Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory

Mark Cirino, Mark P. Ott

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612775043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ernest Hemingway's work reverberates with a blend of memory, geography, and lessons of life revealed through the trauma of experience. Michigan, Italy, Spain, Paris, Africa, and the Gulf Stream are some of the most distinctive settings in Hemingway's short fiction, novels, articles, and correspondence. In his fiction, Hemingway revisited these sites, reimagining and transforming them. Travel was the engine of his creative life, as the recurrent contrast between spaces provided him with evidence of his emerging identity as a writer. The contributors to Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory employ an intriguing range of approaches to Hemingway's work, using the concept of memory as an interpretive tool to enhance understanding of Hemingway's creative process. The essays are divided into four sections— Memory and Composition, Memory and Allusion, Memory and Place, and Memory and Truth—and examine The Garden of Eden, In Our Time, The Old Man and the Sea, Green Hills of Africa, Under Kilimanjaro, The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon, as well as several of Hemingway's short stories. Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory is a fascinating volume that will appeal to the Hemingway scholar as well as the general reader.

PART I

Memory and Composition

1

Memory and Manhood

Troublesome Recollections in The Garden of Eden

MARC HEWSON

While it may be going too far to insist that the whole of Hemingway’s fictional enterprise was a remembrance of things past, a strong case can be made that the writing he did after his return from World War II is heavily influenced by the writer’s use of his life experience, whether as a creative well or for psychological self-assessment. Certainly the work he accomplished during the remaining years of his life (most of it available to readers only after his death and in more or less bowdlerized forms) evidences a man and writer looking back over a career and trying to forge from it a sense of self in ways different from his earlier work. Hemingway was careful to emphasize his new attitude toward remembering and writing after 1946. While at work on Across the River and Into the Trees, for instance, he was fond of explaining that his method of writing, his very understanding of literary composition, had changed. Though in the past he had used admittedly complicated methods to illustrate his conception of the writer’s art (whether it was by means of the “iceberg theory” or the elusive fourth dimension), his new explanations were even more difficult to understand. He described Across the River as being presented to the reader through a series of “three-cushion shots,” saying, “In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus” (Breit 62). According to his fourth wife, Mary, he later defined his technique of exposing himself by exploring other people in A Moveable Feast as a sort of “biography by remate,” a jai-alai term denoting a complex rebound shot (“Making of a Book” 27). If both descriptions lead us to conclude that the late works revolve around reflection and reflexivity, they equally hint at a man with a fragmented or at least disjointed sense of himself and a writer hoping to use memory to regain his equilibrium.

Returning from the European theater of war to Cuba in 1946, Hemingway began work on what he called at the time “the Land, Sea, and Air Book” that was to be an investigation of war’s effect on a man. (As with much of his writing, of course, it might also be fair to call his intention an investigation of manhood.) At the time of Hemingway’s death in 1961, the mammoth project had transformed, in Michael Reynolds’s words, into “a multivolume portrait of the artist/writer in the first half of the twentieth century,” a four-part vision of art’s effect on a man (138). If Joyce’s influence is to be seen lying behind those manuscripts as they metamorphosed over fifteen years, though, so too is Proust’s, given the central place that memory and reminiscence play in what would be posthumously edited and published as A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light, which became Under Kilimanjaro. Indeed, à la recherche du temps perdu seems to have been much on Hemingway’s mind as he worked on all of the intricately intertwined pieces, clearly bearing out Rose Marie Burwell’s contention that his late writing was a “search for a form and a style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist” (1). Writing like this was not simply autobiography; it was self-analysis in the same vein Proust had tapped thirty years earlier and with a similar focus on questions of gender and sexual identity.

Like many others returning from the war, Hemingway felt the increased need for personal and cultural interrogation as social mores and gender roles began to change even more rapidly than they had after World War I. And the general impression from the writing of the 1940s and 1950s would seem to be that he hoped to turn to memories of his former years to perform that interrogation and to recoup or repair his gender identity. In A Moveable Feast, therefore, we meet a Hemingway character uncovering all those “facts” about his life that the writer manfully wanted to believe: the early struggle with poverty, the need of his friends for his knowledge and experience, the mistakes of his life being as much other people’s faults as his own, and the unwavering diligence to his craft in the face of all this. Equally in Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light, we glimpse a man nostalgic for his past and anxious to use that past to explain and erase his present doubts. Even the published works of the period follow this model. Across the River and Into the Trees, with its fantasy relationship of the battle-hardened, middle-aged Richard Cantwell and his beautiful (and significantly named) Italian heiress, Renata, seems the work of a man reviving his youthful masculinity; and The Old Man and the Sea, with its insistent refrain that Santiago was a man who went out too far, could be viewed as Hemingway’s attempt to cast his career as a manly history of literary experiment and trial continuing into the very writing of that novella itself.

