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dissertation entitled

Ernest Hemingway's Versions of Pastoral

presented by

David J. Savola

has been accepted towards fulfillment

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6/01 cJCIRClDateDuepGS-p. 15

 

ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S VERSIONS OF PASTORAL
By

David J. Savola

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2001

ABSTRACT
ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S VERSIONS OF PASTORAL
By

David J. Savola

Much of Ernest Hemingway’s work can be understood as an ongoing argument
with conventional depictions of the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
In his effort to drive literature away from the imitation of literary precedent and closer to
an attachment with the natural world, Hemingway invokes conventional depictions in an
effort to call attention to their artificiality and make his readers more aware of their
limitations and distortions. Hemingway makes particular use of the set of conventions
associated with pastoral, structuring his work to call attention to the ways in which the
pastoral has been used to develop a simplistic view of the natural world, and to return to
pastoral some of the sophistication it had originally possessed in the work of Theocritus

and Virgil.

Copyright by
DAVID J. SAVOLA
2001

I dedicate this work to John Savola, Jr. and Elizabeth Niemi Savola

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the guidance and encouragement of Prof. James I. McClintock of
Michigan State University whose thoughtful comments as this manuscript developed
made me feel I was on an exciting journey of discovery. His enthusiasm for scholarship
and for nature Writing were a constant stimulus. I am grateful as well to Prof. William A.
Johnsen of Michigan State whose kindness and generosity helped me to believe that this
project was possible at times when I doubted it most. I also wish to acknowledge the
support of the English Department of Northern Michigan University, particularly Prof.
Peter Goodrich for his encouragement, and Prof. James Livingston, for his kindness, wit,
friendship, and fine example as teacher and colleague. I am particularly grateful to Prof.
Annette Steigerwald of Ohio University for her careful reading of this manuscript as it
developed, even in its most inchoate stages, for her enormous patience in helping me
through numerous moments of frustration and doubt, for her useful suggestions in
refining and clarifying my argument, and for her tremendous generosity of spirit. And I
am indebted to Loretta Crum of Boreal Press, whose keen editorial eye helped me cut
much deadwood from this manuscript and whose faith in this project was a tremendous
source of inspiration. Any infelicities of style which remain in this manuscript are the

fault of no one but myself.

The works of Ernest Hemingway are protected by international copyright.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

CHAPTER 1

ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S VERSIONS OF PASTORAL ............................................. l
Ecocriticism .......................................................................................................... 2
Pastoral ................................................................................................................ 18
Ernest Hemingway’s Versions of Pastoral .......................................................... 32

CHAPTER 2

NORTHERN MICHIGAN AS “THE LAST GOOD COUNTRY” IN ERNEST

HEMINGWAY’S NICK ADAMS STORIES .................................................................. 49

CHAPTER 3

THE SUN ALSO RISES AS A CRITIQUE OF PASTORAL ......................................... 72

CHAPTER 4

DEATH IS ALSO IN ARCADIA: “A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD” ........ l l 1

CHAPTER 5

BEING EXTREMELY ACCURATE AND NOT LITERARY: GREEN HILLS OF

AFRICA AS A REVISION OF PASTORAL ................................................................. I39

AFTERWORD ................................................................................................................ I82

WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................. 199

vi

Chapter One

Ernest Hemingway’s Versions of Pastoral

In his biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellman reports that Joyce once remarked

“there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know” (695). Indeed, after
some seventy years of critical investigation, Hemingway’s work continues to repay
analysis. Although Hemingway’s work has been subjected to a number of reductive
readings, such as the theory of the code of the Hemingway hero, the theory of the
traumatizing wound Hemingway suffered as a youth in World War I, or the long-standing
tradition of reading him as spokesman for the Lost Generation, scholars continue to find
still unplumbed depths in his work.

One promising new approach to Hemingway‘s work is reading it as an
investigation of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Hemingway
was well-read in natural history essays, handbooks on woodland lore, studies of game
animals, safari memoirs, and nature poetry. Throughout his life such outdoor activities as
fishing, hunting, and camping were consuming passions. Much of his writing is an effort
to find a way for literature to render an accurate vision of the complex relationship
between human culture and wild nature. Central to this project is his use of the enduring,
highly conventional form of pastoral. Hemingway uses the central elements of the
pastoral tradition to investigate the limitations and distortions which have so long plagued

literary efforts to understand the natural world and humanity’s position within it. Recent

developments in the evolving field of ecocriticism can help us appreciate Hemingway’s
use of pastoral to explore literature’s ability to present an accurate picture of the natural

world.

I. Ecocriticism

While literary study has been engaged with such social and political concerns as
racial and gender inequities for some thirty years, ecologically-minded criticism is a
relatively recent phenomenon. Ecocriticism receives comparatively little attention from
the academy. Recent anthologies of literary theory ignore ecocriticism altogether. Philip
Rice and Patricia Waugh’s Modern Literafi Theory: A Refit (2nd ed. 1992) treats
Marxism, Feminism, New Historicism, and Postmodernism, and overlooks ecocriticism.
David Richter’s The Critical Tradition (2nd ed. 1998) examines such contemporary
approaches as Queer Studies, Feminism, and Cultural Studies, and omits any mention of
ecocriticism. Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (2nd ed. 1996) includes
a chapter titled “Conclusion: Political Criticism” which begins with this arresting
observation:

As I write, it is estimated that the world contains over 60,000 nuclear warheads,

many with a capacity a thousand times greater than the bomb which destroyed

Hiroshima. The possibility that these weapons will be used in our lifetime is

steadily growing. The approximate cost of these weapons is 500 billion dollars a

year, or 1.3 billion dollars a day. Five per cent of this sum--25 billion dollars--

could drastically, fundamentally alleviate the problems of the poverty-stricken

Third World. Anyone who believed that literary theory was more important than

such matters would no doubt be considered somewhat eccentric, but perhaps only

a little less eccentric than those who consider that the two topics might be

somehow related. . . .Why this perverse insistence in dragging politics into the

argument? (169)

Despite drawing so near to linking political criticism with ecological concerns, Eagleton
ignores ecocriticism.

Several ecologically-concerned critics have noted a particular hostility on the part
of literary academia toward nature writing and toward ecocriticism. James I. McClintock
has noted that nature writing has been largely ignored because “the reading public
understands nature writing as a genteel, if durable literary occupation practiced by natural
historians, and academics think of it as a minor literary occupation imitative of Thoreau”
(67). Glen A. Love has noted the inherent anthropocentrism of the discipline which calls
itself “the humanities” (“Revaluing Nature” 229). The idea of a human-centered
universe is anathema to the ecological outlook; ecology emphasizes interdependence and
interrelations and it views anthropocentrism as the ideological basis of much
environmental despoliation. William Howarth has noted that the interdisciplinarity
characteristic of ecocriticism raises resistance. “Connecting science and literature is
difficult,” says Howarth “for their cultures have grown widely apart” (76). But, Howarth
notes, “perhaps the greatest obstacle to acceptance is that much-privileged species,

Professores literati, who praise innovation but tend to preserve the status quo” (77).

An additional difficulty facing ecocriticism is the influence of post-structuralist
literary theory. Some scholars feel that post-structuralism has made the academic world
suspicious of writing and scholarship that engages with the natural world. Frank Stewart,
for instance, claims:

Even as concerns for the environment mount . . . literary theorists and academics
continue to distance the humanities and the literary arts from the natural world
outside their offices. This defoliated and desacralized world doesn’t really count
as a subject in our literature, I have been informed by poets and critics who argue
the point in person and in their books. Like it or not, we live in a postcapitalistic,
postindustrial, postmodern urban world from which the gods have departed. The
only real and important theme to write about in such a world, they have

concluded, is the indeterminacy of language. (221)

Indeed, ecocriticism is actively engaged in a real, physical world outside ideological
constructs and the shifiing relations between signifier and signified. Ecocriticism,
mindful of recognizing the powerful and immediate dangers attendant on environmental
degradation, is often impatient with solipsism. Karl Kroeber, in his book Ecological
Literary Criticism: Romntic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (1994), identifies one
of the central features of the approach as “an intellectual position that accepts as entirely
real a natural environment existent outside of one’s personal psyche” ( l 9). Kroeber also

comments, “the increasing self-isolation of criticism within narrow

ideological/metaphysical concerns appears to be a defensive maneuver to protect critics

from taking up practical social responsibilities” (20). Lawrence Buell makes a similar
comment. He questions
the increasing marginalization of the literal environment in the explanation of
what is most decisive and important among agendas of American naturism. The
conception of represented nature as an ideological screen becomes unfruitful if it
is used to portray the green world as nothing more than projective fantasy or
social allegory. (The Environmental Imagination 36)
Ecocriticism eschews ideologically justified intellectual isolationism. Ecocriticism wants
to bring the personal, social, and environmental responsibility of the literary theorist to
bear upon his or her praxis both in writing and in social action. As Herbert F. Tucker
puts it, ecocriticism
challenges interpretation to own its grounding in the bedrock of natural fact, in the
biospheric and indeed planetary conditions without which human life, much less
humane letters, could not exist. Ecocriticism thus claims as its hermeneutic
horizon nothing short of the literal horizon itself, the finite environment that a
reader or writer occupies thanks not just to culturally coded determinants but also
natural determinants that antedate these, and will outlast them. (“From the
Editors” 505)
However, the academy is becoming more tolerant of ecologically-concerned
criticism. Numerous literary scholars are seeking to merge their concern for the natural
world with their interests in literature. Various members of the Western Literature

Association did valuable groundbreaking work in establishing this new approach. In

1985 Frederick O. Waage produced Teaching Ecological Literature: Materials, Methods,
Resources which was an important event in the development of an eco-centered
criticism. In 1990 the University of Nevada at Reno appointed Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty
the first American professor of Literature and the Environment. The 1991 Modern
Language Association convention included a special session on “Ecocriticism: The
Greening of Literary Studies.” In 1992 the Association for the Study of Literature and the
Environment was formed, establishing for the first time a professional organization in
which ecologically-concerned literary scholars could share ideas and insights, and
promote research in the field. In 1993 the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment was established by Patrick Murphy, providing for the first
time an organ dedicated to ecocriticism.
In the relatively few years since the founding of ASLE and the establishment of

ISLE, ecocriticism has burgeoned considerably. Influential journals, such as New
Litinag History (Vol. 30.3, 1999) and Studies in Romanticism (Vol. 35.3, 1996) have
published special issues devoted to ecocriticism. A number of anthologies of nature
writing have been issued which are designed as textbooks for use in college composition
courses, such as Constructing Nature: Readings from the American Experience , edited
by Richard Jenseth and Edward E. Lotto (1996) and A Forest of Voices: Conversations
in Ecology (2nd ed. 2000), edited by Chris Anderson and Lex Runciman, which have
fostered academic attention to nature writing. Several major anthologies of nature writing
have appeared in recent years, such as Thomas Lyon’s This Incomparable Lande: A

BooJkgof American Nature Writing (1989) and The Norton Boiof Nature Writing edited

by Robert Finch and John Elder (1990), which have done much to bring nature writing to
the attention of literary scholars.

Two works which help to legitimize ecocriticism are The Ecocriticism Reader
(1996) edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and Reading the Earth: New
Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment (1998) edited by Michael P.
Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic. Each of these volumes
gathers a number of ecocritical readings of literary texts and also features essays which
explore the central tenets of ecocriticism. The number of ecologically-informed critical
studies appearing in a variety of journals attests to the fact that ecocriticism is at present a
growing field. Perhaps the clearest indication that ecologically-minded criticism is finally
receiving serious attention from the academic community is the appearance in MIA
(Vol. 114.5, October 1999) of a Special Forum on “Literatures of the Environment.” In
fact, ecocriticism has presently expanded to the point that, as Lawrence Buell has
remarked, “The ‘Who’s listening?’ question that nagged me when I began such work in
the late 1980’s has given way to ‘How can I keep up with all that’s coming out?’ and
‘Can I even keep track of, let alone stay in touch with, all the players?”’ (“The Ecocritical
Insurgency” 699).

The scholars who practice ecocriticism are mindful of the relative youth of this
critical approach, and are engaged in a discussion to establish its central premises. There
is some resistance against codifying the approach too rigidly. “Literature and the
environment is a big topic, and should remain that way,” says Cheryll Glotfelty (xxii).

Glotfelty arrived at this conclusion after a conversation with Wallace Stegner, who, she

says, urged her to let the topic remain “large and loose and suggestive and open, simply
literature and the environment and all the ways they interact and have interacted, without
trying to codify and systematize. Systems are like wet rawhide; when they dry they
strangle what they bind” (xxii). Frank Stewart refuses to overly rigorously define nature
writing (the genre with which ecocriticism most directly concerns itself). Stewart avoids
narrow definition “because nature writing’s openness to a range of utterances is to me
more of a virtue than a flaw. . . . In one sense nature writing is about nature’s ‘laws,’ and
in another its style and perspective have the potential--as with great science and great art--
to be wild and unbounded” (220). Similarly, Scott Slovic comments, “ecocriticism is
large and contains multitudes. There is no single, dominant worldview guiding
ecocritical practice--no single strategy at work from example to example of ecocritical
writing or teaching” (“Forum” 1102). Lawrence Buell remarks, “if ecocriticism still lacks
a paradigm inaugurating statement like Edward Said’s Orientalism (for colonial discourse

studies) or Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissagce Self-Fashioning (for new historicism), that

 

may be just as well” (“F orum” 1091 ).

Although eco-critics want to retain an open and inclusive definition of their
critical practice, some central premises emerge. One is interdependency. From the time
Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology (or oecolog) in 1866 “the major theme
throughout the history of this science and the ideas that underlie it has been the
interdependence of living things” (Worster 378). As Cheryll Glotfelty notes,

all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is

connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes

as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the

cultural artifacts of language and literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in

literature and another on the land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between

the human and the nonhuman. (xix)

For this reason, ecocriticism assumes individual humans, individual wild creatures,
individual locations, even individual texts cannot profitably be examined in isolation, but
must be considered as elements within a complex system of interactions.

Glotfelty also points out that there has been discussion over the selection of an
appropriate term for this critical approach. Though ecocriticism seems the preferred
term, others in current usage include ecopoetics, environmental literary criticism, and
green cultural studies (xx). Glotfelty says several scholars prefer ecocriticism over
environmental criticism.

They favor 999- over gvi_ro- because, analogous to the science of ecology,

ecocriticism studies relationships between things, in this case, between human

culture and the physical world. Furthermore, in its connotations, guy—iro- is
anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that we humans are at the center,
surrounded by everything that is not us, the environment. m- in contrast,
implies interdependent communities. integrated systems, and strong connections

among consituent parts. (xx)

This insistence on interdependency points up one of the truly valuable features of
ecocriticism. It sees literature not as something compartmentalized or “academic,” but as

something tied to the physical world. William Howarth has observed, “ecocriticism seeks

to examine how metaphors of nature and land are used and abused” (81). Ecocriticism
sees the world as influenced by the metaphors we use to describe it, whether as “virgin
land,” or “mother earth,” or “the howling wilderness,” or “the fresh, green breast of the
new world.” Each of these metaphors encode ideological assumptions about humanity’s
relationship to the natural world, and enable our exploitation of it, or remind us of our
kinship with it (“mother earth”) and obligations toward it.

Interdependency implies the abandonment of anthropocentrism. Traditionally, the
area of study that calls itself the humanities has considered the natural world one
particular, definable entity, one quite separate from human culture. And the humanities
have concerned themselves exclusively with the study of this human culture. But
ecocriticism rejects the idea of human culture as separate from wild nature. As Jean
Arnold puts it

the view that culture is produced by human beings and is therefore separate from
nature bypasses the fact that all human culture resides in the natural world, that
every penny of economic worth ultimately draws on resources of the natural
world, and that we owe our very existence to its processes. To disregard the fact

that human cultural production is embedded in the natural world is to entertain a

selective vision that places humankind in a pre-Copernican position of centrality it

does not deserve. (“Forum” 1090)

Mending the artificial split between culture and nature is no mere academic exercise, but
one that has serious ramifications. The assumption that human culture and wild nature

are separate underlies much of the historical effort to tame and dominate wild nature.

Ecocriticism believes that literature can do much to correct this dangerous assumption.
As Glen A. Love remarks, “the most important function of literature today is to redirect
human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world”
(“Revaluing Nature” 237). In their introduction to The Norton Bofiof Nature Writing.
John Elder and Robert Finch comment, “all literature, by illuminating the full nature of
human existence, asks a single question: how shall we live? In our age that question has
taken its most urgent form in relation to the natural environment” (28).

The interdependency central to ecocriticism also fosters interdisciplinarity.
Ecocritics frequently borrow concepts and technical terminology from fields outside the
humanities, fields such as geology, biology, meteorology, forestry. This is one of the
most valuable aspects of ecocriticism; it has enormous potential for revitalizing the
humanities by breaking down their traditional separation from the sciences. William
Howarth remarks that “ecocriticism seeks to redirect humanistic ideology, not spuming
the natural sciences but using their ideas to sustain viable readings” (“Some Principles”
78). As Lawrence Buell says, ecocritics “proceed from a conviction that informed
knowledge of the natural world and/or natural science(s) ought to matter for the
practitioner of environmentally-valenced literary studies” (“Ecocritical Insurgency" 703).
This is one of the most fruitful and distinctive aspects of ecocriticism, as it offers the
promise of freeing the humanities from the impression of insularity which so many feel
dogs this area of study.

The interdependency and interdisciplinarity typical of ecocriticism has also lead to

the breakdown of the traditional split between creative and critical texts. Scott Slovic’s

§_e_e_king Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992), for example, mingles critical
studies of the work of Thoreau, Wendell Berry, John Muir, and Annie Dillard with
personal narrative. By the same token, some ecocritical scholars try to break down the
traditional separation between the rarefied and insular atmosphere of the academy and the
“real world” outside by involving academic work with environmental practice. Cheryll
Glotfelty, for instance, includes in her Environmental Literature course at the University
of Nevada at Reno activities fostering environmental awareness, such as the re-use of
office paper and participation in recycling efforts. John Tallmadge has brought nature
writing classes outside, complementing classroom study of Thoreau with field trips to Mt.
Ktaadn (Waage 114-121). John Elder’s work on Robert Frost involves more than just an
analytical study of the poet’s work, but also uses his own re-enactment of the type of farm
labor Frost performed and wrote about (wall-building, apple-picking, hay-mowing) as an
investigative tool (“Poetry of Experience” 649-659).

Much ecocriticism has dealt with work ostensibly branded “nature writing'.”
Numerous studies devoted to work in this genre have appeared, ushered in by the
detailed, and still useful, introduction Joseph Wood Krutch includes in his M
American Nature Writing (1950). John Elder’s Mning the Earth: Poetry and the
Vision of Nature (1985, 2nd ed. 1996) examines the work of nature-related poets, such as
Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Wendell Berry, and AR. Ammons. Sherman Paul’s 3);
the Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers (1992), examines Thoreau, John Muir,
Aldo Leopold, Henry Beston, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, and Barry Lopez. James I.

McClintock examines the central features of the work of Krutch, Gary Snyder, Annie

12

Dillard, and Edward Abbey in Nature’s Kindred Spirits2 (1994). And, of course, some
central figures of the nature writing genre have been the sole subject of book-length
studies, such as Gary Snyder, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey. Certainly such studies
have played a valuable role in bringing these often neglected works to the attention of the
academy, and in raising ecocritical practice to new levels of sophistication. But
ecocriticism need not limit itself to those works generally considered “nature writing.”
As Ursula K. Heise Observes, “ecocriticism has nothing specifically to do with am
writing” (“Forum” 1097). And, as Scott Slovic says, “not a single literary work anywhere
utterly defies ecocritical interpretation” (“Forum” 1102). There is a large cast of authors
not traditionally thought of as “nature writers” whose work is only beginning to receive
ecocritical attention, authors to whom such attention may very profitably be applied. such
as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ernest
Hemingway, to name only a very few.

I have noted above that one of the impediments ecocriticism has faced in its
efforts to advance itself within the academy is the influence of post-structuralist literary
theory. Certainly ecocriticism does posit a real, physical world outside the constructs of
language and culture. But not all ecologically-minded scholars are so dismissive of post-
structuralist theory as are Stewart and Kroeber. Dana Phillips, for example, says. “in
their flight from literary theory, ecocritics have ignored an inconvenient fact: a
considerable body of what hasto be called ‘theory’ must be surveyed, at the least, before
one can speak sensibly about ecology” (“Ecocriticism” 582). Some critics have found

significant intersections between the concerns of literary theorists and ecological

criticism. Scott Slovic, for instance, has not succumbed to the hatred of solipsism evident
in Stewart and Kroeber, but sees an investigation of the psychology of human perception
as one of the central features of nature writing. “Nature writers,” Slovic says. “are
constantly probing, traumatizing, thrilling and soothing their own minds-~and by
extension those of their readers--in quest not only of consciousness itself, but of an
understanding of consciousness” (Seekigg Awareness 3). Jhan Hochman has
appropriated the techniques of cultural studies and applied them to human representations
of nature in Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Them (1998). And
Sueellen Campbell has, in “The Land and Language of Desire” (1989), an article which I
believe will be extremely influential as ecocriticism continues to develop, investigated
some of the ways in which post-structuralist literary theory and ecology intersect.
Campbell says
Both theorists and ecologists . . . are at core revolutionary. They stand in
opposition to traditional authority, which they question and then reject. All of
them begin by criticizing the dominant structures of Western culture and the vast
abuses they have spawned. What I once might blithely have called The
Establishment is now identified by such ornate epithets as ‘logocentrism,’
‘phallocentrism,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘technocracy’--those structures of interwoven
thought and power, concept and institution, in which humans matter more than
other creatures, men more than women, Europeans more than Africans or Asians

or Native Americans, logic more than emotion, reason more than dreams or

madness. For both theory and ecology, it is axiomatic that knowledge and power.

ideas and actions, are inseparable. (127)

Campbell’s work has much promise for releasing the transformative potential of
ecocriticism. Because the natural world is influenced by the language we use to describe
it, the interrogation of literature as a method of negotiating our relationship to the world
around us has a potential for radically altering--improving, informing, updating-our
understanding of our membership in the natural community.

