Bryant Mangum, "Ernest Hemingway," in Critical Survey of Long Fiction," ed. Frank Magill. Salem Press. pp. 1337-1349. Reproduced from Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Copyright 1981, by Salem Press, Inc. By permission of the publisher: Salem Press, Inc.
Other literary forms
Ernest Hemingway will
be best-remembered for his novels and short stories, though critical debate
rages over whether his literary reputation rests more firmly on the former
than the latter. In his own time, he was known to popular reading
audiences for his newspaper dispatches and for his essays in popular magazines.
He wrote, in addition, a treatise on bullfighting (Death in the Afternoon,
1932) which is still considered the most authoritative treatment of the
subject in English; an account of big-game hunting (Green Hills of Africa,
1935); two plays (The Fifth Column, 1938 and
Today is Friday,
1926); and reminiscences of his experiences in Paris during the 1920's
(A Moveable Feast, 1964).
Achievements
There is little question
that Hemingway will be remembered as one of the outstanding prose stylists
in American literary history, and it was for his contributions in this
area that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, two years
after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. The general
reader has often been more intrigued by Hemingway's exploits--hunting,
fishing, and living dangerously--than in his virtues as an artist.
Ironically, he is often thought of now primarily as the chronicler of the
"lost generation" of the 1920's, a phrase which he first heard from Gertrude
Stein and incorporated into The Sun Also Rises as one of its epigraphs.
The Hemingway "code," which originated as a prescription for living in
the post-World War I decade, has become a catch phrase for academicians
and general readers alike.
Biography
Ernest Miller Hemingway
was the first son of an Oak Park, Illinois, physician, Clarence Edmonds
Hemingway, and Grace Hemingway, a Christian Scientist. As a student
in the Oak Park public schools, Hemingway received his first journalistic
experience writing for The Trapeze, a student newspaper. After
serving as a reporter for the Kansas City Star for less than a year,
he
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enlisted as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross and was sent in 1918 to serve on the Italian front. He received a leg wound which required that he be sent to an American hospital in Milan, and there he met and fell in love with Agnes Von Kurowski, who provided the basis for his characterization of Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway was married in 1921 to Hadley Richardson. They moved to the Left Bank of Paris, lived on her income from a trust fund, and became friends of Gertrude Stein and other Left Bank literary figures. The Paris years provided Hemingway with material for the autobiographical sketches collected after his death in A Moveable Feast. Also in the Paris years, he met the people who would become the major characters in his roman a clef, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway dedicated the novel to Hadley, divorced her (in retrospect, one of the saddest experiences in his life), and married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927. During the 1930's, Hemingway became attached to the Loyalist cause in Spain, and during the years of the Spanish Civil War, he traveled to that country several times as a war correspondent. His feelings about that war are recorded in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was an enormous popular success. In 1940, he divorced Pauline and married the independent, free-spirited Martha Gellhorn, whom he divorced in 1945, marrying in that same year Mary Welsh, his fourth wife. The 1952 publication of The Old Man and the Sea is usually regarded as evidence that the writing slump, which Hemingway had suffered for nearly a decade, was ended. The last years of his life were marked by medical problems, resulting to a great extent from injuries which he had sustained in accidents and from years of heavy drinking. In 1961, after being released from the Mayo Clinic, Hemingway returned with his wife Mary to their home in Ketchum, Idaho. He died there on July 2, 1961, of a self-inflicted shotgun wound.
Analysis
"All stories,
if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story teller who
would keep that from you," Ernest Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon.
He might have added that most of his own stories and novels, if traced
back far enough, also begin in death. In The Sun Also Rises,
death from World War I shadows the actions of most of the main characters;
specifically, death has robbed Brett Ashley of the man she loved before
she met Jake, and that fact, though only alluded to in the novel, largely
accounts for her membership in the lost generation.
