions getting killed. And when a
friend, in leaving, says "Keep out of trouble," Ettore of
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1 3 0
icourse takes it literally and seriously announces his dedi
cation to his profession through "clean living" (pp. 122-
123). A further hint of irony is found in the almost per
fectly complementary situation of another man in the group
who is an opera singer who is so bad, despite his unbounded
enthusiasm for his own singing, that everywhere he sings
audiences throw things at him. One wonders if, like a real
pro, he touches his bruises every time an audience is men
tioned? Then too, Ettore provides the perfect foil for that
failing of youth which is opposite to Henry's lack of en
gagement— overenthusiasm. Ettore has decided to play the
wrong game well, and his very enthusiasm for it condemns war
as ludicrous, particularly so with the hint of Babbitt that
Hemingway inserts into the boy's inflection. Such a press
ing to full enthusiasm and use of dialect are old satiric
devices.
Thus, although the passage concerning Ettore may be on
the surface only a passage of humorous banter, the implica
tions of the banter are grim in regard to the subject at
hand, war and Henry's attitude toward it, and in mulling
over Ettore's enthusiasm, the reader may well be reminded of
the more harsh satirical treatment by Hemingway of similar
kinds of enthusiasm. A good example is found in one of the
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1 3 1
sketches in In Onr Time where the unidentified speaker sets
up "an absolutely perfect obstacle" that was so "absolutely
topping" that whenever the enemy tried to get over it, "we
potted them from forty yards" and "we were frightfully put
out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall
back" (1st 49■ p. 211). When reading Hemingway, it would be
well for the reader to remember Hemingway's long apprentice
ship in using satire. Like many moralists, Hemingway, even
up to the very end of his writing career, could never resist
the ironic barb, though it may in part have led, as we shall
see later, to his undoing.
Of much more serious impact on Lieutenant Henry's feel
ings toward the war are the dramatic changes he finds in his
friends following the summer offensive. After he has re
turned to the front, he checks in with his commanding offi
cer, the major, who now looks "older and drier" (p. 164).
He is, as the priest comments later, now "gentle." The
theme of "how bad it is" which had been taken up by Passini
and the priest at the time of Henry's wounding is now taken
up again upon Henry's return, this time by the major— a
certification of the same sentiments previously expressed
by the socialist driver and the priest. Just how bad it is
comes through gradually to Henry when the major tells him
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1 3 2
that he is lucky that he got hit when he did and (an even
more telling blow) in his statement that "if I was away I do
not believe I would come back" (p. 165).
More shattering yet is Henry's reunion with his friend
Rinaldi. Rinaldi is one of several Hemingway characters who
has often been badly treated by Hemingway critics. He is
usually taken at face value, accepted on the basis of what
he says about himself— a dangerous practice in criticism, as
in life. A hard professional, flippant and cynical, he
speaks of himself (and Henry) as having "nothing inside"
(p. 66). But as usual in Hemingway, the negative emotions
are the most apparent. What we tend to see most directly
is Rinaldi's cynicism about himself and his life, the anger,
the depression, and the frustration that come from the over
work of a surgeon in a bloody war. Like the best bullfight
ers, however, Rinaldi combines his cynicism with a tremen
dous devoutness, a devoutness seen only obliquely. He is
tough, but he is also sensitive; throughout the initial
scenes with Henry, he shows a great affection for him. In
what happens to Rinaldi during the summer, there is good
evidence, to my mind, for the fact that here is a man who
cares a great deal about people in general.
Driven beyond physical endurance by the enormous
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1 3 3
demands put on him by the offensive, he has also been driven
to the wall emotionally. The picture of Rinaldi as Henry
finds him on his return is not just that of a man almost
shattered from exposure to the pain of others. He cannot
think, for to think means to feel: "No, by God, I don't
think; I operate" (p. 167). If he can turn himself into a
mechanical man, keep busy, work all the time, perhaps he
will not have time to feel. But now the offensive is over:
"I don't operate now and I feel like hell. This is a ter
rible war, baby. You believe me when I say it" (p. 167).
If this means that Rinaldi is simply a one-dimensional man,
simply a cynical surgeon, simply a foil for Henry and his
devotion to Catherine, it would not be that war is so ter
rible; it would not be that everything that was so funny,
so full of life before the summer is now flat and dead. No
man destroys himself, with such vigor as Rinaldi is seen
destroying himself here, just because he has run out of
work, unless that work has taken on more than just profes
sional dimensions. For a surgeon such as Rinaldi, the in
cessant burden of life and death that the war has forced
upon him has more impact that just that on his professional
pride. Rinaldi's emotional destruction is the product of
an emotional investment, never stated, but implicit in his
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1 3 4
behavior toward Henry, and his present wild irrationality.
Neither is he a failure. He does not demonstrate to Henry
the uselessness of a commitment, the failure of "the ideal
of service," but rather the failure of war to allow love to
8
exist except at a terrible price.
Drink, he says to Henry, "nothing is worse for you.
. . . Self-destruction day by day. . . . It ruins the stom
ach and makes the hand shake. Just the thing for a surgeon"
(p. 172). Then turning to the priest, trying to make the
mess "like the old days," he cannot bait him as before. He
can only call out wildly, "To hell with you priest 1" (p.
173). Paranoically, Rinaldi suspects everyone is trying to
get rid of him. He also suspects that he has syphilis,
although the major doubts it.
"The snake of reason" acts more like a wounded deer.
Rinaldi has been pushed to the edge, and we might hypothe
size from the pain that his change has caused us that the
effect on Lieutenant Henry is a powerful one indeed.
Henry's evening is not over, for following his exposure
to the changes made in the major and Rinaldi, he encounters
Q
See James F. Light, "The Religion of Death in A Fare
well to Arms." in Ernest Hemingway; Critiques of Four Manor
Novels. p. 39.
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: 135
I
one more changed friend. Like Rinaldi, the priest has made
an increasingly heavy investment of emotion in the war be
cause of his calling. Indicative of this investment is a
decrease in his sense of self. The baiting by the men at
the mess used to make him blush, but having possibly been
called on to give the last rites to numberless young men in
their last agony, "the baiting did not touch him now" (p.
173). Although he prays that something will happen to stop
the war, he does not believe in victory any more. He sees
that "many people have realized the war this summer" and
"officers whom I thought could never realize it realize it
now" (p. 178). If everyone could see it, perhaps both sides
would just stop. In such a statement we see the desperate
hope of a tired and depressed young man. Henry adds to the
priest's discouragement by suggesting that it is only in
defeat that we realize war, that we can become Christian,
not technically, but only "like our Lord" (p. 178). Since
the Austrians have won by beating back the advance, they
will not stop fighting. What is there to hope for? "What
do you believe in?" the priest asks Henry. "In sleep," he
replies. There has been a change in Henry's thinking some
where along the way. No longer does he argue that victory
is necessary, fighting is necessary, or that defeat is worse
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136
■than war. Henry no longer believes in victory or defeat,
and as for victory, "It may be worse" (p. 179). So that by
the end of this evening, this depressing evening, it may be
that when Henry says "sleep," he means more than that he is
just tired.
It may mean that he sees at last that in the war game
everyone loses and that the goal he has been committed to
is really as empty as the rhetoric that describes it: that
everything in war was in vain. The next day, while riding
with Gino, the patriot, it becomes apparent to the reader
that Henry has come a long way since the beginning of the
novel. It may be that he has always been embarrassed by
the kind of language that Gino uses, but his mental declara
tion is formulated with a depth of bitterness and perception
inconsistent with the Henry we observed before his wounding:
"The things that were glorious had no glory and the sacri
fices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was
done with the meat except to bury it" (p. 185).
With neither mind nor heart any longer even distantly
devoted to the process of war or to victory as the lesser of
two evils, it is only Lieutenant Henry's physical presence
on the scene that must be accounted for. Complete with
drawal cannot be accomplished, however, until the other
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1 3 7
party to the contract, the Italian army, in some way invali
dates the contract Henry is bound to whether it is meaning
ful to him any longer or not. There is no doubt that with
out the incident at the bridge or one like it, Henry would
have continued to serve despite his disillusionment until
the end of the war or until he was killed. We await the
COUP de grâce.
The battle police at the bridge operate very well as
symbols of the enforcement of non-meaning. They stand for
everything that Henry has come to realize is false and ir
rational about the war. The main quality in the passage
that stands out about these carabinieri is their complete
self-confident ignorance: they have no idea whatsoever of
what it means to be under fire. Henry notes on two separate
occasions that "the questioners had that beautiful detach
ment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death
without being in any danger of it" (pp. 224-225). Here, in
spades, is the ultimate absurdity of commitment to the ir
rational that Henry has been part of. With growing aware
ness, however, he perceives their stubborn blindness: "They
were all young men and they were saving their country" (p.
224). In their pursuit of the cliche, they shoot everyone
they question, for the questions are not really requests
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9
for information, but the recitation of the litany of war.
The absurdity of the game that Henry has pledged him
self to is revealed in the contrast brought out here between
the rules, rituals, rhetoric, and values of the pretense,
and the reality which at its worst can involve panic, cow
ardice, brutality, suffering, destruction, and death. All
the human elements, the pity and the terror of the individ
ual. are lost on these minds which find war glorious and
filled with purpose. The basir of game, as we have defined
it, is its framework of rationality; the very basis of war
as seen here is its irrationality. While the Austrians and
Germans roam the countryside unopposed, the Italians have
applied the most immediate practical solution: they have
^There is much irony in the parallel of Henry's previ
ous shooting of the deserting sergeant and also in the anx
ious desire of the driver, Bonello, to "finish off" the
sergeant, inasmuch as Bonello himself later deserts to the
enemy (the last of the series of these desertions is, of
course, Henry's own). Further irony is gained when we see
how closely Henry's irritation at the lack of defenses by
the Italians matches the later patriotic enthusiasm of the
carabinieri at the bridge. Following Henry's outburst
against the lack of rear-guard action, the driver Aymo is
killed by a trigger-happy Italian rear-guard. The series of
senseless shootings begins with Henry's shooting of the
sergeant, Aymo's death, the shooting of the Lieutenant Colo
nel at the bridge, and ends with the threatened shooting of
Henry himself. Both of these ironic patterns create a crazy
patchwork of absurdity that reaches a climax in Henry's de
cision to abandon his commitment to the war.
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1 3 9
decided to shoot all of their own officers.
These elements of reality and unreality are nowhere
better contrasted than in the interview (observed by Henry)
between the battle police and the "fat gray-haired little
lieutenant-colonel" who is taken out of the retreating col
umn for "questioning":
"It is you and such as you that have let the barbar
ians onto the sacred soil of the fatherland" [said the
battle police].
"I beg your pardon," said the lieutenant-colonel.
"It is because of treachery such as yours that we
have lost the fruits of victory."
"Have you ever been in a retreat?" the lieutenant-
colonel asked.
"Italy should never retreat."
"If you are going to shoot me," the lieutenant-
colonel said, "please shoot me at once without further
questioning. The questioning is stupid." (pp. 223-224)
Reason is lost. This is the country of the slogan.
Unlike Henry, the colonel has no choice except to try to
give his death what dignity he can. Not only is a human
life destroyed for no good reason, but a valuable profes
sional has been stupidly thrown away. For Henry, younger
and more objective in his position, an alternative to a
stupid death does present itself and he takes it, dashing
down to the water to escape. Turning from the state of
passive acceptance and then disillusioned compliance, he
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jbegins, from this moment, to move actively toward a game
! worth playing.
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CHAPTER V
LEARNING TO PLAY THE GAME WELL
There are three movements that dominate A Farewell to
Arms. The first is the movement away from the commitment to
war which I have just discussed. The other two are combined
in the love story of Catherine and Henry, In Henry's move
ment toward a full commitment to Catherine, there is the
accompanying growth of what has been called the "sense of
doom." This constant foreshadowing of misfortune or death
that accompanies Henry's growth in his ability to love can
be looked at in two ways.
First, this growing "sense of doom" can be considered
as another manifestation of Hemingway's anti-sentimentality.
A Farewell to Arms is an attempt by Hemingway to write a
"true" love story, one in which the protagonist, Frederic
Henry, progresses from a false sense of love as a "court
ship game" to a true sense of love as "total involvement."
That is, Henry enters into the "game" as Hemingway conceives
141
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1 4 2
:Of it, involving genuine risk; Henry begins by "playing at"
love and ends by "participating" in it.
Contrary to its treatment in A Farewell to Arms, love
in sentimental fiction is usually considered the sovereign
method for gaining happiness, a happiness generally treated
as eternal and indestructible. Trouble, conflict, and risk
generally accompany the attainment of the love object, sel
dom in securing it, maintaining it, or facing its reality.
In other words, emotional benefits are received, but the
price is seldom paid. The price of commitment in reality,
as Hemingway pointedly demonstrates in A Farewell to Arms,
is loss and the fear of loss; "If two people love each
other there can be no happy end to it" (D .I .A .. p. 122).
The second way of regarding this sense of doom is to
regard it as akin to the necessary movement toward disaster
which is one of the few ingredients that is agreed upon as
essential to tragedy by most definers of the term. A fine
description of this movement is given by Jean Anouilh in
his preface to his version of Antigone:
That's what's so handy about tragedy— you give it a
little push so it'll start rolling— nothing: a quick
look at a girl passing in the street who raises her
arms, a yearning for honor one fine morning, when you
wake up, as though it were something to eat, one ques
tion too many in the evening— that's all. After that.
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1 4 3
you just leave it alone. You're calm. It's been punc
tiliously oiled from the start.^
As slight as the gestures described by Anouilh may be, they
are all gestures leading to a firm commitment. Like a fin
ger or an eyebrow raised at an auction, a contract has been
signed, a risk taken. So it is with Frederic Henry the
first day he sees Catherine in his hospital room in Milan:
I heard some one coming down the hallway. I looked
toward the door. It was Catherine Barkley.
She came in the room and over to the bed.
"Hello, darling," she said. She looked fresh and
young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen
any one so beautiful.
"Hello," I said. When I saw her I was in love with
her. (p. 91)
Henry has just signed a contract to a commitment that will
eventually overcome every other consideration in his life.
When Catherine dies at the end of the novel, the two strands
of emotion, love and threat of loss, have grown from the
very ordinary and almost trivial beginning we have just
witnessed to a climax wherein complete emotional commitment
is achieved only to be followed by a disaster equally com
plete .
^As quoted in and translated by Oscar Mandel, A Defi
nition of Tragedy (New York, 1961), p. 40.
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1 4 4
But before tracing Hemingway's achievement in develop
ing these two strands of emotion to see how he has endowed
them with so much potency, let us probe further into the
necessity of the disaster which ends this novel. In exam
ining the outcome of Hemingway's emotional buildup, we may
very well ask if there is any necessity at all reflected in
Catherine's death. Is not her death simply a biological
accident? Surely, we ask, this death cannot be implicit in
the love itself— might not Catherine just as well have con
tinued to live, if the author so chose to have her live?
But I think we miss Hemingway's point if we ask these ques
tions . The concept of tragedy that Hemingway begins to
evolve in fiction with this novel does not involve a matter
merely of a flaw in character, nor does his concept of
tragedy revolve around a particular set of circumstances in
any direct sense related to cause and effect (nor is this
Anouilh's point either). Necessity, according to Hemingway,
is born of life itself; it is inherent in the human condi
tion. Life must end in death, and all commitment must end
in loss. These two ideas are the essence of Hemingway's
tragic vision. Anyone, suggests Hemingway, who has the
courage honestly to commit himself will become a loser;
"You will find no man who is a man who will not bear some
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1 4 5
marks of past misfortune" (D.I.A.. p. 104). The equation is
proportionate; the more heroic or courageous the man, the
more sizable and necessary is the disaster which will even
tually overtake him.
He points out further on the same page in Death in the
Afternoon that "there is no remedy for anything in life.
Death is a sovereign remedy for all misfortunes." That is
to say, life or the natural circumstances of living exist
in constant opposition to "game," man's emotional struc
tures and goals. There can be "no happy end" to love be
cause in some way or another life must break through what
man has built in order to destroy it, if not through death,
then through separation, loss of affection, or physical
degeneration. There are a hundred thousand ways that love
can be lost, and no man can build a wall high enough to keep
them all out. Knowing this, should a man play the game
anyway? Should he run his course, glancing back over his
shoulder, committing himself to an all-out effort, realizing
all the while that he can never win?
Catherine need not die as any logical consequence of
circumstances. But love must die. The game is logical,
man-imposed, man-created; the circumstances of life are not.
By having Catherine die, Hemingway has simply created a more
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1 4 6
unified way of dealing with the truth that must come about
in one way or another and bringing both axioms, regarding
life and commitment, to bear on Henry's commitment at the
same time; »
Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You
died. You did not know what it was about. You never
had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the
rules and the first time they caught you off base they
killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously. . . . But
they killed you in the end. You could count on that.
Stay around and they would kill you. (p. 327)
The game of life, the "outer game" where knowing the rules
does not matter, is not the Hemingway game. In the game of
life you lose just by playing, and the harder you play, the
more you lose. This larger game wherein man is just a pawn
in a pattern outside his own control is the "biological
trap" that Henry speaks of when Catherine tells him she is
with child (p. 139), the same trap that the ants find them
selves in in the "ant allegory" (pp. 327-328) which follows
the passage quoted above. What is most natural to nature
is disaster, death. The center of Hemingway's concept of
tragedy is the conflict between the game man creates for
himself with his own will (a context that is meaningful for
man but always temporary) and the game man is forced to play
wherein his will counts for nothing, a context of non-
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1 4 7
meaning which permanently threatens destruction.
One of the main elements in A Farewell to Arms fitting
ly designed to carry the sense of doom, the forecast of
necessary disaster, is Hemingway's symbolic use of rain.
2
And as many critics have noted (particularly Carlos Baker),
the opposing symbol, standing for what I have called "cre
ated game," is that of "home." The rain is a particularly
we11-chosen symbol for what Hemingway had in mind, for it is
an atmospheric gloom that is both natural and unavoidable.
"Home," on the other hand, must be extremely temporary and
makeshift for these two lovers, Catherine and Henry; it is
a matter of creating an atmosphere of genuine love in a
shabby hotel room, a hospital room, or a room rented in
someone else's house. Materially a very flimsy thing, this
man-created atmosphere of home is in every case, whether in
Italy or Switzerland, opposed by the oppressive inevitabil
ity of the rain. Those (like Ray B. West, Jr.) who see the
temporariness of home here as signifying the "lost genera
tion" are cutting this symbol much too short. Home is tem
porary because all human happiness is temporary, a flimsy
^See Baker's Heminowav: The Writer as Artist, pp. 101-
116.
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1 4 8
island that must sooner or later be washed away with the
tide. Nature must win, and the use of rain as a symbol of
this necessity is given special poignancy in the fear of the
rain that is expressed by Catherine early in the novel:
. . I'm afraid of the rain."
"Why?" I was sleepy. Outside the rain was falling
steadily.
"I don't know, darling. I've always been afraid of
the rain."
"I like it."
"I like to walk in it. But it is very hard on lov
ing ■ " ' [italics mine.]
"You're not really afraid of the rain are you?"
"Not when I'm with you." (p. 126)
Henry asks her several times why she is afraid of it, and
finally she gives in and tells him that it is because some
times she sees herself dead in it and sometimes she sees
him dead in it. The basic tragic conflict of the novel is
nicely summarized in the desperation of her concluding cry
and Henry's final comment:
"It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not
afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't."
She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped cry
ing. But outside it kept on raining. (p. 126)
It continues to rain "outside" on each occasion that
they establish a home together until Catherine dies and
Henry leaves the hospital and walks to the hotel, alone, in
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1 4 9
I
'the rain.
I
In A Farewell to Arms there is not only the antagonis
tic non-meaning of nature that we have just seen expressed
in the omnipresent rain, there is also a non-meaning, an
irrational threat, expressed through man. Man is, of
course, part of nature despite his efforts to separate him
self from its necessity. Man can become a force aligned
with irrationality if he is unaware. The aware man can,
with courage, create a temporary, small island of meaning
by committing himself to a worthy ideal which brings with it
a pattern of behavior that stands in itself as meaningful.
The non-meaning of nature, its lack of relevance to man's
purpose is, in a sense, simply given; it is the non-meaning
created by man himself that often produces the greatest
ironies in Hemingway's fiction, perhaps because man need
not be unaware, because something could be done. Since non
awareness is often a matter of being blinded by one's own
ego, the most unpleasant people in Hemingway's fiction are
the selfish, the petty, and the egotistical.