One of the most frequently cited works in ecocriticism is Joseph Meeker’s 111;
Comedy of Survival: Studies in LiteraerEcology (1972). In this work, Meeker identifies
what I feel ought to be a central premise of ecocriticism:

Human beings are the earth’s only literary creatures. . . . If the creation of

literature is an important characteristic of the human species, it should be

examined carefully and honestly to discover its influence upon human behavior
and the natural environment--to determine what role, if any, it plays in the welfare
and survival of mankind and what insight it offers into human relationships with
other species and with the world around us. Is it an activity which adapts us better
to the world or one which estranges us from it? From the unforgiving perspective

(of evolution and natural selection, does literature contribute more to our survival

than it does to our extinction? (I97)

Meeker’s premise is valuable because it presents literature as something important,
something that matters. In recognizing literature as an adaptive strategy it uses natural

science to examine the role literature plays in negotiating the involvement of human

culture in wild nature. And it invites us to take seriously the way literature colors our
understanding of the world around us. Metaphors may deceive or inform. Metaphors
which help us understand, respect, and nurture the natural world are a valuable. positive
adaptation. Metaphors which obscure or misrepresent our membership within the natural
community are maladaptive and imperil our very survival.

Works of literature, and approaches to literary study, which help us to accurately
understand the natural world and our place within it are of inestimable value. Literature
which endorses or enables ecological exploitation or destruction is enormously
dangerous. Truth is valuable and falsity is dangerous. Ecocriticism must be mindful of
this simple, but important premise.

However, one implication of Meeker’s premise is the temptation to view
ecocriticism as a doctrinaire effort, an enforcement of ecological correctness. It is
important that we resist this temptation. To dismiss works of literature from earlier eras
or from other (non-westem) cultures on the basis of their supposed failure to obey the
current injunctions of ecological correctness is unfair and disadvantageous. One of the
most important lessons of ecology is the astonishing complexity of the natural world,
with its massive webs of interdependency. No one view of the natural world, or of
humanity’s relationship to it, can ever be all-encompassing or final. An informed and
responsible ecological criticism must incorporate the lessons we gather from the natural
world itself, and must see literature as an evolving effort to understand the intricate,
growing, changing system of webs of interdependency that is the natural world, of which

we, as humans, are part. Each individual work of literature must be seen as an organic

entity which functions in complex interrelationship with other works--works not only of
“literature.” but of scientific studies, policy statements, works of history-~which each
function as individual cells in a complex organism. Each of these individual cells is a
small part of a large, complex, continually evolving effort to understand the natural world
and our place within it. “Our reconstructions of environment cannot be other than
skewed and partial,” says Lawrence Buell. “Even if this were not so, even if human
perception could perfectly register environmental stimuli, literature could not”
(Environmental Imagination 84). We must understand literature, then, as an organic
entity which evolves toward an understanding of our relationship to nature, without
arriving at any final, all-encompassing, static vision. As Wallace Stevens says, “after the
final no there comes a yes/ And on this yes the future world depends/ . . . .It can never be

satisfied, the mind, never” (Collected Poems 247). Literature, as a tool for the mind to

 

measure its relation to the world around it, can never arrive at a final answer. The project
of ecocriticism is to trace the wandering journey toward an answer and not to hope to
arrive at any final summing up.

One genre which holds considerable promise for ecocritical exploration is the
pastoral. The pastoral has, in its variety of permutations, both attempted to fix a vision of
the natural world, and to evolve in response to changing perceptions of the natural world
and of humanity’s place within it. The pastoral vision has been a complex and difficult
area for ecocriticism, and for ecocriticism to arrive at a higher level of sophistication it
must interrogate the defining qualities of the pastoral. An understanding of the pastoral.

its enduring appeal for generations of readers, and its limitations as an accurate

representation of the natural world, is important to appreciating Hemingway’s project of

investigating literary depictions of the natural world.

II. Pastoral

One of the most persistent and enduring Western literary modes is pastoral. From the
time of its invention in the Idyls of Theocritus (c. 316-260 BC.) and its further
development in the Eclogues of Virgil (70-19 B.C.) pastoral has powerfully articulated
the human yearning for a union with a pure and simple natural world. Pastoral is derived
from the Latin m, “to graze,” so the presence of shepherds or herdsmen has been

essential to pastoral from its origin. The pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil depict
idealized shepherds tending their flocks while discoursing on love and loss. and engaging
in singing contests (eclogues). The shepherds are depicted as particularly gifted in poetry
and music; they have been taught these arts by the nymphs who dwell in the wooded hills
in which the Shepherds tend their flocks. The work life of these shepherds is extensively
idealized; according to traditional forms of pastoral, they do not labor to raise their sheep.
Rather, an atmosphere of leisure, or M, is characteristic of the pastoral. In the Idylls
and Eclogues, the shepherd-poets rest in a peaceful bower where food and drink is
abundant. The setting of the classical pastoral is Arcadia. In Theocritus, Arcadia
designates an actual location in Greece (though he is depicting the life of rural folk in his
native Sicily), but Virgil alters this actual region into a highly idealized landscape. As
Ten-y Gifford notes, Virgil’s “Arcadia is significantly an alpine region that is cut off on

all Sides by other high mountains. It was the perfect location for a poetic paradise, a

literary construction of a past Golden Age in which to retreat by linguistic idealization”
(20). The form as established by Theocritus and Virgil was borrowed by Renaissance
Europeans and figured in the accounts of the New World written by early colonists. The
form has been freely adapted over the centuries. Today many works called “pastoral”
bear very little resemblance to the Idylls or Eclogues. Today nearly any work of literature
with a rural setting may be termed “pastoral.”

Pastoral is one of those terms we use much too liberally, confident that we know
what we mean when we use it. But the term has become so elastic that it has no widely

agreed-upon meaning. As Dana Phillips has noted, “the pastoral is perhaps the most

 

plastic of modes” (“Postmodern Pastoral" 236). William Empson, in Some Versions of
Pastoral (1935), uses it to denote any work that cloaks complexity within simplicity, and

applies it to such disparate texts as The Beggar’s Opera and Alice’s Adventures in

 

Wonderland. Paul Alpers notes in What is Pastoral ? (1996) “it sometimes seems as if
there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics and scholars who write about it“
(8). Alpers himself identifies the “representative anecdote” of pastoral as “herdsmen and
their lives, rather than landscape or idealized nature” (22). Frederic Garber identifies

PaStoral as characterized by a nostalgic vision, one which suggests that “we are returning.

 

in the fiction, to where we used to be” (455). Lawrence Buell, in The Environmental

\Imagination (1995), defines pastoral as “all literature that celebrates an ethos of rurality or

“attire or wilderness over against an ethos of metropolitanism” (439). In contrast to such

elaStic definitions, Don Scheese offers an effective gloss on critical accounts of the

I“eaning of pastoral:

At the heart of the pastoral, no matter what its historical context, is a preference
for the apparently ‘simple‘ world of ‘nature’ (traditionally understood as the non-
human realm) over the complicated life of ‘civilization.’ Writers (and artists) of
this tradition have typically represented or constructed nature as a retreat or
sanctuary, as arcadian garden or wildemess refuge. (4)
In addition, pastoral involves “some form of retreat and return, the fundamental pastoral
movement, either within the text, or in the sense that the pastoral retreat ‘returned’ some
insights relevant to the urban audience” (Gifford 2).

Leo Marx. in his The Machine in the Garden (1964), distinguishes between two
types of pastoral—the sentimental and the complex. The sentimental type of pastoral is
an idealized image of wilderness or rural nature as a locus of peace and simplicity, and is
so pervasive that it may be found in such literary examples as the idyllic portion of Huck
and Jim’s trip down the river, or in such elements of popular culture as beer commercials.
The complex type of pastoral also is characterized by an idealized picture of garden or
wilderness landscapes, but calls attention to the artificiality of this vision by presenting a
“counterforce”—a device which intrudes into the idyllic vision through some violent
incursion. For Marx, “it is industrialization, represented by images of machine
tecl'lnology, that provides the counterforce in the American archetype of the pastoral
design” (26). Marx’s prime example of this counterforce is Hawthome‘s sketch of a
Peaceful wooded area near Concord, Massachusetts locally known as Sleepy Hollow.
Noting the peaceful, idyllic qualities of the area, Hawthorne is deep in the dream of

Sentimental pastoral. Suddenly this dream is shattered by the noise of a locomotive. This

20

sudden incursion of mechanized-technological human culture into a scene of rural peace
and simplicity is a significant alteration of the simplistic vision of sentimental pastoral.3
It replaces the vision of rural or wild land as a restful refuge from civilization with a more
complex and accurate vision of nature as vulnerable to the invading forces of technology.
Marx’s distinction between the sentimental and complex versions of pastoral is a valuable
. contribution. It helps us recognize that pastoral is not of necessity a reductive vision of
the natural world, though it is often used in this way. Marx shows us that the pastoral can
be used to inculcate a highly idealized, unrealistic vision of the natural world, or that it
can call attention to the fragility and extreme artificiality of this vision, and so present a
more complex. accurate, and responsible vision of the natural world.

Raymond Williams notes, in The Country and the City (1973) that pastoral has
contained a significant measure of sophistication from its beginning. Although the
pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil depict the delight and ease of shepherds at rest in a
peaceful bower on a smiling summers’ day, the poems acknowledge the harshness of
Winter, and the demands of agricultural labor, and so avoid presenting a simplistic.
excessively idealized vision of nature or of rural life. “Within the beautiful development
0f the pastoral songs,” Williams says. a “sense of a simple community, living on narrow
margins and experiencing the delights of summer and fertility the more intensely because
they also know winter and barrenness and accident, is intensely present” in the Eclogues
of Virgil and the M of Theocritus (15). However, as pastoral developed in the
Renaissance and later, the acknowledgement of the difficulties of the shepherds’ lives

inherent in earlier pastoral began to fall away. The idealized vision of Arcadia “could be

21

seen, by false extraction, as the essence, the only essence, of pastoral” (Williams 16).
This development renders the complex. though highly stylized, vision of pastoral into a
stilted and idealized vision. Williams explains that in classical pastoral
there is almost invariably a tension with other kinds of experience: summer with
winter; pleasure with loss; harvest with labour; . . past or present with the future.

The achievement, if it can be called that, of the Renaissance adaptation of just

these classical modes is that, step by step, these living tensions are excised. until

there is nothing countervailing, and selected images stand as themselves: not in a

living but in an enameled world. (18)

In its development, pastoral was gradually deprived of its complexity and reduced to a
simplistic view of the natural world, so that from the post Renaissance period onward the
original multi-layered attitude of pastoral faded from the genre.

It is this movement toward artifice that makes possible Samuel Johnson‘s
complaint against John Milton’s “Lycidas” (163 7): “in this poem there is no nature, for
there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new” (qtd. in Alpers, 79). The highly
elaborate form of “Lycidas” makes the poem more dependent upon literary convention
than depiction of rural nature or the lives of shepherds. When, at the poem’s conclusion.
the persona turns to “fresh Woods and Pastures new.” the woods and pastures are only
metaphors for new poetic projects and do not refer to any actual woods or pastures. The
poem is not about nature but exclusively about poetry. However, as Paul Alpers points

out, “pastoral conventions need not be as artificial and repetitious as they appeared to

Johnson, because they have modal motivations that are always ready to be freshly

engaged or acknowledged” (80).

Because the term “pastoral” is so elastic, I feel the necessity of establishing some
sort of working definition before I proceed, and to distinguish between two broad
categories of pastoral. I am mindful of the essentially arbitrary nature of such a
definition. Pastoral is any work of literature, whether prose or verse, that celebrates an
idyllic rural life, takes place in an ordered, controlled natural setting (a garden rather than
a wilderness), and is tinged with a nostalgic longing for a lost golden age. Further, I wish
to appropriate Marx‘s distinction between sentimental and complex pastoral. Both types

include the qualities I have listed above, but sentimental pastoral presents a simplistic
vision of the natural world, while complex pastoral includes some element, such as
Thoreau’s locomotive or Twain’s steamboat crashing into the raft, which acknowledges
the artificiality of the idyllic quality of pastoral, and admits the complexity, vitality, and
fragility of the natural world. However, Marx is concerned with the incursion of
technology into the pastoral, the arrival of the machine into the garden, while I wish to
admit other, non-mechanistic devices into the complex vision of pastoral, devices which

aCknowledge the fragility and complexity of the natural world, without necessarily

referring directly to technology.

The celebratory attitude expressed toward rural life I take to be an essential
e1en'ient of pastoral. It is indeed present in the earliest classical examples, and can be
distinguished in such nineteenth and twentieth-century examples as Thomas Hardy’s DE

@111 of the Native (1878) and Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918). A critique of the

23

artificial or even corrupt values of urban society is present in pastoral, and this is carried
out through the presentation of rural folk as more virtuous and honest due to their close
contact with the natural world. As Lawrence Buell notes, “‘pastoral’ has become almost
‘synonymous with a the idea of a (re)tum to a less urbanized, more ‘natural’ state of
existence” (Environmental ImaginLiog 31).
The pastoral setting is necessarily a garden rather than a wilderness landscape.
The Arcadia of Virgil is not a wild forest, but a pasture, a clearing in the forest made
suitable for the raising of crops and livestock. Leo Marx has identified the setting of
pastoral as a middle landscape, neither as settled and artificial as the town, nor as wild
and wooded as the forest (1 13). As Joseph Wood Krutch observes. ”to the cultivated man
of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was not the wilderness but the garden
which symbolized the charm of nature as Opposed to that of society” (25). Renaissance
Europeans christianized the classical pagan form of the pastoral. commingling Virgil's
Arcadia with the Judeo-Christian Eden. In biblical tradition. wilderness was a locus of
trial and punishment. Yahweh made the ancient Israelites wander in the wilderness for
forty years as a punishment for their faithlessness. As Roderick Nash points out. “the
identification of the arid wasteland with God’s curse led to the conviction that wilderness
Was the environment of evil, a kind of hell" (15). In contrast, Nash says
From what little we are told about the Garden of Eden it appears to have been. in
the tradition of other paradises, the antipode of wilderness. ‘Eden’ was the
Hebrew word for ‘delight,’ and Genesis represents it as a pleasant place indeed.

The Garden was well watered and filled with edible plants. Adam and Eve were

24

relieved of the necessity of working in order to survive. . . . But the snake
encouraged the first couple to eat the forbidden fruit and as a punishment they
were driven out of the Garden. The world Adam and Eve now faced was a
wilderness, a ‘cursed’ land full of ‘thorns and thistles’. . . . The story of the
Garden and its loss embedded into Western thought the idea that wilderness and
paradise were both physical and spiritual opposites. (15)
In J udeo-Christian terms, the wilderness was a threatening domain, hardly the setting
appropriate to the paradisiacal vision of sentimental pastoral. The Puritan English
colonists in the New World. given to typology as they were. tended to envision
themselves as modern versions of Old Testament figures. and viewed their mission in the
New World as taming the wilderness. converting the howling wilderness into a new
version of Eden. The early Puritan colonists tended to view wilderness as an expression
of inward wildness and immoral license, while a garden landscape was seen as an
outward reflection of inner restraint and propriety. This view persisted well beyond the
time of the Puritan colonists. It figures prominently in the agrarian outlook of Thomas
Jefferson, and is expressed perhaps most forcefully in Hector St. John de C revecoeur’s
Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Because their labor brought order to the
wilderness, American farmers were, in Crevecoeur’s terms, exemplars of morality:
We are a people of cultivators scattered over an immense territory.
communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers.
united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws without

dreading their power, because they are equitable. We are all animated with the

25

spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained because each person

works for himself. . . .We have no princes for whom we starve, toil and bleed; we

are the most perfect society now existing in the world. (67)
By the same token, Crevecoeur presents those people who live on the frontier between
cultivated land and the wilderness as subject to moral contamination. Those who live in
- the wilderness, Crevecoeur says, have “degenerated altogether into the hunting state” and
are “no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank” (78). The setting for pastoral
is neither town nor wild forest; it is of necessity a garden landscape.

Nostalgia is also a necessary component of pastoral. The story of Eden implies
man‘s expulsion from the Garden; the Arcadia OfVirgil is located not only in a
geographically isolated location, but in a long-vanished Golden Age as well. The idyllic
vision of a past Golden Age, in which life was better than it is today, has been part of
pastoral from its inception. The union of humanity and nature expressed in this vision is
located necessarily in some distant past-~the desire for this union is defined by its loss.
As Raymond Williams observes, the pastoral is always set in some just-vanished better
time, but this time is not fixed in any definite historical moment. Rather, each pastoral
moment harks back to a still earlier, recently vanished, better time (Williams 35-45). The
pastoral moment, then, is defined not by its location in history, but by the fact of its loss.
The pastoral vision of a harmonious relation between humanity and nature is always
located in an unrecoverable past.

Though pastoral has for so long been such an enduring form, and the vision of

harmonious union between humanity and nature presented in pastoral is to this day so

26

powerfully appealing, several ecologically-minded scholars have criticized pastoral as in
some ways reductive, simplistic, or inaccurate. For example, the celebratory tone of
pastoral is in some respects inaccurate. Willa Cather’s My Antonia, for example, views
the life of immigrant farmers in rural Nebraska as idyllic. Jim Burden, the novel’s point
of view character, sees the life of the immigrant girl Antonia Shimerda in effusively rosy
terms. Jim, looking back on his youth in Nebraska from his adult position, that of a
lawyer in practice in New York City, has been protected in his upbringing from the rigors
of life faced by immigrant homesteaders like Antonia and her family. For instance, he
sees the Nebraska country roads along which immigrant homesteaders like Antonia and
her family labor intensely and unceasingly as roads to freedom lined with sunflowers.
But Jim himself has never worked in that countryside, as the immigrants have done. The
life of nagging uncertainty and of grueling labor that the immigrants have known is
beyond Jim’s understanding. concealed from his vision by the celebratory view of rural
life which protects his position of privilege. Raymond Williams has noted that the
pastoral concept of gtjgrjl, or leisure, in which the garden pours fourth its fruits without
any necessity for agricultural labor, conceals the actual conditions of the workers who
tend the livestock and raise the crops, often under conditions of grinding poverty and
backbreaking effort, and preserves the privileged position of the landed aristocracy who
live off the efforts of the laboring class (Williams 32). In this sense, then. the celebratory
tone of pastoral’s treatment of rural life can be seen as an endorsement of exploitation.
The pastoral’s veneration of the garden landscape (and its concomitant loathing of

wilderness) is also objectionable. Implicit both in the Arcadia of Virgil and in the biblical

27

Eden is a vision of nature made subject to human utility. Arcadia produces olives and
grapes for the shepherds and abundant forage for their livestock. Eden produces all the
material wants of Adam and Eve. But of how Arcadia or Eden provide for the slug, the
condor, or the porcupine, no mention is made. This vision is anthropocentric; it supposes
humanity as the center of all creation, and, as such, endorses human exploitation of the
natural world. As Terry Gifford says, “in the English tradition the image of nature as
garden or estate confirms the religiously endorsed right of humans to exploit nature” (33).
And the English notion of pastoral underscored the mission of subjugating the wilderness,
which the European conquerors of the New World saw as their right and obligation. As
Roderick Nash observes,
Transforming the wild into the rural had Scriptural precedents which the New
England pioneers knew well. Genesis 1:23, the first commandment of God to
man, stated that mankind should increase, conquer the earth, and have dominion
over all living things. This made the fate of wilderness plain. In 1629 when John
Winthrop listed reasons for departing ‘into . . . .the wilderness,’ an important one
was that the whole earth is the lords Garden & he hath given it to the sonnes of
men, and with a general Condision, Gen. 1.23: Increase & multiply, replenish the
earth & subdue it’ . . . . Two centuries later advocates of the expansion into the
wilderness used the same rhetoric. ‘There can be no doubt,’ declared Lewis Cass,
soldier and senator from Michigan, in 1830, ‘that the Creator intended the earth
should be reclaimed from a state of nature and cultivated. . . . . Wilderness was

waste; the proper behavior toward it, exploitation. (Nash 31)

28

Similarly, Leo Marx notes “down to the twentieth century the imagination of Americans
was dominated by the idea of transforming the wild heartland into . . . a new ‘Garden of
the World.’ On the whole, Americans were unsentimental about unmodified nature. . . .
The wilderness was precious to most Americans chiefly for what could be made of it--a
terrain of rural peace and happiness” (142). In this sense, the pastoral’s veneration of the
garden landscape is an ideological tool to enable the conquest of the wild lands of the
New World.
Roderick Nash warns that pastoral’s pernicious influence enabled not only past
efforts at destruction of wilderness, but threatens the future of wilderness as well.
The greatest long-term threat to the interests of people who covet the wild may
reside in the garden scenario. It too ends wilderness, but benificently rather than
destructively. . . . In a garden-earth the fertility of the soil is not only maintained
but enhanced. Fruit trees support songbirds. Carefully managed streams run clear
and pure. The air is unpolluted. Forests supply an endless supply of wood. . . .
There is a minimum of pavement, cows dot the meadows, democracy thrives, and
the kids have rosy cheeks. It is an appealing vision whose roots run back through
Thomas Jefferson’s deification of the yeoman farmer to the Garden of Eden. But
wilderness is just as dead in the garden as it is in the concrete wasteland. (Nash
380)
In this respect, the garden scenario inspires horror among those writers who value wild

nature, who see in wild land a valuable corrective to the destructive arrogance of

29

anthropocentrism. This view is expressed perhaps most forcefully by Edward Abbey.
who says, in his Desert Solitaire (1968):

wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our

lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains

of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and

betraying the principle of civilization itself. (169)

Some critics have called for a revision of the garden aspect of the pastoral vision. For
instance, Glen A. Love comments that “a viable pastoral for the future might well find its
healing vision not in the simplicity of the garden, but in the complexity of the old-growth
forest” (“Pastoral Theory” 205). The garden vision denies the value of a biologically-
diverse (healthy) ecosystem.

The nostalgic aspect of the pastoral vision also carries some ecological dangers. It
offers a convenient way to disregard our responsibility fOr the health of the environment.
If a harmonious relation with the natural world is located in some unrecoverable historical
moment, some Golden Age located in the distant past, then it follows that humans can do
nothing to restore this relation. If our environmentally damaged planet is a product of our
fall from grace, our prelapsarian innocence is unrecoverable. This may be seen as
excusing current exploitation of the natural world. Aldo Leopold notes that “in America
until about 1905 the dominant idea. . . was that the restriction of hunting would ‘string
out’ the remnants of the virgin supply and make them last a longer time. Hunting was
thought of and written about as something which must eventually disappear (Game

Management, Leopold’s emphasis. 17). Similarly, Americans of this time believed

30

wilderness itself would eventually, and inevitably, disappear. With wild nature
ensconced in an unrecoverable past, efforts towards its preservation become futile. All
that can be done is to forestall its inevitable loss.

