Hemingway and Existentialism

By José Antonio Gurpegui Palacios

Ernest Hemingway fue y sigue siendo un escritor particularmente único y controvertido. Este volumen propone un modelo de lectura filosófica, sobre todo desde la perspectiva del existencialismo que dominó Europa durante el segundo cuarto del siglo XX y que fue popularizado por pensadores y escritores como Sartre o Camus. Un enfoque como éste suscita una cuestión de naturaleza temporal, porque cuando Hemingway comenzó a publicar sus obras la filosofía existencialista todavía no se conocía en Europa. La propuesta defendida en este volumen hace referencia al reconocimiento del escritor por los autores rusos (Turgenieff, Tolstoi, Dostoievski), a los que se refiere como su influencia literaria más importante y directa, y que en ocasiones aparecen como referencias indirectas en sus novelas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Release date: Sep 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9788491341536

Book preview

Introduction

Karl Jaspers states that in Kierkegaard there is something different that disturbs us once we have started to understand him (1980: 72). The same appreciation could be said with respect to Hemingway. The American Nobel’s popularity has motivated, to a great extent, the vulgarization, in every sense, of the impressive artistic legacy which he left behind, and has identified him as the drunken fun loving womanizer who put an end to his life by committing suicide. As Federico Eguíluz states, regarding the criticism arising after the writer received the Nobel Prize,

Uno sospecha, de todas formas, que estos ataques podían ir dirigidos más al hombre que a su obra, porque Hemingway no había tenido nunca demasiado tiempo para dedicarse a los círculos literarios, y nunca dudó en expresarlo así con un lenguaje claro y agresivo. (45)¹

The reading of his literary corpus awakens innumerable questions: why the obsession with death? Why the persistence of introducing a nihilistic existence? Why the moral principles so far from ethics? Why the continuous, repetitive heroprotagonist structured over and over following identical parameters, to the point of coining the term code hero when speaking of his characters? Why does he place them in extreme situations in a desperate attempt to obtain the grace under pressure—as it has also been coined? Why his apparent misogynous attitude? Why do his novels take place outside his native North America?

The questions become even more worrisome when we consider his famous iceberg theory in which a narration must only show one eighth of what can be found in the surface. One searches for answers when reading the abundant criticism about Hemingway and realizes that a good part of it barely gives light into some of the already mentioned questions making us suspect, using Eguíluz’s terminology, that most of it has been based on the visible part of the iceberg not showing what is hidden. The basis of this work is to go into depth—as Heidegger would say—with the objective of finding a coherent principle as universal as possible to obtain satisfactory answers to the questions posed. That principle, as I will try to prove, is found in existentialist philosophy. The reading of Kierkegaard and mainly Heidegger, but also Jaspers and Sartre, will give us another way of interpreting, another path to understand the human worries that distressed Hemingway. They offer us a dialectic, I even dare to affirm a methodology or exegesis, by which we can project in his novels and in most of his short stories an interpretative model that helps us understand while harmonizing the apparent incongruence that some have found in them. The theory here defended is that existentialist philosophy may help to understand the conception that Hemingway had of the individual as a human being as well as his relationship with the world. After all, as Heidegger states in Ontology: The Hermeneutic of Facticity, All interpreting is an interpreting with respect to something, on the basis of it and with view to it. The fore having which is to be interpretively explicated must be put into the context of the object and seen there. One must step away from the subject matter initially given and back to that on which it is based (60).

Searching for Literary Independence

Throughout his life, Hemingway antagonized many people, in many cases artistic figures with whom he had kept a close friendship. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos,² who had been part of his closest circle of friends, were some of the writers who suffered his humiliations and embarrassing writings. However, it is also true that Hemingway suffered his share of attacks. Brassaï, in his essay about Henry Miller, states that, among the modern writers, Hemingway was his black beast, and quotes a passage of Miller’s correspondence after Hemingway’s death, Céline’s death touched me more than Hemingway’s. The latter’s work never attracted me neither as a writer nor as a man. It was all just a legend created around his name (173).

Among all the disputes, one of the most peculiar and surprising is the one with Sherwood Anderson. The only feeling that Hemingway could have towards Anderson was that of gratitude. Anderson was the one who encouraged him to travel to Europe when Hemingway’s future as a reporter seemed somewhat unsubstantial; it was also the author of Winesburg, Ohio the one who wrote letters of recommendation to Gertrude Stein opening doors to the crème de la crème of the Parisian intellectuality; he also influenced in a determinant way—together with Francis Scott Fitzgerald—for Boni & Liveright publishing company to publish the American version of In Our Time, even though Hemingway was not a known author; and last but not less important, his influence in Hemingway’s artistic beginnings was decisive, to the point that Gertrude Stein would state that the main debt of Hemingway’s style was due to herself and Sherwood Anderson.

