Hemingway's Work Research Articles

"How People Go to Hell": Pessimism, Tragedy, and the Affinity to Schopenhauer in The Sun Also Rises

This paper suggests a way of relating Hemingway's work to pessimism as a philosophical tradition and to tragedy as a literary genre. The first section summarizes the thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer, the most important representative of pessimism in philosophy. The aesthetics of this German philosopher give us the concept of the "tragedy of circumstances," extremely useful in the study of texts which are not tragedies in the classic sense of the word. The second section applies the terms pessimism and tragedy to Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

News from the Hemingway Collection

Save America's Treasures: Preservation Update This spring with the support of our Save America's Treasures grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennedy Library celebrated its first year of preservation work on the Ernest Hemingway Collection. All of Hemingway's letters that are housed at the Library—written from when he was nine years old in 1909 to the time of his death in 1961—were conserved at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover, Massachusetts. This preservation task included 2,500 letters, each one individually assessed and treated. In addition, we have updated the Finding Aid for Ernest Hemingway's Outgoing Correspondence and made it available for the first time online. The Finding Aid is located at: http://www.jfklibrary.org/fa_ehcat_outgoingcorr.html. Along with the outgoing correspondence, the Finding Aid for Ernest Hemingway's Manuscripts is now keyword searchable and is located at http://www.jfklibrary.org/fa_ehcat_mss.html. Among the items that NEDCC conserved was the diary of Agnes Von Kurowsky, Hemingway's Red Cross nurse at the hospital in Milan where he convalesced after his WWI injuries. She is the woman on whom the character Catherine Barkley of A Farewell to Arms was loosely based. Her diary entries describe her first encounters with her new patient, "Mr. Hemingway," who arrived at the hospital on 17 July 1918, only to celebrate his 19th birthday four days later. Agnes writes of the birthday party she and the other nurses and patients threw for him: "Mr. Hemingway's birthday, so we all dressed up and had gelati on the balcony and played the Victrola." Kennedy Library staff has also concentrated preservation efforts on the impressive collection of books from Hemingway's private library. The collection includes an unnumbered and unbound press copy of James Joyce's [End Page 151] Ulysses with Hemingway's signature on the cover page as well as a draft of Ezra Pound's Cantos published by Three Mountain Press printed specifically for Hemingway on handmade watermarked paper. These are among the books in the collection that are scheduled for conservation along with several signed first editions of Hemingway's works, some of which were donated to the Collection. Hemingway's handwriting is scrawled along the margins throughout his personal copies, providing a glimpse into his analysis of other authors. As one can imagine, Ernest Hemingway's library is filled with books on two of his favorite subjects: Spain and African wildlife. Each book in his personal library has been cleaned and precisely measured for a custom made, acid free box to ensure its preservation. Four of the books, including Los Proverbios by Francisco Goya, Portrait of Mabel Dodge by Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and the The Torrents of Spring, received conservation treatment at NEDCC. Preservation efforts have also been directed toward Hemingway's considerable collection of non-print materials. In the process of cleaning, cataloging, and re-housing the diverse objects, staff have revisited some of the wonderful pieces that comprise the Collection: a sterling silver baby spoon with "EH" engraved in the curved handle, a lock of Ernest Hemingway's hair cut in August of 1947 that has surprising tints of red blended with the shock of white that we have come to recognize as Papa's, and the Al Valore Militare Medal, the Italian medal of honor, awarded to Hemingway on 8 June 1918 for his heroism at the battle of Piave. 10th International Colloquium on Ernest Hemingway in Cuba In late May, the Kennedy Library's Ernest Hemingway Curator, Susan Wrynn, traveled to Havana, Cuba for the Ernest Hemingway Colloquium at the Ambos Mundos hotel. The conference, which celebrated the 65th anniversary of the first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, was attended by fifty plus scholars from Cuba, the United States, and as far away as Italy. Susan's presentation offered an overview of the...