Pastoral values the natural world as a simpler and somehow more ‘real’
alternative to civilization. Many critics object to pastoral’s portrayal of nature as simple.
Glen A. Love, for example, contends

it is one of the great mistaken ideas of anthropocentric thinking, and thus one of
the cosmic ironies, that society is complex while nature is simple. . . . If we are to
believe what modern ecology is telling us, the greatest of all intellectual puzzles is
the earth and the myriad systems of life which it nourishes. Nature reveals
adaptive strategies far more complex than any human mind could devise. Surely
one of the great challenges of literature, as a creation of human society, is to

examine this complexity as it relates to the human lives which it encompasses. . .

. But the pastoral mode, in an important sense, reflects the same sort of

anthropocentric assumptions which are in such dire need of reassessment.

Literary pastoral traditionally posits a natural world, a green world, to which

sophisticated urbanites withdraw in search of the lessons of simplicity which only

nature can teach. (“Revaluing Nature” 230)

Love sees the continued appeal of pastoral as “a testament to our instinctive sense of
ourselves as creatures of natural origins,” and as such we are driven to return to “the earth

for the rootholds of sanity somehow denied us by civilization. But we need to redefine

31

pastoral in terms of the new and more complex understanding of nature“ (“Revaluing
Nature” 231).

Ernest Hemingway‘s work attempts such a redefinition of pastoral. He
interrogates the artificiality of the genre, calls attention to the ways in which it
conventionalizes and oversimplifies our relation to the natural world, and injects a
greater, more ecologically knowledgeable sensibility into the pastoral vision. The
objections eco-critics have voiced against the pastoral are most applicable to sentimental
versions of pastoral, which present a simplistic vision of the natural world. Hemingway’s
work critiques sentimental versions of pastoral as simplistic visions of nature and of
humanity’s position within the natural world. His work revitalizes pastoral by exposing
the simplistic assumptions contained within sentimental versions of pastoral, and returns
to pastoral some of the complexity it originally contained in the flyll_s of Theocritus and

the Eclogues of Virgil.

III. Ernest Hemingway’s Versions of Pastoral

Perhaps more than any other modern American author, Ernest Hemingway is a
victim of his farne. TO this day many people who have never read a single one of his
works can readily identify Hemingway by photo. And the considerable shadow cast by
Hemingway’s carefully cultivated public persona is a major impediment to appreciation
of his work. As Jim Harrison has observed, “it was certain that [Hemingway] was
playing to a much larger crowd than his immediate critical audience or the academic

community. It was hard to forgive him this and it would muddle the issue (his true

32

stature) for years afterwar ” (235). We know Hemingway--or think we do--as a
brawling, swearing, hard-drinking embodiment of machismo, an embarrassing caricature
of masculinity. A central part of this image is of Hemingway the marlin fisherman and
big-game hunter, an inveterate exploiter of nature. But posthumous publications have
invited new critical attention to Hemingway’s work. The publication of The Garden of
m (1986), for example, with its portrayal of a highly complex relationship between the
married couple David and Catherine Boume, who indulge in sexual games involving
switching of gender roles, has required us to revise the deeply-entrenched impression of
Hemingway as prototypically masculine, misogynist, and heterosexist. The story within
the novel, reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987) as “An
African Story,” obligates us to revise the received impression of Hemingway as a
despoiler of nature. The story presents an elephant hunt as a travesty against nature, and
evinces a powerful sympathy for the elephant who is killed. In response to The Garden of
E_deg a reassessment of Hemingway’s earlier works has been undertaken, and this has
revealed the sophisticated investigation of gender identity and the rules governing sexual
behavior running throughout the entire corpus of Hemingway’s work. Hemingway’s
treatment of the relationship between humanity and the natural world requires similar
attention.4

Hemingway explained the theme of his Eden novel as “the happiness of the
Garden that a man must lose” (Baker, A Life Stor_'y, 460). Indeed, much of Hemingway’s

work can be profitably read as an investigation of the relationship between humanity and

33

the natural world. His work repeatedly examines this relationship and critiques the ways
in which literature has traditionally portrayed it.

Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories can be read as an effort to revise the pastoral.
In contrast to the world of natural innocence and simplicity offered in conventional
versions of pastoral, Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories offer a more complex
understanding of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. In these
stories the forests of Northern Michigan take on a powerful psychological significance for
Nick. As the setting of some of the most significant events of Nick’s psychological
development, the Michigan northwoods become a psychological landscape as well as a
mere geographical location. They become a locus of desire--a place in which the longing
for intimate contact with a pure and simple nature intersect with the psychological and
cultural forces which forbid this contact. Significantly, as Frederic J. Svoboda has
shown, the wilderness setting of the Michigan stories is itself an element of nostalgia.
“Upper Michigan has not been a real wilderness or frontier for more than a century,
certainly not for many years before Ernest Hemingway happened on the scene,” Svoboda
says (18). The Nick Adams stories are set in a “false wilderness,” an evocation of “the
m_er_ngry of the frontier” (Svoboda’s emphasis, 18). These stories evoke a wild landscape
accessible only through memory or imagination. As such, they explore and acknowledge
the idealizing, fictionalizing aspects of the pastoral vision. My second chapter examines
the Nick Adams stories as a revision of pastoral.

My third chapter examines the single work most central to the Hemingway canon.

the one work which criticism has explored most exhaustively, the novel The Sun Also

34

m (1926). The novel’s title, of course, is an echo of Ecclesiastes. Hemingway
explained that “the point of the book 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 and caring little about Vanities. . . . I didn’t mean the book to be a hollow or
bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero” (SL 229).
Despite this quite clear and direct reference to ecological themes present in the work,
critics tend to overlook or downplay the novel’s treatment of the earth and tend to focus

on the novel’s characters as representatives of the postwar “lost generation” or as

 

Eliotesque “wastelanders,” “hollow men,” or fisher kings. However, The Sun Also Rises
is intimately connected with natural themes. One of the novel’s central concerns is an
investigation of the pastoral vision. The novel contains a semi-parodic inversion of
pastoral with Jake and Bill as the shepherd poets seeking refuge from post-war Paris
along the banks of a remote Spanish trout stream. The nOvel invokes the retreat and
return pattern of classical pastoral. The central characters escape the confusion and
spiritual aridity of 1920’s Montpamasse and travel to the pastoral landscape of northern
Spain. The fiesta they attend is a pagan religious festival, and the m is a ritual blood
sacrifice. The fiesta thus offers Jake, Brett, and company an opportunity to renew their
sense of connection to the natural world, through regressing to a pre-Christian religious
view. However, the novel critiques the traditional use of the retreat and return pattern.
The central characters are not rejuvenated by their contact with “the rootholds of sanity
somehow denied us by civilization” as Glen A. Love puts it (“Revaluing Nature” 231).

Rather, they are made glaringly aware of the shallowness and futility of their lives. And

35

the pure and simple nature to which they retreat--the world of the fiesta--is actually
corrupted by their presence. In introducing Pedro Romero to Brett, Jake corrupts the
pagan religion he finds so valuable, and betrays the sense of order and value he finds in
belonging to the sacred fraternity of the afficionados. As Love has noted, “literary
pastoral traditionally posits a natural world, a green world, to which sophisticated
urbanites withdraw in search of the lessons of simplicity which only nature can teach”
(“Revaluing Nature” 231). “Yes,” one can imagine Jake saying at the novel’s conclusion.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

Hemingway attacks the naive sentimentality of the traditional natural history essay
in “A Natural History of the Dea ”(1938), which is the subject of my fourth chapter.
The story begins with a question. “Can any branch of Natural History be studied without
increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey
through the wilderness of life? Let us therefore see what inspiration we may derive from
the dea ”(CS 335). The story then gives an excruciatingly detailed description of
corpses in various stages of decomposition, thus skewering the naive sentimentality of the
natural history essay. It replaces the aroma of the blossoming Garden with the reek of a
battlefield on a hot day. As such, the story rejects the idealizing vision of the natural
world presented in much nature writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The story reminds us of an unpleasant though unavoidable truth--that death is a
necessary and inescapable part of the natural order. The same creator who brought roses
and clematis into the world built death and decay into the world’s design. “A Natural

History of the Dead” invokes an important element of Renaissance versions of pastoral.

36

As Leo Marx has noted, during the seventeenth century various landscape painters
“introduced the image of a speaking death’s head into the most delicate pictorial idylls.
To make the meaning of this memento mori inescapable they sometimes inserted the
printed motto. Et in Arcadia Ego, meaning ‘1 [Death] also am in Arcadia’” (26). This
story is an important chapter in Hemingway’s argument with the pastoral vision.

My fifth chapter examines Green Hills of Africa. Green Hills of Afrig has been
slighted by critics and reviewers since its publication in 1935. However, it is a work that
richly rewards ecocritical attention. Frequently dismissed as a shallow or frivolous work-
-or as a mere experiment--Green Hills is actually a carefully orchestrated effort to
rejuvenate American literature by deliberately departing from the models of literary
tradition. Sentimental pastoral, with the great weight of generations of tradition and
imitation behind it, conventionalizes our understanding of the natural world, and of
humanity’s position within it. Green Hills of Africa invokes the pastoral convention of
retreat and return, but significantly departs from some central elements of the convention.
The garden landscape of Arcadia or Eden is substituted with “a million miles of bloody
Africa” (159), a landscape which is representative of wildness itself. The pastoral
activities of plowing, sowing, and tending livestock are derided in this work as
destructive and exploitive. Green Hills substitutes the hunting of wild game for the
tending of flocks so central to the classical pastoral vision. Green Hills has much in
common with Henry David Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Walking.” “In wildness is the
preservation of the world,” Thoreau says in “Walking” (613). And Green Hills of Africa

is Hemingway’s elaboration of this statement; it is his effort to rejuvenate the American

37

literary tradition by injecting the wildness Thoreau claims is missing from it. In
emphasizing the wildness of the landscape he depicts, and in deliberately producing a
“wild” text (one which departs from the models of literary precedent) Hemingway is
developing an anti-pastoral vision. This is part of his project in the work, departing from
conventional depictions of the natural world (nature tamed) in favor of giving a more
direct presentation of nature’s wildness; as Hemingway describes it, “being extremely
accurate and not literary” (21).

Ernest Hemingway’s work is rich with opportunities for ecocritical exploration.
By virtue of the time and place in which he grew up, and the cultural forces he was
exposed to, it is natural, perhaps inevitable, that the natural world should figure so
prominently in Hemingway’s work. Hemingway, born in 1899, grew up in Oak Park,
Illinois at a time when the landscape in this area was undergoing tremendous change.
There was still considerable wild country around Oak Park at the time of Hemingway’s
childhood. He was able to catch bass in the Des Plaines River and hike and hunt for
arrowheads on the prairie grassland surrounding his home town. But this was a period in
which a largely rural America was becoming more and more urban. Hemingway
witnessed the prairie slowly give way to manicured lawns and paved streets. Hemingway
spent his summers in the Petoskey-Charlevoix area of Michigan, from the age of l 1
months to the age of 18 years, when he went to serve the Red Cross in the Great War.
This area of Michigan was no longer wilderness by this time, and the young Hemingway
camped, hiked, hunted, and fished among acres of stumps which memorialized the vast

white pine forests which had fed a ravenous logging industry. Much of this lumber was

38

shipped south along Lake Michigan, and used to build Chicago and the many villages
surrounding the city, Oak Park among them.

Hemingway was witness to the continual encroachment of civilization upon the
land. As he told William Faulkner in a 1947 letter, “My own country [is] gone. Trees cut
down. Nothing left but gas stations, sub-divisions where we hunted snipe on the prairie,
etc. Found goOd country outside [the US] and lost it the same way” (SL 624). Wild
country was increasingly under threat throughout Hemingway’s youth and early
adulthood, and he felt its loss keenly. Wild country is celebrated throughout
Hemingway’s work, and the memory of its loss gives his work an elegiac tone. As Susan
Beegel puts it,

To love the land as Hemingway loved it, perhaps especially to love the land w_hen
Hemingway loved it, in the early years of the twentieth century, when the coming
of the automobile and urban Sprawl driven by a fully mature Industrial Revolution
rapidly transformed the rural and wilderness areas of the United States into a web
of highways and destroyed landscapes, was to live in a state of continual
bereavement. (“Eye and Heart” 57)

Perhaps one major impediment to an ecocritical appreciation of the work of
Hemingway is the connection between Hemingway and such outdoor sports as hunting.
As Robert E. Fleming has noted, “hunting and fishing are regarded by some as barbaric
sports, and self-styled animal rights activists and friends of animals see these activities as
diametrically opposed to the welfare of the fish and game on which they depend” (2).

However, hunting and fishing are an important part of life for many ecologically-

39

concerned people. Many efforts toward the preservation of wild lands, lakes, and rivers
grew out of the concerns of hunters and fishermen to preserve and manage their prey
species. Henry David Thoreau, revered as a saint by many in the environmental
movement, and widely considered the most influential figure in American nature writing,
says in a frequently overlooked passage of Wm: “perhaps the hunter is the greatest
friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society” (190). Thoreau felt that
these outdoor activities were a valuable way of connecting one’s self to the natural world.
He says,

I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for
[hunting and fishing]; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously
about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes,--
remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education. . . . We cannot but
pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education
has been sadly neglected. (191)

Another major figure in the environmental movement, Aldo Leopold, valued hunting as
well. He remarks in the essay “Goose Music”:
the instinct that finds delight in the pursuit of game is bred into the very fiber of
the [human] race. Golf is sophisticated exercise, but the love of hunting is almost
a physiological characteristic. A man may not care for golf and still be human,
but the man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds
or animals is hardly normal. He is supercivilized, and I for one do not know how

to deal with him. (Sand County 227)

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Hunting and fishing seem to have firlfilled this purpose for Hemingway; they made him
feel close to nature, a participant in the natural order, for hunting is not merely to pursue
and destroy game animals, but to live in their country. to learn their habits and ways. to
live among them.

Hemingway was intimately familiar with the natural world, not only through such
recreational activities as fishing, hunting, and camping, but through organized study. AS
Susan Beegel shows in her tremendously valuable essay “Eye and Heart: Hemingway’s
Education as a Naturalist” (2000), the young Ernest Hemingway grew up at a time when
nature study was all the rage. Emest’s education in nature study was under quite
qualified hands. His paternal grandmother, Adelaide Edmonds Hemingway, was trained
in botany and “taught sons and grandchildren how to see when they looked at nature. She
taught them the parts of flowers with their Latin names” (Reynolds, The Young
Hemingway 30). His father, Dr. Clarence Edmonds (Ed) Hemingway, became a member
of the Agassiz Association during his years at Oberlin College. The association was
founded to preserve the techniques of nature study developed by the Swiss-American
scientist Louis Agassiz. As Beegel explains, “the Agassiz Association was devoted to
amateur nature study through fieldwork out-Of-doors, a concept Agassiz pioneered with
Swiss schoolchildren and helped to popularize in America” (68). Dr. Hemingway
founded a chapter of the association in Oak Park before Emest’s birth.

From early childhood, the Hemingway children were active in the local Agassiz
society, gathering specimens of plant and animal life, and reporting their findings before

the assembled members of the chapter. Ernest, at age ten, was elected assistant curator of

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the Oak Park chapter of the Agassiz society (Reynolds, Young Hemingway 30). Central

 

to the Agassiz method of nature study was close, first-hand observation of specimens.
Beegel notes that “their guiding principle [was] ‘Nature must be studied from her own
book.’. . . . ‘Train your pupils to be Observers, and have them provided with the
specimens about which you speak, ‘ Agassiz urged science teachers. ‘Teach your
children to bring them in themselves. Take your text from the brooks, not from the

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booksellers (69). Thus, the close observation of the natural world which is such a
distinctive quality of Hemingway’s writing is a legacy of the Agassiz method of nature I)

study, as is the emphasis on being “extremely accurate and not literary” in depiction of

the natural world, which is such a central feature of Green Hills of Africa.

 

Hemingway’s training in the Agassiz Association influenced his work in another
respect. “Science education in the Agassiz tradition also had a strong religious basis,”
Beegel notes (72). Although his work in paleontology helped lay the groundwork for
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Agassiz rejected evolution. Acccording to
Agassiz, natural selection, adaptation, and evolution were not the active principles of the
natural world. Rather, “the genius of the Creator” was the principle underlying all of
nature (qtd. in Beegel, 72). Agassiz claimed that “the Animal Kingdom . . . is the
exhibition of the divine thought, as it is carried out in one department of that grand whole
which we call Nature” (qtd. in Beegel, 73). The religious basis of nature study was
reinforced by Dr. Hemingway, who was a deacon of the Third Congregational Church of
Oak Park. By the time of his experiences in the Great War, which made his parent’s

genteel outlook seem terribly, even dangerously, naive, Hemingway made one of the

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major projects of his writing the correction of this view. “A Natural History of the Dead”
is perhaps the most direct example of Hemingway’s rejection of the vision of the natural
world as the creation of a beneficent God. It also underlies the conclusion of Green Hills
of Africa, in which Hemingway is in the Holy Land
by the Sea of Galilee eating some lunch and drinking a bottle of wine and
watching the grebes out on the lake. The hills made shadows on the water, which
was flat calm and rather stagnant looking. There were many grebes, making
spreading wakes in the water as they swam, and I was counting them and
wondering why they never were mentioned in the Bible. I decided that those
people were not naturalists. (294)
The emphasis on sheet physical fact in this description, the flat and stagnant appearance
of this body of water (sacred to Christians because Christ walked upon it, in violation of
all natural laws) seems a deliberate deflation of the Agassiz-inspired view of the natural
world as “the exhibition of the divine thought,” as does the remark Hemingway’s friend
Karl makes about the scene: “‘I’m not going to walk on it.’ Karl said, looking out at the
dreary lake. ‘It’s been done already’” (294).
Hemingway also read widely and deeply on the subject of the natural world. Oak
Park High School students were required to read such nature poets as Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, and
John Greenleaf Whittier (Beegel 74). The romantic excesses of these poets are yet
another error Hemingway felt called on to correct in his own work. Hemingway refers to

his “A Natural History of the Dead” as “the Whittier’s Snow Bound of our time” (DITA

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133). From his youth, Hemingway was an avid, even voracious, reader, and works in the
field of natural history filled many of his library shelves throughout his life. Michael
Reynolds has investigated the importance of Theodore Roosevelt to the young Ernest
(Reynolds, The Young Hemingway 23-28). Roosevelt’s African Game Trails (1910)
remained in his library throughout his life. Robert E. Fleming has noted that
“Hemingway would go on to amass an excellent outdoorsman’s and naturalist’s library,

ranging from copies of the American Rifleman and Field and Stream to Colonel

 

 

Townsend Whelan’s Wilderness Hunting and Wildcrgft, from Harold Elmer Anthony’s
Field BLok of North American Birds to Louis Roule’s F ishes, Their Journeys and
Migrations” (1). He also read such nature writers as Stewart Edward White, Ernest
Thompson Seton, Gilbert White, Jack London, John Burroughs, W.H. Hudson, Aldo
Leopold, and Henry David Thoreau. Hemingway was abundantly familiar with the
literature of nature, and with the distortions, prejudices, and inaccuracies that inform (or
obscure) literary depictions of the natural world.

One significant development in nature writing which occurred during
Hemingway’s youth was the “nature faker controversy.” As Frank Stewart explains, in
the early years of the twentieth century a popular variety of nature writing sprang up in
reaction to the “survival of the fittest,” “nature red in tooth and claw” vision which grew
out of Darwinism. This popular nature writing “portrayed a world of animal compassion
and kindness, suggesting that individual animal behavior was flexible rather than
predetermined or mindlessly instinctual, and that even in the animal kingdom morality

existed under ‘natural conditions’” (Stewart 84). The foremost practitioner of this school

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of nature writing was William J. Long, author of six books and numerous magazine
articles. Long claimed to present first-hand, factual observation of animal behavior in his
work. Among the events Long claimed to have witnessed were kingfishers and great blue
herons driving minnows into shallow pools to teach their young to fish, porcupines
rolling themselves into balls in order to tumble downhill in flight from predators, and.
most notoriously, a woodcock treating its broken leg by making a cast of clay (Stewart
86, 94).

The respected nature writer John Burroughs was outraged at Long’s claims.
Stewart notes that “to Burroughs, Long stood for all the nature hacks whose work
tarnished the reputation of serious nature writers such as himself. In Burrough’s opinion
the popularity of ‘skillfull frauds’ like Long misled trusting readers about nature’s true
meaning, a meaning it was crucial to understand” (86). Burroughs played the chief role in
the “nature faker controversy,” publishing a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly
aimed at discrediting Long and others of his ilk. Burroughs’ friend President Theodore
Roosevelt stepped into the fray, publishing “Roosevelt on the Nature F akirs” in the June
1907 issue of Everybog’s Magazine. Roosevelt soundly castigated Long and company:

I don’t believe for a minute that some of these men who are writing nature stories

and putting the word ‘truth’ prominently in their prefaces know the heart of the

wild things. Neither do I believe that certain men . . . have succeeded in learning
the real secrets of the life of the wilderness. They don’t know, or if they do know,
they indulge in the wildest exaggeration under the mistaken notion that they are

strengthening their stories.

45

As for the matter of giving these books to the children for the purpose of
teaching them the facts of natural history--why it’s an outrage. There is no more
reason why the children of the country should be taught a false natural history
than why they should be taught a false physical geography. (qtd. in Stewart, 97)

Given the fact that Hemingway was so enamored of Roosevelt and, even as a youth, read
widely in natural history, he must have been aware of the nature faker controversy. And
it is likely that this debate is another influence that lay behind the effort in his work to
avoid sham and fakery in literary portrayals of the natural world.

One of the most salient features of Hemingway’s writing is its minute adherence
to physical fact. Honest, direct, accurate presentation of the physical world is a central
component of Hemingway’s aesthetic. “Go in fear of abstractions, “ Ezra Pound warns in
“A Retrospect” (1918 ), his statement of the tenets of Imagism (5). Pound also urges
“direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective” (3). Pound’s role as
Hemingway’s mentor is well-documented. The famous statement in Aialewell to Arms
(1929) on the danger of abstractions is one indication that Hemingway took Pound’s
lessons to heart:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the

expression in vain. . . . I had seen nothing sacred [in the war], and the things that

were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago
if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words you
could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain

numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the

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places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such

as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of

villages, the numbers of the roads. the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments

and the dates. (184)
Minutely rendering physical nature, recreating an emotional experience by invoking
concrete, sensory detail is a hallmark of Hemingway’s aesthetic. In A Moveable Feast
(1964) he writes of making “the country so that you could walk into it” (91 ). In _(_}__r_e_e_r_1
Hills of Africa he praises the work of Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Thomas Mann for their
ability to minutely render physical experience, to make the reader feel bodily present in
the scene. “For we have been there in the books and out of the books--and where we go,
if we are any good, there you can go as we have been” (109).

