Hemingway's Notion of "Grace"

Abstract

NOTES HEMINGWAY'S NOTION OF "GRACE" George Monteiro Brown University The opening sentence of Mark Schorer's 1952 review of Ernest Hemingway 's The Old Man and the Sea reads: "The only guts that are mentioned in this story are the veritable entrails of fish, but we are nevertheless reminded on every page that Hemingway once defined this favorite word, in its metaphorical use, as 'grace under pressure'."1 Schorer thereby perpetuated what was already a canard in Hemingway studies, one that persists to this day. Even the author's own denial in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald that "guts" was what he meant by the phrase did not entirely dispel the prevailing notion. Whatever Hemingway meant by "grace under pressure," what he precisely did not mean was "guts." To Fitzgerald he explained, on April 20, 1926, that "it makes no difference your telling G[erald] Murphy about bull fighting statement except will be careful about making such statements. Was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers. "2 It was not Fitzgerald, however, who first carried the phrase over into print. That credit, it appears, belongs to Dorothy Parker. In 1929, she wrote in The New Yorker: That brings me to the point which I have been trying to reach all this time: Ernest Hemingway's definition of courage—his phrase that, it seems to me, makes Barrie's "Courage is immortality" sound like one of the more treble trillings of Tinker Bell. Mr. Hemingway did not use the term "courage." Ever the euphemist, he referred to the quality as "guts," and he was attributing its possession to an absent friend. "Now just a minute," somebody said, for it was one of those argumentative evenings. "Listen. Look here a minute. Exactly what do you mean by 'guts'?" "I mean," Hemingway said, "grace under pressure." That grace is his. The pressure, I suppose, comes in, gratis, under the heading of the Artist's reward.3 If the "grace" belonged to Hemingway, so, it might appear, did the phrase "grace under pressure." No one, it seems, has questioned the notion that he coined the phrase. Nor is there any reason to question it. What does seem likely, however, is something else, namely that his idea of what constituted "grace" was anticipated by his predecessor in the short story, Anton Chekhov. 112George Monteiro In his letters, some of which were translated into English in 1924, Chekhov talks about "grace." To his younger contemporary and fellow writer Maxim Gorky, he writes: "Your best things are 'On the Steppe,' and 'On the Raft.'" He continues: They are splendid things, masterpieces; they show the artist who has passed through a very good school. I don't think that I am mistaken. The only defect is the lack of restraint, the lack of grace. When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace."· Chekhov's notion fits perfectly with Hemingway's aesthetics as well as his ethic. When Hemingway moved from Cuba in 1959, he left behind at Finca Vigía five volumes of Chekhov's stories in English, the Constance Garnett translations published in the 1920s. This small collection included The Schoolmaster, and Other Stories (1921), The Wife, and Other Stories (1921), The Cook's Wedding, and Other Stories (1922), The Duel, and Other Stories (1922), and The Party, and Other Stories (1925).5 Since Hemingway was an avid reader,6 one who moved around a good deal and therefore perforce left some things behind and lost others, even this generous sampling of Chekhov in his Cuban library should not be assumed to constitute the totality of his reading of the Russian's work, though it does serve to suggest an early date for his acquaintance with Chekhov's fiction. Confirmation of this appears in his letter of December 20, 1925, to his friend Archibald MacLeish. From Schruns, where he was vacationing with his wife and young son, he wrote that Chekhov, although "an amateur writer," did write "about 6 good stories."7 This "amateur" had also stipulated a definition for the...