A Farewell to Arms
begins and ends with death: Catherine Barkley's fiance was killed
before the main events of the novel begin; and her own death at the end
will profoundly influence the rest of Frederic Henry's life. The
Caporetta retreat scenes, often referred to as the "death chapters" of
A
Farewell to Arms, prompt Frederic Henry to give up the death of war
for what he believes to be the life of love. In
For Whom the Bell
Tolls, death is nearby in every scene, a fact suggested first by
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the image of the bell in the novel's
title and epigraph, the bell whose tolling is a death knell. Perhaps
most important in
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan's choice
to die as he does comes from his reflections on the heroic death of his
grandfather compared with what he sees as the cowardly suicide of his father.
Finally, Santiago's memories of his dead wife in The Old Man and the
Sea play in and out of his mind as he confronts the possibility of
his own death in his struggle against the great marlin and the sea.
Indeed, in Hemingway's
work, as Nelson Algren observes, it seems "as though a man must earn his
death before he could win his life." Yet it would be a mistake to
allow what may appear to be Hemingway's preoccupation--or, to some, obsession--with
death to obscure the fact that he is, above all, concerned in his fiction
with the quality of individual life, even though it must be granted that
the quality and intensity of his characters' lives seem to increase in
direct proportion to their awareness of the reality of death.
There is a danger,
however, in making so general an observation as this. Hemingway's
attitudes about life, about living it well and living it courageously in
the face of death, changed in the course of his most productive years as
a writer, those years between 1926 and 1952, which were marked by the creation
of his three best novels, and the Nobel Prize-winning novella
The Old
Man and the Sea. During this period, Hemingway shifted away from
what many consider the hedonistic value system of Jake, Brett, Frederic,
and Catherine, a system often equated with the Hemingway code, to a concern
with the collective, almost spiritual value of human life reflected in
the actions of Robert Jordan and Santiago. If the constant in Hemingway's
works, then, is the fact that "All stories, if continued far enough, end
in death," the variable is his subtly changing attitude toward the implications
of this fact, no better gauge of which can be found than in the ways his
characters choose to live their lives in his major novels.
The best prologue
to Hemingway's novels is a long short story, "Big Two-Hearted River," which
has been described as a work in which "nothing happens." By the standards
of the traditional, heavily plotted story, very little does happen in "Big
Two-Hearted River," but the main reason for this is that so much has happened
before the story opens that Nick, Hemingway's autobiographical persona,
has been rendered incapable of the kind of action one usually associates
with an adventure story. Death has occurred; not literal human death,
but the death of the land, and with it the death of Nick's old values.
It has been brought about by the burning of once-lush vegetation that covered
the soil and surrounded the water of Nick's boyhood hunting and fishing
territory. Presented with this scene, Nick must find a way of living
in he presence of it, which he does by granting supremacy to his senses,
the only guides he can trust. He earns the right to eat his food
by carrying the heavy backpack containing it to his campsite; after working
with his own hands to provide shelter, he can savor the cooking and eating
of the food.
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He can then catch grasshoppers,
which have adapted to the burning of the woods by becoming brown, and use
them as natural bait for fishing. Then he can catch fish, clean them,
eat them, and return their inedible parts to the earth to help restore
its fertility.
It is appropriate
that "nothing happens" in this prologue to Hemingway's novels because the
dilemma of his main characters is that "nothing" is going to happen unless
a modern Perceval removes the plagues of the people and restores fertility
to the land. The task for Hemingway's characters, particularly those
in his early works, is to establish a code by which they can live in the
meantime. Nick, like T.S. Eliot's Fisher King, who sits with his
back to an arid plain at the end of The Waste Land (1922), is shoring
up fragments against his ruins: he is developing a personal system that
will enable him to cope with life in the presence of a burned out, infertile
land. Also, like Eliot and many other lost-generation writers, Hemingway
suggests that the actual wasteland is a metaphor for the spiritual and
psychological impotence of modern man, since the state of the land simply
morrors the condition of postwar man's psyche. Like the grasshoppers
in "Big Two-Heaarted River," who have changed color to adapt outwardly
to the changing of the land, Nick must adjust internally to the altered
condition of his psyche, whose illusions have been destroyed by the war,
just as the land has been destroyed by fire.
