Hemingway's "Francis Macomber" in Pirandellian and Freudian Perspectives

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway's Short Happy Life of (1936) is one of his finest stories. The author counted it among his best achievements, and a great number of critical readings have shown it to be a text that is supremely characteristic of Hemingway's style as well as of his subject matter, themes and preoccupations. It gives us in terse dialogue and graphic narrative, mostly from the two male characters' viewpoints, the East African setting, the safari, the action scenes, and, above all, the emotional crisis that comes to a head among the main participants. Critical discussion has centered chiefly around the ending (murder or accident?) and the evaluation of the three major characters, Robert Wilson (admirable or brutish?), Macomber (initiate to true heroism or sham virility?) and Margaret Macomber (hateful or pitiable?). (1) Other critical preoccupations have included aspects of colonialism, Hemingway's misogyny, or smaller points like the significance of the guns mentioned in the text, of the Shakespeare quotation (serious or ironical?), or the meaning of four-letter man (the c-word, of course). This essay approaches the text from two diametrically opposed angles. First it takes up the philological question of Hemingway's sources, and then it tries to supplement former readings by a psychoanalytically guided interpretation of the tale's psychodynamic deep-structure, its phantasmal scenario of early-childhood affects and object relations, in the aim of clarifying the literary profile of the story and referring it to broader psycho-cultural contexts. The quest for the sources of Hemingway's tale has hitherto been only partly successful. Biographical parallels seem to be more apparent than literary analogues. Francis is a work of fiction, but was clearly triggered off by stories and situations encountered at the African safari undertaken by Hemingway and his wife in 1933-34 (described in Green Hills of Africa, 1935). Philip Percival, the white hunter and guide of the party, is recognizable in Robert Wilson to a certain extent, although Wilson's role is less friendly and humorous than Pop's part in Green Hills of Africa. The author's strained feelings about his rich wife, Pauline Pfeiffer--they split up soon after--can be found in the depiction of Margot Macomber as a typical bitch. (The theme is also present, as is well known, in Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1936.) Margot's biting dialogue sounds different, though, from Poor Old Mama's solicitous, cheerful talk in Green Hills. Robert Wilson's clipped manner of speech, packed with Briticisms, seems partially to go back to a British infantry officer, Eric Dorman-Smith, whom Hemingway had met and admired as a young man. (2) Wilson and Macomber are, of course, also projections of Hemingway's ambivalent self-fantasies, his own particular idealizations and anxieties. Other historical persons behind the characters include the attractive Jane Mason (Hemingway's occasional lover and sportsfellow of the mid-thirties) as well as an anonymous nice jerk to whom Hemingway referred enigmatically more than twenty years after the completion of the story. (3) The ending of the narrative has historical model. Philip Percival, who had mentioned to Hemingway instances of sexual contacts between some colleagues of his and their female clients, remarked drily that to his knowledge no client has ever succeeded in shooting her husband as EH describes. (4) The literary analogues so far mentioned by critics are of a more general kind. Philip Young pointed out that Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), one of Hemingway's favourite texts, relates, as does Hemingway's short story, a young man's passage from fear to courage. (5) Other suggested parallels include Stewart Edward White's The Land of Footprints (1912), a book Hemingway had read, which describes hunting in Africa in terms comparable to Macomber, and Leo Tolstoy's novella Death of Ivan Illich (1886), which centres around a loveless marriage and the maturation of the eponymous character. …