Several scholars have identified the combination of the close attention to physical
fact with subjective, emotional response as a salient feature of nature writing. “A
distinguishing feature of the nature essay--and this has been true from the beginnings of
the genre onward--is precisely the attempt to harmonize fact knowledge and emotional
knowledge,” says Thomas J. Lyon (3). John Elder and Robert Finch claim that nature
writing “fuses literature’s attention to style, form, and the inevitable ironies of expression
with a scientific concern for palpable fact” (25). Hemingway’s efforts to recreate an
emotional experience through a scientific rendering of physical reality is very much in
this line. Indeed, rendering the natural world in complete, accurate detail was, for
Hemingway, the highest of callings, and the most absolute, and most daunting,

responsibility of the artist. “A writer’s job is to tell the truth,” Hemingway says in his

47

introduction to the anthology Men at War (1942). “His standard of fidelity should be so
high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than
anything factual can be” (7). Hemingway found that many literary depictions of the
natural world were rife with inaccuracy and misrepresentation, and he sought in his work
to critique these traditional depictions and to expose the ways in which they

conventionalize and misrepresent the natural world.

 

' “Nature writing” is among the slipperiest of terms. Stewart and Stegner, as noted above, assert that the
form should not be rigorously conscribed. Thomas J. Lyon has attempted to define the subcategories within
the genre in the essay “A Taxonomy of Nature Wtiting” (1989), but notes that “nature writing is not in truth
a neat and orderly field” (276). The subcategories Lyon identifies are field guides, such as Roger Tory
Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds (1961); natural history essays, such as Rachel Carson’s The Sea
Around Us (1950); rambles, such as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974); solitude and back
country living, such as Thoreau’s Walden (1854); travel and adventure, such as William Bartram’s Travels
(I791); narratives of farm life, such as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from 2m American Farmer
(1782); and studies of man’s role in nature. such as Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Great Chain of Life (1956).
Lyon places each of these genres on a continuum. with field guides on the most scientific and objective end
of the continuum, and each genre containing more and more personal reflection, as it moves toward the
“man’s role in nature” end of the scale, which is the most highly subjective. Although Lyon distinguishes
the subtypes of the nature writing genre, he does not define what he means by “nature writing.” Lyon does
not address poetry which deals with the natural world, despite the fact that there is a long and rich history of
such work in American literature, from William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to
Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, and AR. Ammons. For the sake of convenience. I will apply this term to
any literary writing which takes the natural world as its ostensible subject, whether fiction or non-fiction,
prose or verse. This is an elastic definition, I know, but that is the nature of the beast.

2 One indication of the problematic quality of the term “nature writing” is McClintock’s observation that
Abbey, one of the most widely admired practitioners of nature writing “did not like to be called a nature
writer” (67).

3 Other examples of the intrusion of the machine into the garden include the collision of the steamboat into
Huck Finn’s rafi in Chapter 16 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Firm (1884), and the incident in the
“Sounds” chapter of Walden (1854), in which Thoreau describes the sound of birds pervading the woods
near Walden Pond, which is interrupted when “the whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods”( 106).

" Hemingway’s work is beginning to receive the ecocritical attention it deserves. Susan Schmidt, in
“Ecological Renewal Images in ‘Big Two-Hearted River’: Jack Pines and Fisher King,” (1990) examines
the bumed-over landscape of Seney as a reflection of Nick’s emotional state. Susan Beegel, in “Second
Growth: The Ecology of Loss in ‘Fathers and Sons’: (1998), performs an ecocritical reading of this
important story. Hemingway agd the Natural World (2000), edited by Robert F. Fleming, gathers a number
of ecologically informed readings of Hemingway’s work. Beegel contributed a valuable essay to A
Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), which examines “Hemingway’s Education as a Naturalist.”
However, there is much fertile ground that is yet unsown.

 

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Chapter Two:
Northern Michigan as “The Last Good Country”

In Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories

Hemingway’s work can be understood as an ongoing argument with conventional
depictions of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. In his effort to
drive literature away from the imitation of literary precedent and closer to an attachment
with the actual world, Hemingway invokes conventional depictions in an effort to call
attention to their artificiality and to make us more away of their limitations and
distortions.

In explaining the theme of his unfinished novel The Garden of Eden as “the
happiness of the Garden that a man must lose,” Hemingway invokes some conventions
central to pastoral (Baker, A Life Story 460). For instance, the pastoral vision of a correct
relation between humanity and the natural world as represented by a garden, rather than a
wilderness landscape is alluded to, as is the convention of nostalgia. Both of these
images of a so-called proper, yet simplified relation is presented as something whose loss
is inevitable.

One pastoral convention to which ecologically-informed critics have objected
most strenuously is the vision of nature as simple, a vision which, as I have explained in
the previous chapter, grows out of the increasingly artificial nature of the pastoral as it

develops in the Renaissance and later. Glen A. Love, as I have mentioned previously,

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contends “it is one of the great mistaken ideas of anthropocentric thinking, and thus one
of the cosmic ironies, that society is complex while nature is simple” (“Revaluing
Nature” 230). Love insists that “we need to redefine pastoral in terms of the new and
more complex understanding ofnature” (231).

Hemingway’s work attempts this more complex understanding. In contrast to the
world of natural innocence and simplicity offered in conventional versions of pastoral,
Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories offer a more complex examination of the relationship
between humanity and the natural world, returning to pastoral some of the complexity it
originally possessed in Theocritus and Virgil. The Nick Adams stories articulate an
attraction to the natural world as a locus of wished-for simplicity, yet they critique and
undercut this vision, presenting this simplicity as illusory and unattainable.

The stories collected by Phillip Young as The Nick Adams Stories (1972) cover a
large portion of Hemingway’s career. Nick Adams is the central character of the 1925
short story collection In Our Time and appears in the posthumously published novel
fragment “The Last Good Country,” which Hemingway biographer Michael S. Reynolds
claims is perhaps the last piece of fiction on which Hemingway worked before his 1961
suicide (Young Hemingway 51). The fact that these stories occupy such an extensive
portion of his career attests to the importance of Northern Michigan to Hemingway’s
imagination. Many of these stories present the woods of Northern Michigan as a
psychological landscape as well as a mere geographic location. The landscape becomes
invested with such psychological significance that it occupies Nick’s thoughts throughout

his life.

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From his early childhood, Nick and his family spend their summers in the
Michigan northwoods, traveling from their home in the Chicago area (curiously, this
setting is not featured in any of the stories) just as young Ernest Hemingway did each
summer from the age of eleven months to the age of nineteen, when he went to serve the
Red Cross in the Great War. Northern Michigan becomes the setting for several of the
- most significant events of Nick’s psychological development--his initial understanding of
gender and family roles, the strained politics of his parents’ marriage, his exposure to
such natural/biological phenomena as death and childbirth, and his initiation into sexual
activity.

The setting of these stories is a frontier landscape, often more evocative of the Old
West than of the upper Midwest. The saloons and prostitutes and train stations of “The
Light of the World” (1933), for instance, seem to call up the familiar conventions of the
formula western novel. The setting often seems as much Dodge City as Boyne City. But,
as Frederic J. Svoboda observes, “upper Michigan has not been a real wilderness or
frontier for more than a century, certainly not for many years before Ernest Hemingway
happened on the scene” (18). The Michigan in which young Ernest spent his summers
was not some remote frontier, but a “false wilderness” in which stumps and slashings
were the only remnant of the vast stands of virgin white pine that had been felled by a
ravenous logging industry (Svoboda 18). The Michigan of this time was a relatively
civilized place. The streets of Petoskey and Charlevoix were crowded not with hard-
bitten frontier toughs, but with tourists and resort operators, with so-called summer

people visiting from the more urban centers to the south (Dr. Hemingway’s family among

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them) and with the locals whose business depended on their patronage. As Svoboda
points out, in the Nick Adams stories “we travel not to the civilized, real Michigan of
Hemingway’s time. but to an older. purer Michigan created in Hemingway’s memory and
imagination” (21 ).

The Nick Adams stories evoke a wild landscape accessible only through memory
or imagination. In so doing, they explore and acknowledge the idealizing, fictionalizing
aspects of the pastoral vision. The wild frontier that is the Michigan northwoods of the
Nick Adams stories is located, as Raymond Williams observes of pastoral, in a just-
vanished, yet unrecoverable past. As the Golden Age of pastoral is a highly fictionalized
convention, Hemingway uses fiction to recover the lost wild frontier.

The Hemingway story to which criticism has paid the most attention, “Big Two-
Hearted River” (1925), is a prime example of Hemingway’s acknowledgment of the
complexity surrounding the relationship between humanity and the natural world.l The
story invokes some pastoral conventions, particularly those of retreat and return. In the
story Nick does return from a complex, civilized society to an apparently simpler and
more peaceful natural environment. Nick, damaged physically (he had been wounded in
the leg and spine) and psychologically (he has suffered shell-shock) by his experience in
World War I, returns to the Northern Michigan wilderness for a fishing trip, and the
healing calm of this remote setting offers a welcome reprieve from his experiences in
war-tom Europe. When Nick steps off the train in Seney, he is attempting to recover a
place (and a time) where life made much more sense, was simpler and more elemental

than the devastating. chaotic world of the European war. As soon as he gazes into the

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river and sees trout, he feels enlivened and comforted. “Nick’s heart tightened as the
trout moved. He felt all the old feeling” (NAS 178). Nick hikes alone to the back woods
and follows a deliberate, highly ritualized procedure in setting up camp, rigging his fly
rod, and capturing grasshoppers for bait. In so doing, he feels that he has escaped the
complexities of civilized life. “Nick felt happy,” the narrator tells us. “He felt he had left
everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write. It was all back of him” (N AS
179). The pleasure he takes in fishing has a therapeutic effect, as though it serves as a
form of self-directed psychoanalysis. He takes a couple of good-sized trout, then decides
he will cease his exploration of his psyche for that day. Further downstream the river
runs through a swamp.
Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with
the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible
to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together
overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water.
in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic
adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any
farther today. (NAS 198)
What Nick decides here is to forgo any further investigation of the less illuminated parts
of his psyche, because, just as the lack of sunlight and the deep water would make fishing
in the swamp difficult, the darker reaches of his mental interior are--for the moment--too
difficult to face. Nick is able to avoid the demons that plagued him in his war memories

and is sufficiently healed by this sojourn in the wilderness that at the story’s end he is

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able to confront these demons. Nick retreats from this confrontation of the darker aspects
of his psyche initially, yet, if we read this story as a sentimental version of pastoral, he is
sufficiently healed by this pastoral interlude-this retreat into natural simplicity--that he
anticipates a time when he will be able to confront these demons. “There were plenty of
days coming when he could fish the swamp,” Nick thinks (NAS 199).

However, this story is not sentimentally pastoral and the vision of nature which it
presents is anything but simple. When Nick decides to “fish the swamp” he is facing
much more than the memories of his war experiences. He is facing the very forces which
prevent him from achieving a desired union with the natural world and yet draw him
tantalizingly toward it. This story is a key portion of Hemingway’s revision of pastoral.

There are a number of indications that “Big Two-Hearted River” is something
more than a conventional version of pastoral. First, the landscape in which Nick finds
himself when he steps off the train is not the green, comfortable bower of Arcadia. He
finds himself in a setting as scorched and shattered as the war-bludgeoned Europe he
seeks to escape. When Nick arrives in Seney, “there was no town, nothing but the rails
and the bumed-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney
had not left a trace. . . . Even the surface had been burned off the ground” (N AS 177).2
This is an indication that the pastoral convention of retreat into a pristine Arcadia is being
invoked and yet departed from. In this story, nature does not offer a simple retreat from
the troubling effects of civilization. The pastoral convention of retreat is exposed as a
naive wish, a vain, illusory hope. Nick cannot leave civilization behind; it is part of him

and he cannot escape it. It colors his vision, as a jaundiced eye.

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Another of the story’s departures from pastoral is its treatment of the convention
of m. In sentimental versions of pastoral, Eden pours forth her fruit. Arcadia’s vines
are heavy with grapes, and the shepherd poets gather food and wine at their leisure and do
not have to labor for it. When Nick hikes from Seney into the backwoods, his trip is not
leisurely. The story repeatedly emphasizes how much sheer physical effort he must put
into this vacation. When Nick picks up his pack, the narrator tells us

He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the

pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the

pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the
tumpline. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. . . . He walked along the
road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily.

It was hard work walking uphill. (NAS 178)

Recounting the writing of this story some thirty-five years later, Hemingway Still
emphasizes the effort Nick puts into his hike. In the memoir published posthumously as
A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway recalls working on this story while seated in a
Paris cafe. He says,

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk

into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high

ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. . . then [you could] slip your
arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get
the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine

needles under your moccasins as you started down for the lake. (9])

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C learly. Nick physical exertion is emphasized in this story, and this marks a significant
departure from the pastoral convention of pm.

When Nick gets to his campsite, no Arcadian bower greets him. He labors to
make the ground habitable for him. (This is several decades before the advent of
minimal-impact camping). He prepares the ground by chopping out some tree roots and
uprooting some ferns. “He did not want anything making lumps under the blankets”
(NAS 183). He then takes an ax to a pine stump, to split up pegs for staking out his tent.
Once his camp is set up, Nick is able to enjoy this peaceful refuge, but the narrator
emphasizes the labor that has gone into its production.

Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. . . . Now things were done. There

had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired.

That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch

him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his

home where he had made it. (NAS 183)

Wild nature is not, in this case, a restful home for man. Nick is at home in this campsite
only because his labor has made it habitable. The effort itself is a significant portion of
Nick’s enjoyment of the experience of setting up camp.

Yet another indication that this story is a departure from conventional versions of
pastoral is the fishing trip itself. Through fishing Nick hopes to gain a sense of contact
with wild nature. But Nick’s fishing is not some carefree, leisurely activity. It is
something that must be very deliberately, very carefully undertaken. When Nick awakens

in his tent the first morning, he is in a hurry to start fishing, but must impose order on his

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impulses. “Nick was excited. He was excited by the early morning and the river. He
was really too hurried to eat breakfast, but he knew he must” (N AS 188). After he has
breakfast, Nick rigs up his fly rod, carefully following a rigidly prescribed procedure. But
throughout this process, he must keep his feelings under control. The text repeatedly
emphasizes how careful he must be. When he ties a hook to his leader and tests the knot
by pulling the line taut, “he was careful not to let the hook bite into his finger” (N AS
190). When he hooks a small trout, he must be careful in releasing it. “He had wet his
hand before he touched the trout, so he would not disturb the delicate mucus that covered
him. If a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white firngus attacked the unprotected
Spot” (NAS 192). When he hooks a huge trout, the sensation of the raging, wild creature
on the end of his line is so powerful it frightens him. The narrator tells us, “there was a
long tug. Nick struck and the rod came alive and dangerous, bent double, the line
tightening, coming out of water, tightening, all in a heavy, dangerous, steady pull” (N AS
193, my emphasis). When the trout breaks the leader, Nick feels his contact with wild
nature has been so immediate and direct that it is more than he can bear. When the
trout breaks free, “Nick’s hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too
much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down” (N AS 193).
The care Nick must exercise in fishing suggests that something more than a mere
submersion into wild nature is going on in this story. The contact with nature that fishing
represents for Nick is something potentially dangerous, something that must be carefully
controlled. The suggestion that wild nature is, to some degree at least, potentially

threatening, suggests that this story is a departure from pastoral convention. Indeed, “Big

57

Two-Hearted River” is a central component of Hemingway’s project throughout the Nick
Adams stories, the revision of pastoral.

Sueellen Campbell has provided a tool useful for examining Hemingway’s
alternative version Of pastoral. In an essay discussing the intersecting concerns of literary
theorists and ecological writers, Campbell uses Lacanian theory to investigate the longing
for contact with the natural world that is a prominent feature of much nature writing and
a central feature of pastoral:

According to theory, and here Lacan is important, we emerge from the unity of

infancy only when we begin to experience ourselves as separate from our

mothers’ bodies. This happens at the moment we enter into the network of
language, the ‘symbolic order’ that will determine what we become. At the core
of our sense of self, then, is our feeling of loss and the desire for unity that is born
of loss. Loss makes us what we are, and desire is an empty force (not dependent
on any object we might want at any given time) which always drives us but can

never be satisfied. (134) .

Campbell moves Lacan’s theory of desire from the area of sexuality to ecology. The
symbolic order which is the source of language, culture, law, and social convention,
separates us not only from the mother’s body, but from the very earth itself. “Because our
culture does not teach us that we are plain citizens of the earth,” says Campbell, “because
we live apart from the natural world and deny our intimacy with it, we have lost the sense
of unity that is still possible in other cultures. Our desire marks what we have lost and

what we still hope to regain” (135).

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What we still hope to regain is a sense of union with the natural world. And what
cuts us Off from the world is the symbolic order which codifies our behavior, and which
forms the basis of our sense of individual identity. That which defines our identity cuts
us off from the world which bore us and nurtured us. In Lacanian theory, the symbolic
order is associated with paternal authority. As Catherine Belsey explains, “the ‘father’
will stand for the symbolic order in its entirety, the paternal authority representing Law,
which will be invoked in order to impose limits on the imaginary omnipotence of the now
differentiated other, the arbitrariness of the signifier, and the anxiety of desire” (397).
According to Belsey, “the Father is a signifier, and it is the Name of the Father which
authorizes meaning, the paternal-signifying Law which holds in place the ordering
mechanisms of the symbolic” (397).

Nick Adams is introduced to outdoor activities and to interaction with the natural
world by his father. In “Fathers and Sons” (1933) Nick'recalls his father and feels “very
grateful to him for two things: fishing and shooting . . . . Now, at thirty-eight, he loved to
fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he had first gone with his father. It was a
passion that never slackened and he was very grateful to his father for bringing him to
know it” (258). These two legacies the father has bestowed on Nick are in their function
ambiguous, even paradoxical. Hunting and fishing offer Nick an opportunity to gain
contact with the natural world and as such function benignly, yet they also function as
devices in a corporeal and psychological sense to hold in place the symbolic order which
humans use to regulate their interaction with the natural world. Hunting and fishing are

each a means of imposing human control over nature. In hunting, one uses an artificial

59

means, such as a rifle, bow, Or shotgun to bring down game. The procedure one follows
in tracking, stalking, and sighting on game is highly elaborate (particularly in the case of
shooting game birds on the wing, which is the type of hunting of which Nick is
particularly fond). In fly fishing, one uses a fly rod in a highly complex, very involved
procedure to cast a bait, whether artificial or natural (like the grasshoppers Nick uses) to
entice the fish to strike. Hunting and fishing are at once a means of gaining contact with
wild nature, and of imposing strict order upon this contact.

Nick’s father seems a made-to-order representative of the Lacanian Father as Law.
He is, significantly, a physician, whose profession involves manipulating and regulating
natural functions through science. He is also an amateur naturalist. Nick recalls in “Now
I Lay Me” (1927) the “jars of snakes and other specimens that my father had collected as
a boy and preserved in alcohol” (N AS 146). He is also concerned with regulating natural
functions, most importantly, sexuality. Dr. Adams tells his young son that bestiality and
mashing are “heinous crimes” and sums up “the whole matter [of sex] by stating that
masturbation produced blindness, insanity and death, while a man who went with
prostitutes would contract hideous venereal diseases and that the thing to do was to keep
your hands off of people” (N AS 259).

However, the symbolic order which Dr. Adams imposes, the Law he uses to order
and regulate nature, is of limited, tenuous power. However much it is made subject to
human control, nature is quite capable of bursting loose from this control and asserting its
wildness. Nick discovers quite early how limited is his father’s control of nature in

“Indian Camp” (1925). In this story Nick witnesses Dr. Adams perform a cesarean

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section on an Ojibway woman without benefit of anesthetics or surgical instruments. Dr.
Adams confidently assumes control of the situation, performing the procedure with a
pocket knife and sewing up the incision with “nine-foot, tapered gut leaders” (N AS 19).
Nick, probably seven or eight years old at the time, assists in the delivery, holding the
basin that receives the placenta. Dr. Adams seems to enjoy the situation, and values it as
an opportunity to Show Nick how he can impose order on this most natural of functions--
childbirth. He asserts his control over biological nature by ignoring the woman’s
screams of pain and tells his bewildered son that he does not hear the screams “because
they are not important” (NAS 18). However, when the procedure is finished, his sense of
control is shattered. The woman’s husband is trapped on the bunk above her, unable to
move because of an infected, possibly gangrenous injury (the narrator tells us “he had cut
his foot very badly with an ax three days before” [NAS 17]). Unable to bear her
suffering, the husband cuts his own throat. When the Doctor checks on “the proud
father,” the lantern he holds reveals a disturbing scene to Nick’s astonished gaze: “The
Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The
blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. . . . The open razor
lay, edge up, in the blankets” (N AS 20). Nick emerges from this experience with a sense
of the limited and precarious nature of the power of the Father, and sees the symbolic
order to which nature and desire are subject as a force both oppressively restrictive and
disturbingly fragile. Nature, Nick finds, will not always constrain itself within the bounds

of the Father’s control.

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Nick repeatedly attempts to gain contact with the natural world by subverting the
symbolic order, particularly by defying moral codes which restrict sexuality. In
Hemingway’s work, defiance of sexual codes is sometimes linked with particular
geographical locations. Rose Marie Burwell, as well as Nancy R. Comley and Robert

Scholes have discussed this with reference to The Garden of Eden, in which the principal

 

characters refer to their gender-switching sexual games as “going to Africa” (Burwell
104, Comley & Scholes 99). The woods of Northern Michigan serve a similar function
for Nick Adams. Nick’s “education in [sexuality] had been acquired in the hemlock
woods behind the Indian camp” (NAS 260). It is significant that Nick is initiated into
sexuality by Trudy Gilby, an Ojibway girl who “did first what no one has ever done
better” (NAS 266). In having sex with Trudy, Nick defies not only his father’s injunction
that he “keep his hands off of people” but also defies the white, Christian, cultural order
which forbids extramarital or “miscegenistic” sex. For the rest of his life, Nick sees the
Michigan northwoods as a locus of desire, a place at the limits of the paternal authority.
Recalling his experiences with Trudy from the vantage point of adulthood, Nick mingles
the woman’s body with the physical wilderness. He remembers Trudy’s
plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well-holding arms, quick
searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste Of mouth, then uncomfortably,
tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-
endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended, the great bird flown like an owl in
the twilight, only it daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your

belly. (NAS 266)

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4d-

 

 

As the setting of his sexual initiation, the Michigan northwoods retains an important
psychological significance for Nick.