We can ask ourselves about the origin of the furious satire against Anderson represented in The Torrents of Spring. It could be argued that this is only the first attack on a writer, something present throughout Hemingway’s writings. He also parodied Harold Loeb in The Sun Also Rises; Scott Fitzgerald in the first version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro; Dos Passos in To Have and Have Not; Sinclair Lewis in Across the River and Into the Trees; and Stein and Ford in A Moveable Feast. Nevertheless, Anderson’s case is peculiar.³

To begin, we must say that the fight was not personal as it happened with the rest of the writers. The contact between Anderson, who was in the United States, and Hemingway, who was living in Europe while developing and writing the novel, was nonexistent. Even the constant correspondence of the early days had ceased. There are no existing references concerning any types of professional, sentimental or economical problems that could be pending between them. Therefore, it seems appropriate to focus the analysis purely on the artistic field. In Dark Laughter (1925), the cause of the dispute, Anderson advocated and praised the purity of the Black and Indian primitivism against modern society’s technology. That was the touchstone that irritated Hemingway. It is significant that Hemingway entitled his first publication in our time—the lower case corresponds to the fashion of those times, motivated by e.e.cummings and followed by Ford Madox Ford, editor of the transatlantic review, tending to eliminate the capital letters. This in itself seems to indicate a wish to break away, a formal distancing if so, from the past. Aside from the purely formal aspects, the title is interesting in itself, "in our time; what does Hemingway mean when he makes a deliberate reference to our time? If, as is the case, it is not about the heading of any of the stories, what does he want to manifest with this title? Does he pretend to suggest that his" time is different from the prior one? If so, in what sense?

The literary atmosphere he lived while in Paris during the twenties was singular and the French capital was the literary capital of the world. Two most outstanding artistic figures James Joyce, who published his Ulysses in 1922, and Ezra Pound, who had been writing his Cantos since 1915, were living there. The references mentioning the admiration that young Hemingway felt for those two writers are numerous, as in the earlier correspondence with Anderson, where the name of Joyce is mentioned repeatedly. Not in vain was Hemingway one of the first to reserve the extremely expensive first edition of the Ulysses, although he could barely afford such expense.⁴ He read it quickly and on March 9, 1922, a month and a week after the Ulysses was published, he would write to Anderson, Joyce has a most goddam wonderful book (in Ellman 543). Hemingway also signed a letter opposing the tampered North American edition of the Ulysses published by Samuel Roth and even promised to bring Joyce a live lion from his African safari (Fortunately we escaped that, stated Joyce, in Ellman, 708). His relationship with Pound, him being a fellow countryman, was much more intimate. Hemingway would teach him boxing and Pound would tutor him in the noble arts of writing. Jeffrey Meyers brilliantly harmonizes the relationship between the two writers,

Both Pound and Hemingway were passionately devoted to their art and soon established a dynamic creative sympathy. They liked each other personally, shared the same aesthetic aims and admired each other’s work. Pound was an unofficial minister of culture who acted as midwife for new literary talent. Hemingway, who at this time of his life was most responsive to constructive criticism, was intensely interested in technique: of poetry and prose as well as of boxing and bullfighting. He came to Pound as a pupil and allowed the poet to assume his favourite role as teacher. Pound, the first significant writer to recognize Hemingway’s talent, did everything possible to help him achieve success. (73)

Make It New, the maestro had foretold, and that was the outmost which Hemingway would assume as his dogma for faith. This was his time, the time of the literary revolution; a time where the old school was useless. The horrors of World War I had destroyed the optimism of harmonized humanity in which an individual could develop all of his potentials—Everybody’s sick. I’m sick, too (16), Georgette states at the beginning of The Sun Also Rises; Cohn had manifested such an opinion before, ‘I’m sick of Paris…’ (12). The traditional values seemed, pragmatically speaking, as obsolete as outdated. It was a new era, different from the one before and this was the reason why the models of expression also had to be different. This was Joyce’s and Pound’s aspiration; also Kafka’s or Tristan Tzara’s—with whom he published in the same edition of the transatlantic review—and of many others. As in every aspect of his life, also creatively, Hemingway followed the extreme. To create something new, you had to kill the father, and his artistic father at the time was Sherwood Anderson.