Miss Van Campen, the head nurse of the American hospi
tal, is a fairly good example of the unaware character who
makes more than just a token appearance. Significantly, she
feels that her present duties are really beneath her. (In
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1 5 0
'both Across the River and into the Trees and A Moveable
Feast ambition is categorized specifically as a cardinal
sin, as it would be in Hemingway's scheme, since it is con
cerned with glorification of the self rather than perform
ance of one's job as honestly and courageously as possible.)
Miss Van Campen's ambition is particularly damning in her
profession, and it leads eventually to the stupidity of her
charge that Henry has inflicted jaundice on himself to es
cape going back to the front (p. 144). With no empathy and
with the self-righteousness of her kind, she vindictively
has Henry's leave cancelled. She is, of course, very much
like the more impersonal irrationalities of the war and the
natural world, an enemy of home, and remains a constant
menace to Henry and Catherine's happiness at the hospital.
Significant, too, and typical is her devotion to appear
ances rather than reality. She refuses to let Henry and
Catherine go out together when he is able to discard his
crutches, "Because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen
unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he
needed attendance" (pp. 117-118).
Other unaware characters who appear only briefly are
Ettore, the hero; the first incompetent doctor at the hos
pital; the battle police; and toward the end of the novel.
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1 5 1
the nurses who briefly appear in the corridor while Henry is
waiting for Catherine to be operated on. These two nurses
and their conversation fit into a pattern that seems to
occur in all the major novels, a pattern I shall discuss in
a later chapter. Here, the occasion is an extremely grim
one. Catherine is at the height of her suffering, and Henry
has come to suspect that she may really die. She is being
taken into the operating room to have a Caesarean done when
two nurses appear, hurrying toward the entrance to the gal
lery:
"It's a Caesarean," one said. "They're going to do
a Caesarean."
The other one laughed, "We're just in time. Aren't
we lucky?" They went in the door that led to the gal
lery. (p. 324)
Completely unaware of Henry and Henry's justifiable anxiety
(the individual human condition) about Catherine or Cath
erine's, the patient's, condition, they view the coming
operation only in their own terms, as something different
and exciting, as something they might enjoy. "Aren't we
lucky" is the full expression of their complete self
absorption .
Even though this is a brief interlude, it comes at an
extremely climactic moment- and is a good example of the
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1 5 2
irony that Hemingway continually finds between the unaware
ness of those who are self-involved and the reality of the
situation as perceived by the reader. The irony, one will
notice, does not come against something the reader knows
about Henry's condition in itself, so much as it does
against the reader's consciousness of Henry's awareness of
Catherine's condition and the full weight of his commitment
to her at this time. In other words, "self" focus conflicts
sharply with "other" focus.
It should be noted that although the nurses and the
carabinieri are not sentimental per se. the blindness that
the unaware display is the same blindness that lies at the
heart of sentimentality. Both groups are exploiting an
emotion connected with their roles, as personally elevating
expressions of love of country and love of profession. They
both ignore the real conditions of others that are implicit
in the two roles properly performed. They create a view of
reality that fits their personal needs. As such, they and
other characters like them can be counted as part of the
general pattern of Hemingway's anti-sentimentality.
Frederic Henry begins, particularly as seen in his re
lationship to women and love, from a completely self-
centered position. On his leave early in the novel, Henry
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1 5 3
goes to the city and immerses himself completely in self-
satisfaction. Later, when he meets Catherine, he looks upon
her simply as an objective in a game of chess, another ave
nue to self-satisfaction. As I have pointed out, initially
he cares very little for her emotional well-being or the
fact that she has been driven emotionally off-balance by
her previous misfortunes. After Henry's wounding, he still
does not love. The prescription for love offered by the
priest (in terms of Christian love) remains unapprehended
by him. When Catherine shows up at the American hospital
in Milan, he sees her differently through this demonstration
of devotion to him, and feels that he loves her. But it
remains for Catherine to teach Henry what love really means;
the period in the hospital becomes a period of indoctrina
tion .
Catherine begins by giving herself physically to Henry:
Catherine sat in a chair by the bed. The door was open
into the hall. The wildness was gone and I felt finer
than I had ever felt.
She asked, "Now do you believe I love you?"
"Oh, you're lovely," I said. "You've got to stay.
They can't send you away. I'm crazy in love with you."
(p. 92)
Catherine's emphasis here is on the love given in the act;
Henry's emphasis is on the pleasure received and a concern
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1 5 4
ifor the continuation of it. For Hemingway, sex is an essen
tial ingredient in the love between man and woman, and the
continuation of Catherine and Henry's sexual relationship
throughout the summer is the medium by which true regard for
the other person is reached. Sex, too, is essentially an
anti-sentimental ingredient of love. A full and honest
giving and receiving of pleasure from the other partner con
tradicts those self-directed emotions of longing and self-
pity which are central to love as sentimentality.
The sterility and seIf-absorption of love without sex
are of course eminently demonstrated in the emotional trap
that Jake Barnes finds himself in; the failure of love and
marriage without sex is graphically illustrated in the short
story, "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot." Mr. Elliot, as one would sup
pose, is a poet and has kept himself "straight" for Mrs.
Elliot. They "try to have a baby" every now and then, but
the experience is very unsatisfactory, so that Mr. Elliot
turns more to his poetry and Mrs. Elliot turns to a girl
friend whom she sleeps with and has many a good cry with.
The last line (one of Hemingway's more moderately ironic
"wows" as he calls them) becomes a statement of complete
disaster and the triumph of perversion: "Elliot drank white
wine and Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend made conversation
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1 5 5
and they were all quite happy" (1st 49. p. 252).
We can see here to some extent what it is that Heming
way means in his famous statement about morality in Death in
the Afternoon: "What is moral is what you feel good after
and what is immoral is what you feel bad after . . ." (p.
4). Mr. and Mrs. Elliot could not be more conventionally
moral. Both were presumably virgins before marriage; both
use sex not as a way of giving or receiving pleasure, but
as in the Victorian tradition, purely for creating children.
Yet their relationship could not be more immoral, as far as
Hemingway is concerned.
I think those who see Hemingway's heroines as either
"things" with which to achieve pleasure or as products of
an "adolescent's dream" fail to see the honesty, the reci
procity, and the general healthiness of the man-woman rela
tionship that Hemingway projects as being ideal. Neither do
these critics apprehend the idea (which has considerable
psychological support in our time) that the growth of love
which involves giving and sacrificing for the other partner
must be based on a firm and mutually satisfactory sex basis.
The place of sex in Hemingway's scheme of love is quite con
trary to the covert sensuality of pornography.
During the summer Catherine and Henry learn to become
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1 5 6
more emotionally and mentally at one while they become
physically at one with each other. The sharing of other
experiences has more poignancy and meaning because of the
sharing of sex. They both become more acutely aware of
sights and sounds:
She came in looking fresh and lovely and sat on the bed
and the sun rose while I had the thermometer in my mouth
and we smelled the dew on the roofs and then the coffee
of the men at the gun on the next roof. (p. 102)
Henry finds himself also more able to relate to other people
with affection. In the small and easily overlooked scene
with the maker of silhouettes (p. 135), a genuine wave of
affection passes between Henry and the artist, who refuses
to take payment for the silhouettes and says to Henry's
offer of money, "No, I did them for a pleasure. Give them
to your girl." (Quite a bit is made of this matter of
"please" or "for your pleasure" in several places in Heming
way's writing, particularly in Across the River and into the
Trees. where these verbal forms become equivalent to the
general ability to love and to consider others.)
Catherine risks a good deal in continuing to come to
Henry's bed every night. At the same time, Henry's initial
physical excitement passes into a more general affection
for Catherine. He finds that "if we let our hands touch.
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1 5 7
just the side of my hand touching hers, we were excited"
(p, 112). Henry finds himself going along the hall with her
on her rounds on his crutches and carrying the basins for
her. Being together and sharing experiences becomes mean
ingful beyond the sharing of the sex experience itself, and
yet sex remains the central core, the source of energy: "It
was lovely in the nights and if we could only touch each
other we were happy" (p. 114). Catherine, when Henry wor
ries about getting married, shows him how true marriage is
a sharing of identities, so that as far as she is concerned,
"There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me"
(p. 115). It is interesting to see that it is Henry, not
Catherine, who wants to be "really married," not just to
make a possible child legitimate, but because he is afraid
that he might lose her: "But you won't ever leave me for
some one else" (p. 115). And when she answers that he
needn't worry about that, he replies, "I don't. But I love
you so much and you did love some one else before" (p. 116).
Just before Henry must return to the front, they spend
an evening in a hotel across from the railroad station, a
hotel that accepts guests without luggage. The room is all
red plush, mirrors, satin, and cut glass; it is enough to
make Catherine feel "like a whore" but
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1 5 8
after we had eaten we felt fine, and then after, we felt
very happy and in a little time the room felt like our
own home. My room at the hospital had been our own home
and this room was our own home too in the same way.
(p. 153)
Obviously it is not just the sensation of eating and sex
that have made the difference, but the communion established
through their agency. "Home" becomes a metaphor for this
communion established in both flesh and spirit.
Henry returns to the front and is almost immediately
involved in the massive retreat from Caporetto. A lyric
passage that runs through Henry's mind while asleep in the
front of an ambulance stalled in the retreat congestion
shows how prominent a place in his consciousness and value
system Catherine and the meaning structure called "home" has
achieved. Beginning with a reference to physical desire,
"Stiff as a board in bed. Catherine was in bed now between
two sheets, over her and under her," the passage continues
by weaving in elements (as pointed out by Charles R. Ander
son in an excellent analysis of the passage) from a six
teenth-century lyric, "Christ, that my love were in my arms/
And I in my bed again'." as well as a line apparently adapted
from the child's prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep," and
elements from the children's lullaby, "Sweet and Low," from
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1 5 9
! 3
Tennyson. Moving from the initial sexual stimulus, the
passage thus continues with several fragments reminiscent of
a feeling for home and then ends with a concern for the
pregnant Catherine, who in the dream (it is also raining
around the ambulance in actuality) is connected to rain in
two ways: as fertility, "That my sweet love Catherine down
might rain," and as danger, "Well, we were in it. Every one
was caught in it" (p. 197). Up to this point, aside from
being a tender and moving passage and an interesting prose
experiment, the section can be seen as a lyric summary of
the entire love story and its sequence, including a pre
figuring in the reference to the rain of the story's end.
Furthermore, in the ambiguous reference to rain there is
presented in capsule form the two sides of risk (the "small
rain" of Catherine, home, and life is opposed by the "big
rain" of threatening nature) with special emphasis on the
fatalism inherent in the human condition (the "small rain"
cannot quiet the insistent storm; also note how reminiscent
the phrase "Every one was caught in it" is of Henry's pre
vious statement, "You always feel trapped biologically" (p.
^"Hemingway's Other Style," in Ernest Hemingway:
Critiques of Four Maior Novels, ed. Carlos Baker.
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1 3 9 ) .
The conclusion of the passage confirms Henry's growth
to a genuine commitment. His deep concern, his wanting to
do something for Catherine, marks the inception of the mo
tive, if not yet the actions, characteristic of love:
"Good-night, Catherine," I said out loud. "I hope you
sleep well. If it's too uncomfortable, darling, lie on
the other side," I said. "I'll get you some cold water.
In a little while it will be morning and then it won't
be so bad. I'm sorry he makes you so uncomfortable.
Try and go to sleep, sweet." (p. 197)
Following Henry's disengagement from the war, his first
thoughts, after he has time to think, wander invariably to
Catherine. There is the contrast between his miserable
physical circumstances of being wet, cold, and hungry, and
Catherine's promise of soft, warm love:
Hard as the floor of the car to lie not thinking only
feeling, having been away too long, the clothes wet and
the floor moving only a little each time and lonesome
inside and alone with wet clothing and hard floor for
a wife. (pp. 231-232)
As he assesses the situation he is now in, it is interesting
to see how "seeing coldly and clearly," which has become
associated with the home of the priest and awareness, and
the priest's later speech concerning the difference between
lust and love, now comes to mind in combination with
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_ 161
"emptily," a synonym for the hollowness Henry began to feel
with his separation from Catherine: "But you loved some one
else whom now you knew was not even to be pretended there;
you seeing now very clearly and coldly— not so coldly as
clearly and emptily" (p. 232). And what Henry sees with his
awareness and recently acquired commitment is that it is
"not my show any more." It is time to return to Catherine.
When he finds Catherine in Stresa, where she has come
to have the baby, he has the "feeling that we had come home"
(p. 249). He finds that together they can feel alone
against the others, and that everything he values is now
concentrated in Catherine: "'My life used to be full of
everything,' I said. 'Now if you aren't with me I haven't
a thing in the world'" (p. 257). Actually, as we have seen,
this is not true; his life up to now has been filled with
practically nothing— but perhaps, in a sense, it is the same
thing.
When Count Greffi, an old acquaintance of Henry's who
happens to be in Stresa at this time, asks Henry, "What do
you value most?" Henry replies immediately, "Some one I
love" (p. 262). The talk then turns to religion, and the
count mourns that he thought when he became old he would be
come devout, but he has not. Henry says that his own
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devoutness comes only at night. But the count replies that
Henry must not forget that he is in love and "Do not forget
that is a religious feeling" (p. 263). Or at least it can
be. Henry has come very close to fulfilling the priest's
prescription of doing things for, wishing to sacrifice for,
and wishing to serve. (The conversation between Henry and
Count Greffi in many ways parallels the previous conversa
tion between Henry and the priest.) As the priest pre
dicted, Henry finds a happiness he could not have appre
hended before.
As for Catherine herself, the critics may be right who
insist that she needs one or two really bad qualities to
set her off. She certainly is much too brave. She risks
great embarrassment and ruin by devotion to Henry in the
hospital. She travels to a deserted resort town to have
her baby in a foreign country (having lost one man in the
war and knowing that the father of her baby is at the
front). She accompanies Henry across the border in the
middle of the night in a storm in a small boat, without
question or complaint— as a matter of fact, showing a sense
of humor in response to Henry's attempt to sail with an um
brella. She endures the difficulties of pregnancy without
complaint, only worrying that Henry might be bored. When
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163
she is about to die, she is concerned about Henry: "'Don't
worry, darling,' Catherine said. 'I'm not a bit afraid.
It's just a dirty trick'" (p. 331). But as Hemingway points
out,' life has a way of taking care of such imbalances in
character:
If people bring so much courage to this world the world
has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills
them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are
strong at the broken places. But those that will not
break it kills. It kills the very good and the very
gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none
of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there
will be no special hurry. (p. 249)
Henry has learned to love from the example of someone
who had a great deal of love to give. Aware at last of what
is meaningful in life, fully committed at last to another's
welfare, Frederic Henry now has something really to lose.
The tragedy and irony of life is that now that he has some
thing to lose, he must lose it.
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CHAPTER VI
EMOTION AND HEMINGWAY'S USE OF IRONY
Hemingway, as I have demonstrated, depends a good deal
on irony as a writing technique. Irony is a way of calling
attention to differences, and as such it offers particular
advantages to the writer interested in the rights and wrongs
of human behavior. Illuminating contrasts result, as we
have seen in both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms,
from placing one role with a certain set of values against
another. A second very important advantage of using irony
for Hemingway's purposes is the dramatic operation of irony:
the comparison remains implicitly in the material and the
connection must be formed in the mind of the reader. Final
ly, it should be noted that the comparisons inherent in
irony almost invariably result in the creation of emotion.
One of the techniques discovered to be most character
istic of Hemingway's style is the depiction in very flat,
unemotional language of subject matter that is emotional
164
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1 6 5
because of its inherent ironic contrasts. The effect of
this suppression of emotion behind unemotional language is
to further increase the emotional impact of the material.
The two passages that are most often cited as examples of
this technique (because they are admittedly stylistic exer
cises and therefore exaggerate this characteristic) are the
two interchapters from In Our Time. "Chapter III" and "Chap
ter V." Let us look at "Chapter V":
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six
in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There
were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet
dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained
hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed
shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two
soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain.
They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat
down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very
quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told
the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand
up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting
down in the water with his head on his knees. (1st 49.
p. 225)
The first impression a reader is likely to have of this
passage is that the quality of prose is very much like that
of a newspaper. It proceeds deliberately in short matter-
of-fact sentences without comment or elaboration, and almost
completely without qualifiers of any sort. The ironies
within the material itself are so muted that the dull reader
is likely to react "so what?" Certain details, such as the
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opening emphasis on the number of people to be shot and the
time of day, are reminiscent of journalism and seek to lead
the reader into that frame of response. But if one looks
closely one can see that the paragraph is not journalistic
at all. For one thing, the prose is much flatter than news
paper prose, which often has a kind of impersonal evaluation
of events ("the shocking incident," "they defended the
bloody reprisal," or "the general reaction in the city on
hearing the news was one of dismay") which is missing here.
There is also an anonymity of the personnel involved which
is atypical of journalism, as is the kind of detail included
and even emphasized in the passage (the weather, the hospi
tal, and the sickness of the one minister). Actually, of
course, the paragraph is emotionally loaded.
The ministers are shot, of all places, against the wall
of a hospital. The shutters of the hospital are nailed
shut. The refusal of mercy that this announces works
against the shooting itself and the shooting in particular
of the minister "sick with typhoid" who needs to be inside
the hospital rather than outside. The sick minister and the
others who stand "very quietly" against the wall remind us
of sheep being slaughtered, rather than desperate, dangerous
characters who need to be disposed of for the good of
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1 5 7
'society. The military efficiency and the deliberate,
measured pace of the prose itself contrast with the human
weakness of the sick minister who, once he is without sup
port, simply crumples and sits down in the water. This last
detail is particularly unpleasant. It is not humorous, of
course, but the picture of the minister slumped down in the
water "with his head on his knees" has a near-comic absurd
ity that completely destroys the dignity of the ritual and
contradicts the rationale of the need for punishment. To
talk about the sound of rifles, the look of fear on the
faces of the victims, the impact of the bullets— which
another writer might choose to describe— would only con
tribute to the glamour-veneer of an essentially brutal act.
Hemingway skillfully breaks through this veneer (the same
sort of emotional insulation, as we noted in A Farewell to
Arms. that our culture provides for the actualities of war
by covering them with ritual and myth) to show murder as it
really is, unpleasant, messy, and brutal. The desperate
attempt by the soldiers to make the ritual work, to prop
the minister up, to make him play his part, adds further
irony to the scene.
Malcolm Cowley points to the nightmare quality of this
and similar passages, and I think his term "nightmare" is
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1
very appropriate. We find this quality in the interchap
ters in In Our Time and in many of Hemingway's most emo
tionally powerful passages. The effectiveness of such pas
sages probably cannot be totally explained, but the effec
tiveness may, as it has been suggested, be connected with
Hemingway's talent for searching out the very primitive and
basic elements in situations. There is in these passages a
terrible clarity combined with a kind of slow-motion inevi
tability which probably depends on such things as the sim
plified diction, short sentences, and lack of internal
punctuation. In addition, there is often in such passages
a narrator who, as the event unfolds, seems riveted to the
sequence in a time that is cut off from normal time, an
effect that Sean O'Faolain appropriately calls "the captive
now," which involves a timelessness that is the very oppo-
2
site of the journalistic devotion to "the times."
In "Chapter III," from In Our Time, some soldiers are
ambushing German soldiers as they climb over a garden wall;
The first German I saw climbed up over the garden
^"Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway," in Hemingway; A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks (New
York, 1964).
^The Vanishing Hero (New York, 1956), p. 118.
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1 6 9
wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then pot
ted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully
surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three
more came over further down the wall. We shot them.
They all came just like that. (1st 49. p. 203)
Again, details proceed in a very quiet, matter-of-fact way.
Among the ironies here is again the location of the violence
and the surface ritual (this time akin to a children's game
like hide and seek— the soldier who is killed "looked aw
fully surprised"). The surface ritual is in turn opposed
by the reality of the situation: we realize that the narra
tor, who in this case frames the ritual in his mind, is
actually killing people; we realize that the jolly term
"potted" is equivalent to a calculated, cold-blooded kill
ing. But the point I want to make here in particular is
the timelessness which is again achieved so that the emo
tional force of the passage cannot be escaped by assigning
this event to the convenient pigeonhole of a particular
moment or set of circumstances. The passage is like a bad
dream that comes back again and again to haunt us and from
which we cannot release ourselves.