Music at the Finca Vigia: A Preliminary Catalog of Hemingway's Audio Collection

This illustrated note provides a description and preliminary catalog of Hemingway's Audio Collection, including phonograph records and the sound system, at the Museo Ernest Hemingway (Finca Vig'a) in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. The description considers architectural and acoustic features of the house, some specifics of Hemingway's sound technology, and the organization of the collection, as well as patterns of wear that may indicate Hemingway's favorite works. The catalog is based on digital enhancements of photographs taken by the author in November of 2000.

Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories

greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939, says Jean-Paul Sartre in a 1946 essay in The Atlantic Monthly, the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck. [. . .] At once, for thousands of young intellectuals the American novel took its place together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States.1 Hemingway s use of dialogue, short declarative sentences and his emphasis on action (instead of inner monologue) appealed to Sartre and Albert Camus, both of whom wanted to express new sensibilities in keeping with the accelerated rhythms of the machine age. In La Force de l'âge (The Prime of Life), Simone de Beauvoir writes that a great many of the rules that she and Sartre observed in their novels were inspired by Hemingway.2 Sartre, the author of La Nausee {Nausea) was reading Hemingway in the 1930s and admired what Claude-Edmonde Magny calls la technique objective dans le roman americain [the objective technique in the American novel].3 Sartre believed that psychological analysis, the hall mark of the French style from Mme de LaFayette to Marcel Proust, could no longer mirror the complexities of the new era or the sense of the absurd generated by the events of World War II. In their book, Transatlantic Migration: The Contemporary American Novel in France, Thelma M. Smith and Ward L. Miner state that in the wake of the American influence, it was much more important to express the social interactions rather than indulge in psychological analyses.4 In addition to these new stylistic changes and an emphasis on social interactions, Hemingway's work, from the beginning, was imbued with a deep sense of loss and the absurd. When Gertrude Stein referred to the author of The Sun Also Rises as a member of the lost generation she was

Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice , and: Hemingway's Theaters of Masculinity (review)

REVIEWS Broer, Lawrence R. and Gloria Holland, eds. Hemingwayand Women: Female Critics and die Female Voice. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2002. xiv + 353 pp. Cloth: $39.95. Paper: $24.95. Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway's Theaters ofMasculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2003. vii + 284 pp. Cloth: $59.95. Paper: $24.95. If by some strange miracle the late, venerable Hemingway scholar Carlos Baker (1909-1987) were resurrected and transported to a presentday Hemingway conference, or able to leaf through a recent batch of Hemingway criticism, how well would he recognize the "new" Ernest Hemingway? Well enough, I suppose—for Baker surely knew a great deal more about the man than he could say in his authorized biography (1969) or imply in his authorized edition of letters (1981)—but any more casual student of Hemingway educated entirely before 1986 might be much harder pressed to recognize in recent scholarship the familiar literary macho man of modern American