The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels Linda Patterson Miller The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels. By Hilary K. Justice.Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. 162 pp. Cloth $39.00. Most scholars recognize Hemingway as a writer who wrote what he knew, which means he wrote what he lived—sometimes even as he was living it. Many scholars also recognize how readers too often misread Hemingway's texts, drawing direct parallels between Hemingway's personal life and the narrative life so as to perpetuate biographical fallacies that ignore artistic nuance. Hemingway himself, as Hilary K. Justice argues in The Bones of the Others: The [End Page 140] Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels, came to understand that fame defined his reading public's expectations for his work, a recognition that then inhibited his ability to write truly, or truthfully. This idea that "fame became of him" is not a new insight. What is stunningly new about Justice's book is her recognition that Hemingway's conflict between his private and public selves (what she calls the "Writer" who writes Personal books versus the "Author" who writes what people see as Authentic books) determined the overarching stylistic and thematic configurations of his life's work (which she defines in the aggregate as the "Hemingway Text"). As Hemingway's fame escalated following the publication in 1926 of The Sun Also Rises (which thrust him into the public arena as an Author), he began to devise artistic innovations that would allow him to mine the mother-lode of personal material that had inspired his stories written between 1923 and 1927. He would side-step personal exposure as a writer to the degree that he discovered ways to embed and perhaps to deflect the personal material within the text. These acts of transformation, as Justice describes it, began to transcend individual texts by cross-referencing multiple texts, thus creating the larger meta-text that Hemingway himself could not have anticipated as a young writer. He "could not yet have the perspective on his own creative process to articulate what in retrospect would become obvious: that in his Personal writing, he would always represent his emotional response to his current situation by refracting it through his past, finding emotional points of contiguity between his present and his past, and using this doubled emotional intensity to make his readers 'feel more than they understand,' the purpose of Hemingway's 'theory of omission'" (4–5). In the first chapters of her book Justice illustrates how Hemingway used this refractive process in his early stories, best seen as paired entities (the Nick Adams stories as aligned with the marriage tales, for example). Justice convincingly argues that Hemingway often worked almost simultaneously on two different stories, perhaps with one in the early generative stages as he worked to complete the other. This alignment allowed Hemingway to transform one narrative's conflict into the other narrative's resolution, thus deflecting the real personal issues in the material at hand. As Justice recognizes, Hemingway's difficulty in completing books during his later, post-World War ii period resulted from his juggling several works simultaneously, to the degree that "the experiences that informed [his] early works, as well as his experiences since writing them" complicated [End Page 141] his collective artistic consciousness even as it led to an increasingly intricate and more opaque style as a high modernist. As Hemingway summed it up for Harvey Breit in 1950, "'In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus. If they don't understand that, to hell with them'" (57). He would also declare in The Garden of Eden manuscript the importance of knowing "'how complicated it is'" so as to "'then state it simply'" (55). Hilary Justice's book cannot be easily "dissected" primarily because its thesis underscores the interdependent stylistic and thematic relationships of all of Hemingway's writing. To the degree, then, that the reader must regard Hemingway's work collectively and also non-sequentially...