Hemingway's Spain

Imagining the Spanish World

Carl P. Eby

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781606352427, 9781606352427
• eBook ISBN: 9781631011368
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ernest Hemingway famously called Spain "the country that I loved more than any other except my own," and his forty-year love affair with it provided an inspiration and setting for major works from each decade of his career: The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden; his only full-length play, The Fifth Column; the Civil War documentary The Spanish Earth; and some of his finest short fiction, including "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

In Hemingway's Spain, Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino collect thirteen penetrating and innovative essays by scholars of different nationalities, generations, and perspectives who explore Hemingway's writing about Spain and his relationship to Spanish culture and ask us in a myriad of ways to rethink how Hemingway imagined Spain—whether through a modernist mythologization of the Spanish soil, his fascination with the bullfight, his interrogation of the relationship between travel and tourism, his involvement with Spanish politics, his dialog with Spanish writers, or his appreciation of the subtleties of Spanish values. In addition to fresh critical responses to some of Hemingway's most famous novels and stories, a particular strength of Hemingway's Spain is its consideration of neglected works, such as Hemingway's Spanish Civil War stories and The Dangerous Summer. The collection is noteworthy for its attention to how Hemingway's post–World War II fiction revisits and reimagines his earlier Spanish works, and it brings new light both to Hemingway's Spanish Civil War politics and his reception in Spain during the Franco years. 

Hemingway's lifelong engagement with Spain is central to under­standing and appreciating his work, and Hemingway's Spain is an indispensable exploration of Hemingway's home away from home.

1
Hemingway in the Dirt of a Blood and Soil Myth

MARÍA DEGUZMÁN

For expatriate U.S. modernists writing and publishing between the early 1920s and the late 1950s, Spain functioned not as a well-charted colony (that was reserved for France) but as a last frontier, a land to be discovered. As I argue in my 2005 book, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire, twentieth-century writers such as John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, unlike nineteenth-century writers obsessed with racial origins and the physiognomic aspects of race, shifted away from a specifically racial typing of the inhabitants of Spain toward figuring them in relation to their country as land. Dos Passos in Rosinante to the Road Again (1922); Waldo Frank in Virgin Spain: Scenes from the Spiritual Drama of a Great People (1926; revised in 1942); Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Picasso: The Complete Writings (1934); Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises (1926), Death in the Afternoon (1932), the script for the film The Spanish Earth (1937), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); and even Richard Wright in Pagan Spain (1957) were primarily interested in Spain as land. Their writings engage with the idea of the Spanish land as a transforming force determining national character, temper, soul, or spirit; as raw material waiting to be transformed (redistributed, fertilized, and tilled); and, most significantly, as a medium helping them to vitalize their work. Spaniards usually figure as peasants, artisans, villagers, laborers, bullfighters, dancers, and guerrilla soldiers—representatives of a primal, “authentic” relationship to the land, if not actual embodiments of both its creative and destructive forces.

To U.S. expatriate modernists, Spain meant land, partly to compensate for their own uprootedness, and Spaniards, as “primitives” or elemental, were supposed to have an implicit connection to it. These modernists saw Spain as sacred terrain for a modern myth of the soil, a myth propagated against modernity’s own centrifugal and entropic forces. Spain, however, did not represent just any soil. Historically and symbolically, it was associated with the “discovery”—the conquest and colonization—of the greater part of the Americas by Europeans. Thus, it doubled both as symbol for and destination (if only metaphoric) of the poets, writers, discoverers, and creators of new worlds, of those trying to “make it new.” Spain became for these writers both a figurative and a very literal ground of experience upon which to constitute their art practices and their own identities as expatriate Americans or Americans abroad “mak[ing] it new” again. In a world already old and mapped and increasingly mediated by the mechanisms of finance and technology, these modernists went to Spain on a simultaneously nostalgic/retrospective and future-oriented/prospective voyage toward a new frontier, a “last good country,” to use Hemingway’s phrase.