mythology (even if this mythic Hemingway, however obsolete, lives on in popular culture and in far too many American classrooms). Seldom has a major writer been as thoroughly reconstructed as Hemingway has been since the 1986 posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden. The revolution in Hemingway studies—which has overhauled, most importantly, our understanding of gender and sexuality in Hemingway's work—is now nearly two decades old, and it shows little sign of waning. After biographical , psychological, semiotic, historical, feminist, queer theory, and literary historical reconsiderations of Hemingway and gender, the surprising thing may be that the revolution still has such vitality. The two books under review here, Hemingway and Women and Hemingway's Theaters ofMasculinity, both advance the revolution and demonstrate that it is still inspiring excellent work. These volumes not only help us to see further beyond the Hemingway myth, they more importantly help us to see how attention to gender has led to a much closer reading of Hemingway's texts. In Hemingway's Theaters ofMasculinity, Thomas Strychacz forgoes consideration of Hemingway the man in favor of an engaging and rigorous close reading of those places in Hemingway's texts—and they appear everywhere—where we can see gender being rhetorically or theatricallyperformed. Drawing on the work ofJudith Butler, Strychacz argues that the insistent theatricality of gender performance in Hemingway's texts undermines the sort of essentialist notions of stable, self-identical gender identity that until relatively recently character- 242Reviews ized most Hemingway criticism. Strychacz convincingly demonstrates "that Hemingway's narrative art constantly represents masculinity as temporary and subject to abrupt change rather than stable and permanent; as relational and contingent rather than self-determined; as the function of insubstantial codes and evaluating audiences rather than the sole possession of code heroes; as negotiated and constructed rather than constitutive of an essential identity" (8). Strychacz augments the ideas of Butler with Bertold Brecht's principle of the alienation effect, or Verfremdungseffekt, to suggest that the theatricality of gender performance in Hemingway's work "hollows out" or denaturalizes for audiences traditional essentialist notions of masculinity: "As Brecht and Butler recognize in various ways, the staging of mundane obvious- and natural-seeming social practices within a defamiliarizing context has the effect of unraveling them, showing that their obviousness is a result of repetitive performances rather than some universal essence. Hemingway's staging calls a masculine self into being and calls it into question with the same gesture" (48). Strychacz begins with an astute and liberating reading of a particularly clear instance of this, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," demonstrating how the story forces an audience of both characters and readers to judge the manhood of Macomber while simultaneously denying them any grounds beyond performance upon which to found their judgments. "The codes of manhood Hemingway articulates [here] are defined not by taciturn heroes but by taciturn watchers who stand quietly, invisibly off-stage, unconcerned with their participatory or evaluatory role precisely because that role is so fundamentally constitutive ofthe process ofmanhood-fashioning" (52). Strychacz then elaborates these themes in considerations of The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time before turning to the "theater of war" in a strong reading of A Farewell to Arms and a...