An understanding
of the principles set forth in "Big Two-Hearted River" is perhaps essential
to an understanding of the life-in-death/death-in-life philosophy that
Hemingway presents in his major novels, particularly in
The Sun Also
Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Bringing these principles
in advance to The Sun Also Rises enables a reader to see the mythical
substructure that lies beneath the apparent simplicity of the story line.
On the face of it, The Sun Also Rises tells the story of Jake Barnes,
whose war wound has left him physically incapable of making love, though
it has done so without robbing him of sexual desire. Jake has the
misfortune to fall in love with the beautiful and, for practical purposes,
nymphomaniac Lady Brett Ashley, who loves Jake but must nevertheless make
love to other men. Among these men is Robert Cohn, a hopeless romantic
who, alone in the novel, believes in the concept of chivalric love.
Hemingway explores the frustration of the doomed love affair between Jake
and Brett as they wander from Paris and its moral invalids to Pamplona,
where Jake and his lost-generation friends participate in the fiesta.
Jake is the only one of the group to have become an aficionado,
one who is passionate about bullfighting. In the end, though, he
betrays his aficion by introducing Brett to Pedro Romero, one of
the few remaining bullfighters who is true to the spirit of the sport--one
who fights honestly and faces death with grace--and this Jake does with
full knowledge that Brett will seduce Romero, perhaps corrupting his innocence
by infecting him with the jaded philosophy that makes her "lost."
Predictably, she does seduce Romero, but less predictably lets him go,
refusing to be "one of these bitches
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that ruins children." Finally,
she and Jake are left where they started, she unrealistically musing that
"we could have had such a damned good time together"--presumably if he
had not been wounded--and he, perhaps a little wiser, responding, "Yes.
. . .Isn't it pretty to think so."
Few will miss
the sense of aimless wandering from country to country and bottle to bottle
in The Sun Also Rises. The reader who approaches Jake's condidtion
as a logical extension, symbolically rendered, of Nick's situation in "Big
Two-Hearted River," however, will more fully appreciate Hemingway's design
and purpose in the novel. As is the case in "Big Two-Hearted River,"
the death with which The Sun Also Rises begins and ends is less
a physical death than it is a living or walking death, which, granted,
is most acute in Jake's case, but which afflicts all of the characters
in the novel. They must establish rules for playing a kind of spiritual
solitaire, and Jake is the character in the novel who most articulately
expresses these rules, perhaps because he is the one who most needs them.
"Enjoying living," he says, "was learning to get your money's worth and
knowing when you had it." In a literal sense, Jake refers here to
the practice of getting what one pays for with actual money, but in another
sense, he is talking more abstractly about other kinds of economy--the
economy of motion in a good bullfight, for example.
To see how thoroughly
Hemingway weaves this idea of economy into the fabric of the novel, one
needs only to look at his seemingly offhand joke about writing telegrams.
On closer examination, the joke yields a valuable clue for understanding
the Hemingway code. When Jake and Bill, his best friend, are fishing
in Burguete, they receive a telegram from Cohn, addressed simply, "Barnes,
Burguete." The address was free, and Cohn could have included full
name and address, thus increasing the probablility that Jake would get
the message. As a response to Cohn's telegram, Jake and Bill send
one equally wasterul: "Arriving to-night." The point is that
the price of the telegram includes a laugh at Cohn's expense, and they
are willing to pay for it.
After the Burguete
scene, there is no direct discussion of the price of telegrams, but through
this scene, Hemingway gives a key for understanding how each character
measures up to the standards of the code. Ironically, Bill, with
whom Jake has laughed over Cohn's extravagance and whom Jake admires, is
as uneconomical as Cohn. From Budapest, he wires Jake, "Back on Monday";
his card from Budapest says, "Jake, Budapest is wonderful." Bill's
wastefulness, however, is calculated, and he is quite conscious of his
value-system. In his attempt to talk Jake into buying a stuffed dog,
Bill indicates that, to him, things are equally valueless: whatever
one buys, in
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essence, will be dead and stuffed.