Yet, to see the late fiction as an unalloyed submersion in the past and a restoration of gender stability is to overlook the troubling nature of Hemingway’s relation to his own history, not to mention the strong editorial presence behind each of the posthumously published books. Hemingway himself is certainly responsible for the constructions of masculinity in books like Across the River and Old Man that he approved for publication. However, the stable sense of male self in Feast is due in large part to Mary’s editing of the manuscript after his death and her re-creation of what Debra Moddelmog calls “the popular, commodified Hemingway and his work” (59). The effect of that editorial presence was to make the book sound more like the earlier pontificating Hemingway writer than the later, more speculative one. Those changes—and similar emendations to the other posthumous texts by their respective editors—belie the depth of ambivalence Hemingway felt toward the course his life had taken. If he comes to us in Feast in the guise of a grounded, masculine man, the truth of how Hemingway viewed the arc of his career from middle age is much less unshakeable than is apparent in that one text. Its narrator may indeed suggest a calm and collected Hemingway, but other Hemingway heroes of the late works are less sure of themselves. In fact, once we can see beyond the ego-mending done by Hemingway’s literary inheritors, the general trend of those manuscripts can be seen not as a solidifying of character and identity but as an increasingly stark realization of the near-complete fragmentation of the male self and, more importantly, of the role memory plays in destroying instead of preserving the self.

Nowhere is this more visible than in The Garden of Eden (even in its heavily abridged published form), which many scholars now agree to be, in Jerry Varsava’s words, “importantly and honorably different from Hemingway’s other novels” (115). Viewed from afar, of course, this book, begun in Hemingway’s flurry of postwar writing activity, seems quite in line with the fiction he had successfully brought to completion in previous years: a tale of marital woe involving two young expatriate Americans in Europe working through the troubles of their relationship. If it is similar to the earlier writing in its plot, in its elegiac handling of that plot or even in its use of the past to evaluate the present, though, Garden (which haunted Hemingway on and off until the end of his life) diverges strongly in terms of the conclusions it reaches about memory and male identity.

The importance of memory in the book is clear once we realize, first, the story’s autobiographical aspect (as a fictional revisiting and reworking of his second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer, in the late 1920s) and, second, its very revolution around reminiscence. In the published version, David and Catherine Bourne have recently married and are enjoying a honeymoon in Provence. As the book unfolds, Catherine asks David to engage in a series of sexual and gender inversions and then to commemorate them in a book about their life together. Most of what follows revolves around Catherine’s and David’s reasons for and responses to these experiments. She envisions them as an escape from restrictive, culturally dictated gender roles, but he worries that they jeopardize his masculinity and his professional life as a fiction writer (especially after Catherine asks him to leave aside his other work in favor of writing the autobiographical honeymoon narrative). In response, David attempts to reestablish what he considers his disintegrating manhood by rejecting that narrative—and eventually Catherine herself—and returning to stories of his youth with his father in Africa. He also begins a relationship with Marita, a recent acquaintance of the Bournes who earlier had a lesbian affair with Catherine.¹ Throughout the manuscript, Hemingway explores the ways in which gender identity is premised not only on personal action but also, and perhaps more significantly, on commemoration and recollection of that action. It is, after all, his writing of the transformations and games more than his participation in them that fuels David’s self-doubt. Even though he eventually refuses to write about their inversions anymore, he is still willing to engage in them.

If Hemingway was at a gender crossroads at this point in his life (which seems likely when we recall the diverse depictions of masculinity and femininity in the postwar writing and his real-life engagement with Mary in sexual experimentation that closely mirrors incidents in Garden), this book would seem to reflect his quest for a palatable and livable gendered existence. More specifically, it argues the impossibility of remembering gender to reembody it. Given that memory is almost wholly bound up in Garden with the trouble in establishing gender identity, we can conclude that in the latter stages of his career Hemingway had come to worry that conscious recollection cannot easily lead to personal reconstruction. This is made clearest through a careful examination of David’s attempts to regain his autonomy through written reminiscence after being led into the confusing world of Catherine’s sexual experiments. From stories of his wife he turns to stories of his childhood with the half-conscious hope that such a return will mean an end to his worries.

