Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity: In the Garden of the Uncanny

311 Pages·2019·1.969 MB·English

by  Stephen Gilbert Brown

AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Hemingway,
Trauma
and Masculinity
In the Garden of the Uncanny
Stephen Gilbert Brown
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Series Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14765
Stephen Gilbert Brown
Hemingway, Trauma
and Masculinity
In the Garden of the Uncanny
Stephen Gilbert Brown
University of Nevada
Las Vegas, NV, USA
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-030-19229-7 ISBN 978-3-030-19230-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19230-3
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This book is dedicated to those souls
who in struggling to transcend their wounds,
teach us how to live with them…
my nephew
Evan
and
Reed Goodmiller
A
cknowledgments
Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity: In the Garden of the Uncanny, no
less than my previous four books, is indebted to the efforts, inspiration,
and influence of numerous colleagues, whose contributions I would here
like to acknowledge. The book, as well as the courses I teach on
Hemingway, Joyce, and Proust, had its genesis in Prof. Phil Sipiora’s grad-
uate course The Literary Expatriates of Paris (U. of S. Florida)—an early
inspiration for which I am thankful. I am likewise deeply grateful for the
tireless, self-sacrificing efforts of my research assistant, Erika Hylton, track-
ing down sources in the Lied Library (UNLV), through inter-library loan,
and online—to the point of shipping a box of books at her own expense
to Costa Rica during my post as a visiting professor there. I wish to thank
as well the ever-helpful research librarians at UNLV, particularly Priscilla
Finley. At UNLV, I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the English
Department for supporting my research-related travels to conferences,
archives, and some of Hemingway’s sacred landscapes—and to Prof. Gary
Totten (Chairperson) in particular. I am similarly indebted to the cheerful
and self-sacrificing efforts on my behalf of Brianna Silverio, April Vomras,
and Michele Sanders. I, likewise, owe a special thanks to the students in
graduate seminars and undergraduate courses for their lively participation
and for providing a first critical audience. The scholarship of Jesse Cook
on Garden of Eden has particularly inspired my own continuing deep
interest in this work.
No less worthy of thanks are my colleagues on the Hemingway panel at
ALA (SF, 2018) for providing a critical audience and cogent feedback.
I want to particularly thank Mark Cirino (Thought in Action), not only for
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the influence his work has had on my own, but for the conversations that
helped sharpen the critical focus of the book, as well as for bringing it to
the attention of other scholars—and Carl Eby in particular, for whose
interest in the project I am also thankful. I would also like to acknowledge
Suzanne del Gizzo, not only for the influence of her work on my own, but
for publishing my article “Hemingway and Akeley: Identity Formation
and Hemingway’s Naturalist Calling” (copyright 2018, The Hemingway
Foundation, All Rights Reserved, Originally Published in The Hemingway
Review (38.1)). My editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Allie Troyanos and
Rachel Jacobe, also deserve special thanks for their enthusiastic steward-
ship throughout—as does Linda Wagner-Martin (ed. American Literature
Readings in the 21st Century) for the distinction of including my book in
this series. I wish to extend a special thanks to my friend and fellow
Hemingway aficion, Chris Warren (Co-Director Hemingway Society
Conference, Cooke City, MT July, 2020; Hemingway’s Yellowstone, forth-
coming), not only for the pilgrimages he led to the numerous sites of this
“Last Good Country” of Hemingway’s life and art, but again for the
hours of conversation, sometimes in Hemingway’s favorite watering holes,
that helped bring this book into sharper focus.
I am finally thankful for the touchstone Hemingway has proven to be
in my long friendship with Nancy Buonacoursi, who recently hiked to the
17,500 ft level of Mt. Kilimanjaro with her daughter, Lauren to bless that
sacred ground with the ashes of her son Reed: a tribute to his long-
standing admiration of Hemingway, and in bittersweet fulfillment of a
mother-son dream to climb Kilimanjaro together. Finally, I wish to thank
my family clan members, Den, Dave, and Chris, and the following close
friends and companions for their unflagging interest in and support of this
project: Blu, Marty, Bobbi, Arlah, and my dear colleagues Tim and
Christopher.
c
ontents
Part I The Love Chase 1
1 Introduction: Entering the Garden—The Genealogy
of a Reading 3
2 Eden and Its Discontents 15
3 The Mother of Invention: The Birth of the Twin 33
4 Sisters of the Forest 73
5 The Forest of Four Wounds: Hemingway and the
Sawyer’s Daughter 105
6 As One Animal of the Forest: “The Last Good Country”
of Sibling Eros 137
Part II The Blood Chase 165
7 The Father of the Forest: Identity Formation and
Hemingway’s Naturalist Calling 167
8 An Uncanny Genealogy: Agassiz, Roosevelt, and Pound 193
ix
x CONTENTS
9 A Father’s Fall from Grace 223
10 The Rise of the Old Brute 245
11 The Tabula Fabulas: Re-Reading Hemingway’s First
Narratives 271
Index 303