There is a very profound irony in the working of this
style, it seems to me, between all the mechanisms that
humanity has invented to rationalize the terror of existence
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(including the whole area of propaganda, ritual, and mass
media sentimentality) and the stark insistence, as imple
mented by this stylistic technique, that the dark part of
human existence is not momentary or accidental, but continu
ing and as real as anything else in man's experience.
After looking briefly at these exaggerated examples of
Hemingway's stylistic technique and reviewing in some detail
Hemingway's handling of emotion in The Sun Also Rises and A
Farewell to Arms, we may come to the conclusion, as most
readers of Hemingway's work do sooner or later, that Heming
way is an extremely emotional writer simply because he takes
such pains to avoid explicit mention of emotion. That is to
say, his entire approach to emotion is related to a con
sistently practiced verbal irony. Feeling very deeply about
man's injustices, stupidities, and brutalities, Hemingway
finds it more effective to whisper rather than to shout.
There is something in Hemingway's story-telling posture very
similar to the posture of the satirist who recounts absurd
ities with a straight face. Perhaps there is a strain, too,
of the straight-faced story teller of the American frontier,
with the significant difference that Hemingway allows life
to produce its own exaggerations and its own absurdities.
Another important difference between Hemingway and writers
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1 7 1
such as Lewis working in the satiric tradition (in the works
that follow The Sun Also Rises) is that Hemingway seldom
uses irony to achieve a comic effect, and, generally speak
ing, it is by remaining at least close to the comic that the
satirist escapes the maudlin.
Leaving the comic uses of irony behind for the most
part after writing The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway turns in A
Farewell to Arms, as we have just seen, to uses of irony
more closely aligned to the tragic mode. In doing so,
Hemingway remains as strongly anti-sentimental as before,
but takes a position, as we shall see, that is much more
likely to ensnare him inadvertently in a sentimentality of
his own. This tendency of Hemingway to fall into his own
trap is quite similar to the tendency of the satirist who,
attacking vice and corruption, finds that most of his own
subject matter is concerned with a detailed exploration into
3
the very aspects of things he wants to eliminate. Before
examining Hemingway's difficulties in properly directing
^Alvin B. Kernan, "A Theory of Satire" in Modern Sat
ire. ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York, 1952), p. 174. Much
of my general information regarding the workings of satire
is drawn from the Kernan article and another article in the
same collection: Northrop Frye, "The Mythos of Winter:
Irony and Satire."
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1 7 2
the emotional values he generates in his fiction, which we
will do for the remainder of this chapter and throughout the
next, we should keep two propositions in mind as a basis for
our examination: (1) a writer may arouse deep emotions
without being sentimental or employing sentimental tech
niques, and (2) there is a great difference between endors
ing a system of values that is essentially sentimental, and
becoming sentimental inadvertently while endorsing a system
of values which is basically antithetical to sentimentality.
Hemingway's position is fundamentally anti-sentimental
because the solutions he proposes to man's basic dilemma are
solutions that are directed away from the self and self-
indulgence. Hemingway's use of irony generally contrasts
the sentimental position with his own. His ironic contrasts
insist that we recognize man's limited powers, that we
recognize the immediate power and reality of the dark irra
tionality that surrounds the individual. His ironic con
trasts insist that the world cannot be seen as an extension
of man's desires. Hemingway's use of irony supports those
characters who can see beyond themselves, who face life with
courage rather than with self-pity, and who can bring them
selves to face the reality of their own characters and
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1 7 3
4
situations clearly and unflinchingly. At the same time,
Hemingway's use of irony exposes and condemns the selfish,
the unaware, and the egotistical.
Thus Hemingway's use of irony can be said to contrast
two fundamentally different world views, one that he feels
is moral with one that he feels is immoral. Either the
irrationality which surrounds the individual, which lies
outside the circle of the light that Jake Barnes burns at
night or beyond the willing hands of Frederic Henry at
Catherine's deathbed, can be recognized, and on the basis of
such a recognition lead to meaningful behavior, or the ir
rationality can be ignored or explained away, leading to
behavior which is negative or destructive and making it im
possible for man to love, empathize with, or become com
mitted to his fellow man.
Just as, in Hemingway's doctrine, man does not stand in
the center of the universe, so too is his morality not God-
given but man-created. This man-created morality is meta
phorically represented in Hemingway's works by the structure
we have termed "game." This view of man's place and his
^The reader might recall in this connection Bill Gor
ton's satirical word-play with "Irony and Pity" in The Sun
Also Rises, pp. 113-115.
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1 7 4
moral responsibility is the reason why Christianity never
becomes a very important factor in the thinking of the
Hemingway protagonist. Christianity, in Hemingway's design,
must be considered to be aligned with sentimentality:
Christianity is both ego-centered (centered on man's wel
fare, conduct, and beliefs) and anthropomorphic. What is
the use of praying, Frederic Henry seems to be saying in
the desperation attending Catherine's death, if one cannot
ask and expect to have the omnipotent Being stem the tide?
If He has any relationship with man at all, it must be in
terms of what is asked for in reason. But whatever is "out
side," beyond the sphere of man-created order, has little
regard for man's reason: Catherine dies— for no man-
centered "reason." There is no higher court. There is no
appeal from the necessity of courage.
Thus, in what is probably one of the best short stories
ever written, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," the older wait
er knows "it was all nada. . . . Our nada who art in nada"
(1st 49. p. 481). There is no help for man except the
"clean, well-lighted places" that he carves out of the dark
ness for himself. The other waiter, who has "youth, confi
dence, and a job," is unaware of everything except his own
desires. He sees no meaning in providing such a clean
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1 7 5
, well-lighted place as their cafe offers to the old man. The
young waiter does not observe the dignity of the old man
who, being the last customer, delays the closing of the
cafe. The younger waiter can see no difference between the
bodegas. where one must stand at a bar, and a clean and
pleasant cafe. For him, the consequences of the night do
not exist. For him, the old man who from "despair" of
"nothing" tried to kill himself the week before "should have
killed himself" (p. 478). Although the structure of the
irony is perfect, it is played at almost whisper-intensity
so that many a reader has passed over the irony. The young
er waiter is so real, so normal, so average, so character
istic. How then should we characterize his lack of concern,
his selfishness, his lack of empathy, his shallow cynicism,
his blindness?
Although the young waiter "wouldn't want to be that
old," it remains a distinct possibility, just as it is pos
sible that he, like the old man, will outlive the wife he
is so impatient to go home to. It may be that he will live
to be alone and be in despair "over nothing." But it is
clear that he has not yet been required to face the darkness
with courage or even recognize its existence (and thus gain
awareness and compassion for others faced with the same
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1 7 6
itask). For now, the younger waiter lies outside the moral
community; how well he will pass the tests of future disas
ters remains to be seen. As for the two who are joined to
gether with "all those who need a light for the night," the
very old man who is clean and maintains his dignity and the
older waiter who empathizes with those who may need the
cafe, the implication in the story is very strong that they
have done all that it is within them to do and they are to
be admired for it.
Many recent discussions of this story emphasize Heming
way's presentation of "nothingness" as a real entity, a
presentation which appears to involve a strikingly profound
intuitive proposal by a writer who has been thought to be
5
so unphilosophic in his orientation to life. Less com
mented on, and equally important to the theme of the story,
is the emphasis placed on the awareness of the older waiter.
In looking back over the story, the reader should note how
much of the story is devoted to the older waiter's clear and
accurate perceptions of himself, of the other two charac
ters, and of what might generally be termed "the situation."
The fundamental irony of the story lies in the wonderfully
^Barrett, p. 285
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1 7 7
balanced and controlled contrast between the attitude of
boredom (seIf-absorption) displayed by the young waiter, who
has "everything," and the active concern and essential
"aliveness" of the older waiter, who has "nothing." The
ironic paradox that results is that only through the aware
ness of nothing or non-meaning can meaning be created. At
a certain point in one’s experience with this story para
doxes and puns begin to trip over themselves. Like Miss Van
Campen in A Farewell to Arms, the younger waiter is in a
service occupation; it is his profession to think of others,
but he does not serve or wait. Whether it was in Heming
way's mind or not, I cannot help adding that the younger
waiter has not yet learned (to quote from Milton's "blind
ness sonnet," which talks of Milton's relationship to God's
scheme and begins "When I consider how my light is spent"):
"They also serve who only stand and wait."
Blindness versus awareness is Hemingway's most perva
sive theme and it is borne on a rippling wave of irony into
almost everything he writes. Seeing oneself, others, and
the situation clearly is the basic requirement for the crea
tion of meaning— genuine concern or love for others. Illu
sion and self-centeredness are the enemies of meaning, just
as the younger waiter is hostile to the old man and
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1 7 8
'impatient with the older waiter. A wonderfully ironic meta
phor for the hostility of unawareness to meaningful human
relationships is the deafness of the American lady in an
other short story, "A Canary for One." The American lady,
through selfishness and irrational prejudice against all
"foreigners," has broken up a love affair of her daughter
with a young Swiss engineer. She ironically decides to
substitute a caged canary for the engineer, thinking (in
parallel with her own caging of her daughter) that the
canary will adequately compensate the girl for her loss.
It becomes clear that the woman is not only physically deaf
but emotionally deaf. She participates in and becomes an
enforcer of non-meaning, much like the carabinieri (who are
also deaf) at the bridge in A Farewell to Arms. Although
her physical disability is more literal, it has a distinct
relationship to the blindness of the younger waiter who,
although standing in the light, cannot see what is in the
light nor even perceive that there is a difference between
the light and the darkness.
Although in these two stories, "A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place" and "A Canary for One," love of one kind or another
is considered, and even recommended, this subject is handled
without sentiment: emotion is examined without emotional
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179
ism. Compare Hemingway's handling of this theme with that
of Dickens in A Christmas Carol. In recommending compas
sionate awareness of others, Dickens's technique is to
squeeze all the sentimental triggers that come to hand.
Scrooge, like the American lady and the younger waiter, is
deaf and blind to the conditions and needs of other people,
but unlike the Hemingway characters, Scrooge is caused to
have a magical transformation of character. Even a villain
with the hardest possible heart, the meanest man in the
world, is found to have a spot of pure gold deep down in
side his hardened hide. How is Scrooge reformed? Why, he
is made aware of others by an appeal to his self-pity 1 The
Ghost of Christmas Past begins Scrooge's conversion by
appealing to his sentimental feelings for himself as a
neglected, unhappy child. Only then is he ready to receive
the scenes of other suffering victims from the past and
present with the proper feeling. The Ghost of Christmas
Future rounds out the picture by showing Scrooge his own
death, unmourned and unloved, appealing again to Scrooge's
feelings for himself. Scrooge's magical transformation is
crowned with the most poignant of all sentimental triggers,
the crippled child. The reader is invited to weep for him
self as unwanted and unloved, and later he is invited to
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1 8 0
weep in joyful recognition that all is right with the world;
no one is really so bad that he cannot be changed by the
proper appeal to his better nature, and the poor, but hard
working, will eventually be rewarded for their industry.
Although admittedly an exaggerated example from the other
end of the emotional scale, Dickens's handling of compassion
is certainly not atypical, and such a realization should
lead us to some admiration for the frequency and adeptness
with which Hemingway avoids the emotional cliché in his
constant employment of the themes of love, compassion, and
commitment.
Hemingway does arouse emotions by his use of irony, but
generally the emotions aroused remain unconnected with
sentimentality. Usually the emotions aroused are those we
traditionally attach to tragedy and to satire. The tragic
emotions are associated with the ironies inherent in Heming
way's "world picture," whereas the satiric emotions are
associated with those ironies that result from the contrast
of Hemingway's view of man and his place in the world with
the sentimental view of man and his place in the world.
Thus the satiric pattern of emotion is dependent on an ini
tial establishment of the tragic pattern so that a second
set of contrasts, between the tragic and the sentimental.
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1 8 1
can be set up.
As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, any definition
of tragedy which tends to lock tragedy into a rather precise
category, such as Aristotle's definition and all those which
have followed, which are rigorously prescriptive,^ is nei
ther helpful nor meaningful. Since there really is no other
term to describe the serious emotions connected with a thor
oughly realistic view of life that lie at the opposite pole
from sentimentality, I suggest we take the term tragedy out
of the purist deepfreeze and use it. Let us consider trag
edy as part of an emotional continuum. By doing so, we re
lieve ourselves of the necessity of considering tragedy as
an absolute, and we can talk about literature in any genre
as having tragic properties without matching the literary
work in question, point by point, with classical tragedy.
In ordinary critical discourse, we generally use trag
edy as much to refer to a particular emotional effect or
quality as to refer to those circumstances which create the
emotion. Roughly speaking, the tragic emotions are aroused
^It is probable that Aristotle was being descriptive
and perhaps even exploratory in his discussion of tragedy,
but has been interpreted as categorical and prescriptive.
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182
lin a removed observer in response to the suffering of, or
threat of misfortune to, an admirable human being. As ob
servers of such conditions, our main feeling is best termed
symoathv. It is not pity, for we do not pity those we ad
mire; nor do we empathize. since the harsh, relentless spot
light of tragedy and our removed position as observers force
us to be too intellectually aware of the situation to allow
us to become subjectively identified with the suffering pro
tagonist. As we shall see in our examination of Hemingway's
later novels, the reader's identification in tragedy with
the protagonist is a "generic" one, that is, the protagonists
becomes representative of man's condition in general. Such
a generic identification is, of course, completely opposite
to the "self" involvement facilitated by the sentimental
treatment of suffering or misfortune.
In addition to sympathy, there is a feeling produced by
the condition of the tragic protagonist that might be best
termed "a recognition of terror." Again, as in the case of
sympathy, the emotion is too cognitive to be thought of as
actually experienced fear. The distinction can be seen as
being the difference between a child's reaction to a con
vincing horror movie and an informed adult's reaction to the
persecution and suffering of King Lear. Both with sympathy
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183
land with the recognition of terror, the partial intellec-
tualization of the emotions removes them from a personal
adoption for sentimental purposes. We have explored the
pattern of irony that evokes these two emotions in our de
tailed examination of A Farewell to Arms. It results from
the conflict of man-created meaning, or the game context,
with the non-meaning that surrounds the individual both in
nature and in relation to other men.
The emotional values of satire are produced by Heming
way when he contrasts his value system, or game, with senti
mental or ego-centered value systems. As we have seen, this
contrast specifically opposes awareness with blindness,
commitment with selfishness, courage with cowardice. The
satiric pattern is really a part of the larger, over-all
pattern of tragic irony except for one significant differ
ence: the tragic emotions are evoked by necessary circum
stances. Injustice, cruelty, and stupidity need not
be a part of man's behavior, and when these are demonstrated
in the actions of specific characters in opposition to the
values held by the central protagonist, they arouse the
reader's indignation and anger if the threat posed by them
is potent, or they arouse our scornful laughter on those
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184
few occasions when the threat posed by them is impotent.
So it is that we become very angry with the carabinieri at
the bridge and indignant with Miss Van Campen and Lady
Brett, while we laugh at the antics of Robert Cohn and the
braggadocio of Ettore.
The irony of tragedy and the irony of satire in general
are very closely allied. Both are based on a conflict of
value systems, and both flow from an author who maintains a
strong moral position. We can see in Hemingway's work that
the tragic and the satiric frequently overlap, and we can
see that the tragic and the satiric are based on the same
terms, i.e., of contrast: the positive individual is seen
in opposition to negative forces which threaten to injure
or crush him. We can see that the combinations of sym
pathy, recognition of terror, and indignation at work in
the previously cited "Chapter V" from In Our Time. Our
sympathy is drawn to the sick minister, who appears to be
in the grip of forces which, with overwhelming and relent
less power, would destroy his human dignity. We have al
ready noted the sense of terror evoked by the inevitability
of misfortune suggested by the rain and the typhoid and by
the timelessness created by the prose style. But we are
also made indignant by specific suggestions of human
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185
(blindness: the use of the hospital for the shooting, the
mechanical adherence to ritual by the firing squad, and the
attempt by the soldier to force the sick minister into a
ritual that he cannot participate in.
In Hemingway's fiction the forces of tragedy are
necessarily impersonalized, whereas the threats posed by
ego-centered individuals are usually vehicles of satire. In
For Whom the Bell Tolls the threatened foul-up of the Repub
lican Army which we are made conscious of from the very be
ginning, although representing a human rather than a natural
threat of disaster, becomes necessary and unavoidable and as
a threat plays a crucial part in the tragic irony surround
ing the blowing up of the bridge, as does the Fascist gun
fire which disables Jordan. On the other hand, the unnec
essary egocentricity, blindness, waste, stupidity, and
selfishness associated with such individuals as Comrade
Marty and Pablo are vehicles for the satiric emotions of
anger and indignation.
The story we examined earlier in this chapter, "A
Clean, Well-Lighted Place," contains both tragic and satiric
irony. The tragic irony is seen in the contrasts between
the power of man to create a circle of light and the vulner
ability of man and the light he creates to the omnipresent
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power of darkness, between the courage man shows and the
certain defeat the reader knows lies in wait for man. We
are sympathetic with the older waiter. We see him in oppo
sition to forces completely beyond human power to resist
except temporarily and in a very small way. He maintains
the light of the cafe as long as he can until the lateness
of the hour and the insistence of the younger waiter force
him to return to the voracious darkness. We do not identify
with the older waiter's specific condition, but we can
identify emotionally and intellectually with his general
condition; his awareness of others, his sympathy for the
old man who needs the cafe, and his ability to see the need
for the cafe to provide light and dignity and protection
for the old man against the forces of non-meaning. We can
also experience in reading this story a very powerful recog
nition of the power of that non-meaning. We can feel the
very fabric of the terror that awaits the old man who seeks
the protection of the light for as long as possible and who
does not want to go home to face the emptiness that is
there, the emptiness that has led him to attempt suicide
because of "nothing." We feel indignant, too. We want to
shake the younger waiter who cares so little, who is so
blind, who through his own selfishness contributes to the
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1 8 7
Ipowers of the darkness that lie in wait for all of us.
Occasionally in Hemingway's writing the direction of
the irony is reversed from its usual realistic course, or
perhaps more accurately turned back on itself, when a situ
ation which of itself would normally call for sympathy on
the part of the reader is given further emphasis through the
use of irony. On such occasions irony is overused or, in
effect, an additional element of irony is brought into an
already ironic situation. As a result, the emotional value
of the situation is increased out of proportion to the
dramatic context. Whenever sympathy is boosted in this way,
it is made less generic and intellectual and more personal
and emotional, losing its tragic context and becoming ex
aggerated and sentimental.
Such a "jacking up" of emotional values usually occurs
as a result of Hemingway's inadvertent overuse of satiric
irony. His tendency to overload a dramatically achieved
tragic situation by the injection of satire probably stems
from his own great personal hostility to human unawareness
as well as from the great temptation that the use of irony
has for him in exposing injustice and selfishness. Add to
this the great sympathy Hemingway obviously holds for the
man who courageously and alone must fight a losing battle.
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1 8 8
and it becomes easy to see why it is that Hemingway is un
able at times to leave well enough alone— why he must get in
that one extra blow at the enemy, that one last bitter jibe.
Thus Hemingway can be said to become sentimental when he
loses his own perspective, ignores his own doctrine of re
straint in the use of emotion, and overpersonalizes his
discussion by becoming too intimately involved. Always a
moral writer, his great weakness is moralizing. Always a
dramatic writer, his weakness is overdramatization. His
great sentimental lapses are really little pieces of melo
drama: suddenly there is a villain hissing at the audience
and a hero struggling manfully to overcome the forces that
would victimize him. To put it another way, Hemingway hates
sentimentality so much that he loses his balance and becomes
sentimental himself in attacking it. Such a pitfall is very
much like the current phenomenon of those who hate the
Communists so much they end up being as ruthless and totali
tarian as the Communists in their zeal to attack them.
Whereas tragedy is written in a spirit of resignation, sat
ire is written in a spirit of impatience— the satirist can
not just sit on the sidelines and watch; he must involve
himself personally and his readers must become involved too.