“The Last Good Country” (1972) develops this significance more thoroughly.
Here, a particular landscape is connected with wildness itself. This story begins with
Nick (probably about sixteen or seventeen years old) fleeing from two game wardens who
have come to arrest him for violating game laws. Nick evades this manifestation of
paternal authority by fleeing with his sister, called Littless, to the last remaining stand of
virgin timber in the area. It is only by undertaking an arduous journey through tangled
second-growth timber, through dense cedar swamp dotted with sink holes, through “long
bad slashings” that remain from a hemlock forest long-since decimated by bark-peelers,
that they are able to reach a wild place, untouched by human influence (NAS 87).

When they reach the virgin forest, with trees rising sixty feet to the first limb, the two
children feel a sense of relief. The forest seems to Littless like a sanctuary and it makes
Nick feel “like the way I ought to feel in church,” (N AS 89). “This is the way forests
were in the olden days,” says Nick. “This is about the last good country around here.”
This landscape is defined as beyond the reach of human influence. “Nobody gets in here
ever,” Nick says (NAS 89).

This story seems to be constructed as another version of pastoral. It certainly
invokes a number of pastoral conventions, the convention of retreat most prominently.
The sanctuary the children find in the virgin timber certainly insulates them from the
complications and restrictions of civilized life. And the convention of o_tiLm_ is invoked

as well. Just as the shepherd poets of Theocritus and Virgil enjoy at leisure the fruits of

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nature, nature pours forth her bounty for Nick and his sister. They feed on trout easily
caught from a stream which provides fish in ridiculous abundance, and grouse, normally
quite wary birds, stare at Nick stupidly as he easily shoots enough for a meal. Although
the refuge they find is in virgin timber, the garden landscape of pastoral convention in
invoked here as well. The virgin timber through which they walk is described as dark and
solemn, because the thick forest canopy keeps the forest floor in shade. But Nick’s
campsite is a clearing amid the forest. This is emphasized in the description of the site as
Nick and Littless approach it.
They were coming down a long hill when they saw sunlight ahead through the tree
trunks. Now, at the edge of the timber there was Wintergreen growing and some
partridge-berries and the forest floor began to be alive with growing things.
Through the tree trunks they saw an open meadow that sloped to where white
bitches grew along the stream. Below the meadow and the line of the bitches
there was the dark green of a cedar swamp and far beyond the swamp there were
dark blue hills. There was an arm of the lake between the swamp and the hills.
But from here they could not see it. They only felt from the distances that it was
there. (NAS 91)
This meadow among the dark forest recalls the cheerful meadows of Arcadia, and the
ease and comfort the Adams children enjoy there recall the innocence of Eden. The
feeling of distance emphasizes the setting’s function as a retreat from civilization, a
sanctuary from the restrictive world of human society. This is clearly a garden

landscape, despite its being surrounded by virgin forest.

Although “The Last Good Country” invokes some of the most familiar
conventions of pastoral, this story departs from pastoral convention in significant ways.
The story deflates the pastoral convention of simplicity; it acknowledges the complicating
factor of desire. In their flight to this primeval setting, Nick and his sister feel they have
escaped the symbolic order itself and reached a location beyond the restrictions of their
European, Christian culture. They have returned to a more elemental, pre-civilized
world. Here they achieve something of the intimacy with the natural world that Sueellen
Campbell says Western culture denies us. They feed on easily captured trout and
partridge and abundant berries and camp in a cheerful, edenic meadow amidst the virgin
timber which insulates them from the restrictive culture outside. Here they are beyond
the constraints of the most central components of the symbolic order--the rules governing
gender identity and sexuality. Nick’s relationship with Littless is intensely affectionate
and has a powerful (though apparently unconsummated) incestuous component. They
sleep together (innocently) and Littless plots to have children with her brother and
become his common-law wife. Littless cuts her hair as short as a boy’s and announces
that her new look is “very exciting. Now I’m your sister but I’m a boy, too. Do you think
it will change me into a boy?” (NAS 112). The fragment trails off without resolving the
plot, but a powerful sense of foreboding creeps into the last few pages. Nick becomes
worried that the Evans boy, who constantly follows Nick around like some malevolent
conscience and who has reported Nick to the game wardens for illegally shooting a buck,
will follow them to their edenic retreat, and bring with him the restrictive social order

they have sought to escape. “All that bastard cares about is trailing me,” Nick says (NAS

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129). The wilderness sanctuary to which Nick and Littless flee is truly the Leg; good
country. The “long, bad slashings” that surround it are signs of the inevitable
encroachment of human culture into the wild. This sanctuary yvfl fall victim to human
exploitation, and before long.

Hemingway’s work frequently tests the cultural codes that govern and restrict
behavior, particularly sexual behavior. But the characters who subvert this order often
risk horrific consequences. Catherine Boume, in The Garden of Eden, suffers madness as
the price of her gender-bending sexual adventures, and her husband David clings to his
sanity only through his solitary devotion to the therapeutic activity of writing, which is
itself an effort to impose order on experience through language. Nick Adams is keenly
aware of the risks he runs in testing the limits of the symbolic order, ever since his
encounter with the former boxer Ad Francis, who has been driven insane (“The Battler”
[1925]). Francis’ mutilated face leads Nick to believe that he is punch-drunk. But the
beatings Francis took in the ring are only a contributory cause of his insanity. The main
cause was his relationship with a woman who may or may not have been his sister (the
text leaves this distinction indeterminate). Francis’ fiiend, a pleasant black man called
Bugs, explains that

[Francis’] sister was his manager and they was always being written up in the

papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he

loved his sister, and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of

unpleasantness. . . . Of course, they wasn’t brother and sister no more than a

rabbit. . . .[But] she looks enough like him to be his own twin. (NAS 55-56)

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Nick emerges from this encounter with the knowledge that the symbolic order restricting
sexuality (and imposing control over nature) is violated only at enormous risk. Catherine
Belsey notes that Lacanian theory sees the human personality as a knot of intermingled
strands of Law, loss, and desire “though to untie them in practice would be to precipitate
psychosis” (397). Though Nick desires contact with the wild natural world (and with his
own wild nature within) and resents and distrusts the symbolic order which restricts this
contact, Nick comes to realize that the symbolic order cannot be safely subverted. To
untangle the desired object from the Law which constrains and defines it would be to
court madness. However much we need and desire contact with the wild, we are defined
by the civilizing codes which constrain us and to defy these codes is to surrender our
identity.

Nick’s memories of Michigan depict the interconnectedness of Law and desire.
When he is away from this supposedly simple, natural wooded setting, the location
retains a powerful significance for him. When Nick goes to Italy in the Great War, he is
severely wounded and afterwards finds himself unable to Sleep at night. Nick tells us, “I
had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark
and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time,
ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come
back” (NAS 144). Nick keeps himself awake by recalling his youth in the woods of
Northern Michigan:

I would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a boy and fish its

whole length very carefully in my mind, fishing very carefully under all the logs,

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all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shallow stretches . . . I would

stop fishing at noon to eat my lunch . . . and I always ate my lunch very slowly and

watched the stream below me while I ate. (N AS 144 [my emphasis])

Nick calms himself in this terrifying situation by giving in to a nostalgic vision of a more
simple, more comforting, more stable past, taking comfort from this remembered contact
with the natural world. However, this contact must be scrupulously conscribed; he must
be “very careful,” very deliberate, in his dealings with the natural world, even in his
memories of it. The mingling of Law and desire is powerfully evident here.

Though Nick desires contact with the natural world, he is imbued with the lesson
of the Father. He is obligated by the ordering principles of his culture to keep nature and
desire contained. This obligation figures prominently in the story “A Way You’ll Never
Be” (1933), in which Nick is serving on the Italian front as some sort of public relations
officer. He arrives at the front to boost the morale of the Italian troops by “demonstrating
the American uniform” (NAS 163). He has suffered shell shock and relives horrifying
visions of his wounding. He is very concerned with holding on to his sanity, having been
“certified nutty.” “I don’t seem crazy to you, do I?” he asks a fellow officer (N AS 159).
However, his grip on sanity is tenuous. When an Italian soldier asks why he is there, he
replies

I am demonstrating the American uniform. . . . It is a little tight in the collar but

soon you will see untold millions wearing this uniform swarming like locusts.

The grasshopper, you know, what we call the grasshopper in America is really a

locust. . . . If you are interested in scars I can Show you some very interesting ones

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but I would rather talk about grasshoppers. What we call grasshoppers, that is,

and what are, really, locusts. These insects at one time played a very important

part in my life. (NAS 163)
Nick then goes on, trying desperately to hold himself to a sane line of speech, but is
utterly unable to contain himself. He launches into a rambling discussion of the preferred
type of grasshoppers for trout bait and the most efficient means of catching them. In his
effort to hold on to his damaged sanity, Nick finds himself at the juncture between the
desired contact with wild nature and the imposition of the symbolic order which controls
it. The double vision of the bait discussed here mingles these two aspects. AS
grasshoppers, they are a positive image, and link him to the sense of control over nature
that fishing represents for him. But in noting that “what we call grasshoppers are in
reality locusts” Nick transforms this useful, innocuous creature quite subject to human
control into a creature representative of pestilence--a sign of nature’s constant potential
for bursting loose from the ordering mechanisms of human control. The term “locust”
calls up the Old Testament creature sent by Jehovah to plague the Egyptians, linking in
Nick’s mind the disruptive power of the natural world with the image of the Father as
Law. Also, locusts are themselves suggestive of wilderness, as John the Baptist was “one
crying in the wilderness” who “fed on locusts and wild honey” (John 1.23, Mark 1.7).
Nick is aware, at some deep and elemental level, that Law and desire are inseparably
bound.

Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories are, among other things, an alternative

version of pastoral. When Nick emerges, broken and damaged in body and mind, from

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his experiences in Europe and travels to the Big Two-Hearted River, he is engaging in
something considerably more complex than a pastoral retreat from chaotic civilization
into pure and simple nature. He is keenly aware that the wild, natural world that is the
source of his being and his joy and comfort is something he is irretrievably separated
from by the very forces which define him; the object he desires is at once forbidden and
determined by the symbolic order. He is aware that nature is not purely subordinate to his
wishes; it is quite capable of asserting its independence at any moment. In carefully
following a prescribed system for setting up camp, capturing bait, rigging his fly-rod, and
playing the trout, he is at once gaining contact with the desired natural world and
insulating himself from its wildness. The fact that desire and the law which restricts
desire originate from the same locus is the fact which fiightens Nick on this trip and the
fact which comforts him. This is what Nick acknowledges when he decides “there were
plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.”
The pastoral vision has been criticized as a reductive view of nature, one which
suggests that nature is quite subject to human control. As Glen A. Love, says, the
redefinition of pastoral . . . requires that contact with the green world be
acknowledged as something more than a temporary excursion into simplicity
which exists primarily for the sake of its eventual renunciation and a return to the
‘real’ world at the end. A pastoral for the present and the future calls for a better
science of nature, a greater understanding of its complexity, a more radical
awareness of its primal energy and stability, and a more acute questioning of the

supposedly sophisticated society to which we are bound. These are the qualities

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of much of our best western American literature, where writers characteristically

push beyond the pastoral conventions to confront the power of a nature which

rebuffs society’s assumptions of control. (“Revaluing Nature” 235)
Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories are an effort in this direction. They call attention to
the ways in which the persistent influence of the pastoral vision distorts and
conventionalizes our understanding of the natural world and of humanity’s relationship to
it. In contrast to the tamed and Simplified nature of pastoral, Hemingway’s Nick Adams
stories present a natural world that is darker, lovelier, and deeper than the
conventionalized retreat of Arcadia, and so return to pastoral some of the complexity it
originally contained. In the Nick Adams stories, the natural world is not simplified or
conventionalized; it is depicted in a light which acknowledges its complexity, vitality,

fragility, and power.

 

' Though the criticism on “Big Two-Hearted River” is voluminous and is varied in approach, many of these
studies have seen the story as pastoral. As early as Malcolm Cowley’s 1944 introduction to The Portable
Hemingway, Nick’s fishing trip has been seen as an escape from his memories of the war. This view has
been persistent in its influence. As recent an article as Fredrik Chr. Brogger’s “Whose Nature?: Differing
Narrative Perspectives in Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River’” (1999) presents “the central subject of
the story [as] Nick’s attempt to overcome his mental imbalance and his fears by escaping from culture into
nature” (20).

2 Hemingway’s construction of a fire-ravaged Seney is highly fictional. As Jack Jobst reports in
“Hemingway Bids Goodbye to Youth: Childhood’s End in Seney” ( 1995), in the Seney fire of 1918, only
one building burned, the Philip Grondin Hotel, which Hemingway here names The Mansion House.
Hemingway’s departure from fact in his rendering of this landscape suggests that his revision of the green
landscape of pastoral is deliberate.

7l

Chapter Three

The Sun Also Rises as a Critique of Pastoral

The work most central to the Hemingway canon is the 1926 novel The Sun Also
figs. The novel cemented Hemingway’s reputation as a serious novelist, and has
received more critical attention than any other of his works; it continues to receive critical
attention because it fits so nicely into college literature survey courses. It provides a
convenient example of the post-World War I malaise that has been taken as such a salient
feature of literary modernism. In this light, the novel offers abundant connections to
other modernist works, with its echoes of Fitzgerald, Eliot, Joyce, and other prominent
members of the modernist canon. The characters’ descent into a fog of alcohol and
promiscuity has been branded a prime example of that phenomenon of literary history
referred to as “The Lost Generation.”

However, works of literature which receive an abundance of critical scrutiny are
not always well served by this attention. The primary text becomes obscured by the
abundance of secondary literature. We forget the text itself, and see only the
accumulations of “readings” of the text, which interconnect to take on a weight and
solidity and authority all their own. The Sun Also Rises has become less a complex
literary work with its own difficulties and challenges than an illustration for literature
teachers to use as a demonstration of what is meant by modernism. Moreover, this

“modernism” is, of course, a clearly definable, monolithic entity.

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Because The Sun Also Rises has for so long been an essential element of the
Hemingway persona (a persona constructed by scholars, critics, publishers, journalists,
promoters, and, to no small measure, the author himself), this work is doubly difficult to
approach. Not only have the many layers of critical readings obscured the text; the
deliberately crafted public persona of Hemingway obscures it as well. The beret-wearing,
absinthe-sipping habitué of left bank cafés is one prominent aspect of the public image of
Hemingway the celebrity. Also, the academy has set up another impediment to
approaching the novel; the tendency to see The Sun Also Rises as a roman a clef, a thinly
disguised version of real left bank characters, with Jake Barnes as a stand-in for
Hemingway, differing from his creator in name only. However, the work is a novel, not a
memoir; it is fiction, not reportage. And whatever the work’s origins may be in actual
visits to Spain, and actual persons, the life experiences have been rendered into intricately
crafted fiction. Lady Brett Ashley is a complex created character of fiction, whatever
origins she may have had in the actual Duff Twysden. Robert Cohn is a fictional Robert
Cohn, quite distinct from the real Harold Loeb. And Jake Barnes, the veteran who lost
his genitalia in the war, is quite distinct from Ernest Hemingway, husband of four wives,
father of three sons.

The weight of critical attention the work has received has given readers a falsely
secure sense of what the novel is about. One of the major ecologically-concerned critics
working today, Glen A. Love, bemoans the lack of ecological attention in contemporary

literary study.

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Besides our tendency to postpone or relegate to lesser priority ecological
considerations, we must also recognize . . .our disciplines’ limited humanistic
vision, our narrowly anthropocentric view of what is consequential in life. . . . The
challenge that faces us in these terms is to outgrow our notion that human beings
are so special that the earth exists for our comfort and disposal alone. Here is the
point at which a nature-oriented literature offers a needed corrective, for one very
important aspect of this literature is its regard—either implicit or stated—for the
non-human. While critical interpretation, taken as a whole, tends to regard ego-
consciousness as the supreme evidence of literary and critical achievement, it is
eco-consciousness which is a particular contribution . . . of nature-writing, and of
many other ignored forms and works passed over because they do not seem to
respond to anthropocentric—let alone modernist and postrnodemist—assumptions
and methodologies. In such a climate of opinion, for example, Hemingway’s lh_e
Sun Also Rises, which is little concerned with ecological considerations, is widely
taught in college classes, while his The Old Man and the Sea, which engages such
issues profoundly, is not. (“Revaluing Nature” 230)

Despite Love’s objections, The Sun Also Rises is profoundly concerned with ecological

 

considerations, as I mean to demonstrate in the ensuing pages. Our assumptions about
the work have consigned it to the convenient pigeon-hole of “modernism,” and have
prevented us from seeing the words on the page in their crisp, stark clarity and wealth of

disturbing suggestion.

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Though many critics have seen this novel as the central document of the Lost
Generation, Hemingway’s view was quite different. He explained that he tried to balance
Gertrude Stein’s remark, “you are all a lost generation,” with this quotation from
Ecclesiastes:

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth

abideth forever . . . The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to

the place where he arose . . . the wind goeth toward the south, and tumeth about

unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind retumeth again

according to his circuits . . . . All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full;

unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
Hemingway quotes Ecclesiastes as a rebuke against the arrogance of anthropocentrism.
This passage powerfully evokes the indomitable rhythms of nature, and emphasizes the
transitory quality of human life. In selecting his title from this passage, Hemingway
weaves this message into the very fabric of the novel. As Hemingway explains in a 1926
letter to Maxwell Perkins:

The point of the book 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 and caring little about Vanities . . . .I didn’t mean the book to be a

hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the

hero. (SL 229)

While this comment has received limited attention in some critical studies, little has been

done to recognize its true import as a key to the structure and thematic complexity of the

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novel. Peter L. Hays, for instance, dismisses altogether the idea that the title has any
important thematic significance. “There is the novel’s title,” Hays says, “from
Ecclesiastes 1:4-7, but, Hemingway’s comment about ‘the earth abiding forever’
notwithstanding that particular passage has less direct Significance for the 'novel than such
titles as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, or The Old Man and the Sea for
the novels they head. Few critics any longer see ‘the earth abiding forever’ as the hero of
the novel” (16).

Hays’ remark notwithstanding, I accept the notion that Hemingway knew what he
meant when he explained the significance of the title. The relationship between humanity
and the natural world is one of the novel’s central thematic emphases. The principal
characters of The Sun Also Rises find themselves cutoff from the religious and cultural
values which had guided the beliefs and behavior of earlier generations (the familiar
definition of the “lost generation”). In addition, and this is perhaps more important, they
are cut off from the very earth itself. Their separation from the natural world is perhaps
the major source of their isolation and dissolution. Were they more aware of the
involvement of wild nature in human culture, were they more conscious of their role as
small parts of the vast system of interrelationships that is the natural world, they would
meet their challenges with a clearer sense of purpose, with a greater sense of their own
individual direction and self-worth. They would feel a part of the earth, and “the earth
abideth forever.” In this sense, the novel offers a prime example of the corrective to
anthropocentrism that Glen A. Love claims is missing from the work. Love says that a

nature-oriented literature is valuable because it attempts to correct the “notion that human

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beings are so special that the earth exists for our comfort and disposal alone” (“Revaluing
Nature” 230). This is precisely what The Sun Also Rises is designed to do.

Hemingway indicates elsewhere that he sees the value of literature in its ability to
tie the author and the reader to an acute sensual participation in the natural world. In
Green Hills of Africg (1935) he praises Tolstoy’s story “The Cossacks” because it
communicates a palpable connection to a vivid natural scene. “In it were the summer
heat, the mosquitoes, the feel of the forest in different seasons, and the river that the
Tartars crossed, raiding, and [reading it] I was living in that Russia again” (108).
Hemingway gauges the success of the artist in his ability to make the reader feel vividly
present in a particular natural scene. “For we have been there in the books and out of the
books—and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been. A
country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were
of any importance permanently, except those who practiced the arts” (108). Artists are
granted a greater importance in this aesthetic because they work in concert with the
rhythms of nature. Their artistic power is an expression of the power of nature herself.
Art is, in Hemingway’s view, a means of infusing wild nature into human culture.
Human culture, in order to be sustainable, must remain true to the natural order. As
Thoreau says in “Walking,” (1862):

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around . . . and

yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is

exclusively an inter-action of man on man,--a sort of breeding in and in, which

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produces at most a merely. English nobility, a civilization destined to have a

speedy limit. (624)

The central characters of The Sun Also Rises are the victims of just such a culture. A
central purpose of the novel is the restoration of clearer. sounder, more natural values, an
effort to bring the lost generation home.

Criticism has recognized much of Hemingway’s use of allusion in The Sun Also
flies, particularly in the connection of the central character, Jake Barnes, to the
mythological figure of The Fisher King. If Hemingway were not familiar with the work
of Jessie Weston or James Frazer, he certainly would have known of it through TS. Eliot
(whom Hemingway read carefully) and Ezra Pound, who was Hemingway’s literary
mentor. Carlos Baker identifies allusions to Homer in The Sun Also Rises, and Kathleen
Morgan has produced a book-length study on Hemingway and Homer. Peter L. Hays
makes a case that the novel is informed by allusions to Catullus.l However, one
important allusion which remains unacknowledged is Hemingway’s extensive use of
reference to pastoral throughout the novel. The novel, in fact, has the use of pastoral
convention built into its very structure. The Sun Also Rises is not only “a damned
tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero,” as the author claimed, but is a major
element of Hemingway’s argument with pastoral.

Throughout his career Hemingway emphasized the importance of writing
truthfully, even in fiction. As early as a 1925 letter to his father, Hemingway stresses the
importance of faithful invention. He tells his father: “you see I’m trying in all my stories

to get the feeling of actual life across-mot to just depict life--or criticize it--but to actually

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make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the
thing” (SL 153). He emphasizes the importance of truthful representation in this 1932
account of his apprenticeship as a writer: “I was trying to write then and I found the
greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you truly felt, rather than what you were
supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in
action; what the actual things were that produced the emotion that you had experienced”
(Death in the Afternoon 2). Literary depictions of the relationship between humanity and
the natural world are often fraught with inaccuracy and misrepresentation. In “On
Writing,” a fragment deleted from In Our Time and posthumously published in The Nick
Adams Stories in 1972, Hemingway’s narrator complains that books on fly fishing insist
that one must fish upstream when his experience has taught him otherwise. “It was no
fun to fish upstream although all the books said it was the only way. All the books. He
and Bill had fun with the books in the old days. They all started with a fake premise”
(233). The pastoral vision proceeds on a number of fake premises. Pastoral
conventionalizes the relationship between humanity and the natural world, and
misrepresents this relationship in a number of significant, telling ways. The Sun Also
Eggs is Hemingway’s effort to expose the fallacious assumptions embedded within
sentimental versions of pastoral and to inject into pastoral a greater level of complexity.