For Hemingway, this paradoxical project took the form of a reenactment of Anglo-American frontier values such as rugged individualism, courageous deeds, ritualized battles with nature (through bullfighting, hunting, and fishing) and with the “natives” (in the Spanish Civil War), camaraderie with male companions (the gang in The Sun Also Rises, guerrilla soldiers in For Whom the Bell Tolls), and what is coded as an authentic relationship with the soil (ingesting, like a peasant, the fruits of the earth; being baptized in bulls’ blood; getting covered with Spanish sand and dust; baking, like clay, in the Spanish sun). The land(s) of Spain and Spaniards became for Hemingway what the earth was for Antaeus, the giant who wrestled with Hercules and whose strength derived from his physical connection with his mother Earth. Hemingway’s Spanish venture partook of a visionary colonialism. Without staying and becoming permanently involved with the country and the people about whom he wrote, he used Spain as raw material for his retrospective liberalism. In a sense, he took the goods and ran: he went to Spain, mined it for its possibilities, and left its continuing problems for its inhabitants to handle. Ezra Pound once observed that Spain was “an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes” (quoted in Cunard 27). The statement is harshly hyperbolic, but with a measure of truth in it. For all of their demonstrable experience of Spain, Hemingway’s “Spanish” novels—The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls—can be centrally located within the parameters of Anglo-American imperial ideology.¹ Hemingway’s passion for the Spanish earth and the mythic identification of his Anglo-American heroes with that dirt were steeped in a blood and soil myth dependent on Heideggerian notions of authenticity. This myth, moreover, contained resonances of the blood and soil myth of fascist ideologies developing throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, ideologies that came to their horrific fruition in the later 1930s. Emmanuel Levinas writes of the “obsessive grip” of myths (Entre Nous 31) and of a desire to liberate humanity from the barbarism accompanying the resurgence of these myths that sacrifice human lives in the process of transmuting uniqueness, difference, and Otherness into a totalitarian Sameness.

As I argue in Spain’s Long Shadow, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls form two different stages of Hemingway’s mythic identification with Spain through the dramatized interaction between the man and Spain as earth or, more precisely, soil. The Sun Also Rises represents the first stage of the myth and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the second. The Sun Also Rises is all about choosing one’s “last good country,” and I mean this in an ideologically, geopolitically loaded way, not merely in the universalizing sense that Hemingway identifies, for example, in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, written 19 November 1926: “The point of the book [The Sun Also Rises] to me was that the earth abideth forever—having a great deal of fondness and admiration for the earth and not a hell of a lot for my generation.… I didn’t mean the book to be a hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding for ever [sic] as the hero” (SL 229). Despite this universalizing moral, the contents of The Sun Also Rises are particularizing. The earth that is most revered is not just any earth, but the Spanish earth. Jake Barnes chooses Spain in contrast to his foil, the anti-Semitically debased Jew Robert Cohn. In the terms defined by language theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, Cohn is the abject, the embodiment of all that is opposed to and inassimilable by the I (1)—an I embodied in The Sun Also Rises by Jake, the narrator. Finding himself in France, Cohn dreams of escaping to an idealized South America, yet never chooses to go there. In fact, Cohn seems incapable of commitment to either countries or women, or they to him. If The Sun Also Rises concerns choosing one’s “last good country,” For Whom the Bell Tolls is about “being there”—the choice already having been made—and about Robert Jordan, the Anglo-American hero with the promised-land last name, lying on his belly “on the brown, pine-needled floor of the [Spanish] forest” (FWTBT 1). Much can be said about Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn as foils, and about the significance of Cohn’s various attributes: his desire to go to South America, his book-knowledge, and his abjection as a kept man and as a man whom women leave. These attributes are closely contrasted to those of Jake: his choice of Spain, his alternation between correspondence (story writing, letter-writing, and telegrams) and physical activity, and the somewhat mysterious injury that keeps Jake from being physically intimate, beyond an exchange of embraces or kisses, with anyone. Although it is Jake whom his friend Bill accuses of having “fake European standards” (SAR 115), it is to Robert Cohn that Hemingway attributes such inauthenticity. One might even add “fake expatriate U.S. modernist standards.” Expatriation seems to have generated in Hemingway a degree of private guilt, shading into public shame. In other words, Hemingway imagines Robert Cohn and deploys all the scenarios involving him both to allow Jake a relatively guilt-free experience of discovery and to grant the narrator an authentic relationship to the Spanish earth/soil, thus giving the narrative authenticity. “In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger defines ‘authenticity’ as the condition of those who reflect on the identity they acquired at birth so as to critically assess the values and goals of that identity and ‘choose’ their own identity. … [furthermore,] for Heidegger, ‘being there’ passively is never enough” (DeGuzmán 217–18). One has to think and act to prove one’s authenticity. Hemingway seems to have constructed Jake Barnes under the weight of this injunction.