He is a conscious spendthrift who has no intention of conserving emotions
or money. He ignores the fact that letters, cards, and telegrams
are designed to accommodate messages of different lengths and that one
should choose the most appropriate (conservative) form of communication
available. At first, it seems strange that Jake can accept as a true
friend one whose value-system is so different from his, but just as Frederic
Henry in A Farewell to Arms will accept the priest, whose code is
different, so can Jake accept Bill. Both the priest and Bill are
conscious of their value-systems. Thus, if Bill's extravagance appears
to link him with the wasteful Cohn, the similarity is a superficial one.
Like Jake--and unlike Cohn, who still believes in the chivalric code--he
has merely chosen extravagance as a way of coping, knowing that whatever
he gets will be the equivalent of a stuffed dog. Morally, Bill is
less akin to Cohn than he is to Rinaldi in A Farewell to Arms, who
continues his indiscriminate lovemaking, even though he knows it may result
in syphilis. Just as Frederic Henry remains true to Rinaldi, so Jake
remains true to Bill.
Standing midway
between Bill and Cohn is Brett's fiance Michael, whose values, in terms
of the code, are sloppy. Like Cohn, Mike sends bad telegrams and
letters. His one telegram in the novel is four words long:
"Stopped night San Sebastian." His one telegram in the novel is four
words long: "We got here Friday, Brett passed out on the train, so
brought her here for 3 days rest with old friends of ours." Michael
could have gotten more for his money in the telegram by using the ten allotted
words, just as he could have sent a letter without abbreviations for the
same price. The telegram and the letter suggest that although he
is conscious of the principle of economy, he simply has no idea
how to be economical. Thus, when Brett says of Michael that "He writes
a good letter," there is an irony in her comment which Jake acknowledges:
"I know. . . . He wrote me from San Sebastian." In juxtaposing the
telegram and the letter, Hemingway shows Michael to be a man without a
code, a man who, when asked how he became bankrupt, responds, "Gradually
and then suddenly," which is precisely how he is becoming emotionally bankrupt.
He sees it coming, but he has no code that will help him deal with his
"lostness."
Unlike Cohn,
Bill, and Mike, both Brett and Jake send ten-word telegrams, thus presumably
getting their money's worth. When Brett, in the last chapters of
the novel, needs Jake, she wires him: "COULD YOU COME HOTEL MONTANA
MADRID AM RATHER IN TROUBLE BRETT"--ten words followed by the signature.
This telegram, which had been forwarded from Paris, is immediately followed
by another one identical to it, forwarded from Pamplona. In turn,
Jake responds with a telegram which consists of ten words and the signature:
"LADY ASHLEY HOTEL MONTANA MADRID ARRIVING SUD EXPRESS TOMORROW LOVE JAKE."
Interestingly, he includes the address in the body of the telegram in order
to obtain the
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ten-word limit. The sending
of ten-word telegrams indicates that Jake and Brett are bonded by their
adherence to the code; since they alone send such telegrams, the reader
must see them as members of an exclusive society.
Yet ironically,
to Jake and Brett, the code has become a formalized ritual, something superimposed
over their emptiness. They have not learned to apply the code to
every aspect of their lives, the most striking example of which is Brett's
ten-word (excluding the signature) postcard at the beginning of Chapter
Eight: "Darling. Very quiet and healthy. Love to all
the chaps. Brett." The postcard has no word limit, except that
dictated by the size of one's handwriting. Brett, however, in the
absence of clearly labeled values, must fall back on the only form she
knows: in this case, that of the ten-word telegram, which is here
an empty form, a ritual detached from its meaningful context.
Jake and Brett,
then, come back full circle to their initial frustration and mark time
with rituals to which they cling for not-so-dear-life, looking in the meantime
for physical pleasures that will get them through the night. Yet
if this seems a low yield for their efforts, one should remember that Hemingway
makes no pretense in The Sun Also Rises of finding a cure for "lostness."