This wished-for stability eludes him, however, as the writing David does of his experiences as a boy in Africa—particularly the long story of the elephant hunt that Hemingway writes into the novel—ultimately becomes a further obstacle to his reconstruction of a nonfragmented sense of self. Carl Eby is absolutely right in insisting that Hemingway knew what “Freud and Lacan have taught us, [namely, that] the notion of coherent subjectivity is . . . a myth.” As a result, Eby claims, “the rift in Hemingway’s ego and sense of gender identity is woven into the very fabric of The Garden of Eden” (191). Indeed, Hemingway’s recollection of the sad psychological truth of fractured identity—and his recollection of it via recollection itself no less—is the book’s warp and woof. By implication, the effect on David of Catherine’s insistence on the honeymoon account and his means of avoiding it through a remembered return to childhood uncovers Hemingway’s worry that remembering most often leads to dismembering. David’s writing of the narrative and of the African stories acts as a constant reminder of the difficulty of stable ego creation because it continually destroys his comfortable notions about gender identity.

Almost from the beginning, David exhibits enormous disdain for the story he is writing in the honeymoon narrative, mainly because he is angry that he is not the story’s creator. “Symbolically,” Robert Jones attests, “the honeymoon narrative is Catherine’s text” (11). And we can further agree with Varsava that she is “the only genuine artist in the novel” since it is through her inversions that the story exists for David to transcribe (123). Catherine herself confirms the point by her telling slip of the tongue in chapter 6 when she asks him to restart their experiments “that I made up; we made up I mean” (54). Her correction is quick, but not quick enough to keep David from being reminded of her control over their life together. From the start of his work on the narrative, then, David is faced with the painful task of remembering and commemorating a self that he has not been responsible for creating; to write the story of their experiments is also to remember his loss of control. Despite the fact that he sometimes admits to himself the pleasure he too derives from their role reversals, the overwhelming emotional response to his forced recollection is dismay at the dismantling of his masculinity. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, that forced role as scribe and the resulting loss of creative masculine power—not to mention the loss of the power of self-identification—lead him to refuse to work any longer on the honeymoon story. To compensate, David begins to write about the Africa of his adolescence as if a renewed kinship with youth—a youth significantly devoid of female contact—can shore up his ego and allow him to see himself in a positive and empowered light again.

David’s efforts to start working on his stories and to forget the complexities of his marital life demonstrate just how threatened he feels by Catherine’s machinations and their implications with respect to his masculine identity: “You better get to work. You have to make sense there. You don’t make any in this other” (146). He does not make sense in the world of Catherine’s transformations because her experiments automatically call into question, if not deny, the masculine model of gender distinction by which he lives. It is only by maintaining an iron grip on his profession and its concomitant of memory that he believes he can weather the storm and regain a unified sense of himself. That David should attempt such a repair job through writing is hardly surprising given Hemingway’s belief in the power of art to determine identity. More important, though, at this stage in his life, as a man so actively mining his past for creative inspiration, the choice of story Hemingway has David turn to suggests how ambivalent he was in his ideas about the positive power of memory, Catherine’s experiments and inversions having led both her and David down a new and unmapped path. In response he returns to well-charted ground—to established forms and relationships of the past—to combat her supposed destruction of his masculine self. David’s search for his father through his childhood reminiscences in the African stories becomes an active turning back to the old, an attempt to maintain ties to his masculine roots by way of what Steven Roe dubs “a kind of combative enterprise, demanding the violent exertion of creative power” (59).

Taking our cue from Thomas Strychacz’s recent assertion that in Hemingway’s work masculinity is always a performance before an audience, we can begin to realize just how important dramatizing is for David, who is forced to act out traditionally nonmasculine roles, to watch that performance as he writes the honeymoon narrative, and then to attempt to revive his masculinity by watching previous performances of the all-male troupe of his youth. Strychacz contends that “Hemingway’s male characters are constituted as men through their public relationship with an audience rather than . . . by a process of internal transformation” (8). Within such a system, which is perhaps the best explanation to date of the grounds of masculinity for Hemingway, David’s writing of the African stories holds a curious place given his role as both performer of and sole audience to his masculine posturing. David not only has to act out his manhood for it to be reified but has to witness it as well since he refuses to allow Catherine to read the African stories. It is only when he reads them himself that masculinity is theatrically acted out and visible...