Levinas (who once began work on a book on Heidegger but abandoned it when Heidegger became involved with the Nazi Party) points out in his dialogic essay “Philosophy, Justice, and Love” that Heidegger’s writings were preoccupied with a particular setting for the demonstration of this authenticity: “Whatever the case may be, he [Heidegger] has a very great sense for everything that is part of the landscape; not the artistic landscape, but the place in which man is enrooted. It is absolutely not a philosophy of the émigré[.] I would even say that it is not a philosophy of the emigrant” (117). The Heideggerian hero is the enrooted man or the man who enroots himself, commits himself to a place. And, as Levinas also observes, that place is converted into a ground of being that becomes as important as, if not more important than, any particular human being. Heideggerian thought too easily accommodates itself to the dismissal or, perhaps more worrisome, to the dehumanization of the emigrant, the displaced person.

In offering up Robert Cohn as a foil to authenticity in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway conceives him in disturbingly anti-Semitic terms that echo Heidegger’s. Published only a year after The Sun Also Rises, Being and Time suggests a broader context for concerns about authenticity and culture in the late 1920s and 1930s. The Sun Also Rises represents Hemingway’s expression of a broader concern with questions of authenticity among expatriate U.S. modernists and, moreover, of concern over these issues within an even wider European and Euro-American framework.

Anti-Semitism (or an enactment of it which is quite nearly indistinguishable from the complex itself) not only forms the backdrop of The Sun Also Rises and its presentation of an authentic relation to “country”—in which Cohn’s position as foil to Jake is constantly underscored by the anti-Semitism he endures—but also runs like a troublesome seam (not a mere thread) throughout the narrative from Jake’s observation in the book’s opening line—“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton” (3)—to Brett’s statement summing up the bullfighter Pedro Romero’s personal effect on her: “I’m all right again. He’s wiped out that damned Cohn” (243). Add to that Jake’s reply approving Cohn’s erasure—“Good” (243)—and the story leaves readers and critics with precious little room for indulging in apologetics about the anti-Semitism, the continual Jew-baiting, in The Sun Also Rises. However, I do not call attention to this to take Hemingway to task; not only does such an exercise seem rather futile to me more than eighty-five years after the book’s publication, but also many other critics have already voiced such responses. In his 2006 article on Hemingway’s anti-Semitism and the representation of Robert Cohn, Jeremy Kaye documents much of this scholarship, as well as the scholarship that actually takes Cohn to task for not more adequately embodying a white, heterosexual masculine ideal. The critical contribution of Kaye’s article is his argument that Cohn’s role in the book is not entirely contained in and certainly not marginalized by anti-Semitic stereotype, but exceeds the supposed predictability of stereotype as a fetish entirely necessary and central to Jake’s sense of himself as the white, male hero. “Cohn’s presence—” Kaye writes, “indeed, his penis [the fact that he has one, unlike, everyone assumes, Jake]—allows Jake to deny his own castration (symbolic and literal) and project that lack onto Cohn’s Jewishness. In order for this denial to function, however, Jake must first identify with Cohn, because Cohn has the penis he needs, before he can reject him as a Jew, thereby disavowing Cohn’s importance in the making of his manhood” (53). I agree with much of the content of Kaye’s careful and illuminating analysis of the intersection of anti-Semitism and fictions of masculinity, but I differ from him on the relationship between stereotype and fetish. Unlike Kaye, I do not see stereotype in flat, predictable terms. The unsettling power of stereotypes lies in their dynamism, in their multidimensionality (which entails their functioning as fetish, if the occasion calls for it), and in their involvement or complicity with master narratives, with myths.

The Sun Also Rises participates in this blood and soil myth by denying Cohn’s full humanity. He is reduced to something to be wiped out—a stain or a residue—rather than functioning as a character with subjectivity such as Jake’s or even Brett’s. If represented as a person at all, he is typecast—defined by the role of the Other whose otherness does not (is not permitted to) elicit respect and responsibility for the Other on the part of the self (in, for instance, a Levinasian formulation).² The narrative relegates Cohn to persecution or, at best, hostile indifference. He is expendable for the sake of the cause, the blood and soil myth. Though Jake and Brett would hardly seem to qualify as the proper protagonists for the blood and soil myth—being, as they are, obviously deracinated expatriates and imperfect specimens of humanity by the standards of those sorts of myths (Jake is an emasculated drunk and Brett is a consummately unfaithful woman who wanders from man to man)—their disqualification pales in comparison to Cohn’s, or that is how the story scripts the encounter between Cohn, Brett, and Jake. Cohn’s proximity inspires nothing but contempt. Cohn, dehumanized by the end of the narrative into “the human punching-bag” (SAR 199) (though the phrase is originally imputed to Jake), is not treated as a brother-in-arms. Jake and Brett reserve that treatment for each other. Beyond what might be construed as the mutual exclusivity of the couple (hardly exclusive in the case of Brett), the narrative as a whole excludes Cohn. If, as Levinas has argued, “the foundation of consciousness is justice” and “consciousness is born as the presence of the third party in the proximity of the one for the other,” The Sun Also Rises refuses to be (re)cognizant of Cohn in this way or to extend him justice (“Peace and Proximity,” 169). Instead, it traps itself in a closed-circuit and not very happy reciprocity between Jake and Brett, the not-quite-almost-sometimes couple who ride down the Gran Via in a taxi cab memorializing Madrid and their own relationship simultaneously.