Hemingway's theaters of masculinity

In this provocative book, Thomas Strychacz pursues an entirely new approach to the question of in Ernest Hemingway's work. He begins with a close reading of Hemingway's famous story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and continues through the story cycle In Our Time; the short story The Undefeated; the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea; and the nonfiction books Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. Challenging the traditional wisdom that Hemingway fashions a quintessentially style and promotes an ideal of stoic, independent manhood, Strychacz argues that Hemingway's fiction poses as a theatrical performance. Masculinity emerges from a series of complex negotiations between male characters, readers, and cultural codes of manhood. Hemingway's style should be seen as deeply rhetorical, inviting the audience to think of as a contention to be debated rather than a fact that demands acquiescence. Drawing on feminism, gender studies, and the New Men's Studies, this book casts brilliant interpretive light on Hemingway's artistry. It contributes significantly to the larger cultural discussions about the nature of while offering an analysis and critique of in Hemingway's work that greatly extends recent scholarly debates about masculine modernism. It raises the compelling question, What is modernism if masculinity is exposed as more problematic and elusive than previously suspected?

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Little Lord Fauntleroy

It seems clear now from point of view of turn of century that United States had at least three major literary figures in first half of twentieth century: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), William Faulkner (1897-1962), and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). The other writers usually mentioned in company- John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, and Hart Crane- a group once thought be representative of Lost Generation, are still read and discussed, as are Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, and Robert Penn Warren. But none of them appears have continuing power and influence of major three. The nature of work in terms of style, content, and point of view seems quite different, but it is natural look for extent which they influenced each other. An examination of how they perceived and felt about peers and kinds of relationships they maintained is one way reveal and understand respective accomplishments. The most fully explored and emotionally charged friendship was that between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Although Fitzgerald was his senior in years and reputation, Hemingway always seemed be giving him lessons in life and writing- treating his work with respect but at same time finding it somehow lacking in enduring qualities - and offered him a genuine friendship, but one tinged with a degree of jealous condescension. Less discussed has been relationship between Hemingway and Faulkner, who began publishing careers almost simultaneously. Never geographically close enough become fully acquainted, they viewed each other from afar. Hemingway would sometimes satirize style and seemed afraid that Mississippian would prove be better writer, while Faulkner once said publicly his regret that he thought Hemingway had not fully challenged his potential and talent. But Hemingway would go on record in 1946 call Faulkner the greatest living writer (Bruccoli 44), and Faulkner would warmly praise Hemingway's work on other occasions. It was public personae that got in way. The relationship between Fitzgerald and Faulkner has not been discussed at all, probably because they held no public discourse with each other and harbored little sense of competition (Fitzgerald's major work was finished just as Faulkner was beginning his publishing career). There was no chance, then, of Faulkner influencing Fitzgerald, but influence did go other way. In first two novels, Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), general techniques he learned from Fitzgerald about style and authorial attitude seem clearly evident, but critics have found few specific borrowings. Several scholars have found interesting parallels between by two authors. For example, although his intent was compare attitudes and not find influence, Cleanth Brooks published an essay in 1964 on concepts of American innocence as found in Henry James, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. He outlined a number of similarities in characterization, thematic concern, and value systems between Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Jay Gatsby, both self-made men of a different kind. In his 1966 book, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Craft of Fiction, Richard D. Lehan found that although they operated out of very different conceptions of time and history, both Fitzgerald and Faulkner depicted their heroes caught in a world of decay and decline, which required them to extend narrative limits of novels function on levels of history and myth (46-47). A comparison of Sutpen and as idealistic characters suggests that Faulkner's have a moral dimension which Fitzgerald's lack (48). Despite title of F. A. Rodewald's 1975 article Faulkner's Possible Use of The Great Gatsby he mainly summarizes similarities that Brooks had already noted between that novel and Absalom, Absalom! …

Hemingway's Influence on the Life and Writings of Robert Ruark

One writer heavily influenced by Hemingway was Robert Chester Ruark, Jr.—the prolific novelist and internationally syndicated columnist, best-known for Uhuru and Horn of the Hunter . Enamored of Hemingway since becoming familiar with his life and work, Ruark began emulating Hemingway's lifestyle and writings. Despite the critics' charges that Ruark was writing Hemingway parody, he continued to churn out prose that echoed Hemingway themes and continued to live his life as a reflection of Hemingway's most adventurous years. Although Hemingway's works are rarely associated with Ruark's, Ruark's personal and professional reputation remains attached to Hemingway's.

Melancholy Modernism: Gender and the Politics of Mourning in The Sun Also Rises

The sense of loss so central to Hemingway's work inscribes a social rupture with autonomous and potent masculinity—and in this sense his work responds to the crisis in gender in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Hemingway responded to this crisis, along with a dominant strain of American modernism, in a melancholic manner. He sought to keep psychically alive what he insisted had become socially impossible. The Sun Also Rises enacts this process with particular complexity, staging Hemingway's identification with two incompatible and lost forms of manhood—the sentimental and the invulnerable—neither of which he is able to relinquish for a masculinity more currently viable.

A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (review)

A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway should be a welcome addition to many readers' bookshelves. The collected essays, previously unpublished, provide cultural, biographical, and bibliographical detail, and persuasive historicist criticism of Hemingway's life and work. The wealth of information, making the guide potentially useful to scholars at practically any level, constitutes the volume's strength. However, the variety of approaches used to read the Hemingway text in its historical context becomes somewhat troubling; each essay seems to imagine its audience differently, creating a thorny question of who should be reading this book, and under what circumstances, an issue the volume doesn't seem to be able to resolve.

Hemingway and the Natural World (review)