In fact, he heightens the sense of it in his juxtaposition of two epigraphs
of the novel: "You are all a lost generation" from Gertrude Stein,
and the long quotation from Ecclesiastes that begins "One generation passeth
away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. . .
.The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down. . . ." As Hemingway
maintained, the hero of The Sun Also Rises is the abiding earth;
the best one can hope for while living on that earth, isolated from one's
fellowman and cut off from the procreative cycle, is a survival manual.
Finally, that is what The Sun Also Rises is, and this is the prescription
that it offers: one must learn to exhibit grace under pressure, and
one must learn to get his money's worth. In skeleton form, this is
the foundation of the Hemingway code--the part of it, at least, that remains
constant through all of his novels.
Many of the conditions
that necessitated the forming of a code for Jake and Brett in The Sun
Also Rises are still present in A Farewell to Arms, and there
are obvious similarities between the two novels. Like Jake, Frederic
Henry is wounded in the war and falls in love with a woman, Catherine Barkley,
whose first love, like Brett's, has been killed before the main events
of the novel begin. Yet there has been a subtle change from The
Sun Also Rises to A Farewell to Arms in Hemingway's perception
of the human dilemma. The most revealing hint of this change is in
the nature of the wound that Frederic receives while serving as an ambulance
driver on the Italian front. Unlike Jake's phallic wound, Frederic's
is a less debilitating leg wound, and, ironically, it is the thing which
brings him closer to Catherine, an English nurse who treats him in the
field hospital in Milan. Though their relationship
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begins as a casual one, viewed from
the beginning by Frederic as a "chess game" whose object is sexual gratification,
it evolves in the course of Catherine's nursing him into a love that is
both spiritual and physical. Catherine's pregnancy affirms at least
a partial healing of the maimed fisher king and the restoration of fertility
to the wasteland that appeared in The Sun Also Rises.
With this improved
condition, however, come new problems, and with them a need to amend the
code practiced by Jake and Brett. Frederic's dilemma at the beginning
of the novel, how to find meaning in life when he is surrounded by death,
contains clear-cut alternatives: he can seek physical pleasure in
the bawdy houses frequented by his fellow soldiers, including his best
friend Rinaldi, or he can search for meaning through the religion practiced
by the priest from the Abruzzi; he can do either while fulfilling his obligation
to the war effort. His choices, simple ones at first, become limited
by forces beyond his control. First, he must discard the possibility
of religion, because he cannot believe in it; then, he must reject the
life of the bawdy houses, both because it is not fulfilling and because
it often brings syphilis. These are choices which even a code novice
such as Frederic Henry can make, but his next decision is more difficult.
Knowing that Catherine is pregnant and knowing that he loves her, how can
he continue to fight, even for a cause to which he feels duty bound?
Catherine, who had earlier lost her fiance to the war and who had refused
to give herself to him completely because of her sense of duty to the abstract
virtue of premarital sexual purity, has prepared Frederic for his decision,
one forecast by the title
A Farewell to Arms. Frederic's choice
is made easier by the disordered and chaotic scenes that he witnesses during
the Caporetta retreat, among them the shooting of his fellow officers by
carabinieri. Partly because Catherine has initiated him into the
life of love, then, and partly because he needs to escape his own death,
Frederic deserts the Italian army in one of the most celebrated baptismal
rites in American literature: he dives into the Tagliamento River
and washes away his anger "with any obligation," making what he terms a
separate peace.
If Hemingway
were a different kind of storyteller, the reader could anticipate that
Frederic and Catherine would regain paradise, have their child, and live
happily ever after. In fact, however, no sooner have they escaped
the life-in-death of war in Italy to the neutrality of Switzerland, where
the reader could logically expect in a fifth and final chapter of the novel
a brief, pleasant postscript, than does the double edge hidden in the title
become clear. Catherine has foreseen it all along in her visions
of the rain, often a symbol of life, but in A Farewell to Arms a
symbol of death: "Sometimes I see me dead in it," she says.