Some of the best examples of Hemingway's overuse of
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1 8 9
irony can be found at the ends of his novels. The end of a
story is the place where it is difficult for nearly any
writer to maintain an emotional equilibrium in his writing,
and Hemingway usually finds the temptation to overdramatize
man's inevitable defeat too much for him. A Farewell to
Arms is better balanced emotionally at its end than most of
the novels that follow it, but there is one passage that
occurs just before the end of the novel, the one describing
the callous unawareness of the two nurses that I have al
ready referred to, that is unnecessarily melodramatic.
Henry's suffering during Catherine's ordeal in the hospital
is already sufficiently established without the episode of
the nurses. Particularly effective in dramatizing this
suffering is a passage pointed out by Ray B. West, Jr. as a
masterpiece of indirect and restrained depiction of emo
tional intensity; when Catherine is in extreme danger and
Henry is trying to serve her in some way by administering
the anesthetic gas, Catherine cries out that it isn't doing
any good, that it doesn't seem to be working. In three
short sentences, Hemingway suggests Henry's anxiety and
Catherine's severe danger: "I turned the dial to three and
then four. I wished the doctor would come back. I was
afraid of the numbers above two" (p. 323). As West points
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190
jOUt,
Another author might have examined in great detail both
Catherine's illness and the emotion which Frederic was
experiencing at that time; but from the simple, quiet
statement, reinforced by the dial registering the num
bers above two, we get the full force of Frederic's
terror in a few strokes.^
The delicacy with which Hemingway leads his reader here to
create the emotion for himself is in sharp contrast to the
satiric impact of the cruel giggling and delight of the two
nurses who pass Henry waiting anxiously in the corridor as
they go to a Caesarean operation like two teenagers rushing
to a Beatle concert. Henry's pain and aloneness are brought
too much into relief, our sympathy is overtaxed.
This passage in A Farewell to Arms is reminiscent of
another passage parallel to it in The Old Man and the Sea,
a passage even more overtly melodramatic. This is the
passage, as one might guess, which concerns the ironic un
awareness of the tourists who mistake the marlin which has
been destroyed by sharks for a large shark. This inadver
tent transposition of the marlin (which, in the terms we
have established here, roughly symbolizes meaning) and the
^"The Biological Trap," in Hemingway; A Collection of
Critical Essays. p. 150.
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191
;shark (non-meaning— blind, voracious ego-satisfaction) con
tains, through the prior dramatization of Santiago's experi
ence, more than enough emotional dynamite of itself, yet the
transposition's emotional punch is even further boosted by
being made by well-fed, secure tourists (a synonym in Hem
ingway for "unawareness") who are in the act of eating—
blindly. The episode contrasts sharply with the condition
of Santiago, who, having already suffered through the agency
of the sharks of nature, is now caused to suffer lack of
recognition at the hands of human sharks. As explained
earlier, "lack of recognition" is a sentimental trigger.
An already established sympathy has been over-reinforced.
As a matter of fact, there are really three major
ironies (and several smaller touches) which contribute to
what strikes me as an excessively emotional ending to a
basically fine story. The emotional contrast central to
The Old Man and the Sea consists of the courage, persist
ence, faith, and skill of Santiago on the one hand, in
opposition to the old man's bad luck, his loss of the boy,
and his old age (in connection with his stressed condition
of being alone in a hostile element) on the other. The
controlling irony of the dramatization is firmly tragic.
At the end, however, Hemingway has seen fit to increase the
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192
emotional impact of the basic contrast (which God knows, in
terms of the heroic suffering and courage displayed, is
emotional enough as it is) by adding several emotional
boosters. Only one of the ironic patterns that emerge at
the end of the novel is dramatically justified, and that is
the pattern which emerges from the implicit comparison of
the conditions of the young boy and the old man. These
comparisons involve the boy's youth, which of course empha
sizes the old man's age and present exhaustion as well as
the burden of life which he has carried so well, and the
boy's devotion, which emphasizes the lonely ordeal that the
old man has gone through and the hostility that he has sur
vived without becoming bitter or hostile himself. In addi
tion to this pattern, interjected into the ending, is the
ironic unawareness of the tourists, and, in the last line
of the novelette, the irony of the old, exhausted fisherman
who, although deprived by forces beyond his control of his
winnings, has still won the battle of the human spirit—
battered, he still dreams of the lions.
Prior to the ending of the novel the lion is estab
lished as a symbol of the beauty as well as the strength of
youth, and the lithe, regal courage that the lion tradi
tionally represents. The old man no longer dreams of
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193
"storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of
great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his
wife," but only of places and of "the lions on the beach"
(p. 22). As with the example of Joe DiMaggio, who played
to the limit of his ability despite the pain of a bone spur,
the lions provide a sense of heroic perspective to the old
man's struggle, as well as acting to unify a novel which
deals with man's relationship with the natural world.
Nevertheless, the final touch of the lions proves too much
for us; it should never fail to provide a moist eye and a
lump in the throat (may I refer back to my comparison of the
sentimental trigger to the stimulus-response of Pavlov's
dog?);
Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping
again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy
was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dream
ing about the lions. (p. 107)
Although I have reservations about the inclusion of the
lions here, one could argue that these last lines constitute
an effective summary of man's tragic condition— the heroic
g
will to commitment in opposition to necessary defeat. But
^Hemingway's fondness for lion "gentling," a pastime
strongly objected to by his wife, is recounted by A. E.
Hotchner, Pana Hemingway (New York, 1966), pp. 15-15.
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194
iin combination with the passage concerning the tourists that
comes immediately before it, the emotional emphasis of the
ending becomes satiric rather than tragic. An exterior
element, the tourists, has been introduced which changes the
perspective, making Santiago more like a misunderstood,
still noble, victim. The emotional underlining of the con
trast of conditions, the tourists and the old man, boosts
the sympathy we feel for the old man out of proportion to
the dramatic context itself. In effect, Hemingway pulls
the emotional trigger and forces the reader first to lose
his objectivity by making him indignant and second to become
personally involved by a strong demand for the reader's
sympathy in the face of a threat to deny Santiago the sym
pathy he deserves. The sympathy is demanded less on the
basis of man's tragic condition than on man's tragic condi
tion unrewarded by recognition— an entirely different mat
ter. In short, it is an emotional trick, the very thing
which Hemingway had ^dedicated himself to fight and expose
as false and a violation of "true emotion."
Hemingway's rationale for risking his life in such a way is
quoted by Hotchner: "It is wicked, I guess, to lay it on
the line just for fun. But know fsic1 no other place as
good to lay it as on the line" (p. 16).
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195
As we have noted, the evidence of the bulk of Heming
way's writing indicates that of all things, he is most per
sonally involved emotionally with courage. Acts of courage
in themselves generally arouse emotion, but are not neces
sarily connected with sentimentality. Several circumstances
that Hemingway finds attending courage can lead to the
possibility of sentimental coloration. One, certainly, is
the circumstance that the greatest acts of courage are per
formed by the individual, alone, and often cut off from any
outside support whatsoever. If this is so, then the second
condition that may lead to sentimental coloration of courage
follows; the greatest acts of courage must remain unwit
nessed, unrecognized, and unappreciated. When an act of
courage is performed in literature, it is often the reader
who is the only witness, the only person who can accord the
protagonist the proper recognition and appreciation. The
injustice of other characters in the story failing to recog
nize what the reader has perceived may provoke the reader
into an unwarranted emotional response by turning his sym
pathetic admiration into pity. This lack of recognition
can be easily turned by the reader toward himself if he be
comes too closely identified with the story's protagonist.
We are all forced to act as if virtue is its own reward.
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1 9 6
but possibly because of certain perversions of the reward
and punishment system of Christianity, most of us are unable
to fully accept anything but the exact measure of justice.
On this basis, pity can be further transformed into self-
pity, the cornerstone of sentimentality.
Emotion that is contained in a literary situation may
be seen, perhaps, as a kind of expanding gas looking for an
outlet. When the emotion arises from a situation in what
Hemingway would call a "true" way, it tends to remain sus
pended, or to extend the metaphor, the pressure of the in
side and outside remain equalized. (Some of Hemingway's
techniques for accomplishing this will be examined in the
following chapter.) But when additional pressure is added
to the container in one way or another, the gas is forced
out into whatever passage is available: generally, the
emotion flows toward the reader. This pressure is a matter
of emphasis, and if irony, an emphasis-device, is used to
underline those elements I have identified as culturally
defined centers of emotion, the emotion expands or even
explodes.
Thus the use of irony requires a delicate sense of
balance as well as an ability to apply restraint. The
over-all use of irony by Hemingway to suppress the overt
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197
expression of emotion below an ostensibly bland surface and
to transfer the responsibility for creating the emotion to
the reader is certainly a legitimate extension of the Hem
ingway doctrine of letting "the facts speak for themselves."
But when does the selection of facts become illegitimate
manipulation? The point at which outgoing emotions such as
approval, affection, or admiration for a character begin to
rebound to the reader in the direction of self-love and
self-pity is extremely difficult to define precisely, not
because it is subjective and therefore relative to the in
dividual reader's emotional condition and needs, but because
the turning point must be determined intellectually on the
basis of complex literary judgments: (1) are the facts
representative of reality as we know it, and (2) is any
given fact dramatically justified by the realistic pattern?
To determine the turning point emotionally may be easier,
but more difficult to discuss is the question: at what
point do we sense that the author is asking or forcing us
to give up our intellectual perspective and participate
wholly with our emotions? It is almost tautological to
point out that emotion is not antithetical to intellect, but
emotionalism cannot survive without the suspension of the
intellectual faculties.
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1 9 8
Judgments about the dramatic justification of ironic
contrast should be made in regard to the degree of departure
an ironic element may have in respect to the central effect
of the work. On this basis, the interjection of the conver
sation by the tourists in The Old Man and the Sea would ap
pear to be a rather obvious case of plot manipulation. On
the other hand, the interjection of the lions into the final
scene is a less overt case of manipulation, since Hemingway
has attempted to weave the dreaming of the lions into the
fabric of the story and has attempted to make the dreaming
of the lions part of Santiago's condition. However, the use
of the lions at the end of the story still remains a circum
stance irrelevant to the central deed and to the emotions
arising from the central deed, acting as a factor which
magnifies through the power of symbol and irony an emotion
already dramatically established in the narrative. To put
it another way, the lions have almost no dramatic relevance,
only a previously established emotional relevance.
In the case of Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and
into the Trees. an emotion-producing aspect of his condi
tion, his heart trouble, is woven into the narrative. Al
though there are the ironic contrasts of this condition with
his occupation and with his zest for life, and although this
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1 9 9
condition, like that of the lions, has taken on certain
symbolic overtones (namely, Cantwell's struggle to love and
to leave bitterness behind), the condition of his heart is
one of the terms of the dramatic conflict of the novel, so
that Cantwell's death by a heart attack at the end has no
sentimental overflow in and of itself. Unlike Santiago's
dream of the lions, Cantwell's heart is necessary, not ac
cessory. What is sentimental, however, is to have the
sergeant (who up to this point is legitimately used as a
foil of unawareness to Cantwell's awareness) violate the
colonel's instructions by assigning what few valuables he
has left to his loved one to the red tape of army procedure,
the very machinery of insensitivity and inefficiency the
colonel has been fighting all his life. The violation of
orders by the sergeant may be justified by the sergeant's
unperceptive, rule-book-bound character, but it is external
to the terms of Colonel Cantwell's internal conflict— par
ticularly so when the colonel is dead. As a result of this
final touch of satiric irony, the colonel, rather than dying
with his usual courage, in dignity, suddenly becomes an
ironic victim. Again, Hemingway is carried away by his ad
miration for individual courage and cannot resist the final
"wow" that brings our attention more forcibly than necessary
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200
to Cantwell's losses, deficiencies, and alienation.
Irony, the tool that Hemingway so frequently uses to
suppress emotion in his own writing and to attack attitudes
that he perceives as sentimental, can become a double-edged
sword which can swing back dangerously on the user. Heming
way's abuse of the power of irony is most likely in those
situations in which he gets carried away in satisfying his
own emotional investments. Hemingway is not a sentimental
writer, but a writer who for the duration of his career was
locked in a struggle between his attraction for tragic
irony and his attraction for satiric irony and sentiment.
Too often, when his attraction to satire overcame his gen
eral preference for tragedy, his work lost its tragic im
pact and became personal, bitter, and sentimental. Such a
tendency is probably the eternal trap for all writers who
care too much.
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CHAPTER VII
SUFFERING AND LOSS WITHOUT TEARS
The "winner take nothing" philosophy is basic to Hem
ingway's conception of the world; the only victories in such
a world are victories of the spirit, and if a man gains any
thing tangible, the only sure thing is that he will eventu
ally lose it. But in such a world where the integrity of
the individual is so important, victories of the spirit are
enough. They are enough to re-establish one's humanity and
to confirm one's manhood. If a Catherine is lost in child
birth, or the significance of a bridge is lost in the con
fusion of war, or a great fish is lost in a sea of voracious
sharks, there is always, for the man willing to take the
necessary risks, another bridge, another fish, and even
another Catherine. Bringing man much closer to the terror
of complete loss, nothingness, closer than the loss of some
thing outside himself is the possibility that man may lose
himself— that he may lose his identity, his completeness.
201
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202
his "manness." A classic statement of this fear that lies
at the heart of so much that Hemingway has written is found
at the beginning of the short story, "Now I Lay Me":
I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living
for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut
my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go
out of my body. I had been that way for a long time,
ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go
out of me and go off and then come back. I tried never
to think about it, but it had started to since, in the
nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I
could only stop it by a very great effort. (1st 49. p.
461)
Whereas the fear here is announced and overt, more often it
is held distantly in the background, always present because,
unlike this occasion, it is never thought of. When the
selfhood of the Hemingway protagonist is at stake, as it
often is, the emotional climate in which the protagonist
exists can be loaded with terror, frequently involving a
nightmarish series of events tinged with the suggestion of
panic and hysteria.
The triggering mechanism for this nightmare is often a
physical or psychic wound, a wound which has torn away the
protagonist's sense of security or complacency. Typically
alone, the Hemingway protagonist is often reduced to his
selfhood as the only "place" or possession that can be se
cured against the erosion of time and change. A threat to
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2 0 3
Iselfhood is the ultimate threat, involving the ultimate
horror that the irrational forces of the world can accom
plish .
In addition to performing this triggering function, the
wound is often a metaphor for a loss of spirit, an indica
tion, if the wound is physical, of an interior missing part
of some kind, or a gradual decay of some function. Harry's
thorn scratch in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a fine exam
ple, among many, of the wound that serves both as a symptom
and a warning of spiritual difficulty. The gangrene that
has infected his leg is perfectly suited to represent physi
cally the spiritual rot that Harry has infected himself
with. Appropriately, the scratch has become dangerous
through Harry's neglect. There is no hell-fire and damna
tion lying in wait for Harry, no searing pain as poetic
punishment for his sins of omission as a writer and as a man
(and Hemingway, interestingly enough, sees Harry's sins as a
writer as being far more serious). There is simply the fate
of lying out in the middle of nowhere and smelling his own
stench.
The story is a wonderfully vivid nightmare, replete
with death animals, death birds, nocturnal cries, prophe
cies, hallucinations and rituals. And of course, the story
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204
contains another vehicle of horror perfectly suited to the
writer who has sold out to buy luxury gained through a ser
ies of wealthy marriages, a platitude-spouting female ("You
can't die if you don't give up," "What have we done to have
that happen to your leg?" "I'll always love you," "You're
sweet to me"). Harry's wife with her magazine-photo good
looks, her smothering compassion, her cliches, and her hot
broth, serves as the perfect Mephistopheles to Harry's
Faust. For like Faust, Harry has signed away his soul, and
now, near the end, he is trying to preserve it. But like
Faust also, Harry has become so hardened in his sins that
he is not capable of identifying virtue. One wealthy wife
after another has weaned Harry from the realities on which
his talent as a writer must feed. With somewhat more self
perception than Faust, Harry realizes that the ultimate
responsibility is his own (although he is continually
tempted to blame others):
He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he
blame this woman because she kept him well? He had
destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of
himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much
that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by lazi
ness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by pre
judice, by hook and by crook. . . . What was his talent
anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using
it he had traded on it. It was never what he had done,
but always what he could do. (p. 158)
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205
;At first glance, Harry's ordeal may seem considerably re
moved from the atmosphere of panic? the passage cited above
appears to be closer to a mood of languid regret, tinged
with self-pity, than to a mood of desperation.
Panic, however, is usually in Hemingway's work some
where below the surface, and sometimes it is so muted that
it is easily overlooked. Harry's fear is not so much that
he will die as that somewhere along the way he has irrecov
erably lost himself. It is a fear that we see is perfectly
justified, for Harry's cardinal sin is that he has chosen
to ignore the truth for so long that he can no longer find
it: "It was not so much that he lied as that there was no
truth to tell" (p. 157). One of the common indicators in
Hemingway's fiction of panic is ritual, and Harry's despera
tion is carried by means of a number of rituals all related
to his last-minute search for reality and for Harry. There
is the ritual of the bottle, ironically enough in terms of
the confession cited above, and the ritual of the bickering
and argument carried on intermittently with his wife in
order to destroy pretense and discover truth. Character
istically, Harry's wife defends illusion in terms of a
metaphor from medieval romance (like Robert Cohn, she is
apparently guided in part by her reading— "she read enor-
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2 0 6
mously"):
"If you have to go away/' she said, "is it absolutely
necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I
mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have
to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle
and armour?" (p. 156)
There are several layers of irony here, since Harry is cer
tainly by no stretch of the imagination a shining knight;
instead, he is a man who has sold out, who has betrayed
"himself and what he believed in." Harry has come to Africa
to "work the fat off his soul," to rid himself of the ap
pendages that his sloth has gathered. But Harry is not
capable of any really heroic break with the past. He brings
his "rich bitch" with him, and his rigorous training amounts
to nothing more than doing without luxuries. The results
can be predicted; "he . . . felt the illusion of returning
strength of will to work" (p. 158).
In addition to this ritual of "self-purification" by
venom and spite (Harry's image of a snake biting itself is
quite appropriate— p. 158), dominating much of the story is
the ritual of the before-death review of one's life which
Harry conducts in a desperate attempt to find the mainstream
of his selfhood. But none of the rituals work. The bottle
(a petty gesture of independence) simply clouds Harry's mind
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and hastens his physical decay; the verbal probing inter
mittently peters out because of attacks of conscience and
never quite finds the right targets anyway; and Harry's
search through the past becomes a nostalgic review of lost
loves, disappointments, and missed opportunities.
Reality remains beyond Harry's bed. Beyond his reach,
circling the camp, is a ritual of death acted out by the
animals of the bush. Although Harry is all too conscious of
the closing circle of nature around him, he uses his "tal
ent" to escape the implications of reality as long as he
can. Behind the agile workings of Harry's mind and the
rather leisurely pace of events that it creates, hovers the
foul smell of sheer terror. At the beginning of the story,
the vultures come closer to camp than ever before. Next,
there appears to Harry a "sudden evil-smelling emptiness"
that tells him that he is really going to die. Then only
Harry sees a hyena resting "its head on the foot of the
cot." Finally, Harry hears the whimpering cry of the hyena
that announces death. With each of these manifestations the
circle of death that promises to cut off Harry's hopes of
recovering himself becomes increasingly smaller, increasing
ly more ominous. Adding to the ominous nature of the threat
is its increasingly hallucinatory quality. Harry is one
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2 0 8
who has overindulged himself, and there is something in this
horror very reminiscent of the delirium tremens of the alco
holic, enough so that we should become convinced that Harry
is in the process of losing, not gaining, himself. From the
natural phenomenon of the vultures and hyenas, the threat
turns to an "emptiness," then to a "whisper" that cannot be
heard, then to something unnamed that moves in pairs "abso
lutely silently," and finally something, unseen by Harry's
companions, that crouches on his chest. There is a sugges
tion of dramatic irony here (also connected with the ending,
as we shall see), since with each appearance of death there
is presented a hint of the real presence of a hyena for the
reader who is tied to the reality that Harry cannot reach.