- BOOK REVIEWS · Hemingway and the Natural World. EditedbyRobert F. Fleming. Moscow, ID: University ofIdaho Press, 2000. 259 pp + index. Cloth $39.95 From a rich array ofpapers presented at the Seventh International Hemingway Conference, held in Ketchum-SunValley, Idaho in 1996, Robert F. Fleming has edited a must-read collection ofessays. In his introduction, Flemingreminds readers that Hemingwayengaged in careful physical observation of the natural world and studied the natural world through books. The essays in this volume examine this double vision, calling our attention to nature and place in Hemingway's works and situating those works within the larger tradition ofnature writing. Terry Tempest Williams's empathetic keynote essay evokes the power of Hemingway's works for contemporary nature writers. She writes: "We read. We eat his words as sacrament." For her Hemingway's situation in nature is complicated, paradoxical and, above all, erotic. She writes, "Ernest Hemingwayreminds me not thatwe are conquerors ofnature, but rather that we can be lovers." In his relation to the naturalworld TempestWilliams notes several dichotomies: Hunting and loving. Physical and spiritual. Life and death. Controlling masculine and wild feminine. For her the dichotomies are no surprise. She sees that inside Hemingway's naturalist's heartthere is a preoccupation not onlywith an erotics ofplace but also with death. Nearlyhalfofthe essays in thisvolume share TempestWilliams's observation that Hemingway's relationship to the natural world reflects a divided heart. This group ofessays forms a bookwithin abook . The first ofthese essays is by Fredrik Brögger, who offers a seminal reading of"Big Two-Hearted River." He challenges traditional readings by using Gérard Genette's narrative theory to distinguish a "narratorial view" of landscape from an "actorial" one. He argues that "the two-heartedness of the river is analogous with the two-heartedness of the narrative itself, projecting two differing views of nature—on the one hand Nick's anthropocentric need to master the natural environment, and on the other hand the Hemingway review, voi. 20, no. i, EALL 2000. Copyright © 2000 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. BOOK REVIEWS · 105 the narrator's non-anthropocentric openness and respect for whatever nature may represent." David Cremean provides a second look at "Big TwoHearted River." He sees a divide between the physical and spiritual. He looks carefully at Nick's "abomination of combination" (bait fishing with a fly rod) and argues that Hemingway provides a Catholic, incarnational resolution to the division. Ann Putnam contributes an exceptionally fine and beautifully written essay on Green Hills ofAfrica. Her focus is feminist; her reading is close and sharp. Putnam sees a division between the pastoral impulse to merge with nature and a"tragic" impulse to master nature at the center ofHemingway's divided imagination. As she puts it, in Green Hills"what is most loved must finally be slain, for in the end the pastoral impulse to merge with nature is silencedbythe tragic impulse to destroyit." Lisa Tyler combines mytho-poetic and feminist theoryto look at the natural world in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Tyler makes a strong case for reading Bellas an extension ofthe myth ofDemeter and Persephone, with narrative action allowingmatricentric mythto redeem patricentric myth in the novel. She argues that Pilar and Maria are doubles (Pilar is Demeter, the GrainMother ; Maria is her daughter, Persephone) who initiate Robert Jordan into a world which parallels, narratologically, the sacred and redemptive nature rites ofthe Eleusinian Mysteries. Rod Romesburg's essay on For Whom the Bell Tolls uses ecofeminist theory to explore Hemingway's two-hearted view of the natural world. His focus is on "the connection between the domination ofwomen and the domination ofnature under the system ofpatriarchy."He rejects the polarization ofthe war machine (GoIz) and benevolent Mother Earth (Maria) in favor of characters who model the "in between"—^Anselmo and Pilar. Romesburg concludes his interesting analysis of the "divide" with these words: "in Anselmo and Pilar Hemingway may get as close as he can to having characters integratedwith nature and acceptingboth chaos and order. However,by forcing disconnection on his main character, Hemingwayseems to admit he sees no wayto trulyintegrate the two worlds or getbeyond the dualism constructed...

Shadows of a Literary Dialect: For Whom the Bell Tolls in Five Romance Languages

Sixty years after publication, For Whom the Bell Tolls remains an admirable stylistic experiment in which Hemingway manipulates Spanish and English syntax and vocabulary to convey the impression that the characters are speaking Spanish. The result is a literary dialect, a fictional device to evoke rather than replicate distinctive features of Spanish speech. Opinions vary about whether a literary dialect can be successfully translated into a dialect of the target language. This article examines some select translation strategies in Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish versions of For Whom the Bell Tolls , and concludes that in most of these translations of Hemingway's work, something vital is missing.