The arms to which frederic must finally say farewell are those of Catherine,
who dies in childbirth. "And this," Frederic observes, "is the price
you paid for sleeping together. . . . This was what people get for loving
each other."Some will take this ending and Frederic Henry's observations
about love
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at face value and accuse Hemingway
of stacking the odds against Frederic and Catherine, maintaining finally
that Hemingway provides a legitimate exit from the wasteland with a code
that would work and then barricades it capriciously. There is, however,
ample warning. From the beginning of the novel, Hemingway establishes
Catherine as one who knows well the dangers of loving, and from the time
of her meeting with Frederic, she balances them against the emptiness of
not loving. In most ways, Catherine is a model of the code hero/heroine
established in The Sun Also Rises: she stoically accepts life's
difficulties, as evidenced by her acceptance of her fiance's death; and
she exhibits grace under pressure, as shown in her calm acceptance of her
own death. In giving herself to Frederic, she adds a dimension to
the code by breaking through the isolation and separateness felt by Jake
and Brett; finally, even though she does not complete the re-creative cycle
by giving birth to a child conceived in love, she at least brings the possibility
within reach. The reader must decide whether Frederic will internalize
the lessons he has learned through Catherine's life and allow his own initiation
into the code, which now contains the possibility of loving, to be accomplished.
There are some
tenets of Hemingway's philosophy through the publication of A Farewell
to Arms about which one is safe in generalizing. The most obvious
and most important of these is his belief that the only things in life
that one can know about with certainty are those things that can be verified
through the senses, as Jake can confirm that he has had good food or good
wine and as Frederic can verify that being next to Catherine feels good.
Hemingway refuses to judge this belief in the primacy of the senses as
moral or immoral, and Jake articulates this refusal with mock uncertainty
during a late-night Pamplona monologue on values: "That was morality;
things that made you disgusted after. No, that must be immorality."
The point is that in referring observations about life to the senses, one
relieves himself of the need to think about abstractions such as love and
honor, abstractions that the main characters in the first two novels carefully
avoid. Frederic, for example, is "always embarrassed by the words
sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain." With
such a perspective, the value of life can be rather accurately measured
and described in empirical terms. Similarly, death in such a system
can be described even more easily, since there is nothing in death to perceive
or measure, an idea vividly rendered in Frederic's remarks about his farewell
to Catherine: "It was like saying good-by to a statue."
In looking back
on Catherine's death, Frederic or the reader may conclude that it had sacrificial
value, but until the late 1930's, Hemingway was reluctant in his novels
to identify death with an abstract virtue such as sacrifice or to
write about the value of an individual life in a collective sense.
By 1937, however, and the publication of what most critics regard as his
weakest novel, To Have and Have Not, Hemingway's attitudes toward
life and death have changed. Harry Morgan, the "have not" spokesman
of the novel, finally with much
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effort is able to mutter at the end,
"One man alone ain't got . . . no chance." After saying this he reflects
that "It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all
his life to learn it." The major works to come after To Have and
Have Not, namely For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man
and the Sea, amplify Morgan's view and show Hemingway's code characters
moving toward a belief in the collective values of their own lives.
The epigraph
of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was taken from a John Donne sermon
and which gives the novel its title, points clearly to Hemingway's reevaluation
of the role of death in life: "No man is an Iland, intire
of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the
maine.
. . . And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls
for thee." Regardless of the route by which Hemingway came to exchange
the "separate peace" idea of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell
to Arms for the "part of the maine" philosophy embraced by Robert
Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, one can be sure that much of
the impetus for his changing came from his strong feelings about Spain's
internal strife, particularly as this strife became an all-out conflict
during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This war provides the backdrop
for the events of For Whom the Bell Tolls and the novel's main character,
like Hemingway, is a passionate supporter of the Loyalist cause.