Harry's end is appropriately designed to signify his death
as an artist: instead of being pulled down into a trapdoor
and dismembered like Faust, Harry is provided with a slick-
magazine exit which comes just in time, like the cavalry,
and wafts him over pink clouds and a picture landscape to
his own Shangri-La. On the slopes of Harry's Shangri-La,
Mount Kilimanjaro, there is a leopard which has frozen to
death in an attempt to reach the summit ("the House of God")
for no apparent reason; Harry has, on the contrary, seldom
acted without a real or substantial reason connected with
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2 0 9
his own physical comfort. The leopard has been hard on it
self; Harry has certainly not been hard enough on himself
even to maintain his own manhood. (Harry's only hardness
has been that erotic "hardness" that had kept him in com
fortable circumstances. His real "talent" has been demon
strated in bed— "Love is a dunghill," said Harry, "and I'm
the cock that gets on it to crow," p. 155). It is appro
priate that Harry's climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro is
made not only in wishful thinking, but in an airplane. In
the meantime, signifying the reality Harry left behind a
long time ago, his death actually comes from rotted flesh
and poisoned blood to the mournful whimpering of a hyena,
the foul king of animal parasites.
At first glance, Hemingway's constant use of ritual
elements in such stories as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" might
seem strange and contradictory. It may seem strange because
it appears as a devotion to appearances rather than reality
when the ritual elements of game are emphasized more than
the ethical structure which game embodies, and strange too
in that ritual is one of the things that we have seen Hem
ingway deplore the most. We might remember that it is ap
pearance that traps the unwary and the unaware, and it is
devotion to appearances that leads one into false behavior.
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210
into using "tricks." Yet it is appearance as a ritual as
pect of game that Hemingway frequently seems so anxiously
devoted to. The constant dwelling on the right wines, the
proper things to say, the right hotels and restaurants, the
correct techniques and the correct equipment is often so
insistent that it has been found extremely irritating by
many readers who mistakenly find this element irrelevant or
reminiscent of snobbery. To be irritated by this devotion
to ritual, however, is to ignore the condition of the Hem
ingway protagonist whose alienation and insecurity is often
revealed through his devotion to ritual patterns. Such
patterns, on close reading, are prone to reveal a sense of
hysteria or even at times a sense of pathos. The protag
onist who is so deliberate in his activities and who must
have every detail right would seem to be similar (if there
could be such a thing) to a man going down for the third
time who is desperately reaching out to touch as many sub
stantial things as possible before going under for the last
time. There is also a parallel to the set pattern of the
race car driver before he gets into his car, who dresses in
certain clothes, says only certain lucky things, kicks each
tire and touches his lucky coin, or, of course, to the rit
ual preparation of the bullfighter. Both face death, but
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211
what may be even more terrifying, both face the possibility
that they may lose their nerve, thus losing their manhood,
their identity.
It is perhaps this constant contact with substantial or
sensory detail that helps Hemingway's sympathetic character
maintain the treacherous borderline between "something" and
nothingness. In its most extreme forms the ritual pattern
becomes a constant repetition of activities and the strain
on the protagonist is obvious. Such is the case in "Now I
Lay Me," where the protagonist works very hard every night
to keep his trolley on the track by repeating certain activ
ities, like fishing a trout stream in his mind, over and
over again. Or such is the case in the story "A Way You'll
Never Be," where the protagonist stubbornly insists on act
ing out a role, the very peculiar one of wearing an American
uniform and riding around on a bicycle on the Italian front
— a role that he has apparently invented for himself. More
often, particularly in Hemingway's novels, the ritual is
acted out with much less overt emotional strain, and the
threat of disaster that hangs over the protagonist's head
is much more subtly suggested, although no less ominous and
complete.
The threat of disaster which abides in much of Heming-
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212
way's fiction is much less akin to the naturalistic tricks
of fate of a writer like Thomas Hardy, which are very un
pleasant and perhaps even threatening at times to the read
er, than it is akin to the sudden clarifications one finds
in Kafka or Camus that can lead one into the dark pit of
complete panic. Gregor Samsa, in Kafka's "Metamorphosis,"
finds that upon being transformed in the night into a giant
insect, all the basic anchors of life— home, family, em
ployment— become absurdities. They no longer are relevant.
But the terrifying thing, the thing that rips apart our
comfortable illusions, is the gradual realization that there
is really no difference between Samsa's relationships as an
ugly, detestable insect and the quality of the relationships
he had before. The metamorphosis has simply changed his
and our perspectives so that what was true all along is now
visible. Again, through the creation of Meursault, who is
in a way also a kind of "insect," Camus creates a sudden
shift of perspective so that the reader may realize that
everything that was once substantial has turned out to be
nothing but a canvas backdrop. Love, justice, freedom,
religion, indeed civilization itself, are seen as parts of
a gigantic hoax.
The Hemingway protagonist may transmit the same
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213
emotional shock to the reader in a number of different ways,
ranging from the gradual slipping away of the sense of secu
rity as experienced by Nick Adams in a number of stories
such as "The Killers," "The Battler," and "Fathers and
Sons," to the gradual, heartbreaking loss of a goal gained
with so much effort and courage that we see in The Old Man
and the Sea. However, we feel the emotional shock of
threatened disaster most deeply in response to the struggle
of the Hemingway protagonist to save himself. It is at such
times that the game structure becomes the only means by
which some measure of security can be achieved, the only
anchor available by which some measure of spiritual stabil
ity can be acquired. If the Hemingway protagonist seems at
times overly fond of the tangible apparatus of his game, we
should perhaps forgive a drowning man his tendency to fondle
his life preserver.
The first critic to apprehend this quality of implicit
terror in Hemingway's work and discuss it at length was
Malcolm Cowley. It was Cowley who probably began the modern
trend of viewing Hemingway more seriously and more closely
than he had been viewed during the years prior to World War
II. In his introduction to The Portable Hemingway (1944),
"Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway," Cowley makes the
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2 1 4
suggestion that Hemingway might more profitably be associ
ated with the "haunted and nocturnal writers," such as Poe,
Hawthorne, and Melville, than with the naturalistic tradi
tion with which Hemingway is usually associated.^
Cowley points out that in Hemingway's fiction there
"are visions as terrifying as those of 'The Pit and the
Pendulum' even though most of them are copied from life"
(p. 41). But Cowley makes his point largely through an em
phasis on Hemingway's unusual selection of subject matter,
the corpses, the gored horses, the punch-drunk boxers, and
nymphomaniacs, whereas the quality of being "nightmares at
noonday" is only in part dependent on the use of such sub
ject matter. As a matter of fact, two of Hemingway's most
2
terrifying stories, "Big Two-Hearted River" and "Hills Like
White Elephants," have no aberrations in them at all. It
might also be added that it was Hemingway's employment of
such unusual subject matter as Cowley dwells on, that
Reprinted in Hemingway; A Collection of Critical Es-
says. ed. Robert P. Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, 1954). Cowley
did the same thing for Faulkner criticism a year later in
another Portable introduction.
^Cowley's interpretation of "Big Two-Hearted River" in
the same article cited above has become the definitive read
ing of the story.
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215
probably led so many readers to associate Hemingway with
the naturalists in the first place and caused them to be
distracted from the deeper shocks in Hemingway's fiction
that have lain largely unperceived for so many years.
No, it is Hemingway's technique which makes the dream
real, and reality so often like a dream. It is his ability
to suggest, sometimes very subtly, that each moment of
man's existence is passed on the edge of an unthinkable
void, and that for no reason at all, the ground may give way
at any time. Such is the precarious position of Nick in
"Big Two-Hearted River," who walks the edge of chaos, test
ing each moment much as a tight-rope walker tests his foot
ing, foot by perilous foot. The very details of each sen
sory moment are so insisted upon, so savored, that they are
the ticks of a time bomb. It is a similar technique, a
variety of verbal irony, that Hemingway uses in "Hills Like
White Elephants," wherein the man insists so often that
"it's perfectly simple" and that "I don't want you to do it
if you don't really want to." We know just the opposite is
the case: it is not simple at all, and he does want her to
get the abortion no matter how she may feel about it. The
whole world is a throw-rug, and with the insistent beating
drum of protested good intentions, the young man is about to
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216
yank the rug right out from under the young lady's feet. In
"Big Two-Hearted River" the insistence on reality makes
everything become paradoxically unreal; in "Hills Like White
Elephants" the insistence that everything is all right makes
us feel sure that everything is not all right at all.
Nick Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River/' like the central
character in each of Hemingway's novels, is charged with the
task of saving his selfhood. For this story can be viewed
not only in the context of the other Nick Adams stories,
the pattern that Philip Young has so admirably recreated,
but also as part of the persistent pattern of achieving
self-honesty and being hard on oneself that we have already
3
noted in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. To
lose this self-conflict is to lose everything, a possibility
that haunts Hemingway's protagonists like Jake Barnes and
Frederic Henry, and is detected by the recurrence of "night
thoughts" and the constant determination "not to think about
it." What precisely these thoughts are remains ominously
unthinkable, creating a pattern of suggested terror that
^Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway. Young's interpreta
tion of "Big Two-Hearted River" takes up the theme of terror
proposed by Cowley and skillfully relates it to the entire
pattern of the Nick Adams stories.
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217
makes it unnecessary for Hemingway ever to resort to the
Gothic materials of a Poe or the semi-Gothic materials of a
Melville or a Conrad. The terror that quietly accompanies
a Barnes or a Henry is the more immediate terror that accom
panies every man; it does not require a monster or a trip to
the Congo for us to find it. One may be reminded of the
concluding stanza from one of Robert Frost's poems:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars— on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home ^
To scare myself with my own desert places.
For Nickj in "Big Two-Hearted River," the heart of
darkness that he must himself fish is the swamp, but it is
also the other "heart" within his own being that he must at
last face. Despite the burned-over countryside of the world
in which Nick finds himself, he sees how the trout keep
themselves steady even in the deep, fast-moving water, and
he finds watching them is "very satisfactory." But when he
goes "deep," deep so that the water in the swamp is "up
under his armpits" and fishes for trout "in places impossible
to land them," will he be able to remain steady? (p. 329).
^"Desert Places," Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New
York, 1959), p. 385
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218
Will Nick be able to risk himself to a commitment again now
that he knows the experience of losing?
In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came
together overhead, the sun did not come through, except
in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light,
the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was
a tragic adventure. (p. 329)
Unperceived even by those readers who have seen the
story as a story of terror barely held under control is the
fact that the prime terror is held, not in the understated
fabric of the story and the ritual acted out by Nick as a
5
"spell to banish evil spirits," but in the ending and the
implications that the ending casts back on the entire story.
In the ending, Nick
climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, toward the
high ground. He was going back to camp. He looked back.
The river just showed through the trees. There were
plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.
(p. 330)
Hemingway's emphasis is not on the day's fishing just com
pleted, but on the challenge of fishing the swamp which Nick
has put off to some indefinite time in the future. The evil
spirits are not really banished at all by the ritual of the
fishing that Nick has done so far, but only kept in abey-
^Cowley, p. 48.
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2 1 9
ance. The whole purpose of Nick's fishing trip is apparent
ly the direct confrontation with the swamp^ a confrontation
he cannot bring himself to.
Thus Nick would seem, at least temporarily and possibly
permanently, defeated in his attempt to risk (from his shaky
condition we can add "again") commitment and the loss that
commitment inevitably involves ("tragedy"). This, then, is
the picture of the unsuccessful man who is unwilling to get
into "the deep water" of another Catherine, another bridge,
or another marlin. There is no doubt that his mere endur
ance at this point involves some courage. The old forms
are enough to secure for him one-half of the "two-hearts"--
but to be complete, to secure the other half of himself, he
must press his courage to the sticking point. He must move
from the heart of light, and the security of the insulation
that life offers in mere procedure, to the heart of dark
ness. Nick's tragedy is that he cannot again face tragedy.
He cannot regain himself entire. To use Hemingway's phrase
from A Farewell to Arms, it may be that Nick is not broken
to become stronger at "the broken places"; it may be that
Nick has lost his selfhood or manhood forever and can never
again be complete.
Like the nightmare, which so frequently focuses on the
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220
emotional condition of the self, the loss or threat of loss
in Hemingway's fiction appears always as an essentially in
dividual proposition. There is no help available beyond the
individual's own resources. Nature cannot heal Nick; Nick
must heal himself. In the final analysis, man stands alone,
terrifyingly alone, cut off from God and men. He is not a
member of a spiritual or temporal society wherein any re
ciprocal benefits are bestowed; if a man contributes to
society in any sense at all, he does so only by fighting
and by winning his own battle. Always victimized, he need
not be a victim until he stops fighting, until he allows
disaster or the threat of disaster to overcome his courage.
The ultimate disaster, as I have pointed out, among many
kinds of loss, is that by failing in courage, one might lose
one's self. This is why, fighting away from victimization,
the central character's emotional condition, although en
veloped in the problem of loss, is more often related to
terror than it is to sentimentality.
Although the central character cannot be helped, it is
necessary in Hemingway's fiction that he be observed, that
his condition and achievement be witnessed and recognized,
if only by the reader. It is a requirement that can modify
the emotional context surrounding the protagonist in many
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221
iways, sometimes leading, depending on how the emotional
values of the situation are handled, to a tragic effect and
sometimes to a pathetic or even sentimental effect in re
sponse to the protagonist's suffering or loss.
We have already noted in a previous chapter how Heming
way found in the bullfight a metaphor for ethical behavior
as well as a metaphor which could express the tragedy of
man's condition. Of tremendous importance to Hemingway is
the presence of an audience within this framework which ob
serves and judge's the behavior of the bullfighter in rela
tion to the game context. As a metaphor, this actor-audi-
ence relationship is rather strange in its application to
the fictionalization of other aspects of life than the bull
fight, for the protagonist of courage becomes tied to the
existence of an observer, and it often seems as important
to Hemingway that the observer be qualified as it is for
the protagonist to be courageous. The reader of Hemingway's
work, in one way or another, is usually offered the oppor
tunity to be observant and appreciative; however, the other
part of the audience is made up of characters within the
story itself who are either (1) unobservant, (2) learning
to be observant, or (3) already observant. When, as we saw
in the last chapter, the audience is primarily unobservant.
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2 2 2
a sense of injustice is created in the reader audience and
sentimentality can result.
The archetypal pattern for unapprehended courage can be
seen in Hemingway's presentation of the bullfight. Two such
scenes are presented in The Sun Also Rises. The first scene
concerns Belmonte, who, although he cheats by pre-selecting
his bulls, faces a public "who wanted three times as much
from Belmonte, who was sick with a fistula, as Belmonte had
ever been able to give, [and as a result the public] felt
defrauded and cheated" (p. 214). The audience begins to
throw cushions and vegetables, and Belmonte, assuming a role
of indifference and contempt for the crowd, moves to an
isolated position against the barrera and leans on it, "his
head on his arms, not seeing, not hearing anything, only
going through his pain" (p. 215). Alone, in pain, and mis
understood, the emotions arising from Belmonte's condition
have nowhere to go except to the reader.
The second example of non-appreciated valour in The Sun
Also Rises is very similar to the scene of the nurses in A
Farewell to Arms and the commentary by the tourists in The
Old Man and the Sea that I have already cited. The bull
fighter Romero gets a bull that is defective in vision so
that he must lure the bull with his body and then step back
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2 2 3
and finish his pass with the cape. Romero actually demon
strates great skill and courage in dealing with the bull in
this way, but the tourists in the stands prefer "Belmonte's
imitation of himself or Marcial's imitation of Belmonte":
"What's he afraid of the bull for? The bull's so
dumb he only goes after the cloth."
"He's just a young bull-fighter. He hasn't learned
yet. "
"But I thought he was fine with the cape before."
"Probably he's nervous now." (p. 218)
It is significant that the only extended scenes of bull
fighting in Hemingway's fiction (the two scenes just re
ferred to plus the story "The Undefeated") all contain un
appreciated valour. Demonstrating further the lack of
appreciation which Hemingway so often connects with his
courageous protagonist in fiction is seen in factual con
trast in one of the photos included in the photographic
appendix of Death in the Afternoon (p. 369). The scene
shows the bullfighter Granero dead in the infirmary after
being gored in the ring. He is surrounded by a crowd of
men; sixteen of the faces of these men appear in the photo
graph. Hemingway's commentary is pointedly bitter: "Only
two in the crowd are thinking about Granero. The others are
all intent on how they will look in the photograph" (p.
369) .
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The second condition of the observer, that of the
learner, can be one which balances the emotion within the
story so that the burden of the reader-audience is more a
cognizance of the emotion than an emotional involvement. A
very effective story in which the emotional sequence of
stimulus and response is well balanced within the story is
"The Killers." Nick has witnessed the attempt to murder the
former boxer. Ole Anderson, by two Chicago hoodlums who,
with unemotional efficiency, have set up Henry's lunch-room
for the kill in anticipation of Ole's nightly visit. But
Ole never shows up, the killers leave temporarily, and Nick
goes off to warn Ole at Hirsch's rooming-house. He finds
Ole in his room. When Nick tells him what has happened at
the lunch-room. Ole thanks him but tells him that there
isn't anything to be done about the killers. When Nick
suggests getting out of town. Ole tells him, "I'm through
with all that running around" (1st 49. p. 385). Ole, who
is the protagonist of courage here, tells Nick that he
hasn't been able to make up his mind to go out but that he
will "after a while" (p. 386). There is the usual irony in
the willing unawareness of the cook and the good-natured
unawareness of the rooming-house landlady in contrast to
the unavoidable doom that Ole has finally brought himself
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2 2 5
to face with a certain amount of dignity as well as resigna
tion. But the emotional impact of the situation is placed
squarely on Nick, rather than on the non-understanding or
unwilling observers, when Nick finds the horror of Ole's
position unthinkable.
Nick cannot face the fact that there are people in real
life, just as there are in the movies, who force other peo
ple to do what they wish at the point of a gun and who make
a kind of game (one of the killers is "like a photographer
arranging for a group picture") of killing someone they
don't even know. Like the steady impersonal march of some
natural disaster, the killers move in for the kill without
any concern for retribution or arrest and with as much pas
sion as a plumber fixing a leaky faucet. Nick simply cannot
believe what he has heard and seen is true. He becomes even
more disturbed when he decides to risk "playing the hero" by
warning Ole, only to find that his act of courage accom
plishes nothing. Nick offers to tell Ole what the killers
look like; he offers to go to the police; he offers to do
anything that might help. But Ole replies that there is no
help, that "there ain't anything to do" (p. 385). The emo
tions that arise from Ole's situation (as reinforced by the
cynical joking of the killers in the opening scenes) are
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226
very precisely balanced by Nick's reactions throughout the
story. It is Nick, not Ole, who twists and turns like a
hooked trout, and because it is Nick, the emotional impact
of the ending of the story is placed on the learning experi
ence and the lesson of general significance that Nick
learns; grim, unavoidable disaster is a part of the real
world and is a possibility that each man must face as he
lives in that world. Despite the aloneness, the sick help
lessness, and even the surrounding lack of comprehension of
Ole's condition, there is no pathetic emphasis in the story
on his individual suffering. There is not a shred of senti
mentality in the story because there is a comprehending
witness in the story to absorb the emotion and this absorp
tion is made explicit, particularly at the crucial point of
the story's ending:
"I'm going to get out of this town," Nick said.
"Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do."
"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room
and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned aw
ful."
"Well," said George, "you better not think about it."
(p. 387)
The structure of the story with its emphasis on Nick's re
actions gives Ole's victimization intellectual distance, and
by doing so, places this short story as firmly within the
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2 2 7
sphere of tragedy as any short story can be placed.
However, it is possible for the learner type of story
to contain sentimentality if the reactions of the learner
are suppressed. Such is the case in the story "In Another
Country." Like Nick, the narrator here witnesses an ex
tremely emotional situation, but unlike Nick's reactions,
the reactions of the narrator are not indicated nearly as
strongly and are insufficient to carry the emotional load.
The emotional condition of the courageous protagonist of
this story, the major, is much more explicitly described
than that of Ole Anderson, the courageous protagonist of
"The Killers," and the major's struggle to contain his emo
tions multiplies the emotional values involved. The major
is a patient in a hospital where he is being treated by
machines (in which he has little faith) for the restoration
of a hand that has been wounded and rendered almost useless.
He is generally very dignified and soldierly, but one day
he becomes very angry and abusive. He leaves the narrator
for a moment and then comes back to apologize for his rude
ness— his wife has just died unexpectedly of pneumonia. The
reaction of the narrator, "'Oh— ' I said, feeling sick for
him. ' I am .s q . sorry, '" is hardly enough to absorb the shock
of what follows:
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2 2 8
He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very
difficult," he said. "I cannot resign myself."
He looked straight past me and out through the window.