Hemingway’s Aging Heroes and the Concept of Phronesis

This article explores the concept of phronesis (“practical wisdom”) in four aging protagonists in Ernest Hemingway's works ranging from the short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” to the novella The Old Man and the Sea. Phronesis represents an understanding of the “ways of the world, an acute sensitivity to a critical logic of human existence that can be attained only through extensive experience and suffering.” The four aging protagonists are examples of Hemingway's definition of aging “productively and profitably by purchasing an inner peace that consists of an intuitive system of continuous adjustment to the exigencies of daily living.”

L’oeil et le soleil : Bataille avec Hemingway

The relation between Hemingway and Bataille has never been elucidated, and yet detailed biographical examination and, especially, textual and thematic analysis show that not only was Bataille, the theoretician, intensely interested in Hemingway 's work, but he was actually much influenced by The Sun Also Rises while writing his first major work Histoire de l'œil (1927). Moreover, this paper purports to bring together Batailles conceptualization of the experience and paradox of the limits, and Hemingway 's fiction where the energies of desire and death are constantly at work.

"Cat in the rain": A Symbolic and Narrative Prelude in Ernest Hemingway's Work

«Cat in the Rain» is one of the earliest Hemingway's short stories included in In Our Time (1925). Its study and analysis must be taken into account as very outstanding to understand the relationships between men and women in his following fiction.The plot, with certainty based partly on real facts, contains the most striking and literary symbols used by this author along his careen Nearly all these symbols are gathered together in this work, so we find the typical American couple in problems, the hotel and the room standing for a claustrophobic living space, the window focusing the action on the landscape or on the person to stand out, the symbolic animals in this case represented by the cat, the rain always in scene meaning grief and inner storm, the short hair emphasizing the weakness of the woman and her lack of feminity, the mirror facing hidden wishes with the surrounding reality and, at last, big hands symbolizing manliness and sometimes sexual encounter or its desire.

Ernest Hemingway in Holland, 1925-1981: A Comparative Analysis of the Contemporary Dutch and American Critical Reception of his Work , and: Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (review)

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway in Holland, 1925-1981: A Comparative Analysis of the Contemporary Dutch and American Critical Reception of his Work, and: Conversations with Ernest Hemingway Raymond S. Nelson Jan Bakker . Ernest Hemingway in Holland, 1925-1981: A Comparative Analysis of the Contemporary Dutch and American Critical Reception of his Work. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Costerus), 1986. 191 pp. pb. $25.00. Matthew J. Bruccoli , ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986. 216 pages. 22.95 cloth; pb. $11.95. Jan Bakker organizes his book around Hemingway's publications as they chronologically appeared. He summarizes most reviews, first Dutch and then American, and points out areas of agreement and of difference. He functions primarily as an editor, allowing critics to speak for themselves, rather than as an author with a particular point of view. After Islands in the Stream (1970) Bakker lists "General and Miscellaneous Articles" concerning recent Hemingway criticism containing assessments of his work and personality in Dutch publications since 1970 and shares some critical responses to them. There are extensive notes and two annotated lists, the first of select Dutch periodicals and newspapers, and the second of Dutch reviewers and essayists. The book is also well indexed. There are two tantalizing comments that all scholars have no doubt wondered about, comments that underline the intensely subjective nature of most criticism (surely Matthew Arnold dreamed in vain of disinterested criticism). The question becomes even more insistent as the reader hears major critics on both sides of the Atlantic line up to praise and blame virtually every text, offering in each case reasons for such judgments: "One can ask oneself again how it is possible that two sensitive critics should hold such completely opposite views. Could it be that the text of the novel lends itself without impunity to such opposite evaluations, or must one conclude that in the final analysis the private, subjective impulse remains the basic source of all criticism?" Again near the end of the volume, after surveying the whole field, Bakker restates the observation: "Remains the question, always puzzling, why some critics can praise the novel as Hemingway vintage, whereas others reject it in toto." The book is highly readable, and it puts critical responses to most of Hemingway's work in a convenient single book. The researcher who wants complete reviews, based on the summaries, can easily move to the original texts, guided to them by the notes provided. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway reprints forty articles published in the United States from 1919 through 1965, almost all of them interviews with Hemingway. Most of the articles are here newly available to scholars; a few, like George Plimpton's "The Art of Fiction: Ernest Hemingway" or Ralph Ingersoll's "Story of Ernest Hemingway's Far East Trip," have appeared elsewhere but are valuable enough to justify rounding out the collection. Bruccoli also included Hemingway's speech to the American Writer's Congress in New York on 4 June 1937 and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1954. The articles are on the whole laudatory. They document in part the emerging legend of the man of action who was at the same time a man dedicated to writing "truly." Bruccoli says in his Introduction that the articles are sometimes contradictory (and they are). He also alludes to Hemingway's tendency to lie about his life experiences while "aggrandizing himself," but justifies him to the extent [End Page 674] that he aggrandized reading and writing at the same time. Bruccoli calls attention to Hemingway's repeated claim to have completed novels "in the bank" to avoid excessive taxes and to provide for his family as simply not the case. Most of the articles were written by reporters for newspapers and magazines. They were dazzled by the world figure they were dealing with, and they wrote accordingly. Only as we have gained some distance from the man, his work, and world events have we begun to see more clearly the differences between the legend and the facts. Early in these newspaper accounts, for example, Hemingway says he grew up in Venice "when he was a kid" and which he "loved as a young boy." Later he became...