The thing that one immediately notices about Jordan is that he is an idealist,
which sets him apart from Jake and Frederic. Also, unlike Jake, who
wanders randomly throughout Europe, and unlike Frederic, whose reasons
for being in Italy to participate in the war are never clearly defined,
Jordan has come to the Sierra de Guadaramas with the specific purpose of
blowing up a bridge that would be used to transport ammunition in attacks
against the Loyalists. Thrown in with the Loyalist guerrillas of
Pablo's band at the beginning of the novel, Jordan is confronted with the
near-impossible task of accomplishing the demolitiion in three days, a
task whose difficulty is compounded by Pablo's resistence to the idea and,
finally, by increased Fascist activity near the bridge.
Potentially
even more threatening to Jordan's mission is his meeting and falling in
love with beautiful and simple Maria, who is in the protection of Pablo's
band after having been raped by the Falangists who killed her parents.
Again, however, Jordan is not Frederic Henry, which is to say that he has
no intention of declaring a separate peace and leaving his duty behind
in pursuit of love. He sees no conflict between the two, and to the
degree that Hemingway presents him as the rare individual who fulfills
his obligations without losing his ability to love, Jordan represents a
new version of the code hero: the whole man who respects himself,
cares for others, and believes in the cause of individual freedom.
Circumstances, though, conspire against Jordan. Seeing that his mission
stands little hope of success and that the offensive planned by General
Golz is doomed to failure by the presence of more and more Fascists, he
attempts to get word through to Golz, but the
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message arrives too
late. Although he manages successfully to demolish the bridge and
almost escapes with Maria, his wounded horse falls, rolls over, and crushes
Jordan's leg. He remains at the end of the novel in extreme pain,
urging the others not to stay and be killed with him, and waiting to shoot
the first Fascist officer who comes into range, thus giving Maria
and Pablo's group more time to escape.
Jordan is perhaps
Hemingway's most ambitious creation, just as For Whom the Bell Tolls
is his most elaborately concieved novel. Its various strands reflect
not only what he had become the standard Hemingway subjects of personal
death, love, and war, but also his growing concern with the broader social
implications of individual action. Jordan's consideration of his
mission in Spain clearly demonstrates this: "I have fought for what
I believe in for a year now," he says. "If we win here we will win
everywhere. . . ." How well Hemingway has woven together these strands
remains a matter of critical debate, but individually the parts are brilliant
in conception. One example of the many layers of meaning contained
in the novel is the Civil War framework, which leads the reader not only
to see the conflict of social forces in Spain but also to understand that
its analogue is the "civil war" in Jordan's spirit: the reader is
reminded periodically of the noble death of Jordan's grandfather in the
American Civil War, compared to the "separate peace" suicide of Jordan's
father. Jordan debates these alternatives until the last scene when
he decides to opt for an honorable death which gives others a chance to
live. This, Hemingway seems finally to say, gives Jordan's life transcendent
value.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
theorized early in his friendship with Hemingway that Hemingway would need
a new wife for each "big book." As Scott Donaldson observes, the
"theory worked well for his [Hemingway's] first three wives (Hadley: The
Sun Also Rises; Pauline: A Farewell to Arms; Martha: For
Whom the Bell Tolls), but breaks down in Mary's case because
The
Old Man and the Sea does not qualify as a "big book." It does
qualify, however, as a major epilogue to the "big books," much as "Big
Two-Hearted River" qualifies as their prologue. In the prologue,
Hemingway outlines the dilemma of modern man and establishes the task with
which he is confronted in a literal and figurative wasteland. For
Nick in the story, Hemingway posits a swamp, which Nick may fish "tomorrow"
and which is a symbolic representation of life with all its complexities,
including male-female relationships. In the "big books," Hemingway
leads the reader through the wasteland, showing first, in The Sun Also
Rises, the risk of personal isolation and despair in a life cut off
from the regenerative cycles of nature. In A Farewell to Arms,
he dramatizes the vulnerability of the individual even in a life where
there is love; and finally, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he presents
a "whole man" who recognizes the value of individual sacrifice for the
survival of the human race. In the epilogue, The Old Man
and the Sea, Hemingway carries this principle to its final step and
issues, through Santiago, his definitive statement about
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the role of life in death.
