Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction

184 Pages·2008·0.755 MB·English

by  Amy L. Strong (auth.)

Race and Identity
in Hemingway’s Fiction
American Literature Readings
in the 21st Century
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of
the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States.
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By Kelly Lynch Reames
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness
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Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
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Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry
By Nicky Marsh
James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence
By Piotr K. Gwiazda
Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism
Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez
The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow
and Don DeLillo
By Stephanie S. Halldorson
Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction
By Amy L. Strong
Race and Identity
in Hemingway’s Fiction
Amy L.Strong
RACEANDIDENTITYINHEMINGWAY’SFICTION
Copyright © Amy L.Strong,2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-1-4039-7205-7
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
1 Joining the Tribe 1
2 The Violence of Race in “Indian Camp,”
“The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” and
“Ten Indians” 15
3 Black Eyes and Peroxide in “The Battler” and
“The Light of the World” 45
4 Light, Snow, and Whiteness in “The Short,
Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” 59
5 Darkness in The Garden of Eden 83
6 African Brotherhood in Under Kilimanjaro 119
Conclusion: Teaching Hemingway and Race 141
Notes 145
Bibliography 159
Index 169
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Preface
Thirty years ago the field of Hemingway studies had reached its
twilight years. The preeminent Hemingway scholar, Paul Smith,
confessed that by the 1970s “there was nothing more to be said
about Hemingway’s fiction: The patterns were clear; motifs, cate-
gorized. We had an authorized biography and what seemed to be
stable texts” (1). Just as his reputation in the American literary
canon seemed locked in for the twentieth century, a substantial
collection of private manuscripts and personal letters were made
available to scholars at the John F. Kennedy library in the early
1980s and the world of Hemingway studies has not only been revi-
talized, but sharply riven in two. This new mass of material did not
simply provide one or two tidbits of information that upended
earlier assumptions about Hemingway’s constructions of hetero-
sexual masculinity; rather, it provided hundreds and hundreds of
pages of information that needed to be assimilated into our overall
understanding of his legacy in American letters. Most unsettling to
traditional scholars were the new revelations that Hemingway
sometimes played the role of a woman during sexual intercourse
while his wife played the role of a man, that he had dyed his hair a
bright coppery red, and that he and his wives cut their hair to look
like twins.1 The mythos of Ernest Hemingway had been dealt a
severe blow.
Hemingway scholars might reasonably have argued that the
revelations in Hemingway’s stash of personal letters should have
no bearing on our assessments of his literary works. For one thing,
Hemingway had specifically requested that his personal letters be
burned after his death. In a letter dated May 20, 1958, he wrote:
“It is my wish that none of the letters written by me during my life-
time shall be published. Accordingly, I hereby request and direct
you not to publish or consent to the publication by others of any
such letters.” The reputation of the man, Ernest Hemingway,
viii PREFACE
certainly had been ruptured and was destined for substantial
reconstruction, but the integrity of his literary texts could poten-
tially remain untouched. This was not to be; in the early 1980s,
scholars were also given access to the two enormous manuscripts
that Hemingway had been working on during the last ten years
of his life.2 In these manuscripts Hemingway exhibited the same
obsessions with gender-bending, and thus an even more explosive
rift in Hemingway studies wasborn.
The debate did not have much momentum in its first few years,
since only a tiny number of scholars were able to make the trip to
the John F. Kennedy library to actually view the letters and manu-
scripts; moreover, scholars needed to secure permission from the
Hemingway Foundation before they were able to publish portions
of the new material. All this changed in 1986 when Scribner’s
posthumously published a heavily edited version of one of the
manuscripts, a work entitled The Garden of Eden. Far from capping
off an established career, the book crystallized two opposing
trends that were emerging in the field.
Among one group of critics, the book set off reactions of
disavowal and, at times, disgust. Scribner’s was heavily criticized
for daring to publish a novel that Hemingway, the consummate
craftsman, never would have wanted to see in anyone else’s hands
but his own. Some scholars protested that the content was too
autobiographical and therefore less literary than Hemingway’s
other works—a suspicious criticism indeed to be leveled at a man
who famously drew upon his own experiences of war, hunting,
father-son bonding, and failed marriages for material. Most of all,
this group of scholars did not know how to incorporate the
menage a trois, the homoeroticism, and the role reversals in love-
making into their overall understanding of the firmly rooted
Hemingway text.
Hemingway’s family members were the first to register their
dismay over the new novel’s publication. Jack Hemingway
(Hemingway’s son) declared that much of the posthumous publica-
tion of his father’s work would have been “rejected out of hand by
[Hemingway’s] own critical faculty without extensive rewriting—
cutting and pruning he would have refused to have anyone do but
himself” (322). Lorian Hemingway (Hemingway’s granddaughter)
mused, “I wonder what Hemingway, who created masterworks,
PREFACE ix
would say about this unfortunate novel. He might say he wished he
had burned his evidence...Or he might just laugh at us all” (72).
Several other Hemingway scholars soon echoed the family’s dis-
dain. Earl Rovit regrets the novel’s publication: “It’s unfortunate
it was commercially published because it’s a rotten book. There are
lovely things in it and the business of this unorthodox menage a
trois, and the haircuts, and what not. All struck me as personal
material that a writer is getting rid of for his own therapy and is
unable to universalize or make representative of anything other
than his own peculiar warts and whims” (Brian 189). Rovit settles
on the word “unorthodox” to describe the content he objects to
in Hemingway’s new book, a word that expresses what he and
many other readers had not expected to find. He wants Hemingway’s
works to fit into the already established and approved codes that
had been so fully outlined by the 1970s: grace under pressure,
assertion of masculinity, and relentless machismo.
Homoeroticism, lesbian desire, gender reversals, androgyny,
and hair fetishism all formed the backbone of The Garden of Eden,
and those critics who disparaged or dismissed the book because
of these “unorthodox” themes were positioning themselves on
unstable territory. The novel mightily confuses categories: can the
canonical author write a noncanonical book? The literary canon
reflects our own biases—it is a place for inclusion and exclusion, a
place to see reflections of social identities and cultural images, a
place to represent and transmit texts that are perceived to have
cultural value. And yet, as John Guillory has argued, “the process
of canonical selection is always a process of social exclusion, specif-
ically the exclusion of female, black, ethnic, or working-class
authors from the literary canon” (7). When Hemingway’s texts
represent white male heterosexual identities, they are as canonical
as canonical gets. But when the lead characters represent ambigu-
ous race, class, and gender identities, the book does not belong in
the canon?
If the debate about the publication of this novel revolved
around the ethics of publishing a novel that has not received the
final approval or marks of craftsmanship that can only be provided
by the original author, then so be it. Most readers feel a strong
sense of ambivalence about posthumous publications.3 But the
debate about The Garden of Edenranged much farther afield than