Song of Solomon: Morrison's Rejection of Rank's Monomyth and Feminism

SONG OF SOLOMON: MORRISON'S REJECTION OF RANK'S MONOMYTH AND FEMINISM Gerry Brenner* Around Milkman, the hero of her much-admired Song ofSolomon, Toni Morrison wraps various collective fictions: a riddling nursery rhyme that presages his birth and, later chanted by children, leads him to discover his heritage; fables, like the one his father, Macon Dead, tells of the man who rescues a baby snake only to be poisoned to death by its bite; fairytales, like "Rumpelstiltskin," "Jack and the Beanstalk," and "Hansel and Gretel"; a common black folktale, like "People Who Could Fly" (as collected by Julius Lester);1 and family legends, like that of Milkman 's great-grandfather's ability to fly. Even through family names and nicknames Morrison underscores a preoccupation of all four of her novels : for better and worse, humans use and make fictions to give their lives meaning and significance. Underlying these commoner fictions, however, is Otto Rank's powerful monomyth, the myth of the birth of the hero. Its features—with only minor glossing—attach to Milkman and categorically lay claim to his place among the heroes from whose stories Rank extrapolates his monomyth: Moses, Oedipus, Perseus, Gilgamesh, Tristan , Romulus, Jesus, and Lohengrin, to name but half.2 Despite Morrison 's shrewd use of the monomyth on Milkman's behalf, she skillfully mocks him and the novel's other men. Offsetting his and their deflation is a subtle spectrum of praiseworthy women, prime among whom is the novel's only character of heroic stature, Pilate.3 "Marvellous" details circle her with a mythic nimbus that—combined with the humane values by which she conducts her life—rejects the sexism of Rank's monomyth and the expectations of feminists. The nine parts of Rank's monomyth map the standard saga of the hero:4 1. "The hero is the child of most distinguished parents, usually the son of a king." Milkman's father, the city's most affluent black property owner, stands as virtual king. His "lemon-yellow" mother, Ruth, sole daughter of the wealthy, "most respected," and "the most important Negro in the city,"5 Dr. Foster, has equally regal stature. To this pair Morrison adds Milkman's even more distinguished forefathers. Grandfather Macon Dead (Jake Solomon), was an extraordinary man who, in sixteen *Gerry Brenner is a Professor of English at the University of Montana. Among his numerous publications are Concealments in Hemingway's Work (1983) and articles on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cooper, Updike, Fitzgerald, Frank O'Connor, and Hemingway. 14Gerry Brenner years, made "one of the best farms in Montour County." In his fellow blacks' eyes he stood for "the farmer they wanted to be, the clever irrigator , the peach-tree grower, the hog slaughterer, the wild-turkey roaster, the man who could plow forty in no time flat and sang like an angel while he did it"; his farm "colored their lives like a paintbrush and spoke to them like a sermon" (p. 237). And great-grandfather Solomon/Sugarman —virile progenitor of 21 sons and renowned for his ability to fly— is commemorated in nursery rhyme and in his launching site, Solomon's Leap. (Milkman's nocturnal hunt with the elders of Shalimar begins and ends, not by happenstance, at a defunct gas station still presided over by a man who is no one less than King Walker.) 2. "His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as continence or prolonged barrenness, or secret intercourse of the parents due to external prohibition or obstacles." After finding his wife lying naked on the bed— and sucking the fingers—of her dying father (which he interprets as perverse , if not incestuous), Macon Dead abandons conjugal relations with her. A decade later his sister Pilate dissolves his abstinence with herbs whose powers bring him, puzzled, back to Ruth's bed for four days, effecting Milkman's conception. His attempts at aborting the fetus are thwarted by Pilate and Ruth, ensuring that Ruth's "aggressive act [is] brought to royal completion" (p. 133). 3. "During or before the pregnancy, there is prophecy, in the form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth, and usually threatening danger to the father (or his representative)." Milkman...

