Hemingway's Nonfiction

The Public Voice

Robert O. Stephens

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807840412, 9780807810767
• eBook ISBN: 9780807837030
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This study explores Hemingway's newspaper and magazine journalism, his introductions and prefaces to books by others, his program notes on painting and sculpture exhibitions, and his statements in self-edited interviews. In doing so, it throws a new, oblique light on what has usually been regarded as his major work--his short stories and novels.

Originally published in 1968.

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PART ONE / The Public Voice

I. Hemingway’s Career As an Essayist

IN 1956, WHILE WRITING A LOOK MAGAZINE ARTICLE APPROPRIATELY entitled “A Situation Report,” Ernest Hemingway saw himself in a situation he had frequently confronted and decried throughout his forty-year career of writing for pay. He was writing journalism when he preferred to be at work on a novel. On the next day, he promised, he would get back to work on the “long book” after having been away from it for months in Peru to oversee the filming of scenes for the movie version of The Old Man and the Sea. In the report he characterized his attitude toward a kind of writing that consumed a large part of his time and energy during a long creative career: “As for journalism, that writing of something that happens day by day, in which I was trained when young, and which is not whoring when done honestly with exact reporting; there is no more of that until this book is finished.”¹

Throughout his writing career Hemingway displayed that ambivalence not only toward journalism but also toward his non-fictional work in general—toward a body of writing that equaled approximately one-third of his total production. He has been properly recognized as he wanted to be—a serious and consummately skillful master of fiction. But he was also a journalist and essayist of considerable stature, and will probably be recognized so in the total perspective of his life and career. One mark of this growing recognition is that while his stories and novels are taking their places in literary collections and anthologies, his essays have begun to appear as models of expository prose in university writing courses.

But this is an outcome Hemingway did not foresee. He always insisted on separating his fiction and poetry from his journalism and critical writing. In 1951 he declared, “The only work of mine that I endorse or sign as my true work ... is what I have published since Three Stories & Ten Poems and the first In Our Time [sic].”² The reason for such a declaration appeared twenty years earlier when he wrote to Louis Henry Cohn, his first bibliographer, that he did not want his quickly written journalism to enter estimates of his literary worth. “If you have made your living as a newspaperman, learning your trade, writing against deadlines, writing to make stuff timely rather than permanent, no one has a right to dig this stuff up and use it against the stuff you have written to write the best you can.”³ So strongly did he want to bury the bones of his apprenticeship in 1931, that he opposed Cohn’s preparation of a bibliography. It would locate the early work for the world to see.⁴

Other indications of the slight value he placed on his journalism, including that after 1923, appeared in the magazines and nonfiction books themselves. In one of his Esquire articles of 1935 he insisted that while he cared very much about writing good fiction, he took very lightly “the writing of these monthly letters.”⁵ And from the perspective of A Moveable Feast, written in the late fifties, he observed that serious work required the conducive atmosphere of certain cities and ranch retreats, but he could write journalism anywhere.⁶

His wish to separate expository writing from fiction had internal as well as external reasons. This became plain to him, if we can believe Gertrude Stein, when he showed her a “narrative meditation” about E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room and she informed him that “remarks are not literature.”⁷ He tried to pass on the insight later in “Monologue to the Maestro” when he told his protégé Arnold Samuelson that news reporting is built around the element of timeliness. But as time passes, he pointed out, so does the event tied to time. When an action is invented, though, it escapes the tie to a passing event and remains as true as when it was first created.⁸ About the same time, he was writing in Green Hills of Africa that writing against a deadline violates the integrity of a subject by forcing one to find merely facile ways of rendering it. One should write, paint, or hunt, he said, as long as one feels serious about his work and has the skill to do it.⁹ And in 1952 he could still lament that memory is the casualty of journalism: “In newspaper work . . . you have to learn to forget every day what happened the day before.”¹⁰

Besides causing timeliness instead of timelessness, journalism and occasional writing, he feared, could lead one to take a quick and unreflective view of events. In 1959, looking back to his newspaper days, he saw that news reporting had taught him to write about what happened but not to explore why.¹¹ Earlier in Paris, Gertrude Stein had cautioned him to get out of news work because “you will never see things, you will only see words and that will not do, that is if you intend to be a writer.”¹² Exactly what that meant was spelled out later in Death in the Afternoon. He wanted to make his writing embody what he and the reader really felt, not what they were supposed to feel. The tricks of news writing depended on predictable response, and emotion, like memory, had to be intrinsic in the created action where it could be extrinsic in the reported one.¹³

A third objection he had to writing journalism was that it used up materials and energy that should go into creative work. Gertrude Stein had warned that “the one would use up the juice I needed for the other. She was quite right . . . and that was the best advice she gave me.”¹⁴ This became a refrain for Hemingway before he finally declared himself free of newspaper work; he lamented to Sherwood Anderson, among others, in 1922 that “this goddam newspaper stuff is gradually ruining me. . . .”¹⁵ In 1924, having left the Toronto Star, he still shuddered at the possible losses of usable material. In his “Pamplona Letter” for the transatlantic review he complained that photographing, like reporting, denies the essential thing and emphasizes the facade. “And when you destroy the valuable things you have by writing about them you want to get big money for it. Once you put a thing in words, unless you do it ‘on your knees/ you kill it. If you do write it ‘on your knees’ (I forget who said that about knees and it may have been somebody very banal) the thirty francs a page is only a supplementary reward.”¹⁶ It is not clear how symbolic he felt the rate of payment to be.