Then he began to cry. "I am utterly unable to resign
myself," he said and choked. And then crying, his head
up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and
soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his
lips, he walked past the machines and out the door.
(p. 370)
There is no further reaction by the narrator except a de
scriptive one in which, at the end of the story, he notes
how the doctor has secured some "before and after" photo
graphs of various wounds and placed them in front of the
machines. (The wound now in question is of course neither
photographable nor subject to mechanical therapy.) The
understatement of the last sentence directs the emotional
impact of the major's condition right toward the reader;
"The photographs did not make much difference to the major
because he only looked out of the window" (p. 37 0)
In these two stories, "The Killers" and "In Another
Country," we see two different kinds of emotional suppres
sion: the implicit emotion within Ole Anderson's resigna
tion, and the struggle to suppress and then the actual sup
pression of emotion by the major. The emotional condition
of the major has more impact, but despite the fact that the
emotions are very directly presented, they would not have
the sentimental impact they have if the emotions were
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2 2 9
balanced in the story with an explicit reaction sufficient
to balance them, such as an extreme expression of grief on
the part of the observer.
In both stories the themes are implicit, and the themes
in both cases relate to a discovery made by the learner
based on his emotional sensitivity to the situation. In
"The Killers," Nick discovers that there is evil in the
world that lurks behind everyday reality and is not subject
to remedy. The concentration of the emotion in him puts the
emphasis of the story on his learning reaction, not on the
horror of the material itself. In the case of the narrator
in "In Another Country," the theme is probably revealed
through the narrator's discovery that there is more than one
kind of courage, not only the courage of the medal winners
that he first admires, but also the courage of the major who
"did not believe in bravery" (p. 358). Although the ques
tion "What is courage?" is skillfully posed in the first
half of the story, the comparison of the two kinds of cour
age is left to the reader, the learning experience in the
story is left to the reader, and the emotional reaction in
the story is left to the reader. If the story observer does
not react to the suffering or loss of the courageous protag
onist, the reader observer is called upon to react instead.
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2 3 0
Such a call makes the reader an emotional participant, and
he is forced as a participant to leave his intellectual
distance behind. In the first story we see and ÿudse the
reaction of Nick, cognizant of the emotional values of the
story; in the second story, we feel the loss sustained by
the major, and it is possible for us to make his loss and
suffering our own. It is not a question of one story being
more emotional than the other. It is a question of to what
end and in what direction the emotional pressure is being
applied.
The third type of observer is the already observant
character who can be characterized as the "professional."
Whenever the totally competent observer is included in a
Hemingway story, the emotions arising from the courageous
protagonist are almost always sufficiently balanced and
sentimentality is avoided. The story "A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place" provides, again, a case in point. Despite his at
tempts at suicide, the old man who is the customer at the
cafe is the protagonist of courage here. Note how the con
dition of the old man is ostensibly a very sentimental one.
He is old, alone, and partially deaf. We may conclude from
his suicide attempt that he is greatly emotionally dis
turbed, yet he suppresses his surface emotions with great
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231
dignity. However, the story is in no way sentimental. The
emotional emphasis is not placed on the old man or on the
unaware young waiter, but rather on the perceptive sympathy
of the older waiter, which serves again, as such a reaction
does in "The Killers," to keep the emotion within the story
itself. While sharing the older waiter's sympathy and his
recognition of terror, we are allowed to maintain our in
tellectual distance.
Another case in point is the extremely successful "The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macoraber." Here the already
observant character is Robert Wilson, and the courageous
protagonist is, of course, Macomber. Unlike the arrangement
in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," the courageous protagonist
is the main character, and the observer is a supporting
character. The success of this story is due to the extreme
ly adept way in which Hemingway manipulates the emotional
values at the ending. He leads up to the ending by placing
a great deal of importance on the judgment of Robert Wilson,
so that when Macomber chooses to hold his ground against the
charging buffalo rather than run, as he did from the lion,
Macomber indicates that he has accepted the value system.of
Wilson. Macomber at the end of his life chooses to "play
the game" and by doing so indicates that Wilson's approval
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232
6
is more important to him than his wife's.
After Macomber's wife kills Macomber, the emphasis of
the story is placed on the reactions of the wife and of
Wilson; the courage of Macomber and even his death itself
is curiously submerged below the depiction of Wilson's and
the wife's emotional conflict. Commentators on this story
are still evenly divided as to whether the wife kills Macom
ber accidentally or murders him. For my part, I think that
this controversy must be settled by taking the word of the
narrator, who states definitely that "Mrs. Macomber, in the
car, had shot at the buffalo" (1st 49. p. 135). What is
confusing, but quite significant, is that Wilson thinks or
chooses to think that she has done it on purpose. This is
really a masterful stroke, for the dominant emotion that
emerges from the story is the anger of the white hunter who
had "begun to like" Macomber.
The emotional emphasis of the story cannot be placed
^Although Mrs. Macomber's attitude toward her husband
is certainly both ambivalent and ambiguous throughout the
story, she is clearly bent (for whatever psychological rea
sons ) on maintaining her dominance over Macomber. She is
really a monster created by circumstances at least in part
beyond her own control. Considered from Mrs. Macomber's
point of view, this is a very sad story, but Hemingway does
not allow us to take that perspective.
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233
on the "tragic" death of Macoraber just as he is finding
himself, for such an emphasis on the condition of the cou
rageous protagonist, as I have explained, would probably
cause a sentimental leaking of emotion to the reader. Nor
can it go to the unaware observer, in this case the wife,
who is unaware (as is the young waiter in "A Clean, Well-
Lighyed Place"). Let us assume, for a moment, that Mrs.
Macomber's reaction is a cold "I'm glad he's dead— what are
you going to do about it" one. The satiric irony of this
reaction or any other non-appreciative reaction would turn
the emotion back to the sad condition of Macomber, particu
larly if Mrs. Macomber's reaction were made more emphatic
than Wilson's. If, on the other hand, the emotional empha
sis were on the wife and her grief, and if her grief were
real, the story would become sentimental by turning the
reader's attention to the sad death of Macomber and the
wife's consequent ironic loss. As it is, the wife's reac
tion is kept ambiguous and appears to involve a mixture of
shock, defensiveness, and perhaps grief; but more important
ly, her reactions are completely overshadowed by the clear
power of Wilson's rage. Wilson's angry assertion "Why
didn't you poison him?" is the only way in which Macomber's
short "life" can be made a happy one even though Wilson's
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2 3 4
assertion mav be mistaken and unjust. The placing of emo
tional emphasis on Wilson and his anger (a final expression
of approval for Macomber's behavior) puts the theme of the
story squarely on Macomber's life, rather than on his death.
As we have seen, the patterns of these last two stories
are fairly common in Hemingway's work: the several combina
tions of the unaware observer, the aware (or learning to be
aware) observer, and the courageous protagonist. The main
or central character may be any one of the three, even the
unaware observer. This is the case in the story "A Canary
for One," wherein the emotional emphasis is placed on the
American lady whose ideas and behavior contrast so sharply
with the perceptions and condition of the aware observer,
the narrator of the story. Seldom is the emotional empha
sis placed on unawareness in Hemingway's work without a
measure of sentimentality resulting, but in this story that
pitfall is avoided by having the suffering condition of the
courageous protagonist, the daughter, presented entirely by
implication. In addition to the American lady, we might
recall that both Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry as central
characters began their experiences as unaware observers and
then advanced into other roles.
The fact that the role of the central character may
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2 3 5
shift from story to story or change in the course of a novel
has caused a great deal of confusion and a great many prob
lems for those critics of Hemingway who have attempted to
codify the characteristics of a Hemingway hero prototype.
On an over-all basis, the central character in Hemingway's
fiction may be either the antagonist or protagonist. If the
central character is a protagonist, he may be either an ob
server, a courageous protagonist, or both. In regard to
these possibilities, it is difficult to see what the word
hero means. It is very misleading to talk about Romero, for
7
example, as the "hero" of The Sun Also Rises.
To group together all the characters in Hemingway's
works who display courage, whether they are minor or major
figures, disregarding their particular functions in relation
to the central purposes of the stories or novels they appear
in, is not a very useful approach. At the same time, to
7Mark Spilka, whose admirable article I have already
referred to, regards Romero as "an image of integrity,
against which Barnes and his generation are weighed and
found wanting. In this sense, Pedro is the real hero of the
parable . . (p. 25). Although qualified, Spilka's ter
minology is confusing. Romero is an image, perhaps, and a
symbol of integrity, but not a hero even in the Hemingway
sense. He is barely a character and certainly is not dealt
with on the basis of internal conflict. The conflict may
be there, but it is not the subject of this particular
story.
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2 3 6
group together all of the central characters in order to
codify their conditions or qualities is an extremely diffi
cult and risky procedure and probably requires more caution
than has been shown by some analysts. The fact is that al
though Hemingway's central themes, courage, commitment, and
awareness, remain the same throughout his career, he at
tempts to deal with these themes from a number of different
points of view, displaying more virtuosity and imagination
in shifting from one point of attack to another than he is
usually given credit for. It is very likely that Hemingway
worked by instinct, trying first one combination of elements
and then another in an effort to achieve that effect of
emotional rightness which would bring to his readers the
perfect moral vision, that vision by which man's ordeal
could be seen in clear, and as close as possible to tragic
terms.
What does remain largely the same in Hemingway's work
is the nature of the world that surrounds his characters and
the ethical framework, game, by which his characters' be
havior, understanding, and growth (if any) must be evalua
ted. The most constant demand of all in Hemingway's work is
the demand for ethical judgment, a demand sometimes made of
characters within the story itself, but a demand always made
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2 3 7
of the reader-observer. This demand can be met on the level
of general tragic significance only on those occasions in
which Hemingway has arranged the emotional values of his
story in such a way that the reader can use his intellectual
faculties as well as his emotional sensitivity.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE FINAL INGREDIENT:
MAN'S FAITH IN MAN— THE PROFESSIONAL
Although Nick, in "Big Two-Hearted River," cannot be
thought of as a victim since he does not actually give up
the fight to save himself, neither can his condition be
properly described, in the traditional sense, as tragic.
This "in-between" situation is characteristic of the early
Hemingway protagonist whose courage within a hostile en
vironment may evoke a tragic or near-tragic response from
the reader, yet fails to attain the degree of impact that
the reader has come to recognize as characteristic of the
greatest classical and Shakespearean tragic dramas. Whether
Hemingway's work matches, as of course it does not, every
external feature of traditional tragedy is not important.
What we are concerned with are those unchanging circum
stances of man's existence which lie at the roots of tragedy
and which Hemingway himself, in Death in the Afternoon.
238
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2 3 9
identified as the objects of his search, those circumstances
which produce an effect of valid and lasting emotion.
In his most successful novel. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hemingway comes closest to achieving the emotional depth he
was looking for. It is in this novel that Hemingway largely
recreates in modern terms the emotional climate of tradi
tional tragedy, an emotional climate which, in the words of
Joseph Wood Krutch, is the celebration of the "greatness of
the human spirit. . . . an expression, not of despair, but
of the triumph over despair and of confidence in the value
of human life."^ Like so many other modern novels, Heming
way's works have been often condemned as "expressions of
despair," when actually much of his work, as we have seen,
attacks despair and self-pity. But not until the writing
of For Whom the Bell Tolls is despair completely overcome
and replaced by joy and triumph.
The failure of Hemingway's early novels to achieve full
tragic dimension is not the result of weak protagonists.
Neither Jake Barnes nor Frederic Henry is a Willy Loman;
both Jake and Frederic have the courage and strength to act
^"The Tragic Fallacy," in Tragedy; Plavs. Theory, and
Criticism, ed. Richard Levin (New York, 1960), p. 165.
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2 4 0
and develop that can only come from internal resources far
beyond the depth of a protagonist such as Loman. The fail
ure of the early Hemingway protagonist to gain full tragic
stature is due to the fact that the experiences of a man in
nearly complete isolation, no matter how representative of
contemporary man's condition, cannot lead to tragedy, not
tragedy in capital letters. There can be no real tragedy,
no really significant consideration of man's fundamental
circumstances, without a context of society, and ironically
enough, the "tragedy" of our time is that society in its
traditional sense is, or appears to be, disintegrating.
What is missing from the early novels is not a better pro
tagonist, but what might be called a "better perspective"
within which the protagonist's condition can be given more
meaning, more dimension. Each of Hemingway's last novels,
beginning with For Whom the Bell Tolls (which we will con
sider as most representative of Hemingway's later achieve
ments), might be viewed as attempts to gain, first in one
way and then in another, that perspective of social impor
tance which would give the Hemingway protagonist tragic pro
portions .
Hemingway's progress from the early novels to the later
can be most clearly understood if we make a summary re
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2 4 1
assessment of the conditions of the early protagonists in
regard to their relationships to society. The early pro
tagonist, unlike Camus's Meursault who exposes a fundamental
chaos behind existing social forms, is in the position of
experiencing meaninglessness as a result of the lack of
something that once existed but no longer exists. Nick
Adams, Jake Barnes, and Frederic Henry are men looking for
a place within a meaningful context. These are men who are
not so much faced with nothingness as with the problems of
being caught up in something gone wrong, but still some
thing. It is true, as I pointed out earlier, that the
process of disillusionment and loss may drive the central
character to the very brink of disaster, but although the
terror of nothingness threatens, it is never absolute. In
other words, Hemingway is most concerned with the social
incoherence, inconsistency, corruption, and decay which, as
outlined below, surround his protagonists. The most impor
tant task, therefore, for the Hemingway protagonist is the
establishment of some kind of order, whether it be the order
established by the careful fishing of a stream or the care
ful planning and execution of the dynamiting of a bridge.
In this sense, the much-cited parallel between Hemingway's
early work and Eliot's early work can be seen to have some
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2 4 2
validity. For Eliot's emphasis in such poems as "The Waste
Land" (a thematic emphasis, if not an emphasis in subject
matter) is not on the waste land itself so much as it is on
the spiritual deficiencies that caused the drought. Heming
way's early heroes are much more like the central character
in "The Waste Land" who is searching for the formula through
which the ruins— in the form of the deficiencies of modern
life— can be restored to perfection than they are like the
central characters in contemporary European fiction, who
discover that existence is possible only after one admits
the total absurdity of the universe.
In tragedy the immediate scene may be chaotic, an "un-
2
weeded garden," but behind this particular scene of confu
sion there is always an overriding sense of stable social
institutions which will inevitably prevail and eventually
act to heal the wound. Fortinbras stands forever ready in
the wings, ready to stride on stage and proclaim by his mere
presence that although the general Order may be shaken, it
can never totally disappear. It is, of course, the very
assumption of the existence of this Order which gives the
^William Shakespeare, "Hamlet," The Complete Works of
Shakespeare. ed. Hardin Craig (New York, 1951), p. 905.
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2 4 3
individual man the importance he is felt to have in tragedy.
Within the tragic conception of the universe, as Krutch
says, "Man . . . lives in a world which he may not dominate
but which is always aware of him. . . . man assumes that
3
each of his acts reverberates through the universe." In
Hamlet, a man goes astray, a family is plunged into death
and destruction, a community is shattered, and a kingdom is
rocked and almost toppled. A similar chain of responsibil
ity exists for Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, as
we shall see, but it does not exist for the early Hemingway
protagonist.
On the contrary, one cannot help being struck, in look
ing back over the adventures of Nick, Jake, and Frederic,
by the continual motifs of "lack of connection" and of "what
is missing." Religion, for example, is not denied, ignored,
or mocked— its loss is mourned. Both Jake and Frederic look
longingly at cathedrals; both respect religion (wishing to
be "a better Catholic" or "croyant"). but both stand be
wildered outside true religious belief, divided from it by
some mysterious invisible wall that forbids communion.
All three of these early protagonists are cut off, or
^Krutch, p. 168.
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2 4 4
in the case of Nick, are in the process of being cut off,
from normal home life, and they either do not mention their
families, or, like Frederic Henry, are alienated from them.
(Frederic and Catherine promise each other reassuringly that
neither will ever have to meet the other's parents.) Nick
is alienated from his mother in "The Doctor and the Doctor's
Wife," as is Krebs, who might also be placed in the Nick
Adams sequence of stories, in "Soldier's Home." Later in
the Hemingway chronology, Robert Jordan has been alienated
from his father by the father's suicide and instead looks to
his grandfather as paternal hero.
Nick Adams in his adventures in the Michigan woods and
on the road becomes disillusioned with love ("Ten Indians")
and exposed to perversion ("The Battler," and "The Light of
the World"), disillusioned with war ("Chapter VI," and "A
Way You'll Never Be"), and disillusioned with conventional
heroism ("In Another Country"). As a matter of fact, Nick's
shocks are so numerous, as well as complex, that it is hard
to classify them without oversimplifying them. The story
of Nick Adams can be said to be the story of how Nick dis
covers that most of the social contexts of the world in
which he lives are either fraudulent, illusory, or unsatis
factory. No tragedy is possible in such a context wherein
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2 4 5
the fabric of society itself is so rent and fragmented that
the very existence of an underlying moral Order is cast into
serious doubt. In such a situation the individual, i.e.
Nick, has lost his potency; the chain of responsibility
which links Nick to society is broken.
Beyond refusing to be victimized, there is little left
within the scope of individual action for him to accomplish.
Nick is the very opposite of the traditional hero. His
answer to each monster spawned from the marriage of social
decay and human vice is an agitated withdrawal. In contrast
to the withdrawal of Nick, which is particularly notable in
"The Killers" and "The Battler," or his procrastination, as
seen in "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The End of Something,"
is the increasing courage and engagement of the protagonist
in each successive novel. Nick is the asker of the moral
question, the poser of the problem— a moral "thermometer"
for our time. As suggested in the discussion of "The Kill
ers," Nick is very easy to "read," for his reactions follow
the pattern of his conditioning from a Puritan, mother-
dominated home in a strongly middle-class Midwestern small
town (a town patterned after Hemingway's own Oak Park, which
was referred to as "Saint's Rest" because it contained so
many retired clergymen). The reader may very well be wary
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2 4 6
of accepting too literally the measurements of social con
ditions offered up by a moral thermometer with such a back
ground as Nick's. For Nick, in a way, represents a dramatic
exaggeration which comprises his own kind of "everlasting
nay," and a nay which each successive Hemingway protagonist
attempts to counter with some kind of "everlasting yea," no
matter how small an affirmation it may be.
Yet despite the increased engagements of Jake and
Frederic with their environment, we find many of the same
elements of alienation in the lives of these two protago
nists as we do in Nick's. In addition to Jake's and Fred
eric's lack of ties with home or family, both men are es
sentially without a sense of community or country. Jake and
Frederic seem to exist in a special dimension of their own,
invented by Hemingway, which is barren of fixtures. Their
only ties are to a few friends and acquaintances, and even
these can diminish in strength or be severed completely by
circumstances.
Neither Jake nor Frederic has any connections with or
interest in politics or economics; neither is much concerned
with money or buying or possessing things. Neither is much
involved with his job, nor does either man have much passion
for planning for the future. Both Jake and Frederic are
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2 4 7
strangely classless. They move freely among people of all
classes without any sense of superiority or embarrassment;
neither expresses any real concern about status. In short,
the two protagonists have been almost stripped of external
life and virtually exist as "naked" moral entities. They
are as unreal as Nick Adams and are as much dramatic exag
gerations as he is.
On the other side, the nature of the world around Jake
and Frederic, as we have seen, certainly makes investment
outside the self difficult. Both are surrounded by external
behavior that is senseless and by social institutions that
are empty of real value. Love (as well as marriage, family,
and home) is mocked in the nymphomania of Brett, the roman
tic silliness of Cohn, the mechanical lust of Rinaldi, and
if not mocked, certainly to some extent weakened by the
ultimate lack of dimension achieved in the relationship be-
4
tween Catherine and Frederic. Justice, friendship, duty,
loyalty, honor, and responsibility make up the foundation
upon which the more detailed aspects of adequate human lives
are built and, in turn, are given value, and yet each of
convincing case for the unsatisfactory nature of
Henry and Catherine's love is presented by Lewis, pp. 45-54,
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2 4 8
these virtues or principles in the early stories and novels
is found to be either empty or unavailable. The foundation
for life exists only as words; "Only the names of places
had dignity," (F .A.. p. 185) and no place is really home.