The novel invokes the central elements of pastoral convention: the presentation of
city life as complex and corrupt, the presentation of rural life (and of nature) as somehow
more ‘real’ and more simple than life in the city, the pattern of retreat and return, a

nostalgic vision of a lost Golden Age, and the presentation of rural folk as more honest,

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direct, and virtuous than city folk. I believe these allusions are so extensive and so
central to the novel that their inclusion cannot be the result of mere chance. In addition to
these familiar conventions of pastoral, Hemingway has built into the novel extensive
allusions to the M of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, the two works most
central to the establishment of the pastoral genre.

The element of the pastoral vision which is most at odds with the lessons of
modern ecology is the idea of nature as simple in contrast to the complexity of urban life.
In The Sun Also Rises, the idea of nature as simple is examined, tested, and found
wanting. The central characters do find themselves lost, cutoff from any solid cultural or
Spiritual moorings as a result of the Great War. While they find some measure of
meaning in the contact with the natural world they gain in the pastoral surroundings of the
fiesta, in the ritual confrontation with raw natural power in the 991313, and in fishing,
they fail to form any lasting connection with nature or gain any satisfying sense of its
value. This is because their culture has taught them falsely, has cut them off from the
earth which bore them and nurtured them. The cultural assumptions which govern their
interactions with the natural world are encoded within the pastoral vision, which has been
instilled in them through the pastoral’s nearly ubiquitous influence.

The plot line of the entire narrative is an examination of the pastoral idea of
retreat. Lady Brett continues to invoke this idea, of escape from their current troubles
into an imaginary never-never land of “if only” (which is just as fictive a place as the
simple natural world of pastoral) when she says, at the novel’s conclusion, “We could

have had such a damned good time together” (251). Jake’s recent experiences have

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taught him the falseness of pastoral representation, showed him that nature neither can be
or should be simple, and he demonstrates this new-found understanding when he replies,
“Yes. Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (251).

Hemingway’s argument with the pastoral vision is built into the nOvel’s structural
plan. The novel is designed first to invoke the familiar conventions of classical pastoral
and then to critique them. As Glen A. Love notes,

literary pastoral traditionally posits a natural world, a green world, to which

sophisticated urbanites withdraw in search of the lessons of simplicity which only ‘

nature can teach. There, amid sylvan groves and meadows and rural characters--

idealized images of country existence--the sophisticates attain a critical vision of

the good, simple life, a vision which will presumably sustain them as they return

at the end to the great world on the horizon. (“Revaluing Nature” 231)

The novel follows this pattern of retreat and return: the central characters leave
sophisticated Paris and travel to the rural countryside of northern Spain to attend a fiesta,
then return to the city. The novel’s first several chapters are designed to create a vision of
postwar Paris as an urban landscape rife with spiritual confusion, moral complexity, and
cultural aimlessness--precisely the sort of setting that calls for the pastoral convention of
retreat into the (supposedly) more simple, more real, more honest milieu of the country.
The pastoral view of city life as corrupt and complex is established in the novel’s
opening chapters. The novel is written in the first person, from the point of view of Jake
Barnes, an American news writer working in Paris, who had served as an aviator in the

Great War and was wounded so as to lose his penis, but his testicles are left intact (SL

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745). His love affair with Brett, which cannot be consummated because of his wound,
begins when Brett, serving as a nurse in the Volunteer Aid Detachment, attends to him
when he is first wounded, so the relationship is hopeless from its very outset. The novel
is Jake’s moral examination of himself, his investigation of his own behavior and values.
Though he tries to examine the most uncomfortable and unflattering aspects of his own
personality with honesty and directness, he warns us in the novel’s first chapter, “I
mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together” (12).
However frank and direct Jake attempts to be, some of the material he reports is so
painful to him that he must resort to indirection and projection in order to deal with it.
This is an important factor in the novel’s presentation of the city life of Paris as complex
and corrupt, which establishes the necessity for Jake’s pastoral retreat into Spain.

The pain that Jake finds himself in is related to two characters who, in his mind,
most directly represent the confusion and complexity of his Paris life: Lady Brett Ashley
and Robert Cohn. Jake is in love with Brett, but they are unable to attain any sort of
satisfying relationship. She is strongly attracted to him--“I simply turn all to jelly when
you touch me” she tells him (34). And he is so distraught over their failure to find a
satisfactory relationship that he often is unable to sleep at night. Jake is an observant
Catholic, though the Church offers him little solace for his wound. “The Catholic Church
had an awfully good way of handling all that,” Jake says. “Good advice, anyway. Not to
think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it” (39).
Although Jake cannot consummate his relationship with Brett, he is also unable to break

it off with her, so he hangs about her despite the hopelessness of their situation. As she

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prepares to marry the alcoholic bankrupt Mike Campbell, he continues his relationship
with her, even offering to give her money to assist with her divorce from her current
estranged husband, so that she can marry Mike.

Chapter One introduces us to Robert Cohn, who seems a pleasant, though
somewhat na'r've fellow, who, by all appearances has done little to merit the bitter tone
~ with which Jake portrays him. The bitterness, though, stems from the fact that Cohn is
the focus of the feelings of resentment and uncertainty Jake has about his Paris life,
feelings which spur Jake toward his retreat from Paris to the presumably simpler world of
Pamplona. Jake nurses his resentment for Cohn through anti-semitic vitriol. Jake resents
Cohn because Cohn reminds him of those aspects of himself which he most resents. The
technique Jake uses to deal with these painful reminders is to distance himself from Cohn
by emphasizing their difference. By insisting on Cohn’s Jewishness Jake suppresses their
uncomfortable similarity by insisting on this narrow point of differencez.
When Brett enters the bal musette in which Jake awaits her, he is immediately reminded
of the complexity of his emotional situation. Jake has just passed the time conversing
with a prostitute, when Brett arrives in the company of a troop of homosexual men who
give rise to Jake’s resentment: “I was very angry,” Jake tells us. “Somehow they always
made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but
I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to Shatter that superior, simpering
composure” (28). Jake resents the homosexuals with Brett because they remind him of
the painful fact of his own situation--that his war injury has made it impossible for him to

obtain that which he most wants--sexual intercourse with Brett.

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When Cohn meets Brett, Cohn becomes the sticking-point of Jake’s bitter
resentment over his difficult love life. From this point onward, Jake uses Cohn’s
Jewishness as a way of distancing himself from Cohn: “I saw Robert Cohn looking at her.
He looked a great deal as his compatriot must have looked when he saw the promised
land. Cohn, of course, was much younger. But he had that look of eager, deserving
expectation” (29). In Jake’s mind, Cohn’s identity as a Jew is linked with his desire for
Brett. Cohn moons hopelessly after Brett just as Jake does. To suppress this
uncomfortable similarity between them, Jake focuses on this convenient point of
difference. “Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly,” Jake says. “The
reason is that until he fell in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark that
would, in any way, detach him from other people” (52). After Brett runs off to San
Sebastian for an assignation with Cohn, Jake’s bitter resentment is stirred. Cohn becomes
the focus of the emotional baggage that complicates Jake’s Paris life. On a trip to Spain,
Jake aggravates Cohn as he waits for Brett to arrive on a train, a train that Jake knows
Brett is not on. Jake enjoys Cohn’s discomfiture as he nervously waits for his lady love:

I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn--nor as eager. I

was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. Cohn had a wonderful

quality of bringing out the worst in anybody. . . .Why I felt the impulse to devil
him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of

what had happened to him. . . . I certainly did hate him. (104-105)

Very early in the novel, in the second chapter, Jake’s portrait of Cohn includes a

critique of his taste in literature:

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Then there was another thing. He had been reading W.H. Hudson. That sounds
like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and reread “The Purple Land.”
“The Purple Land” is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts
splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an
intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to
take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would
be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent,
equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books. Cohn, I believe,
took every word of “The Purple Land” as literally as though it had been an R.G.
Dun report. (17)
Jake views Cohn as incredibly na'r've, since, on the basis of his reading of The Pugple
Ling, Cohn wants Jake to accompany him on a trip to South America. Cohn has been
made extremely unhappy by his girlfriend Frances insisting that she marry him, and then
berating him publicly when he refuses. Cohn seems to believe that the appropriate
solution to his unhappy Paris life is a flight to South America, for an adventurous sojourn
among the pastoral splendor of Uruguay. Jake sees this invocation of the pastoral
convention of retreat as naive. “Listen, Robert,” Jake tells Cohn, “going to another
country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from
yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that” (19). When Jake
urges Cohn to reject this notion, Cohn insists that he is sick of Paris and a trip to South

America will fix things up just fine:

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So there you were. I was sorry for him, but it was not a thing you could do
anything about. because right away you ran up against the two stubbomnesses:
South America could fix it and he did not like Paris. He got the first idea out of a
book, and I suppose the second came out of a book too. (20)
Jake criticizes C ohn’s falling prey to the Hudsonian influence because it is unrealistic. a
flight from the harsh reality of actual life into the comforting artificiality of literary
convention. The Purple Land, this “very sinister book,” is not merely unrealistic and
romantic, it is an example of that highly conventional form: the sentimental pastoral.
Jake’s description of The Purple Land is accurate. First published in 1885,
reissued in 1904, the novel is rife with romantic adventure and its sincere, distinctly un-
ironic tone make it quite out of place in the post-war milieu in which Jake is writing. The
central character, an Englishman named Richard Lamb, tells of his adventures in Uruguay
circa 1870 when he marries a young Uruguayan woman against her father’s wishes. He
has to hide from the woman’s father and seek a livelihood for himself and his wife. He

rides through the wild countryside looking for employment on an estancia (estate) of a

 

wealthy landowner. Rejected by estate after estate, Lamb experiences a number of
“splendid amorous adventures” as he rides through the Uruguayan countryside (called by
the natives the Banda Oriental). The novel concludes at its starting point, with Lamb and
his bride going to confront her angry father, just as The Sun Also Rises ends by circling
back to its beginning, with Jake and Brett jostling together in a horse-cab, discussing the

hopelessness of their relationship. This is only one of the many elements Hemingway

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borrows from Hudson’s novel. The central element is the use of the conventions of
pastoral.
The Purple Land closely follows pastoral convention. The central character is an
urban Englishman among rural natives, invoking the convention of the retreat of a
worldly sophisticate among simple rural natives, who, like the shepherds of classical
pastoral, earn their living tending livestock. Though the landscape he rides through is
wilderness, he finds the wilderness dotted by places of refuge, small models of the
pastoral Arcadia:
About an hour before sunset I resolved to go no further that day; and I could not
have hoped to find a nicer resting-place than the one now before me—a neat
;a_n_c_h_o with a wide corridor supported by wooden pillars, standing amidst a bower
of fine old weeping willows. It was a calm, sunshiny afiemoon, peace and quiet
resting on everything, even bird and insect, for they were silent, or uttered only
soft, subdued notes; and that modest lodge, with its rough stone walls and
thatched roof, seemed to be in harmony with it all. It looked like the home of
simple-minded pastoral people that had for their only world the grassy wilderness,
watered by many clear streams, bounded ever by that far-off unbroken ring of the
horizon, and arched over with blue heaven, starry by night and filled by day with
sweet sunshine. (76)
The presence of tamed garden spots within a vast wilderness is very much in keeping
with pastoral convention, as is the convention of rural life as a remainder of a lost Golden

Age when people were simpler and more virtuous than city dwellers of the present.

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Hudson invokes this convention as well. In the company of a simple estancia family.

 

Lamb thinks:

I was powerfully tempted to jump up and embrace the whole family on the spot.

How sweet was this primitive simplicity of mind! Here, doubtless. was the one

spot on the wide earth where the golden age still lingered, appearing like the last

beams of the setting sun touching some prominent spot, when elsewhere all things
are in shadow. Ah, why had fate led me into this sweet Arcadia, since I must

presently leave it to go back to the dull world of toil and strife? (80)

The Purple Land does not only contain a few brief mentions of pastoral elements.
but emphasizes pastoral convention repeatedly, consistently viewing South America
through the tinted lens of the pastoral vision. Lamb even invokes the name of the Greek
founder of the pastoral genre:

Stretching myself on my rude bed of rugs, in a room adjoining the kitchen, I

blessed these simple-minded hospitable people. Good heavens, thought I to

myself, what a glorious field is waiting here for some new Theocritus! How
unutterably worn out, stilted, and artificial seems all the so-called pastoral poetry
ever written when one sits down to supper and joins in the graceful Qi_e_lg or

EEC—09 in one of these remote semi-barbarous South American estancias! (34)

Certainly The Purple Land is pastoral at its most sentimental, and this seems to be

the reason Hemingway draws such attention to it in The Sun Also Rises. Despite the fact
that hundreds of critical articles have been written on The Sun Also Rises, and dozens of

books, no one seems to have paid much attention to this direct reference to Hudson in

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Hemingway’s novel, an omission I find quite odd.3 Perhaps it has been ignored because
it calls into question the model the academy has established for the “real” meaning and
importance of The Sun Also Rises. But why should a pastoral romance about South
America be called “a very sinister book”? This is due to a number of reasons, each of
which go to the very heart of ecocritical objections to pastoral.

First, the notion of the pastoral retreat and return is itself illusory--a dangerous
misrepresentation of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The idea
that one can escape one’s problems by retreating into the woods is an idea as old as
Theocritus and Virgil, but this notion is built upon an artificial distinction between human
culture and wild nature. To believe that man and nature are binaristic opposites is to
believe that people have somehow risen up from some primordial ooze that is our natural
origin, and that we have refined and civilized ourselves into creatures separate from and
superior to the rest of creation. But just as the beasts of the forests and the cattle of the
fields, we breathe, drink, eat, excrete, copulate, and grow old to die and return to the dust
from whence we came. To pretend otherwise is to engage in the grossest, most self-
serving, and most dangerous type of deception. AS Hemingway states in Death in the
Afternoon (1932), “Someone with English blood has written ‘Life is real; life is earnest,
and the grave is not its goal.’ And where did they bury him? And what became of the
reality and the earnestness?” (266). We cannot retreat from civilization into nature;
nature is of necessity involved in civilization. If to any degree they are separate, only

thinking makes it so. As William Howarth notes, “although we cast nature and culture as

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opposites, in fact they constantly mingle, like water and soil in a flowing Stream” (“Some
Principles” 69).

Second, the view of nature as somehow more simple than urban civilization is
inherently fallacious. As Glen A. Love observes, “if we are to believe what modern
ecology is telling us, the greatest of all intellectual puzzles is the earth and the myriad
systems of life which it nourishes. Nature reveals adaptive strategies far more complex
than any human mind could devise” (“Revaluing Nature” 231). Lamb, the hero of 113

Purple Land, often feels that he has escaped from the cares and woes attendant on a

 

member of the sophisticated, educated colonizing class to which he belongs. Camped in

one hospitable estancia, Lamb waxes rhapsodic:

 

While I talked to these good people on simple pastoral matters, all the wickedness
of Orientals--the throat-cutting war of Whites and Reds, and the unspeakable
cruelties of the ten years’ siege--were quite forgotten; I wished that I had been
born amongst them and was one of them, not a weary, wandering Englishman,
overburdened with the arms and armour of civilization, and staggering along, like

Atlas, with the weight of a kingdom on which the sun never sets on his shoulders.

(78)

However much Lamb feels he has escaped the cares of his civilized life, and
however much he envies the supposedly simple, pastoral people he travels among, the
colonizing influence of his English background is carried with him at all times. He does
not seem to recognize that by his very attitude toward “these remote semi-barbarous

South American estancias” and the people who inhabit them, with their “primitive

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simplicity of mind” he is himself a colonizer and perpetuator of Western ideologies
calling for the domestication of nature into the realms of civilization. Even if Lamb
wishes to retain the simple in the land he has traversed, as the following passage shows,
he is not really interested in the land as it actually is. but rather uses it for his own
“civilized” needs.

Farewell, beautiful land of sunshine and storm, of virtue and of crime; may the

invaders of the future fare on your soil like those of the past and leave you in the

end to your own devices . . . may the blight of our superior civilization never fall

on your wild flowers or the yoke of our progress be laid on your herdsmen—

careless, graceful, music-loving as the birds—to make him like the sullen abject

peasant of the Old World! (371)
Because Lamb sees the wilds of South America through the distorting glass of the
pastoral vision, he misrepresents the land and the people he reports on. The simple
Arcadian retreats where he passes the night are actually the result of a complex
confluence of economic and political factors; they are not simple at all. The people he
presents as simple and virtuous descendents of Virgilian and Theocritian shepherds are
not embodiments of literary convention; they are actual people with real, unidealized
lives who have to put up with privation, disease, war, and the nosy intrusion of snobbish
Englishmen like Lamb. The Purple Land perpetuates the artifices of pastoral convention
and, as such, is a “very sinister book.”

Although Jake is critical of Cohn for succumbing to the pastoral influence of T_he_

Purple Land, he himself engages in a similar pastoral retreat. The plotline of the novel, in

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fact, follows the traditional pastoral pattern of retreat from urban complexity into rural
simplicity. As Don Scheese explains,
at the heart of the pastoral, no matter what its historical context, is a preference
for the apparently ‘simple’ world of ‘nature’ (traditionally understood as the non-
human realm) over the complicated life of ‘civilization.’ Writers (and artists) of
this tradition have typically represented or constructed nature as a retreat or
sanctuary, as arcadian garden or wilderness refuge. (4)
Terry Gifford notes that pastoral involves “some form of retreat and return, the
fundamental pastoral movement, either within the text, or in the sense that the pastoral
retreat ‘returned’ some insights relevant to the urban audience” (2). Book One of m

Sun Also Rises establishes Paris as an urban setting rife with confusion, a place where

 

“nobody ever knows anything” and where, as the M Georgette says, “everybody’s
Sick”(35, 23). Book Two tells of the trip through the rural country of northern Spain to
Pamplona, and Book Three tells of Jake’s return to Paris. Thus, it is evident that the
pastoral convention of retreat and return is built into the novel’s very design.

Each summer Jake, the sophisticated expatriate, goes on a vacation to Parnplona
to attend the fiesta of San F ermin. This trip is for him a restorative, a flight from the
cares and woes of urban life into pastoral simplicity. When Jake and his friend from New
York, the humor writer Bill Gorton, travel to Spain, the landscape is described in terms
reminiscent of pastoral. As the car in which Bill and Jake ride approaches the Spanish

border, the land becomes increasingly pastoral:

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We started off up the street and out of the town. We passed some lovely gardens
and had a good look back at the town, and then we were out in the country, green
and rolling, and the road climbing all the time. We passed lots of Basques with
oxen, or cattle, hauling carts along the road, and nice farm-houses, low roofs, and
all white-plastered. In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green

and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. (97)

As Terry Gifford notes, Virgil’s “Arcadia is significantly an alpine region that is
cut off on all Sides by other high mountains. It was the perfect location for a poetic
paradise, a literary construct of a past Golden Age in which to retreat by linguistic
idealization” (20). And the Basque country of the Pyrenees is described in just such
terms. Riding atop a double-decker bus open to the outside, Jake and Bill are treated to a
wonderfiil view of the country.

After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees along both sides

of the road, and a stream and ripe fields of grain, and the road went on, very white

and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise, and off on the left was a hill with
an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to
the walls and shifting in the wind. . . . Then we crossed a wide plain, and there
was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees,
and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain. . . . In
back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were
other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going

toward Pamplona. (99)

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Pamplona, then, is described as an isolated region cut off by surrounding mountains. It is
also made a location of nostalgia, linked with a pre-modern Golden Age. At the Spanish
frontier, Jake sees “an old man with long, sunbumed hair and beard, and clothes that
looked as if they were made of gunny-sacking, [and he] came striding up to the bridge.
He was carrying a long staff, and he had a kid slung on his back, tied by the four legs, the
head hanging down” (98). This goatherd seems to have stepped out of the distant past. or
out of the m of Theocritus. Significantly, he is turned back at the border by customs
officials because he lacks an important trapping of modern life: a passport.

After they cross the border into Spain, Bill and Jake stop at a M (a road-side
shop) which is described in terms which make it reminiscent of a by-gone age, invoking
the nostalgic character of pastoral:

There was a low, dark room with saddles and harness, and hay-forks made of

white wood, and clusters of canvas rope-soled shoes and hams and slabs of bacon

and white garlics and long sausages hanging from the roof. It was cool and dusky
and we stood in front of a long counter with two women behind it serving drinks.

(112)

The Basque peasants Jake and Bill meet on their journey are idealized as the
simple, generous shepherds of pastoral. They share their bus ride with Basques, who are
all clad in the black smocks of mountain peasants. The Basques gladly share their wine
with the two Americans, teaching them to drink from leather wine-bags, and being
wonderfully generous, polite, and fiiendly. “These Basques are swell people,” Bill says

(1 10). When they stop at a roadside posada for a drink, at the price of forty centimes,

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Jake says “I gave the woman fifty centimes to make a tip, and she gave me back the
copper piece, thinking I had misunderstood the price” (1 12). C learly, among these
people, Jake is no longer in Paris, where “everything was on a clear economic basis. . . .
'[In France] no one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure
reason. If you wanted people to like you you have only to spend a little money” (236).
After setting up in their hotel in Pamplona, Bill and Jake travel to Burguete to do
some fishing before the fiesta begins. This setting is also rife with references to pastoral
convention. The text invokes the pastoral convention of nostalgia. When Jake awakens
on the first day of their fishing excursion and looks out of the window of the inn, the
setting is described in pre-modem terms:
Outside under the window were some carts and an old diligence, the wood of the
roof cracked and split by the weather. It must have been lefi from the days before
the motor-buses. A goat hopped up on one of the carts and then to the roof of the
diligence. He jerked his head at the other goats below and when I waved at him he
bounded down. (117)
The pastoral landscape is of necessity a garden rather than a wilderness setting.
The Spanish woods Bill and Jake hike through is an example of just such a setting-mature
tamed. They cross a stream on a log which had been flattened on one side for smooth
walking, with a sapling bent over the stream for a hand-rail. They walk through a forest:
It was a beech wood and the trees were very old. Their roots bulked above the
ground and the branches were twisted. We walked on the road between the thick

trunks of the old beeches and the sunlight came through the leaves in light patches

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on the grass. The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy.