The fourth objection was one learned after years of dispute with newspaper and magazine editors, genteel critics, and Boston censors. In his 1934 “Defense of Dirty Words” he pointed to Ring Lardner as an example of the writer tamed by journalism. Lardner had failed, he charged, to write the true language of his characters because he had been restricted by newspaper and magazine editors. The sportsmen of Lardner’s world used four-letter words, and to suggest even by omission that they did not was to lessen the truth of his sketches and stories. Thus journalism not only limited his presentation of the real thing, it conditioned him to accept those limits when he had the relatively greater freedom of book publication.¹⁷ Hemingway’s own encounter with Boston censors during the serial publication of A Farewell to Arms in Scribner’s Magazine taught him the relative strength he had in book publication.

If such was the case against journalism in Hemingway’s mind, his practice indicated he protested too much to be convincing. Not only did he practice journalism and the writing of occasional essays throughout his career, but he also advised others to take the advantages in journalism, and he found the line between expository writing and the creation of fiction not as great as he imagined. He advised his brother Leicester to work for newspapers to learn to write fluently.¹⁸ And on several occasions he changed his mind about what he had written so that a piece first conceived of as critical or journalistic was reclassified as fiction. His New Republic article “Italy, 1927” purported to show the facts of Mussolini’s Italy during an actual trip Hemingway and Guy Hickok made through that country in 1927; yet later that same year he called the sketch a story, titled it “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” and put it in his second major short story collection, Men Without Women. In Death in the Afternoon he presented “A Natural History of the Dead” as a satirically pedantic essay with a dramatized exemplum as part of his justification of bullfighting. But in Winner Take Nothing he reclassified the essay as a short story, cut several exchanges of dialogue between himself and the Old Lady interlocutor, and reduced, or at least made more implicit, the dramatic context of the essay.

His integrity in expository writing was no less important than it was in fiction and this was seen by Louis Henry Cohn, one of the first to evaluate his career as a writer of both nonfiction and fiction. Cohn pointed out that Hemingway had to ignore the demands of publishers and public for more fiction while he spent years writing Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. He knew that neither book would have the sales that another novel would produce, but they represented something also important to him.¹⁹ The importance concerned the relationship between the observed and analyzed thing and the created thing and it became clear in his foreword to Green Hills of Africa: “Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary. . . . The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.”

In his introduction to The Writer Observed, Harvey Breit put Hemingway’s journalism and other essays in perhaps the truest perspective. Hemingway, Breit said, had a potentially great career as a reporter and commentator on the world’s scene. But he adapted his ability to observe and interpret the world to the demands of fiction, where it undergirded the creative imagination with an authoritative sense of the way the world operates, whether in blow-by-blow accounts of prizefights, in the ritual movements of bullfights, or in the tactical developments of wars.²⁰

Before, during, and after the writing of all the fiction from Three Stories & Ten Poems to The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway pursued an unacknowledged career as journalist and essayist, critic and commentator. It began, as Charles Fenton has shown, in Oak Park (Illinois) High School where Hemingway simultaneously wrote Lardneresque reports on school athletic events and bloody stories of Indian revenge.²¹ “The Judgment of Manitou” and “Sepi Jingan,” published in Tabula, the school literary sheet, showed his early abilities in fiction; in columns of the school newspaper Trapeze, Hemingway wrote sports articles and satirical small-talk pieces. His writing at this time, however, was neither consciously part of a journalistic career nor preparation for a literary one. He intended to follow his father’s example in the study of medicine.

After his graduation, though, he decided in favor of cub reporting with the Kansas City Star over pre-medical studies at the state university. From October, 1917, to April, 1918, he covered the police station and general hospital beats and summed up the experience this way for George Plimpton in 1958: “On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.”²²

Leaving the Star to serve with the Red Cross in Italy, he wrote more Lardneresque satire for Ciao, a news and gossip sheet published by young Americans with the ambulance group at Schio. In June, 1918, appeared “Al Receives Another Letter,” an adaptation of Lardner’s brand of humor to the situation of young men still surprised by their rapid elevation to honorary lieutenants in the Italian Army.²³ But the urge to publish stopped when Hemingway was wounded on July 8, 1918, at Fossalta di Piave, and not until after a long convalescence in a Milanese hospital, a hero’s return to Oak Park, and an emotional break with the family in late 1919 did he return to the publishing world.

From February, 1920, to December, 1923, except for six months as associate editor with Harrison Parker’s Co-operative Commonwealth in Chicago, Hemingway worked for the Toronto Star Weekly and the Toronto Daily Star. He began as free-lance contributor to the Star Weekly with a satirical article on art collecting among the bright young set of the city and followed with humorous and satirical accounts about barber colleges, the Toronto mayor’s search for votes at the boxing matches, and on the war profiteer’s attempt to appear as a veteran after the armistice. After three months his vein of satire wore out and he began a series of straight articles on crime, prohibition and bootlegging, and on the finer points of camping and fishing. “When You Camp Out Do It Right,” “Fishing for Trout in a Sporting Way,” and “A Fight with a 20-Pound Trout” appeared among such topical articles as “Canuck Whiskey Pouring into U.S.” and “Plain and Fancy Killing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part One The Public Voice
• Part Two The Transparent Mask
• Part Three "Think Pieces"
• Part Four Correlations
• Part Five Uses of the Essay
• Index