It is no surprise
that The Old Man and the Sea takes the form of a parable and that
its old man takes the form of the archetypal wise man or savior common
to most cultures, mythologies, and religions. While others who surround
Santiago depend on gadgets to catch their fish, Santiago relies only on
his own endurance and courage. He goes eighty-four days before hooking
the marlin, against whose strength he will pit his own for nearly two full
days, until he is finally able to bring him to the boat and secure him
there for the journey from the Gulf Stream. Numerous critics have
noted the similarities between Santiago and Christ. Santiago goes
farther out than most men, symbolically taking on a burden for mankind
that most men could not or would not take on for themselves. When
Santiago returns to land from his ordeal, secures his boat, and heads toward
his shack, Hemingway describes his journey explicitly in terms of Christ's
ascent to Calvary: "He started to climb again and at the top he fell
and lay for some time with the mast across his shoulder." Moreover,
Santiago talks with the boy Manolin about those who do not believe in him
or his ways in terms that are unmistakably religious: of the boy's
father, who does not want his son to be with the old man, Santiago remarks,
"He hasn't much faith." In all of this, Hemingtway is leading the
reader to see that some, in going out "too far," risk their lives in order
to transmit to others the idea that "A Man can be destroyed but not defeated."
Finally, it is of little importance that sharks have reduced Santiago's
great fish to a skeleton by the time he has reached land because the human
spirit which has been tested in his battle with the fish has in the end
prevailed; those who are genuinely interested in that spirit are rarely
concerned with ocular proof of its existence. Santiago's legacy,
which must stand as Hemingway's last major word on the human condition,
will go to Manolin and the reader, since, as the old man tells him, "I
know you did not leave me because you doubted"; and he did not doubt that
man's spirit can prevail.
Hemingway, then,
traveled a great distance from the nihilistic philosophy and hedonistic
code of The Sun Also Rises to the affirmative view of mankind expressed
in The Old Man and the Sea. His four major works, if read
chronogically, lead the reader on an odyssey through the seasonal cycle
of the human spirit. "All stories, if continued far enough, end in
death, and Hemingway never stops reminding the reader of that fact.
He does add to it, though, in his later work, the hope of rebirth that
waits at the end of the journey, a hope for which nature has historically
provided the model. The reader of Hemingway's work may find the idea
of metaphorical rebirth less a solace for the individual facing literal
death than Hemingway seems to suggest it can be. Few, however, will
leave Hemingway's work--"his shelf of some of the finest prose by an American
in this century"--without feeling that he, at least, speaks in the end
with the authority of one who has earned, in Carlos Baker's words "the
proud, quiet knowledge of having fought the
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fight, of having lasted it out, of having done a great thing to the bitter end of human strength."
Major publications other than
long fiction
SHORT FICTION:
Three Stories and Ten Poems, 1923; In Our Time, 1924, 1925;
Men
Without Women, 1927; Winner Take Nothing, 1933; The Fifth
Column and the First Forty-nine Stories, 1938; The Snows of Kilimanjaro
and Other Stories, 1961; The Nick Adams Stories, 1972.
PLAYS: Today
is Friday, 1926; The Fifth Column, 1938.
NONFICTION: Death
in the Afternoon, 1932;
The Green Hills of Africa, 1935; A
Moveable Feast, 1964.
Bibliography
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway:
A Life Story, 1969.
___________. Hemingway: The Writer
as Artist, 1952.
Donaldson, Scott. By Force of
Will: The Life and Art of Ernest
Hemingway,
1977.
Hanneman, Audre. Ernest Hemingway:
A Comprehensive Bibliography,
1967.
Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway,
1965.
Bryant Mangum
Virginia Commonwealth University