Within such a landscape, the most that Barnes and Henry can
be expected to do is somehow to salvage the best sense of
what they are in themselves as persons and to maintain an
isolated beachhead, protecting whatever dignity they can
muster. The composite figure created by Hemingway in his
early protagonists might be called the smallest yet firmest
possible common denominator of life within the modern world.
One paradox of our time is that although the individual is
thought of as counting for very little, the measure of
reliable truth has shrunk to the dimensions of the individ
ual's nerve endings. Thus Hemingway faced in his search
for emotions with timeless validity the problem that derives
from realizing that although tragedy is based on the wrong
connection of a protagonist with the society in which he
lives, a right connection nevertheless _is possible for the
tragic protagonist. For the early Hemingway protagonist
such a right connection is not possible. Nothing that the
protagonist can do can have any more than a personal or
self-centered ethical impact under such circumstances. Even
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2 4 9
in the case of Frederic Henry, who discovers a commitment to
Catherine outside himself, the emphasis of the novelist is
such that we are interested in this commitment in terms of
what it does for Henry, not what it does to, or for, Cath
erine. And despite the temporary "homes" of Frederic and
Catherine, Catherine becomes only a partner in Frederic's
alienation. The stories of Nick, Jake, and Frederic are
variations on the theme of the preservation of the self.
The "everlasting yea" of Jake and Frederic in response
to the bill of indictment set forth by the characters who
compose Nick represents not a refutation, but a consolida
tion. It is true that there is much emphasis on the in
dividual's struggle in the best known traditional dramatic
tragedies; but Hemingway's is a different kind of emphasis.
The struggles of Jake and Frederic are exceedingly thin in
comparison with the struggles of Hamlet, Lear, Oedipus, or
Antigone, primarily because the courage and stature of the
Hemingway protagonists are built and maintained from within
and have little relevance to the welfare of the social order
as a whole. The early Hemingway "hero" is a hero only in
the sense that we can vicariously identify with his situa
tion; he is not a hero in the sense that he can be consid
ered to be associated with willful and effective action
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2 5 0
within any social pattern that extends very far beyond his
own being. In turn, Jake and Frederic can find little of
a social nature which has a positive relevance to the moral
positions they are attempting to attain for themselves. The
early Hemingway heroes are moral microcosms, literally the
"islands" referred to in the Donne quotation prefixed to
For Whom the Bell Tolls, with only auxiliary lines of com
munication to the outside. In contrast with Robert Jordan,
the victories of Jake and Frederic are almost completely
self-contained: Jake merely conquers self-pity, and Fred
eric merely learns to give love.
The sense of social order within classical or Eliza
bethan tragedy consists really of a complex web of attitudes
which magnify and provide dimension, placing a given act by
the individual within the perspective of paramount impor
tance. One of the main differences between our current
world view and the world view of our predecessors in the
periods that produced great tragedy is that we do not really
believe that what a man does or believes as an individual
can be of much importance. Of course, a single man can
accomplish a great deal for good or evil in our time, as
well as in any other time. We need only to think back on
Hitler to find convincing confirmation of the ethical power
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2 5 1
which can rest in the hands of a single individual. But we
are not as inclined, most of us, to concern ourselves with
Hitler the man as we are to analyze the social forces that
made Hitler's rise to power possible. All ages but ours
have tended to interpret events in terms of people and
material or artistic accomplishment in terms of personal
effort. In this sense, "the age of biography" has given
way to an altogether different age of statistics. Man has
become, in the very important sense of the way in which he
sees himself, the diminished servant of impersonal abstrac
tions, such as "orders," numbers, and slogans ("glory,"
"sacrifice," and "in vain"), as distinguished from ideals
of personal conduct, such as Jordan's deliberate decision
to endure his pain and cover the retreat of his friends.
We simply no longer see man as a significant ethical cause.
Recent writers such as Bellow and Heller have stretched the
logic of this personal anonymity to the surrealistic break
ing point. In Heller's Catch-22. for example, dead men
"live" and live men "die" simply because the records (num
bers) say so.^
It may be that the great American nostalgia for the
^Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York, 1952).
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2 5 2
Old West is related to, among other things, the frustrations
we have all felt in response to our diminished powers to act
with a sense of moral significance. The frontier was a
time, at least in legend, in which a man could make his mark
for good or for evil. Billy the Kid was widely known (not
very accurately, it is true) in his own time as well as in
ours; today's master thieves who accomplish million-dollar
robberies with infinite finesse remain anonymous— we are
much more likely to remember the exact amount of money
stolen than the identities of the apprehended criminals.
True, we do have our heroes, although a great many of them,
interestingly enough, are in one form or another of show
business (i.e., TV, sports, politics, and space explora
tion), but we seldom see social or even political events as
much in terms of people as we do in terms of the "forces"
discussed in the doubletalk condemned by Orwell in his
famous "Politics and the English Language" and in Heming
way's A Farewell to Arms.
The paradox that faces the modern writer in his attempt
to achieve the significant emotional impact that can be
achieved through tragedy is that unless the individual man
can be thought of as having a significant social dimension
(what an earlier age called "nobility"), he can have but
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2 5 3
little stature when thought of as an individual. Joseph
Wood Krutch in "The Tragic Fallacy" defines with extreme
precision the difficulty posed by this paradox (a paradox at
least to our modern thinking) that makes the understanding
as well as the writing of tragedy in our age difficult:
If tragedy is not the imitation or even the modified
representation of noble actions it is certainly a repre
sentation of actions considered as noble, and herein
lies its essential nature, since no man can conceive it
unless he is capable of believing in the greatness and
importance of man. . . . Calamity in tragedy is only a
means to an end and the essential thing which distin
guishes real tragedy from those distressing modern works
sometimes called by its name is the fact that it is in
the former alone that the artist has found himself
capable of considering and of making us consider that
his people and his actions have that amplitude and im
portance which make them noble. (p. 155)
Krutch's statement also comes very close to defining the
task that Hemingway set for himself in writing For Whom the
Bell Tolls: (1) to show that the individual is important,
and (2) to show that the individual's actions can have
social significance.
Illustrative of one of the changes in Hemingway's
thinking that apparently took place in the ten-year interval
from the writing of A Farewell to Arms to the writing of For
Whom the Bell Tolls is the famous, although puzzling passage
in the latter novel wherein Jordan declares his faith. He
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2 5 4
spells out what is fighting for in the very abstractions
that made Frederic Henry sick to his stomach:
You're not a real Marxist and you know it. You be
lieve in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. You believe
in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Don't
ever kid yourself with too much dialectics. . . . You
have put many things in abeyance to win a war. If this
war is lost all of those things are lost. (p. 305)
To the reader of the earlier Hemingway, this declara
tion seems weak and incongruous. Not only has Jordan used
abstractions, but he uses slogans, two slogans from previous
middle-class revolutions as a basis for acting in conjunc
tion with the Communists in Spain. It could be that Heming
way just could not figure out a way to have Jordan make this
kind of statement without using abstractions, or it could be
that Hemingway is defending himself here against charges of
Communist sympathy. However, a better solution is suggested
by something else said by Krutch in his essay on tragedy:
"We accept gladly the outward defeats which it [tragedy]
describes for the sake of the inward victories which it re
veals. . . . However much things in the outward world may
go awry, man has, nevertheless, splendors of his own and
that, in a word. Love and Honor and Glory are not words but
realities" (p. 155). The most obvious answer to the puzzle
of Jordan's words, perhaps too obvious to accept (or too
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2 5 5
void of sophistication), is that this is a sincere declara
tion of faith. Unlike the skeptic, Frederic Henry, Jordan
really believes in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These
are not just words to him but words that represent reali
ties, and they are "real" to Jordan, not because they exist
in immediate, tangible forms, but because he has faith in
their possibility. It is such a faith that makes God real
to man. And by having faith in such basic social ideals,
as unaristocratic as they may be, Jordan has, in a sense,
made tragedy possible.
"A tragic writer does not have to believe in God,"
Krutch continues, "but he must believe in man" (p. 166).
Above all. For Whom the Bell Tolls is an expression of faith
in man, and even more importantly, an expression of belief
in man's noblest possibilities in the full knowledge of the
very worst acts of barbarism and cruelty (as well as stu
pidity, selfishness, and cowardice) of which man is capable.
Jordan's outward defeats, represented both by his failure to
accomplish anything by the blowing up of the bridge and by
his death, are completely overshadowed by the glory of his
power to remain true to his faith until the end. He insists
at his death that his mind remain "accurate" and his emo
tions reject "cynicism." Jordan's is an inward victory of
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2 5 6
some significance.
Throughout the novel, Hemingway takes great pains to
show us that Jordan is not naive or gullible, so that Jor
dan's faith in himself and his cause is established on firm
realistic grounds. All of Hemingway's later heroes are ex
tremely alert and aware individuals, but Jordan is perhaps
the most sharply observant of them all. Prom the very be
ginning of the novel we realize that he is a man who not
only sees everything, but is trained to interpret everything
properly. In the opening pages we see Jordan assessing his
companion ("Robert Jordan trusted the man, Anselme, so far,
in everything except judgment. He had not yet had an op
portunity to test his judgment" [p. 4]) and his surround
ings ("Whoever was above had been very careful not to leave
any trail ..." "[He] noticed that the grass was cropped
down in several places and signs that picket pins had been
driven into the earth" [pp. 4, 12]).
In the middle of the novel, in one of the flashbacks
to Jordan's early experiences in the Civil War, we learn
that Jordan initially felt part of a "crusade," but after
six months of fighting, his "purity of feeling" disappeared
(p. 235). Jordan makes friends among the politically pow
erful within the Republican ranks and finds himself exposed
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2 5 7
to the cynicism and maneuvering that goes on behind the
propaganda veil used to maintain the faith of the naive. At
Gaylord's, the Madrid hotel taken over by the Russians,
Jordan learns that "the talk that he had thought of as cyni
cism when he had first heard it had turned out to be much
too true" (p. 228). He finds that "Gaylord's was the place
where you met famous peasant and worker Spanish commanders
who had sprung to arms from the people at the start of the
war without any previous military training and . . . [finds]
that many of them spoke Russian" (p. 229). Jordan is by no
means a dewy-eyed idealist, and that is what makes his ad
herence to his ideals so convincing and important. Jordan
was a man "who liked to know how it really was; not how it
was supposed to be" (p. 230). The more he fought in Spain
the more he realized that "the things he had come to know
in this war were not so simple" (p. 248).
This last statement by Jordan appears to announce a
different direction in Hemingway's thinking. Hemingway
began his search for "true emotion" by observing the "sim
plest things" within experience, and by the time he wrote
For Whom the Bell Tolls, he found that it is principle that
is "simple," in the sense of being fundamental and lasting,
and that it is experience, after all, which is the compli
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2 5 8
cated thing. In appending his qualification, "You have put
many things in abeyance to win a war" to his abstract state
ment of belief, Jordan displays a complexity of development
in his ability to deal with the world that makes the earlier
protagonist, Frederic Henry, seem like a child in compari
son. Like Henry, Jordan also is cynical about certain
things, but this is not the full dimension of his personali
ty. Jordan, too, is suspicious of wonderful-sounding words;
"You felt that you were taking part in a crusade. That was
the only word for it although it was a word that had been so
worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning"
(p. 235). But like the good bullfighter, and unlike Fred
eric Henry, Jordan is able to combine his cynicism with a
devoutness that the most difficult and depressing of circum
stances cannot shake. No other Hemingway protagonist, ex
cept perhaps Santiago, is as strong and tough as Robert
Jordan or as truly heroic. Hemingway has made For Whom the
Bell Tolls a moral laboratory; he takes a strong fabric,
dips it in the strong acid of an impossibly difficult situa
tion, and finds that the weave has held. Jordan believes;
and what is more, we, the readers, believe that he believes
— and like magic, Jordan's stature is given amplitude. In
short, he is the first Hemingway novel protagonist to be a
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2 5 9
"professional. "
Jordan's devoutness, however, is not easily maintained,
nor can it be and still be credible. Faith, like liberty,
has the price of eternal vigilance, and for this reason For
Whom the Bell Tolls can easily be seen as a novel of faith
and the struggle to maintain it. Hemingway's major problem
in the novel is to make this struggle both difficult and yet
possible, extraordinary and yet immediate enough to touch
the moral struggle faced by every reader. Some critics have
maintained that there is too much internal dialogue in the
novel.^ However, despite large segments of the novel that
depart from it, Jordan's consciousness is the novel's cen
tral focus. Not to see this focus is to miss, of course,
the whole point of the novel, which is to show how Jordan is
able to do what he does, not just to show what he does—
which after all would be not much more than formula heroics.
Jordan's internal conflict is, as we shall see, a highly
structured one within the ethical structure which we have
termed the "game context." We shall also see that Jordan's
^Among others who have indicated this are Nemi D'Agos-
tino, "The Later Hemingway," in Hemingway; A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks, p. 151; and Mark Shor-
er, "The Background of a Style," Kenvon Review. Ill (Winter
1941), 104.
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r .... 260 j
levels of awareness and commitment are much more complex
than those of previous Hemingway protagonists. Dominating
Jordan's consciousness is the familiar game element in the
battle to be self-honest, a battle which is a recurring
motif that links together the many divergent forces, charac
ters, and sub-themes that cluster around the central exter
nal act of blowing up the bridge.
Jordan's heroic stature is in large measure achieved
through his ability to transcend the many different con
flicts that pull on his emotions. Under the best of condi- ;
tions, Jordan's probability of success on this particular |
mission is extremely marginal. The reader becomes aware of :
the difficulty of Jordan's task at the very beginning of the!
I
novel in the flashback scene where General Golz gives him !
I
his orders. Just "how bad" the situation is becomes more |
and more apparent throughout the rest of the novel when we |
find out that Jordan is usually composed, "cold in the
head," and to a certain extent gay in the face of danger.
During his interview with Golz, however, he is so worried
by his assignment that he is almost surly and is completely |
I
i
unable to respond to Golz's joking. I
Through the marginal probability of the mission's suc
cess, Jordan's faith becomes a factor we are made conscious
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2 6 1
î
:of as constituting the difference between success and fail- i
! I
ure. In addition, a kind of "chain of being" is established
i
in the novel, starting with the large offensive at the top, |
I
moving down through the separate functions of the various
units, to the function of the particular unit directed by
Jordan, and resting, finally, on the accurate functioning
of Jordan's mind and the soundness of his spirit. The whole;
weight of this pyramid-in-reverse rests on Jordan. Without
blowing up the bridge and without blowing it up at the right
j
time, the whole offensive (the first big Republican offen
sive of the war) will fail. The chain must not be broken.
"Merely to blow the bridge," as Golz tells Jordan, "is a
failure" (p. 4). Later in the novel, when a Fascist cavalry
unit is in the mountains and there is the opportunity to
"make a massacre," Jordan is careful to warn his men not to
shoot unless they absolutely have to: "It would avail
nothing. That would serve no purpose. The bridge is part
of a plan to win the war. This would be nothing. This
would be an incident. A nothing" (p. 277).
It becomes increasingly clear that large events are
crucially dependent on smaller events and that the over-all
battle for Segovia is dependent on individual battles, which
; in turn are dependent on the internal battles fought in the
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262
I
minds of the key participants. General order is dependent |
i I
on internal order. The importance of the individual is con-|
i
firmed by glimpses given to us by the narrator of internal
battles other than Jordan's, battles fought in the minds of j
Anselmo, Sardo, Pilar, Andres, and Maria. By employing suchj
a structure Hemingway tries to make sure that the reader
perceives that reality is an individual proposition— there
is no whole except as a structure of a number of individual
parts. Such a structure forces us to view the opening pro
logue quotation from Donne not so much as a declaration en
dorsing the importance of social responsibility, as a decla
ration endorsing the importance of the individual. "Any
man's death diminishes mg." because each individual's battle
affects every other man's welfare. The morality of the
whole is the sum of the morality of the parts. There is no
mankind; there are only men.
Such a view of individual responsibility is the basis
of genuine Christian ethics. Although war may seem a
strange setting for a demonstration of Christianity, war
'can be seen as quite appropriate in representing the inhuman
forces of this world, the many pressures inherent in human
existence that would seem to make it impossible for the in
dividual to remain a responsible individual. (We have
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2 6 3
already seen this use of war in A Farewell to Arms.. ) Caught
up in the pattern of the whole, forced in regard to "realis
tic" circumstances to kill and to destroy (representing all
the demands for compromise that the world makes on every
man, whether in war or not), it is still possible for man to
act with principle within such a framework. If we view For
Whom the Bell Tolls in this way, it is almost possible to
see it as a kind of "morality play." For in opposition to
the difficult task of maintaining principle within the worst
of all circumstances are the internal emotional weaknesses,
the little temptations to self-deception that would lead
men astray. Principle is only tested when compromise is
necessary. Human issues, as we all know, are never clear-
cut, and from the ragged edges of experience and the com
plexities of our emotional reactions a "messy battle" emerg
es that has its larger external counterpart in the "messy"
civil war which is the setting of the novel.
Hemingway is extremely careful to show that there are
no real villainies in this war except those engendered by
the general human frailties which make war possible. Atro
city by one side is balanced by atrocity on the other, as
the tale of Pablo's massacre is balanced by the tale of
Maria's rape, and the most hateful aspects of Fascism (much
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2 6 4
7
to the dismay of the Communist critics of the novel) are
seen to be implicit in the authoritarianism, pragmatic cal
culation, scheming, hypocrisy, and brutal blindness of the
Communist elements of the Republican side. It is as diffi
cult to pick out the principles to be endorsed on the gener
al political scene (and Jordan spends a great deal of time
in the novel trying to clarify his precise political posi
tion)^ as it is to make the smaller, more detailed decisions
involving principle in the individual's experience. So not
only is Jordan himself a man who prefers to see things as
they really are as a basis for acting on principle, but
reality is further added to the context in which principle
must be demonstrated by making the war situation itself a
non-oversimplified tissue of rights and wrongs. One of the
most dramatic instances that Hemingway uses to achieve this
careful emotional balance which prevents oversimplification
is to have the Fascist lieutenant (whom we previously learn
to admire for his humanity, which is maintained, like Jor
dan's, despite the barbarity of the duty he must perform).
7
This is most notably demonstrated in Ivan Kashkeen,
"Alive in the Midst of Death; Ernest Hemingway" in Heming
way and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York, 1961).
8pp. 136, 162-165, 229-230, 235, 239, 244-246, 305.
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2 5 5
face Jordan at the end of the novel. Jordan is about to die
to help save his friends by facing the troop of cavalry led
by the Fascist lieutenant. The lieutenant, who is ironi
cally so much like Jordan, is the first who will die from
Jordan's submachinegun.
One of the major moral conflicts in the novel involves
the conflict composed of the duty to kill under the circum
stances of war and the principle which values human life.
Anselmo, whom Jordan refers to as "a Christian, something
very rare in Catholic countries" (p. 287), is extremely con
cerned about the sin of killing another human being. Early
in the novel, in a discussion with Jordan, Anselmo explains
that he feels that there is a great difference between
animals and men, and killing men, even Fascists, is a sin.
Anselmo will kill the Fascists since it must be done, "But
if I live later, I will try to live in such a way, doing no
harm to any one, that it will be forgiven" (p. 41). Since
God is no longer with Anselmo ("If there were God, never
would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes"),
Jordan suggests that it must be Anselmo himself who will
forgive Anselmo— again leading to the individual as the key
moral unit emphasized in the novel.
When Anselmo does his duty by killing the guard at the
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2 6 6
other end of the bridge, he comes to help Jordan place the
explosives with "tears running down . . . [his] cheeks
through the gray beard stubble" (p. 435). Anselmo has prov
en himself the most reliable man among all those available
to Jordan, and for this reason, Jordan chooses him for the
key job of helping with the explosive. Yet it is Anselmo
(in contrast to the others' impatience when Jordan repeats
his orders immediately before the battle) who is concerned
that Jordan repeat his orders very explicitly so that there
will be no mistake and so that Anselmo will know very clear
ly that it is his duty to kill the guard:
"I will do as thou orderest," Anselmo said.
"Yes. I order it thus," Robert Jordan said.
I'm glad I remember to make it an order, he thought.
That helps him out. That takes some of the curse off.