There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the

big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park. (122; my emphasis)

The scene in which Bill and Jake rest afier fishing and engage in lunchtime banter
recalls classical pastoral in several ways. The scene has a number of connections to the
flyiLs of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil. As they walk from the inn in Burguete to
the Irati River, they pass through a pastoral landscape. They walk through fields that
were “rolling and grassy and the grass was short from the sheep grazing. The cattle were
up in the hills. We heard their bells in the woods” (121). In the flyjls, Thrysis and his
friend the Goatherd rest from their piping at noon, because “it is never permitted us,
shepherd, to play on our pipes now, / Not during the noon hour, we are too fearful of Pan
who is resting, / Weary from hunting, at that time; for he is irritable then” (3). Bill and
Jake, the novel tells us, take their interlude at this appointed hour; “it was a little past
noon” (125). In the first M, Thrysis and the Goatherd are seated alongside a flowing
spring and enjoy the music of “the water/ Yonder that falls splashing down from the
rocks up above” (3). Jake and Bill are seated alongside a river. near a dam, which “was
built to provide a head of water for driving logs. The gate was up, and I sat on one of
squared timbers and watched the smooth apron of water before the river tumbled into the
falls” (124). Of course, Jake and Bill are seated alongside a river, while Thyrsis and the
Goatherd “sit in the shade of the elm tree, facing Priapus/ Hard by the spring of the
Nymphs, where that favorite seat of the shepherds / Is, and the oaks” (3). However,

Hemingway takes pains to tell us that Jake and Bill have found a similar setting for their

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noontime diversion. “I found the’two wine-bottles in the pack,” Jake reports, “and carried
them up the road to where the water of a spring flowed out of an iron pipe. There was a
board over the spring and I lifted it, and, knocking the corks firmly into the bottles,
lowered them down into the water. It was so cold my hand and wrist felt numbed” (123).
While this spring is not inhabited by nymphs, it houses the favorite muse of these two

~ shepherds, wine. This is also in keeping with the conventions of classical pastoral. In the
fifth Ecl_ogu_e of Virgil, the shepherd Menalcus offers to “make the banquet glad with
much wine” (278), just as Bill and Jake do. A passage of Virgil could describe Bill and
Jake’s pastoral excursion: “Here are chill springs, here soft meadows, O Lycoris: here
the woodland: here with wasting time I too at thy side would waste away” (Eclogue X
291)

The witty banter Bill entertains Jake with, beginning at breakfast at the inn, and
continuing during their streamside lunch, is analogous to the song with which the
shepherd Thyrsis entertains his friend the Goatherd in the Idylls. Thyrsis is renowned for
his singing; Bill is a successful writer of humor, and the banter he performs for Jake, full
of “Irony and Pity” and mocking topical references, is his stock in trade (1 18). When he
mentions impotence, and pauses in his repartee, Jake wishes Bill would continue. “He
had been going splendidly,” Jake says. “But he stopped. I was afraid he thought he had
hurt me with that crack about being impotent. I wanted to start him again” (120). Jake
enjoys Bill’s banter just as much as the Goatherd of the M enjoys Thyrsis’ song.

Bill’s “song” includes a number of mocking references to common naive nature

sentiments. As they begin their picnic lunch of chicken and much wine, Bill urges Jake

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“Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the
product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?” (126). Bill even satirizes the
cliché of nature as the original place of worship: “I want you to say with me, on your
knees, brother. Let no man be ashamed to kneel here in the great out-of-doors.
Remember the woods were god’s first temples. Let us kneel and say: ‘Don’t eat that,
Lady--that’s Mencken” (127).

The Goatherd of Theocritus’ M offers his friend Thyrsis a prize for his song, a
wooden cup decorated with an image of a woman:

on the inside [of the cup] a woman is fashioned, some masterpiece of the

Gods’ manufacture, outfitted with robe and diadem. By her

Side are two men with elaborate hair-dos, disputing in speech, one

After another, but none of their dialog touches her deeply,

Rather, She gazes on one of them one moment, absently smiling,

Then, in an instant she casts her attention again to the other. (4)

The woman depicted here could be Lady Brett Ashley. The diadem indicates the
woman is an aristocrat, like Lady Brett. Waiting for Brett in Pamplona, Cohn gets a
haircut, irritating Jake even further by indulging in “all that barbering” for Brett’s sake
(105). Mike, the man Brett is supposed to marry, also indulges in a fair bit of barbering,
and also “disputes in speech” with Cohn. He asks Cohn “why do you follow Brett around
like a poor bloody steer? Don’t you know you’re not wanted?” and tells Cohn “What if

Brett did sleep with you? She’s slept with lots of better people than you” (146). And,

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while her various lovers dispute, Brett “gazes on one of them one moment,” then “casts
her attention again to the other.”

Thyrsis’ song finds some echoes in Bill’s conversation with Jake. Thyrsis sings.
“Hermes came first from the mountain and said to him, ‘Daphnis, my good friend, / Tell
me now, who is tormenting you? Whom are you so much in love with?”’ (5). Similarly,
Bill asks Jake, “What about this Brett business? . . . Were you ever in love with her?”
Jake answers “On and off for a hell of a long time.” Bill seems to realize that this is a
touchy subject for Jake, and apologizes for prying. Jake tells him, “I don’t give a damn
anymore. . . Only I’d a hell of a lot rather not talk about it” (128).

The song of Thysis finds another echo in Bill’s conversation with Jake. Bill, in
the midst of his witty disquisition, touches on another sore subject:

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake

European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become

obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You become

obsessed by sex . . . .You don’t work. One group claims women support you.

Another group claims you’re impotent. (120)

This recalls a portion of Thyrsis’ song: “‘Cowherd,’ you used to be called, but are now
rather more like a goatherd, / One of those goatherds who, when he observes how the she-
goats are getting / Stuffed, deliquesces in tears because he cannot be such a he-goat. (5)

The fishing scene is as direct an invocation of pastoral as is the novel’s reference

to The Purple Land. This scene, particularly in its air of gtiu_m, seems a pause, a reprieve

from the emotional tension of the rest of the novel. The scene seems a testament to the

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continuing appeal of pastoral, in its presentation of a close and friendly relation between
humanity and the natural world. But the humorous tone indicates an intention of
undercutting, parodizing, critiqueing the set of conventions that make up the familiar
pastoral mode. Terry Gifford notes that Virgil designed his Arcadia as not only a
mountainous location separated from the surrounding countryside by other high
mountains (like Pamplona), but also as “a literary construct of a past Golden Age in
which to retreat by linguistic idealization” (20). When the highly artificial language of
pastoral verse is transplanted into a realistic prose narrative, this linguistic artifice
becomes comic, much as the inflated language and idealized characterizations of chivalric
romance are made comic when Cervantes transplants them into a realistic narrative like

Don Quixote. In this sense, Bill’s humorous language in the fishing scene is an example

 

of just this sort of linguistic idealization.

The comic tone of the fishing scene is introduced by other elements which critique
and undercut the pastoral elements of the narrative. In contrast to the simple, generous,
hospitable peasants of pastoral (such as the Basques, in this narrative) the lady who keeps
the inn at Burguete is tightfisted and inhospitable. When she tells Jake the price of the
room, she is so ashamed of the inflated price that she cannot look him in the eye.
Moreover, the inn is unheated, and so cold that the two Americans have to go to bed to
stay warm. The landlady assuages Jake by telling him that wine is included in the price
of the room, but is so stingy as to peek in to count the empty bottles they accumulate.
Another indication that the pastoral vision is being undercut in this portion of the

narrative is Jake’s description of the room in which they stay. It is decorated with “one

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panel of rabbits, dead, one of pheasants. also dead, and one panel of dead ducks” (116).
This inclusion of portraits of dead wild animals recalls Bill’s earlier comment when he
(about three sheets to the wind) and Jake (sober) walk by a taxiderrnist’s shop in Paris.
Bill tries to get Jake to buy a stuffed dog. Jake sensibly demurs. Bill comments, “See
that horse-cab? Going to have that horse-cab stuffed for you for Christmas. Going to
give all my friends stuffed animals. I’m a nature-writer” (80). The inclusion of these
elements is a portion of the text’s critique of pastoral. Pastoral is presented as a dead
form, one which is so entrenched in artifice and convention that it fails to communicate
one of the salient qualities of the natural environment: its organic vitality. In order to
present an accurate and responsible picture of the natural world, a work of literature must
create an impression of teeming masses of interconnecting, interdependent life forces of
which the natural world is made. As Hemingway explains in Green Hills of Afiica, for
the writer to give a clear impression of “country,” the writer must present “the changes of
the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real,
the names of the trees, of the small animals” (73). Instead, Jake and Bill confront stuffed
animals and pictures of dead ducks.

Jake and Bill feel the need for this pastoral interlude because their culture has led
them away from any solid sense of contact with the natural world. As Bill mockingly
tells Jake, “you’ve lost touch with the soil. Fake European standards have ruined you.”
And by trusting this highly conventionalized, highly artificial vision to explain their
relation to the world around them, they lose touch with the soil even more, wander even

further away from contact with the earth which “abideth forever.”

lOl

Earlier I have mentioned the pastoral convention of nature being simpler and more
real and honest than urban settings, and the quality of nostalgia that is characteristic of
pastoral. Each of these ideas figures into Jake’s main reason for visiting Pamplona, the
m. The emotional tension and moral confusion of his Paris life are not helped by his
religion. The advice the Church gives him for dealing with his wound is “not to think
- about it.” The train Jake and Bill ride from Paris is packed with American Catholic
pilgrims going to Lourdes, a place famous for its waters allegedly capable of miraculous
cures. Jake, very much in need of such a cure, bypasses Lourdes and goes to Burguete for
the fishing instead. He seeks an alternative source of meaning and order in the ggrg'gla,
which is less a sporting event than a highly ritualized blood sacrifice, a return to a pre-
Christian religious state, a retreat to a golden age, a time long before the age of
modernity. As Hemingway explains in a 1923 newspaper article, bull fighting “is a
survival of the days of the Roman Coliseum. . . . Bull fighting is not a sport. It was never
supposed to be. It is a tragedy . . . played in three definite acts” (By-Line 95). Another
of Hemingway’s Toronto Star articles testifies to the value of the world of the ppm as
an escape from the world of modern Paris. Looking back on a visit to Pamplona for the
fiesta, Hemingway reports from the vantage point of Paris, “that was just three months
ago. It seems in a different century now, working in an office. It is a very long way from
the sun baked town of Pamplona, where the men race through the streets in the mornings
ahead of the bulls to the morning ride to work on a Bay-Caledonia car” (By-Line 108).
This view of the m as a pathway to a pre-modem world informs Jake’s view of

Pamplona. The corrida provides Jake an opportunity to escape from the confusion of his

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Paris life and retreat into a supposedly simpler past, one in which strict tradition offers a
clarity lacking from the morally nebulous world of modern Paris. The confluence of

traditions that surround the corrida provide Jake the sense of order and purpose his Paris

 

life lacks, and invokes the pastoral convention of nostalgia as well.
Jake’s membership in the club of bullfighting aficionados separates him from the
rest of his community and gives him a unique connection to the supposedly pastoral

people of Pamplona. Jake’s connection to the exclusive world of the corrida is centered

 

in the hotel owner Montoya, who greets Jake with a smile when he first arrives in
Pamplona:
He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the
two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He
always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders,
but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to
people who would not understand. (136)
And the people who would not understand are the members of the urban culture Jake left
behind in Paris, and in America. The members of this exclusive club of aficionados
emphasize the exceptional quality in Jake that makes his admission possible.
It amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken

for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or

 

confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I
had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out,

rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little

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on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the

hand on the shoulder, or a ‘buen hombre.’ (137; my italics)

Membership in this club, or rather this religious order, gives Jake an important sense of
order and value in his life. It identifies him as a “buen hombre” when apparently little else
in his life does. And it sets him apart from the other members of the left bank bohemian
community, so it is an important element of Jake’s pastoral retreat from his urban life.

In this supposed pastoral retreat of Pamplona, left bank bohemians (or Americans,
for that matter) are seen as a corrupting influence. Upon arriving in Pamplona, Jake asks
Montoya if his friends from Paris have arrived. Montoya “smiled as though there were
something I would hear about” (135). Brett, Mike, and Cohn are foreigners in this milieu,
and Montoya (as well as the other inhabitants of this Arcadia) regard them as outsiders.
This becomes apparent when Jake and Brett walk past a Pamplona wine shop. “The
woman standing in the door of the wine-shop looked at us as we passed. She called to
some one in the house and three girls came to the window and stared. They were staring
at Brett” (142). Brett’s modern, sophisticated appearance, with her short, mannish hair-
cut and fonn-fitting clothing make her a foreign, exotic curiosity in this tradition-bound
land. But Jake’s membership in the club of aficionados separates him from the other
Montpamassians. “For one who had aficion, [Montoya] could forgive anything. At once
he forgave me all my friends. Without his ever saying anything they were simply a little
something shameful between us, like the spilling open of the horses in bull-fighting”

(137).

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As the m is a pagan religious ritual, the matador is a priest of this pre-
Christian order. He is to be protected from contaminating influences. After Jake meets
the promising young matador Pedro Romero, Montoya looks to Jake to help protect the
young acolyte from corruption. Montoya comes to confide in Jake, explaining that the
American ambassador has given Montoya a message to invite Romero to the Grand
Hotel. Jake tells Montoya, “Don’t give Romero the message.” Immediately, Montoya is
relieved. He sees that Jake understands that the priest must be protected. “People take a
boy like that,” Montoya says, “they don’t know what he’s worth. They don’t know what
he means. Any foreigner can flatter him. They start this Grand Hotel business, and in
one year they’re through. . . . He’s such a fine boy. He ought to stay with his own people.
He shouldn’t mix in that stuff” (176). Montoya approaches Jake for this advice because
he understands the importance of protecting a promising young matador like Romero
from foreign influences. Jake values Montoya’s asking him because it confirms his role

as a buen hombre and as an honored member of this exclusive coterie.

 

One indication of the importance of protecting the matador, the priest of this
sacrificial order, from foreign influence, is Romero’s embarrassment and secrecy over his
ability to speak English. When Romero joins the drunken troop of Jake, Mike, Bill, Brett
and company, he confesses, “I must not let anybody know. It would be very bad, a torero
who speaks English . . . . No. I must forget English” (190).

However deeply Jake values his membership in the order of aficionados, and
however important is the trust Montoya places in him, Jake betrays this trust. While

Romero is seated with the table full of foreigners, “Montoya came into the room. He

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started to smile at me, then he saw Pedro Romero with a big glass of cognac in his hand,
sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare shoulders, at a table full of drunks.
He did not even nod” (180). Brett, disgusted by Cohn mooning over her like a love-sick
steer, fed-up with Mike’s drunken antics, in despair over her hopeless attraction for the
genitally-wounded Jake, finds herself powerfully attracted to Romero. Noting Brett’s
bitter unhappiness, Jake asks her, “What do you want me to do?” Brett replies, “Come
on. Let’s go and find him” (188). Jake acts as a pandar for Brett, arranging a sexual
liaison between the woman he loves and Romero, the matador he is supposed to protect
from corruption. This causes Jake to lose much of what remains of his self-respect, and
destroys his membership in the order of aficionados. After Romero leaves the café in the
company of this exotic-looking foreign woman, Jake loses his position as a “M
M” among the brotherhood of the m. As Jake leaves the cafe', he reports
laconically, “the hard-eyed people at the bull-fighter table watched me go. It was not
pleasant” (191). The M2}, represents to Jake a source of order and value sadly lacking
from his urban life. In sending Romero off with Brett, he has betrayed that which he
holds most dear, polluted the pastoral simplicity which he values so highly. Later, when
Cohn finds out what Jake has done and calls him a “damned pimp” the words sting
deeply because Jake knows they are true.

Jake’s corruption of Romero, and violation of the code of the aficionados,
destroys the fiesta for him, and the pastoral retreat it represents. The world of Pamplona
is no longer an Arcadian bower of pure and simple nature, but “a wonderful

nightmare”(226). Arriving in Bayonne on his way back to Paris (the Paris he had been so

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eager to escape), Jake remarks “It felt strange to be in France again. There was a safe.
suburban feeling” (236). Crossing the border from Bayonne to San Sebastian, Jake tells
us, “I hated to leave France. Life was so simple in France. I felt I was a fool to be going
back into Spain. In Spain you could not tell about anything” (23 7). Jake’s experiences at
the fiesta of San F ermin have destroyed his notion of the pastoral retreat into rural

. simplicity. When Jake receives a telegram from Brett, asking him to come to Madrid to
rescue her after she breaks off her affair with Romero, and is left penniless and alone in a
hotel, Jake does not hesitate to run to her side. He immediately sends her a telegram
assuring her that he will arrive on the next train. His response indicates that he has
learned a bitter lesson: “That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to
another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love.
That was it all right” (243). He is reminded of his uncomfortable similarity to Cohn who
had mooned over Brett like a love-sick steer. Jake, more literally a steer than Cohn,
remains at Brett’s beck and call, despite the hopelessness of their relationship. Jake’s
pastoral retreat has not given him any sense of the restorative value of “pure and simple”
nature. He is only made more depressingly aware of his own unhappiness.

The Sun Also Rises critiques the pastoral myth. This myth, which has been so

 

attractive and enduring for centuries, portrays a highly conventionalized image of the
relation between humanity and the natural world. In its division between the supposedly
complex world of urban life and the presumably simple world of rural nature the pastoral
endorses an artificial separation between human culture and wild nature. In order for a

culture to be sustainable, it must own its connection to the wild. Furthermore. the

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pastoral myth of retreat into simple nature in order to return the restorative value of this
green and simple world into an urban setting perpetuates the exploitive potential for
colonization. The view of the urban sophisticates who retreat into the country to rub
elbows with the simple, rural people who inhabit it, is inherently condescending and even
denigrating to the native inhabitants of the region.

Jake finds that he cannot escape the values (or lack thereof) of his particular
culture. Wherever he goes, his troubles follow. Jake learns the truth of the advice he
gave Robert Cohn: “going to another country doesn’t make any difl’erence. . . . You can’t
get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that”
(19). He infects the “simple” “pastoral” country of northern Spain with his postwar,
expatriate ennui. This is analogous to the experience of the thousands of people who
troop to Yellowstone, to Yosemite, to Arches National Monument, to the Gallapagos or
to Antarctica in order to escape their urban or suburban lives with a refreshing sojourn in
the country, and bring with them the corrupting influence of their culture: their SUV’S,
their cellular phones, their televisions, and find that the pure and simple nature they
sought is tamed and regulated and contaminated as a result of their very presence.

Certainly the pastoral vision is a convention, which in itself poses no particular
danger--as long as one recognizes it as convention, and acknowledges its artificiality. But
Jake attempts to live the convention--he tries to restore himself by performing the pastoral
retreat and return. When he returns to Paris at the novel’s end, he recognizes that the
pastoral retreat has not restored him at all, but has merely made him even more acutely

aware of the hopelessness of his entanglement with Brett, the woman who wants him and

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whom he can never have. And he has polluted the pure and simple land he has visited.
Through his betrayal of his fellow aficionados, Jake has offended the native people who
place enormous value in the m as an important part of their culture. As Glen A.
Love notes, the pastoral retreat is supposed to offer urban sophisticates “a critical vision
of the good, simple life, a vision which will presumably sustain them as they return at the
end to the great world on the horizon” (231). “Yes,” one can imagine Jake saying in
response, “isn’t it pretty to think so?” (251).

The Sun Also Rises, despite the abundance of critical attention it has received, has
never been appreciated for the profound engagement with ecological concerns the work
demonstrates. The novel plays an important role in Hemingway’s effort to expose and
dispel the misrepresentation and falsity that has so often plagued literary efforts to depict
the natural world and the place of humanity within this world. “I cannot read other
naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary,” Hemingway says in
Green Hills of Africa (21). In his introduction to the anthology Men At War (1955) he
says, “A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either
honest or not, . . . and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again” (7).
Writing which misrepresents the natural world is a positive danger, since it endorses
fallacious assumptions which lay the groundwork for exploitation and colonization. The
fallacious assumptions which are the underpinnings of sentimental versions of pastoral
pose precisely such dangers. The Sun Also Rises is an effort to inject into the pastoral

some of its original complexity, to expose the dangerous fallacies inherent in sentimental

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pastoral. As such, the novel is an attempt to revitalize the potential of literature to help

humanity own its connection to the natural world.

 

' Carlos Baker. Ernest Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton UP, 1972. 77.; Kathleen Morgan.
Tales Plginly Told: The Eyewitness Narratives of Hemingway and Homer. Columbia SC: Camden House,
' 1990.: Mark Spilka. “The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises.” Twelve Origini Essays on Greg;
American Novels. Ed. Charles Shapiro. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1958; Peter Hays. “ Catullus and _T_l'i_e
Sun Also Rises.” The Hemingway Review. 12.2, Spring 1993.

2 The text calls attention to another similarity between Jake and Cohn: their role as members of
marginalized religious groups. Bill calls attention to Jake’s religion when he asks “Listen, Jake, are you
really a Catholic?” (128). And on the trip through Lourdes, Bill and Jake find the train so packed with
Catholic pilgrims that they cannot get a lunch seating. Bill forgets himself in his irritation and asks a
passing priest “When do us Protestants get a chance to eat, Father?. . . . It’s enough to make a man join the
Klan” (93). Although Jake would be quite at home in Catholic Paris and in Catholic Spain, Bill’s remark
points out a common American prejudice. Michael Reynolds observes, “In those days in America the
KKK and other hate groups feared the Catholics even more than they feared the Jews” (57).

3 The only direct treatment of this allusion I have found is Robert Mcllvaine. “Robert Cohn and The Pumle
Land." Notes on Modern American Literature v.2 (Spring, 1981). Mcllvaine reads the allusion as an index
to the character of Cohn. “Parallels between Richard Lamb and Robert Cohn and interesting and
significant, especially since Hemingway strongly implies that Cohn associated himself with Lamb and
longed to go to South America to have similar adventures. A reading of The Purple Land certainly enables
the reader of The Sun Also Rises to have a clearer understanding of the attitudes motivating Robert Cohn’s
inappropriate conduct among the twentieth-century expatriates in Paris” (n. pag.). Mcllvaine makes no
connection to pastoral.

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Chapter Four
Death Is Also in Arcadia:

“A Natural History of the Dead”

A number of critics have noted Hemingway’s concern with truthfulness to be a
distinguishing feature of his aesthetic. This is a theme repeated frequently in
Hemingway’s comments on those writers whose work he most admires, and frequently
appears in his remarks on the aims he tries to achieve in his own work. In my previous
chapter I noted his comment in his preface to the anthology Men at War,

a writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either
honest or not . . . and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same
again.