Hemingway: The Critical Heritage

A comprehensive selection of criticism of Hemingway's work, much of it written by fellow novelists who include Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and Joyce Cary.

The Shape of Equivocation in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls

S INCE THE DEATH of Ernest Hemingway in I96I, an extensive reassessment and reevaluation of his later work have taken place. While Hemingway's defenders argue that extrinsic factors such as the sheer popularity of those later works and Hemingway's ambivalent political views have alienated the judging literati and, indeed, prevented them from seeing the more complex questions which Hemingway approached in such works,1 others have argued that the imitative, repetitive, and self-consciously profound nature of Hemingway's style in his later years led to decidedly inferior novels and stories. Hemingway, writes Leslie Fiedler of that later work, no longer creating, but merely imitating the marvelous spare style that was once a revelation. . . . What was once an anti-rhetoric has become now merely another rhetoric, perhaps our most familiar one, . . .[which] even its inventor cannot revive . . . for us.2 The critical argument, then, has scarcely been joined, since the two groups I have distinguished have constructed their arguments on such different bases. My purpose here is to suggest a new basis for evaluation: one upon which these other standards of critical appraisal would appear to depend. I shall be concerned here with no less than the effectiveness of Hemingway's work as depicted narrative tragedy. Style, complexity of thematic questioning-all such matters are subsumed by the encompassing tragic forms I shall discuss. I shall argue that the idea of tragedy lies at the center of Hemingway's oeuvre but that this idea is worked out narratively in different novelistic forms throughout his career. My exemplary text is Hemingway's novel of

The Education of Ernest Hemingway

To native writers emerging in the 1920s The Education of Henry Adams (1918) spoke with an immediacy and an authority now difficult to reconstruct. Sherwood Anderson, whose own Winesburg, Ohio (1919) would soon become another model for young writers, was puzzled by Adams's book. But he was intrigued enough by it to grapple with its ideas in the pages of his own autobiography. Scott Fitzgerald, who as a child had known Adams, not only studied the Education but paid its author a writer's compliment by putting him into This Side of Paradise. At one point, in fact, Fitzgerald had even decided to call his first novel The Education of a Personage. On the basis of the Education T. S. Eliot branded Adams a ‘sceptical patrician’, damning him as an ineffectual product of his New England heritage, but not disdaining, all the while, to snap up from die Education images and phrases for his own poetry. Ernest Hemingway, who consciously sided with Eliot on absolutely nothing, would have found himself, had the occasion forced itself, hard put to disagree with Eliot's radier summary judgement of Adams. Nevertheless, all things considered, it remains my conviction that one important way in which Hemingway's work resembles Eliot's, and both resemble Fitzgerald's, is that in certain basic characteristics it is what it is because of The Education of Henry Adams.