Frequently, especially among writers, the physical distance entails a spiritual, conceptual or philosophical distancing with respect to the prevailing values of the place of origin. The title in our time expressed the wish to break away, but the ties with Winesburg, Ohio, even though the first is a book of short stories and the second a novel, are unquestionable. Each and every one of the twenty one short stories in Winesburg, Ohio, has its own meaning in an isolated way, just like the Nick Adams stories in in our time can be understood as part of the set, for they all complement each other in such a way that Nick is progressively shaped as a novelistic character. Both cases deal with young protagonists who live in a rural environment and are moving towards maturity. Thus, we find two peculiar bildungsroman whose initiation towards adult life follows, in certain cases, similar guidelines.

This is the nexus, but in the stories of in our times it is possible to clearly see the spiritual distancing mentioned before. Nick Adams is an infinitely more individualistic character than George Willard, and his process of self discovery is structured around his rebellion against his parents, especially against his father. Stories such as Now I Lay Me, Indian Camp or The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife are clear and definite examples of what has been exposed. Although the rebelliousness against the father could be understood as a natural generation conflict, it clearly stresses the rejection of the traditional values that the parent embodies. Nick rebels against western civilization inherent values and points the way towards fundamental proposals in later protagonists, especially the individual’s individuality and singularity to whom the social code of values seems obsolete, outdated, and old fashioned. Hemingway’s heroes, as can be appreciated in the early Nick Adams, advocate or understand their existence from exclusively individual premises, always taking into account that it is their individual and non transferable experience which will finally make their perception about existence. The final result will be the acceptance of a personal moral system that is not necessarily similar to that which is socially accepted, ethics.

This wish to break away, which can be noticed more or less in a hidden way in in our time, can definitely be seen in The Torrents of Spring. Let us remember the subtitle of the novel, A Romantic Novel in Honour of the Passing of a Great Race. With respect to the meaning, from its content we can infer that the great race refers to the Indians mentioned in the novel. Nevertheless, the meaning of the novel, i.e. a criticism of Anderson, could very well have a new interpretation: could the allusion to the great race be understood as an allusion to those writers who preceded him or perhaps to Anderson’s Indians? These questions could be understood as a simple hypothesis, but taking into account the famous iceberg theory we can agree that it may contribute to substantial interpretations. From this point of view, D.H. Lawrence’s signed photographs, and even the oleo portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that can be found in the conference room, the Indians’ wigman in the novel, can be included in the list of authors aforementioned.

Throughout the reading we find Henry James, of which Scripps thought of as quite a writer (53), although the narrator describes him as that chap who had gone away from his own land (52); Shakespeare, from whom he takes the name of Puck for his bird; Ford Madox Ford, a chatty person who tells good anecdotes, of which he is thankful for; Sinclair Lewis, with whom he talks to about literature; Both Tarkington, another fellow who had the wrong dope (69); John Dos Passos, whom I consider a very forceful writer, and an exceedingly pleasant fellow besides (69); Willa Cather (187), H.G. Wells (197), E.E. Cummings (in capital letters), Scott Fitzgerald, Anderson… as we can see, the literary references are constant, categorically more numerous, and there is more authenticity than in prior works.

In The Torrents of Spring, Hemingway shows an undeniable desire for innovation and experimentalism. The desperate search for artistic independence makes him reevaluate the narrative models known to him. Using Carlos Baker’s words, it is about a declaration of aesthetic independence (77). The novel itself is not understood as a work of art, but instead, it establishes an explicit dialogue with the reader who is always present as the final recipient of the work. Aside from comments and explanations pertinent to its contents, he introduces a series of reasoning which could be mortifying if not placed within an experimentalist and satirical scope. Thus, for example, he remarks through Dos Passos, Hemingway, you have brought a masterpiece (84). In others, it is Hemingway himself who evaluates his own work, As I read that chapter over, reader, it doesn’t seem so bad (93). The real artistic-ideological message is found in the quotes taken from Henry Fielding, who introduces each of the four chapters. The only source of true ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation (16) is the first quote that we read. Others, And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse anyone (40); or, It maybe likewise noted that affectation does not imply an absolute negation of those qualities which are affected (66); and the final one, But perhaps it may be objected to me, that I have against my own rules introduced vices, and of a very black kind (88). The irony is so evident that it cannot be missed; nevertheless, he will present identical narrative principles, this time formally, in Death in the Afternoon, a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl (192).

The Torrents of Spring is not Hemingway’s most appreciated work since it presents all forms of narrative irregularities; however, it represents a factual manifesto of literary independence. The true artistic achievement will come with his next novel, The Sun Also Rises. In this novel Hemingway’s