What I mean by this double “memorializing” is that, after Jake drinks multiple bottles of rioja wine at lunch, he and Brett take a cab ride to “see Madrid” (SAR 246) and savor the “damned good time” (247) they could have had together—in other words, their relationship that was and was not. Feminist critic and philosopher Avital Ronell, in her 1992 book Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania, writes at length on the use of alcohol and other drugs by writers and in literature. According to her analysis, alcohol is deployed as part of a logic of preservationist, “resurrectionist memory”: “At one point Baudelaire seems to ask: whom are you preserving in alcohol? This logic called for a resurrectionist memory, the supreme lucidity of intoxication, which arises when you have something in you that must be encrypted. Hence the ambivalent structure stimulant/tranquilizer” (Ronell 5). The last scene of The Sun Also Rises encapsulates precisely this complex dynamic. Indeed, both Jake and Brett have plenty to encrypt, to encode in the sense of both burying and preserving—for example, all the things about which they cannot and do not speak directly, including their unresolved relationship to each other and their questionable relationship, as wandering expatriates, to any given place. But, as the title of the novel constantly reminds readers, “the sun also rises.” What is buried and preserved will reemerge, will quite literally “rise” resurrected for us to behold, through the alchemical transfiguration of art (and, for Hemingway and for his protagonists, of alcohol coursing in the blood), casting a long shadow: that of the scapegoated figure of Robert Cohn.

The last actions of the novel are of the cab turning “out onto the Gran Via” (SAR 247), Brett remarking on the “damned good time” they could have had together, and a “mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic” and raising his baton, causing the cab to slow down suddenly and Brett to press against Jake in the back seat (247). Numerous readers and critics have read the scene as one more iteration of a phallic wish for sexual potency (the raised baton) that never materializes for Jake. Moreover, the scene affords an opportunity to inscribe Jake in a memorialization of Madrid and, by extension, Spain. The cab turns onto the Gran Via (literally, “the Great Road”), a main thoroughfare of Madrid graced by elegant nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century buildings, hotels, movie theaters, and shops, and, to the west, leading down to the Plaza España, the plaza of Spain. In their preoccupation over Jake’s supposedly emasculating wound, critics have paid scant attention to the fact that the more corporeal coupling or connection occurs between Jake and the Spanish earth, the very dust of it. From this coupling Cohn is likewise excluded—in fact, he is depicted as far too bookish (9–12) and preppy-clean (45), capable only of second-hand or vicarious living.

I highlight the involvement of The Sun Also Rises in the blood and soil myth to explore what might otherwise appear to be an uncomplicated sensualist’s celebration of the Spanish earth through numerous descriptions of Spain’s landscape and earth and through the relationship that the narrative elaborates between Jake and, quite literally, the very dust of the Spanish earth. Dust is mentioned at the very first crossing from France into Spain. At the Spanish frontier, for example, “the guard spat in the dust” (92). The white road into Spain is a “dusty” one (93). Jake’s coat is “gray with dust” (96) by the time he and Bill arrive in Pamplona. The references to dust are scattered throughout the Spanish s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Imagining Spain
• 1. Hemingway in the Dirt of a Blood and Soil Myth
• 2. Ernest Hemingway—¿Amigo de España?
• 3. Allegories of Travel and Tourism in “Hills Like White Elephants”
• 4. Hemingway and Franklin: Men Without Women
• 5. A Creative Spiral: From Death in the Afternoon (1932) to The Dangerous Summer (1960)
• 6. Bulls, Art, Mithras, and Montherlant
• 7. “At Five in the Afternoon”: Toward a Poetics of Duende in Bataille and Hemingway
• 8. “It was all there … but he could not see it”: What’s Dangerous about The Dangerous Summer
• 9. Hemingway’s Spain in Flames, 1937
• 10. Tanks, Butterflies, Realists, Idealists: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Imperfect Ending in Spain of 1937–1938
• 11. The Education of Henry: Politics and Context in Hemingway
• 12. Foreign Bodies: Documenting Expatriate Involvement in “Night Before Battle” and “Under the Ridge”
• 13. Bulls and Bells: Their Toll on Robert Jordan
• Index