I hope it does, anyway. Some of it. (p. 410)
Jordan, too, is deeply concerned about killing. Not
only does he mourn the death of his own friends (going into
a near state of shock at the death of Anselmo), but he
mourns too the death of the enemy. When the lone cavalry
man rides into camp almost up to the place where Robert and
Maria are sleeping, Jordan kills him with cool precision as
a matter of necessity. But later, in going over the man's
papers, he recognizes that the Fascist is no longer simply
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2 6 7
an enemy figure, but an individual human being, a boy that
he has probably seen "run through the streets ahead of the
bulls at the Feria in Pamplona" (p. 302). Ironically, the
Fascist is the son of a blacksmith, a worker, as well as a
member of a very religious family. It is the medal of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus that was sent to the cavalryman by
his sister which Jordan aimed for when shooting him— a medal
that the sister insists has been proven innumerable times
"to have the power of stopping bullets" (p. 303). Jordan's
reaction to the sister's and fiancee's letters is a deep
sense of guilt and sorrow: "I guess I've done my good deed
for today, he said to himself. I guess you have, all right,
he repeated" (p. 303). But guilt, like other destructive
emotions, must be put aside for duty. "I'm sorry, if that
does any good. . . . It doesn't. . . .All right then, drop
it, he said to himself" (p. 304).
Killing, Jordan feels, can only be justified if it is
a necessity and one does not believe in killing. "If you
believe in it," he tells himself, "the whole thing is wrong"
(p. 304). On these and other matters there is a voice with
in Jordan that tries to keep him straight, that insists on
being heard, and insists that only if these transgressions
are faced honestly and not ignored can Jordan survive as a
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268
moral agent with a clear faith;
You listen, see? Because you are doing something
very serious and I have to see you understand it all
the time. I have to keep you straight in your head.
Because if you are not absolutely straight in your head
you have no right to do the things you do for all of
them are crimes and no man has a right to take another
man's life unless it is to prevent something worse
happening to other people. So get it straight and do
not lie to yourself. (p. 304)
"Do not lie to yourself" is the motto embossed on the
shield of Jordan's moral armor. It is a motto that at times
is not easy to adhere to. Jordan finds, despite himself,
that he is occasionally infected by blood lust. When Augus
tin has the "necessity" to kill like a "mare in heat," Jor
dan first thinks that it is the Spanish who have this lust
for killing as "an extra sacrament" (p. 286), that it is
part of the racial inheritance, whereas, he thinks at first,
"we" do it coldly. But then once again the voice of truth
interrupts him;
And you, he thought, you have never been corrupted by
it? . . . Stop making dubious literature about the Ber
bers and the old Iberians and admit that you have liked
to kill as all who are soldiers by choice have enjoyed
it at some time whether they lie about it or not. . . .
Do not lie to yourself. (p. 287)
Throughout the novel, Jordan is able to maintain a
careful emotional balance between extremes. Not only is he
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permission.
2 6 9
able to maintain his idealism while being a realist and
pragmatist, but he is able to be suspicious as well as
trustful, loving as well as unfeeling and calculating, and
completely loyal as well as skeptical. Jordan's suspicions
in the case of Pablo are, of course, quite justified, and
although he is unable to prevent Pablo's making off with the
detonator and caps, Jordan is usually one step ahead of the
guerrilla leader, whose only virtue is his extraordinary
intelligence. Jordan knows that before "the first friendly
thing he does, he will have made a decision" (p. 16), and
it is when Pablo decides to go along with the plan for the
bridge that Pablo steals the materials and betrays Jordan
and the guerrilla band. Jordan knows too what he has in
mind (murdering the men for the horses) for the guerrillas
that Pablo has recruited during the night after changing
his mind a second time. On the other hand, Jordan is able
to trust others, such as Anselmo, Pilar, and Andres com
pletely, not because they have proven themselves entirely
trustworthy (there is not time enough for that), but because
Jordan is emotionally stable enough to take the necessary
risks, a stability that can only arise from a strong general
faith in humanity.
Just as skepticism and trust balance each other in
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2 7 0
Jordan's personality, so also do the ability to love and
the ability to act with unfeeling coldness when the occasion
demands it. Of course, Jordan's most direct expression of
love is that given to Maria, but his attitude toward Anselmo
and Pilar must certainly be said to include a measure of
love. Many readers have noted the parallel between the two
rabbits that are killed by the Gypsy while they are copulat
ing and the position of Robert and Maria as they are sleep
ing together in the snow. (Jordan even calls Maria "little
Rabbit.") As noted a moment ago, a Fascist cavalryman al
most rides over them before Jordan pushes Maria back into
the sleeping bag and shoots the Fascist. Jordan's complete
switch here from tenderness to the cold posture of an effi
cient killer may appear to be rather cynical: Maria "had
no place in his life now" (p. 267). However, Maria and
Robert are not rabbits; the evidence of the immediate con
text (Jordan's anger at Primitive's question, "How is she
in the bed?" [p. 270] and Jordan's promise to Augustin that
he will marry Maria because he cares for her seriously [pp.
290-291]), as well as the overwhelming evidence throughout
the novel of Jordan's true concern shows that Maria is not
just a convenient outlet for sex. If we examine the paral
lel with the rabbits further, we can see that one signifi
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2 7 1
cant difference between the rabbits and the humans is that
the humans are able to make a rapid transition to duty.
Remember, the rabbits are dead. Principle of a sort that
affects a great number of people's welfare is placed over
self-satisfaction (on whatever level, sensual or romantic).
Jordan's duty is primary, as we see in a fragment from a
conversation that he has with Pilar:
"You are a very cold boy," Pilar says.
"No," he said. "I do not think so."
"No. In the head you are very cold."
"It is that I am very preoccupied with my work."
"But you do not like the things of life?"
"Yes. Very much. But not to interfere with my
work." (p. 91)
When we consider that Jordan's work is no ordinary occupa
tion, but the direct and courageous demonstration of his
belief in social justice, his ability to rapidly shift gears
from love to duty appears more selfless than callous.
Further moderation in Jordan is demonstrated in his
healthy balance between skepticism and loyalty. Jordan has,
as we have seen, a knowledge of the behind-the-scenes
machinations of the Communists. He shows a healthy suspi
cion of political slogans, examining their meanings care
fully. He catches himself inadvertently falling into the
use of "Enemies of the people." He decides that "that was
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2 7 2
a phrase he might omit. That was a catch phrase he would
skip" (pp. 163-164). He knows that the Republicans are not
all pure and the Fascists not all evil:
He believed in the Republic as a form of government
but the Republic would have to get rid of all of that
bunch of horse thieves that brought it to the pass it
was in when the rebellion started. Was there ever a
people whose leaders were as truly their enemies as
this one? (p. 163)
Jordan promises to give "absolute loyalty" and as "complete
performance" (sic) as possible during the war, but at the
same time "nobody owned his mind, nor his faculties for see
ing and hearing" (p. 136).
The "morality play" that takes place in Jordan's mind
is concerned, at one time or another during the novel, with
repulsing or balancing false hope, prejudice, over-idealiza
tion, hatred, anger, resentment, guilt, self-righteousness,
and despair. On the one side, Jordan is tempted to resent
Golz's orders and what they could do to him and the people
he leads; he tells himself, "That is not the way to think"
(p. 43). On the other side, when he is tempted to be too
optimistic and to think how it might be if everything con
cerned with the attack came off without a hitch, he reminds
himself, "Keep your sense of proportion. . . . You must not
get illusions about it now" (p. 432). On the one side, he
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2 7 3
is tempted to overgeneralize the faults he has found among
the Spanish; he tells himself, "This is no way to think"
(p. 135). On the other side, he is so appreciative of
Sordo's gesture of bringing the whiskey to him, he decides
that this is one of the reasons he loves the Spanish, but
quickly he reminds himself, "Don't go romanticizing them"
(p. 204). When Jordan starts to think of all the things
Ithat could go wrong, he tells himself to "stop it" (p. 161)
I
When he comes to admire Anselmo's respect for human life,
jJordan finds it necessary to warn himself not to idealize
Anselmo (p. 287).
Much of the structure of Jordan's internal fight with
himself is based on a paralleling of opposing ideas, values,
and courses of action. Jordan spends much of his time em
phasizing the extremely moral focus in the book, making
distinctions, guarding against tempting inaccuracies, and
weighing the evidence of his perceptions against the demands
of his faith. This pattern, which on an over-all basis can
be roughly referred to as comparison and contrast in nature,
is closely related to another pattern wherein the individual
is implicitly compared to the group. The effect of this
comparison is again to emphasize the importance of the in
dividual .
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2 7 4
One of the major ironies of For Whom the Bell Tolls is
that all of the things we normally tend to think of, particu
larly in our time, in regard to the larger order (the army,
the party, the country) are only successfully carried out or
demonstrated by individuals. Political belief is cynical or
distorted as it is reflected in the Republican camp as a
whole, but it is sincere and quite well-defined in the
thinking of such individuals as Jordan. Armed action fails
on the larger scale of the entire offensive, but succeeds
in the hands of dedicated individuals such as Jordan.
The over-all picture of the Spanish Civil War presented
in Hemingway's novel is really a very dismal one. When Golz
gives Jordan his assignment to blow the bridge, Golz fatal
istically predicts that something will go wrong; "Always
someone will interfere" and "I have never been given what I
ask for even when they have it to give" (p. 5). There are
so many moral cripples within the Republican ranks described
during the course of the novel that the real question, in
terms of the outcome of the war, becomes whether there are
enough of the "good ones" to balance and overcome the con
fusion and decay caused by the cripples. Infesting the
Republican cause are the horse thieves, like Pablo, who have
little if any real social concern and who are anti-social
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2 7 5
parasites that have been able to take power because of the
confusion of the war. Pablo's concern for the welfare only
of his own band contrasts strongly throughout the novel with
Jordan's willingness to submit himself entirely to the wel
fare of the whole, a whole that can only be conceived of in
abstract terms. Pablo, on the other hand, is one who would
not fight for anything that he cannot feel directly in im
mediate terms, such as revenge, or anything that he cannot
eat or drink. In addition to Pablo, another cripple on the
immediate scene is Rafael, the Gypsy, who is really more of
a draft dodger than a patriot. Other cripples infesting
the larger scene are the general. Lister, who is a "true
fanatic" and executes his troops for very little reason in
order to gain discipline; the "fake soldiers" of Barcelona
"who like everything about war except to fight" (p. 247);
and the "puffy-eyed man" who, at Karkov's party, goes into
raptures over the propaganda figure, "La Pasionaria." At
one point in Karkov's party, a general, disgusted at "this
filthy sewing circle of gossip," declares that "one man who
could keep his mouth shut could save the country if he be
lieved he could" (p. 359). To top off the list of gro
tesques is the frightening Comrade Marty, whose vicious
cleverness, à la Stalin, becomes so blind to reality that
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2 7 6
it approaches insanity.
In addition to such grotesque figures, the novel con
tains continual hints of mismanagement, intrigue, falsehood,
and double standards. "I have to go upstairs to see people.
Upstairs people" has an ominous sound as Karkov takes his
leave from Jordan in the Gaylord Hotel bar to go up to a
meeting (p. 248). Indeed, the landscape is certainly just
as dismal as Jake's postwar Paris or Frederic's Italian
front in World War I, if not more so. Yet the crucial dif
ference is that whereas the earlier Hemingway protagonists
form no allegiances, or else withdraw their allegiances,
Jordan finds the game worth playing despite the fact that
the circumstances are not perfect. As a matter of fact,
his determination is made even stronger:
Sure, Gaylord's was the place you needed to complete
your education. It was there you learned how it was all
really done instead of how it was supposed to be done.
. . . Gaylord's was good and sound and what he needed.
At the start when he had still believed all the nonsense
it had come as a shock to him. But now he knew enough
to accept the necessity for all the deception and what
he learned at Gaylord's only strengthened him in his
be-lief in the things that he did hold to be true. (p.
230) (Italics mine.)
In this last statement of Jordan's the difference be
tween the early Hemingway protagonist and the later Heming
way protagonist is precisely defined. The early protago
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2 7 7
nists are amateurs, the later are professionals; the early
protagonists are defensive— their only advances are tenta
tive, their commitments outside themselves are tenuous at
best, Jordan does not cut off the world because it is not
perfect; its imperfection only strengthens his determination
to do what little he can. Similarly, Colonel Cantwell
serves well in an Army full of incompetents, egomaniacs, and
petty politicians. The weakness he perceives around him
does not weaken his pride, his dignity, his purpose, or his
faith. Similarly, Santiago fishes for one hundred and
eighty days without catching a fish. He, by God, goes out
alone, as far out as he can, and fishes on the one hundred
and eighty-first day. He catches the biggest fish he has
ever seen, watches it devoured, lost, before his eyes, bit
by bit. And after the incident is all over, he makes plans
with the boy to fish yet again. The human spirit, Hemingway
tells us in his last story, is like the dream of a lion. A
lion in itself is powerful, beautiful, sensual, dignified,
as well as gay and playful. But the dream of a lion is even
better. It can never be destroyed and lives in the hearts
of certain men forever. The individual does count.
The individual man can become a significant moral agent
even in our time, and the manner of Robert Jordan's death
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2 7 8
illustrates this as well as anything that Hemingway has
written. At the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls, as Robert
Jordan lies wounded, ready to die as he knows he must, forc
ing himself not to pass out or take the easy way by shooting
himself, one is reminded of his earlier statement that "he
would much prefer not to die" and that he "would abandon a
hero's or a martyr's end gladly" (p. 164). Just as Jordan's
ideals are made more meaningful by his insistence on viewing
life realistically, so is his death made more meaningful by
his genuine desire to live. One is also reminded of the
thoughts of Sordo as he faces death on a hilltop surrounded
by Fascist cavalry on the ground and aircraft overhead
(thoughts that are so similar to the statement by Catherine
Barkley at her death); "If one must die, he thought, and
clearly one must, I can die. But I hate it" (p. 312). Like
Sardo, who is able to face death with a certain gaiety,
telling himself little jokes (earlier Jordan points out to
himself that "all the best ones, when you thought it over,
were gay" [p. 17]),^ Jordan through his pain is able to get
Compare these lines from Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli":
"[They] Do not break up their lines to weep./ They know that
Hamlet and Lear are gay;/ Gaiety transfiguring all that
dread./ All men have aimed at, found and lost." The Col
lected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1951), p. 292.
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2 7 9
off a small joke to himself before the end:
We ought to have portable short wave transmitters.
Yesr there's a lot of things we ought to have. I ought
to carry a spare leg, too.
He grinned at that sweatily because the leg, where
the big nerve had been bruised by the fall, was hurting
badly now. (p. 469)
Typically of Jordan, the battle within his spirit is
fought to the very end, not just to maintain consciousness
and courage, but to keep his thinking straight. One of his
last injunctions to himself during the final moments is
"Keep it accurate. . . . Quite accurate" (p. 466). Having
kept himself straight inside, he is ready to perform his
last external, social act (an act that is symbolic in a way
of the moral dilemma posed by the entire novel, since it is
a necessary killing) with a dignity and skill befitting a
professional: "And if you wait and hold them up even a
little while or just get the officer that may make all the
difference. One thing well done can make— " (p. 470).
"One thing well done," like Golz's statement on the
telephone when he learns, after all, that the attack will
probably fail ("Nous ferons notre petit possible"), is our
modest hope. It is not much, but neither is it a whimper.
Jordan dies with one of the most believable heroic flourish
es of the mind and spirit in modern literature. Because he
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2 8 0
wins the game, is stern with himself to the end, he is able
to do, in truth, all that is possible for him to do, and
what he has done somehow makes faith seem possible, even in
our time. Hemingway's search for "true emotion" turns out
to be the search for the truth about man. Within For Whom
the Bell Tolls the results of this search are presented with
the deepest honesty and faith that a skillful professional
could employ.
Thus we end this consideration of Hemingway's work in
a sense where we began it, with an author dedicated to his
art, to the importance of the individual, and to the cen
trality within the human spirit of emotion honestly ex
pressed. What came in between The Sun Also Rises and For
Whom the Bell Tolls was a literary journey filled with the ^
anguish and joy experienced by a writer who never stopped
pushing himself toward different, and what he hoped were
better, things. This was the kind of journey that could
only be taken by a writer who was not afraid to experiment,
to search, to change, to grow and to gamble with his whole
being on the results. This was a writer who had the courage
to meet and overcome more extremes of literary failure and
success than almost any fair-sized group of ordinary writers
put together. Hemingway's journey may have started as an
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2 8 1
escape from Aunt Sally, but it ended as a journey into the
heart of man; for Hemingway, like all the very great novel
ists of our century, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, Camus, and Faulk
ner, was essentially a philosophical writer who searched for
the bed-rock foundations of man's experience and who tied
that search to the parallel quest of finding newer, more
immediate, and more vigorous ways of expressing the living
experience in words.
The writer of our time, be he novelist, poet, or play
wright, seems to have found the problems of art and the
problems of living to be more closely joined together as
aspects of the same problem than did his predecessors.
Certain unique aspects of this age with which we are all
familiar— our science, our mass media, and our weakening
religious faith— have made the old fundamental questions
about life and its purposes more imperative and immediate to
our civilization than they have been very possibly since the
birth of Christ.
So it was that Hemingway began his quest for truth by
trying to rid himself and his readers of "old supersti
tions." His attack, in The Sun Also Rises. was on those
idols of the mind and emotions that prevent us from seeing
clearly what is real and investing emotionally in what is
important. At the same time, Hemingway began to laboriously
forge a style that in its own way expressed a manner of
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permission.
2 8 2
seeing. Clear, sharp, and emotionally pointed, his style
eschewed comment, digression, and the labeling of emotions,
emphasizing instead the artistic imitation of how it feels
to live in our age and pressing into service the more usual
tools of poetry— verbal irony, imagery, symbol, and allu
sion— in order to carry his thematic materials. Employing
theme and style together, he began to cut through the blind
ing haze of sentimentality and pretense, so that at the end
of The Sun Also Rises Hemingway's Jake Barnes has become his
own man, an individual, who can at last see himself and
others clearly. The quest continues in the story of Fred
eric Henry, who is unable to see anything that is worth
caring about until, searching through the muddle of false
emotions, egotism, and empty words, he finds that by com
mitting himself to another's welfare and happiness he is
able to give meaning to his own experience, a meaning that
cannot be verbalized so much as it can be expressed by being
lived and felt.
From Hemingway's continual probing of his own experi
ence in order to make sense out of the process of living
comes the game metaphor, a way to give life meaning on its
own immediate terms. Evolved from the bullfight and other
sports and games which pitted the individual against himself
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2 8 3
and his environment, the game metaphor embodies a system of
behavioral rules and ideals which centers on the individ
ual's necessity to be true to himself. Within the game con
text, values, morals, and meaning can be found to have an
intimate and vital connection with life itself. Frederic
Henry turns to a game worth playing, his commitment to Cath
erine, and as a result a life initially without meaning is
given purpose. For a few minutes, enough time to have made
his living worthwhile, Francis Macomber becomes a man and
plays the game by being unflinchingly faithful to the ideal
that he sets for himself. To "play the game" requires that
man deal with life directly, rather than at second- or
third-hand, and as a result man is led into a life where
honor, pride, and courage are once more possible, into a
life where the old virtues no longer exist only as abstrac
tions from experience to be mouthed and perverted.
When, in Hemingway's work, experience itself finally
became meaningful and ordered within the application of the
game metaphor, then the words that expressed the basic vir
tues and principles of experience became more meaningful
too. Living could once more be carried on as an act of
faith in principles too broad to be immediately confirmed
or denied on the basis of a single man's successes or
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2 8 4
failures. An individual's faith in his fellow man, in Hem
ingway's third major novel, sets the stage for tragedy. The
death of Robert Jordan remains a significant death, for the
circumstances and reasons for his death tie it firmly to the
lives of each of us, just as surely as Jordan goes with
Maria. Jordan does go, if Maria believes it; and Jordan
does live, if the reader believes it.
Though tied too firmly to the world as it really is to
admit that man's faith and man's ability to keep that faith
are often lost and broken, Robert Jordan, nevertheless,
lives and dies in faith and in commitment to others, for
his only alternative is loss of self, the nothingness of
abnegation. Like Colonel Cantwell and Santiago who follow
him, the Hemingway protagonist, the hero of For Whom the
Bell Tolls finds duty to himself equivalent to duty per
formed for all, and finds that the truest emotion, the emo
tion that can never be destroyed, is the emotion that is
honestly and without reservation given to others.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
285
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Creator Benson, Jackson Jerald (author)

Core Title Ernest Hemingway and the doctrine of true emotion

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

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