A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth
should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer
account than anything factual can be. (7)

This concept is repeated in a variety of forms throughout Hemingway’s career. He
particularly emphasized that writing should create a factual and accurate account of the
world, and that veracity was far more important than delicacy or attractiveness. In a letter
to the art critic Bernard Berenson in 1953, Hemingway remarks, “I cannot write
beautifully, but I can write with great accuracy . . . and the accuracy makes a sort of
beauty. . . I know how to make country so that you, when you wish, can walk into it” (SL

808). Hemingway’s concern with truthfirlness in writing is particularly evident in one of

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his most undervalued works, the short story, “A Natural History of the Dead.” This story
plays an important role in Hemingway’s project of exposing the inaccuracy and
misrepresentation that infects literary depictions of the natural world. The longstanding
tradition of presenting nature with a face of smiling benignity is one persistent aspect of
the pastoral vision. In “A Natural History of the Dead” Hemingway confronts, directly
and graphically, one aspect of the natural world that many writers have avoided,
trivialized, or suppressed: the fact that death is a necessary part of the natural order.

Hemingway’s “A Natural History of the Dead” (1932) is one of his most
neglected works. So far, only seven articles are devoted to this story, and the few
mentions the work receives in book-length studies of Hemingway’s fiction are generally
slighting'. One reason for this may be the style in which it is written: in its satirization of
the stylistic excesses of genteel, nineteenth century natural history essays, the work is
inconsistent with the famous “Hemingway style” of simple diction and short, declarative
sentences. Another reason for critical neglect of the story may be the work’s
questionable generic identity. It first appeared in Hemingway’s nonfiction study of the
bullfight, Death in the Afternoon (1932), but was lified from this book virtually
unchanged and published in the short story collection Winner Take Nothing (1933) and
reissued in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway in 193 8, so critics have been confused
about whether “A Natural History” is fiction or non-fiction, short story or satirical essay.
“If it is a short story,” John Portz remarks, “it is surely the strangest short story

Hemingway ever wrote” (28).

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Portz’s 1965 article is one of earliest to engage this odd work. Titled “Allusion

9”

and Structure in Hemingway’s ‘A Natural History of the Dead, Portz’s article confesses
that it is “one of his least regarded works” (27). Portz analyzes Hemingway’s allusions to
the nature writers Gilbert White, Bishop Stanley (author of A F amili'arfiHistory of the
B_ir_d_s_), and Mungo Park (author of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa). John
Yunck’s “The Natural History of a Dead Quarrel: Hemingway and the Humanists”
(1963) examines the work as Hemingway’s jab at the New Humanists, as represented by
Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Robert Herrick. The New Humanists favored a
more restrained, decorous, and genteel mode of literature than the unflinching realism of
Hemingway and others of the post-war generation. Yunck claims the barbs against the
New Humanists which Hemingway includes in “A Natural History” are in response to
Herrick’s review of A Farewell to Arms (1929), titled “What is Dirt?” in which Herrick
confesses that his sensibilities were so affronted by the novel that he was unable to finish
it. Kenneth G. Johnston, in “Journeys into the Interior” Hemingway, Thoreau, and
Park,” (1972) compares allusions Hemingway makes to Park to Thoreau’s references to
the explorer. Johnston concludes that each writer used Park as an example of an explorer
on an inward journey, though for Thoreau this journey “was predicated upon his belief
that the divine is immanent in the world” while Hemingway “found no evidence of God,
no argument from design, on the battlefied or, for that matter, at any stage during his
‘journey through the wilderness of life’” (29, 30). Lewis B. Weeks, Jr. gives the work

some rather dubious attention in “Mark Twain and Hemingway: ‘A Catastrophe’ and ‘A

Natural History of the Dea ”’ (I 968). Weeks claims there is a similarity between the

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story and chapter twenty of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883) though the connection
seems strained and of doubtful authorityz. A much more valuable study is Charles Stetler
and Gerald Locklin’s “ ‘A Natural History of the Dead’ as Metafiction,” which displays
an appreciation for the complexity and SOphistication of this undervalued work. Stetler
and Locklin note that the Hemingway stories which have been neglected by scholars are
“considered aesthetically inferior because they have been viewed only in the light of
realist or modernist criticism. In some of these works Hemingway seems to have made
use of techniques we associate with postmodernism” (247). Stetler and Locklin
demonstrate how this work calls attention to its own status as a created object by using
such non—realistic, distancing effects as “the entry of the narrator into the text; a parodic,
playful style; defamiliarization; and the object of the work being language or other forms
of discourse” (249).

The most careful treatment “A Natural History” has received so far is Paul
Smith’s analysis in A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingv_gry (1989)
and Susan Beegel’s essay “That Always Absent Something Else: ‘A Natural History of
the Dead’ and its Discarded Coda” (1990). Beegel’s essay is an expansion of her
treatment of the work in her book Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript
Examples (1988). As the title suggests, Beegel examines Hemingway’s improvement of
the story by cutting its original concluding section, which told of an Italian sergeant
prying the gold teeth out of Austrian corpses. Beegel’s analysis of the story is particularly
valuable because she, unlike earlier critics, is untroubled by the work’s questionable

generic identity. Instead, she turns her attention to what seems clear is Hemingway’s

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purpose in the work: to reject the idea of nature as proof of the idea of a benevolent God
and replace it with “positivistic proof of an absence at the heart of the universe” (77).
Smith’s reading of the work is likewise valuable. Smith sees the story as Hemingway’s
rejection of the sentimentally religious view of nature inculcated by his father. Smith
says, “It was Dr. Clarence Hemingway, after all, who was the first natural historian to
instruct his son in the observation of nature, inform it with the idealism of the nineteenth
century, and then blow it all away with a bullet in his head” (238).

“A Natural History of the Dead” is certainly informed by the view of the natural
world young Ernest was taught by his father. As I have noted in my introductory chapter,
Dr. Hemingway played a serious and active role in the education of the children of Oak
Park. He founded a chapter of the Agassiz Society, named for the influential Swiss
naturalist Louis Agassiz, and led children on nature expeditions in search of specimens
for study. Ernest and his sisters were active in the association from earliest childhood.
Ernest, in fact, became Curator of the Oak Park Agassiz Society at the age of ten. And. as
Susan Beegel and Michael Reynolds have noted, the baby book Grace Hall Hemingway
kept for Ernest records his delight in gathering and studying specimens of plant and
animal life. Grace used to entertain visitors by having young Ernest recite the Latin
names of birds (Beegel, “Eye and Heart” 76, Reynolds, The Young Hemingway 30-31).
Terry Tempest Williams notes that the boy could identify 250 species of plants and
animals native to northern Michigan by their Linnean classficiation (12).

The Agassiz method of nature study stressed first person observation and

painstaking accuracy of reportage. “Take your lessons from the brooks, not from the

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book-sellers,” Agassiz urged (qtd. in Beegel, “Eye and Heart” 69). Yet, despite this
emphasis on meticulous scientific observation, Agassiz’s view of the natural world was
thoroughly infused with religious sentimentality. Agassiz biographer Edward Lurie
reflects this view in his comment on Agassiz’s book on the plant and animal life and the
geological formations of Lake Superior:

The purpose of Agassiz’s study . . . was to illustrate one all-embracing principle,

that ‘the geographical distribution of organized beings displays more fully the

direct intervention of a Supreme Intelligence in the plan of Creation, than any

other adaptation in the physical world’. (151)
Agassiz was thoroughly devoted to the idea of the creation as a revelation of a wise and
beneficent Creator, and was quite hostile to scientific works which, whether explicitly or
implicitly, questioned this view. When Charles Darwin mailed Agassiz a copy of the
just-published Origin of Species (1859) Agassiz was sharply critical, scribbling in the
margin, “This is truly monstrous!” (Lurie 255). Darwin’s notion that life forms struggle
to adapt to the demands of their environment, rather than being expressly and individually
designed by the hands of some Creator, was outrageous to Agassiz. Lurie remarks, “For
Agassiz the only theoretical outlook worthy of attention was an attitude of mind that
interpreted the physical world as the product of an original and continuous intervention
by the Supreme Being” (254).

The idea of the natural world as a revelation of the Creator was imbued in Dr.
Hemingway’s instruction of the young members of the Oak Park Agassiz Club. His

daughter Marcelline remarks that during a visit to the Chicago Field Museum to observe

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dinosaur remains, Dr. Hemingway explained that “the men who wrote the Bible
explained natural history the best they could, but that now through research we knew
much more about how things must have been made thousands of years ago. He told us
that our new knowledge only added to the truths we learned in Sunday School” (qtd. in
Beegel, “Eye and Heart” 72).

The need to co-mingle religion and science reflected by Agassiz has long been a
component of literary depictions of the natural world. Genesis itself depicts the natural
world as specifically created for the use of Adam and his descendents. And the
“argument from design”--the idea that the intricate design of the world implies the
influence of a Designer--was inherent in scientific writing about the natural world for
generations before Agassiz. In the eighteenth century, when the explosive growth of
scientific activity resulted in an abundance of studies of the natural world, scientists saw a
kind and beneficent God at the core of Creation. In his study of the development of the
science of ecology, Donald Worster notes, “Throughout the eighteenth century . . . .God
was seen both as the Supreme Economist who had designed the earth household and as
the housekeeper who kept it functioning productively” (37). Even the extremely
influential Swedish botanist Carl von Linne, more commonly known as Linnaeus, the
inventor of the Linnean system of classification, saw science as means of revealing the
aims and intentions of God. Worster notes that Linnaeus’s essay “The Oeconomy of
Nature” (1749) has, as its_“underlying purpose . . .to find the hand of God in nature” (33).
This view was evident not only in Linnaeus’s work, but was a central feature of much

nature study of the time. Worster explains that such works as John Ray’s The Wisdom of

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God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), William Derham’s Physico-Theology
(1713), and William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) “all were concerned as much with
religious as with scientific matters” (38). These efforts to find God in nature presented a
rose-tinted view of the natural world, a view that was selective, skewed, and partial, as
well as naively anthropocentric. As Worster describes it,

Besides its mechanical precision, the most widely accepted characteristic of the

economy of nature in the Age of Reason was its benevolence. Nature, it was

generally agreed, is an order expressive of God’s kindness toward his creatures,

and especially toward man, for whom the creation primarily exists. (44)

Death was a troublesome stumbling block to those naturalists who undertook to
view nature as the handiwork of a benevolent God. Worster notes the difficulty faced by
the unfortunately named William Smellie, who attempts in his The Philosophy of Natural
flimm explain “the general system of carnage established by nature” in which “the
weaker are unifome preyed upon by the stronger” (46). And Linnaeus, in “The Polity of
Nature” (1759), sees the natural world as a vast tangle of animals “not only gorging on
the most beautiful flowers, but also mercilessly tearing each other to pieces” (Worster
46). The violence and suffering in the world was difficult to reconcile with the image of
a well-ordered world governed by a just and well-intentioned God. Worster notes “Long
before Alfred Tennyson’s lament about a nature ‘red in tooth and claw,’ naturalists had to
explain the bloodshed and suffering in the world. It was, in fact, the most serious
challenge to their assertion of cosmic benevolence and the ascendancy of divine moral

principle in nature” (47).

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The sentimentally religious view of nature found in scientific works passed into
literary treatments as well. Agassiz had a number of influential literary contacts through
his membership in the famous Saturday Club, founded in 1855. James Russell Lowell,
poet as well as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was a member, as were Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The scientist’s
view of the natural world was congenial to this group of writers. At a party for Agassiz’s
fiftieth birthday, Longfellow read a poem in his honor, which depicts “Nature, the old
nurse” taking the child Agassiz

Upon her knee,

Saying: “Here is a story-book

Thy Father has written for thee.”

“Come, wander with me,” she said,
“Into regions yet untrod;
And read what is still unread

In the manuscripts of God.”

And he wandered away and away
With Nature, the dear old nurse,
Who sang to him night and day

The rhymes of the universe.

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And whenever the way seemed long.

Or his heart began to fail.

She would sing a more wonderful song,

Or tell a more marvelous tale. (245)
The view of nature as scripture figures prominently in many of the literary depictions of
the natural world during the nineteenth century. William Cullen Bryant, for instance, was
known for inculcating this view. As a student at Oak Park High School, Hemingway was
required to memorize Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl” and “Thanatopsis” (Reynolds,
Hemingway’s Reading 104). “To a Waterfowl” (1821) sees all nature’s creatures as
guided by a divine hand. Observing the flight of a duck, the poem’s persona
apostrophizes:

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,--

The desert and illimitable air,--

Lone wandering, but not lost. (26)
Having drawn from this observation of nature a secure sense of a divine order at work in
the natural world, the persona feels confident that his place, as a child of the Creator, is
secure as well:

He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright. (27)

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“Thanatopsis” not only sees divinity at work in nature, but also attempts to wrestle with
the problem of death. The poem’s persona addresses his remarks to a character who feels
at home in natural surroundings, “To him who in the love of Nature holds/Communion
with her visible forms” (21). Such a person, the persona explains, finds in Nature a
comfort against the fear of mortality.

When thoughts

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house

Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;--

GO forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air,

Comes a still voice. (23)
The persona speaking in Bryant’s poem comes close to approaching the problem of death
in a realistic, confrontational manner. The physical images of “stem agony” and the
shroud and the “narrow house” (which metaphorically communicates the claustrophobic
horror of a coffin) present the details of death in a quite stark and straightforward manner.
But the syrupy language urging the addressee to “list to Nature’s teachings” retreats
behind a curtain of conventional sentiment. Similarly, the persona approaches a realistic

vision of death in these lines:

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Earth. that nourished thee, Shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolv’d to earth again;

And, lost each human trace. surrend’ring up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix forever with the elements.

To be a brother to th’ insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod. (23)
Though rendered in rather inflated diction, the vision of the dissolution of the individual
life into the elements of earth is strikingly realistic. Yet, the persona once again retreats
from a direct and accurate portrayal of the fact of death behind a screen of sentiment.

Yet not to thy eternal resting place

Shalt thou retire alone—nor couldst thou wish

Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down

With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings

The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,

Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,

All in one mighty sepulchre. (23)
The poem follows this pattern of approach and evasion throughout. It makes an attempt
to deal with death as a fact of nature, and lists the physical facts surrounding the
dissolution of an individual human life--pain, confinement in a coffin, physical decay of
the body, return of the physical substance of the body to the earth from which it was

made. Yet the poem always returns from the brink, retreating from the raw reality of the

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boneyard to the smiling comfort of the parlor. Though the nature poetry of the nineteenth
century--and Bryant, due to his enormous popularity, makes as good an example of this as
Longfellow, or Emerson, or any one of the canonized major poets of that generation--is
full of smiling admiration of Nature, so long as the countenance nature shows her
audience is fine and beneficent, when death appears as part of this natural order, it must
be refined and sentimentalized away, as something too unspeakable to confront. Death,
an inescapable fact of life, is suppressed as distasteful, unless it is sprinkled with smiling
sentiment. Longfellow, in his “Psalm of Life” (183 8) intones

Life is real--life is eamest—

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust retumest,

Was not spoken of the soul. (3)
This poem exhibits the same sort of sentimental evasion that Bryant commits in
“Thanatopsis,” though without the effort to approach death as a physical reality which
Bryant’s poem attempts. These poems are examples of the literary depictions of the
natural world which were part of Hemingway’s early education, and part of what his later
experiences required him to reject. In their departure from the factual presentation of the
natural world and retreat into convention, they have much in common with pastoral,
which also simplifies and conventionalizes, conveniently taming those aspects of the
natural world which are unpleasant or inconvenient. In Death in the Afternoon,
Hemingway quotes Longfellow: “Someone with English blood has written: ‘Life is real,

life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.’ And where did they bury him? And what

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became of the reality and the earnestness?” (266). In his own work, Hemingway wanted
to confront death as “the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of: the
only security” (266).

Trained from childhood in the Agassiz-inspired principle of close observation of
the natural world, Hemingway made accurate reporting an essential part of his aesthetic.
As Susanne Clark observes, “The true reporting of experience, of the active life carefully
observed—that was a moral basis for writing itself that Hemingway translated into the
literary tradition” (56). Hemingway claims that he felt compelled to report reality as he
actually saw it, and not as someone might wish it. AS he explains in Death in the
Afiemoon, he began observing bullfights as part of his education as a writer. “I was
trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you
really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to
put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the
emotion that you experienced” (2). And a direct confrontation with death was an
essential part of this education. He explains:

The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the

wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where

I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest

things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent

death. (2)

Hemingway found it necessary to reject the naively religious view of the natural world

taught him by his father because of his experience in the Great War. Hemingway

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comments on his own youthful lack of sophistication in reference to his war experience.
In a 1942 letter he remarks, “I was an awful dope when I went to the last war. I can
remember thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team”
(qtd. in Baker A Life Story 38). Hemingway’s experiences as an ambulance driver
quickly smashed his naivete. One of his first duties on arriving in Italy was to recover the
bodies from an exploded munitions plant. Many of the bodies were blown into fragments
by the force of the explosion, and had to be untangled from the barbed-wire fence which
surrounded the plant. This event is recounted in “A Natural History of the Dead.”

As Susan Beegel observes, “World War I exploded Hemingway’s childhood
religious training . . . .A Christian belief in immortality was no longer possible to
Hemingway after he observed the sights, sounds, and smells of death on the Italian front”
(“That Always Absent Something Else” 75-6). The gory displays he witnessed as an
ambulance driver were complemented by his experience of his own near death, when an
Austrian Minenwerfer shell exploded near him, impressing on him the fragility of his
own existence, and the fragility, madness, and brutality of the combatants.

The lesson the young Hemingway learned on the Italian front (he was blown up
two weeks before his nineteenth birthday) was augmented by a later, equally catastrophic
event. In 1928, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, who had taught young Ernest to be a keen
scientific observer of the natural world, and to value nature as a revelation of the Creator,
shot himself in the temple with a civil war revolver. Paul Smith notes that early
manuscript fragments in the Kennedy Library collection indicate that Hemingway began

work on what eventually became “A Natural History” soon after his father’s suicide. One

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fragment begins, "The way fish die is most instructive or easily instructive as the death of
one’s parents or fiiends . . . .if either of the parents . . . end their lives themselves by
violent means, the naturalist is again deprived of the moment of observation since he may
be in another part of the country. . . .This is unfortunate” (KL/EH 812, qtd. in Smith,
231).

The starkness of the lessons these experiences taught Hemingway, along with his
overwhelming sense of the importance of writing as a truthful vision of the world,
account for the savage, satirical tone of “A Natural History of the Dead.” Convinced that
death was an unavoidable part of the natural order and that “he is no true-story teller who
would keep that from you,” Hemingway savagely attacks the writers who prefer to tinsel
over the distressing or distasteful aspects of the natural world (DIA 122). As the story

was originally published, as part of Death in the Afiemoon, it was surrounded by a

 

framing device, in the form of a conversation between the “Author” and “the Old Lady,”
in which the Author introduces the story as “the Whittier’s Snowbound of our time,”
clearly indicating that this story is meant as a corrective to the sentimental excesses of
Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant and company (133). The story’s beginning indicates that
nineteenth century natirre writers are also targets of satire:
It has always seemed to me that the war has been omitted as a field for the
observations of the naturalist. We have charming and sound accounts of the flora
and fauna of Patagonia by the late W.H. Hudson; the Reverend Gilbert White has
written most interestingly of the Hoopoe on its occasional and not at all common

visits to Selboume, and Bishop Stanley has given us a valuable, although popular,

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Familiar Histogy of Birds. Can we not hope to furnish the reader with a few

rational and interesting facts about the dead? I hope so. (DIA 134)

The “Author” is a persona invented by Hemingway who consistently focuses on
those features most repellent to such nature writers as Stanley and yet phrases these
observations in a narrative voice which parodies Stanley’s prose style.

Stanley’s Familiar History of Birds is very much in the tradition of Linnaeus and
Agassiz. Published under the auspices of the “Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge” (n. pag.), the work combines the methodology of natural science with a
belief in the beneficence of nature and uses a quaint and fussy prose style, as is evident in
this passage from Stanley’s introduction:

The visible creation, it has been well said, was Adam’s library. There may be

times, places, and occasions in which a page out of a book in that library may

impart not only instruction to the head, but consolation to the heart. When that
persevering traveler, Mungo Park, was at one period of his course fainting in the
vast wilderness of an African desert, naked and alone, considering his days as
numbered and nothing appearing to remain for him to do but to lie down and die,

a small moss-flower of extraordinary beauty caught his eye. ‘Though the whole

plant,’ says he, ‘was no larger than one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the

delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsules without admiration. Can
that Being who planted, watered, and brought to perfection . . .a thing which
appears of so small importance look with unconcem upon the situation and

suffering of creatures formed after his own image? Surely not.’ . . . . And with

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the disposition to wonder and adore in like manner, can no branch of Natural

History be studied without increasing that faith, love, and hope, which we also,

every one of us, need in our own journey through the wilderness of life [?] (1-2)
This confident faith in the natural world as a congenial home for humanity is very much
in the tradition of Agassiz. Following the introduction, Stanley introduces elaborate
“Tables of ClaSsification” which divide the Class of birds according to Order, Tribe,
Genus, Species, and so on, in accordance with the Linnaean system of classification,
identifying the physical characteristics which separate the various divisions and
subdivisions. In so doing, Stanley follows the tradition of Christian natural historians
established by Linnaeus, co-mingling scientific methodology with a positive faith in the
presence of God in nature. It is just these qualities which Hemingway exploits in his
parody of Stanley’s prose style and his satire of Stanley’s positivist outlook.

“A Natural History of the Dead” begins with an echo of Bishop Stanley:

With a disposition to wonder and adore in like manner, as Bishop Stanley says,

can no branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and

hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness

of life? Let us therefore see what inspiration we may derive from the dead. (134)
The story then goes on to describe, in excruciating detail, the appearance of the dead
bodies one encounters in war. And the description is phrased in the language of Stanley,
who carefully classifies and taxonimizes the objects he observes. Hemingway begins by
breaking the objects of his study down into categories, remarking that “in war the dead

are usually the male of the human species although this does not hold true with animals”

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(134). He then divides his objects of study further, from animals, into horses and mules,

observing that
an interesting aspect of war, too, is that it is only there that the naturalist has an
opportunity to observe the dead of mules. In twenty years of observation in civil
life I had never seen a dead mule and had begun to entertain doubts as to whether
these animals were really mortal. . . . But in war these animals succumb in much

the same manner as the more common and less hardy horse. (135)

This sets up a pattern the narrator follows through the piece, that of identifying a fallacy
and then testing it against observation, all the while carefully holding to the mock-
sentimental voice imitative of Stanley.

In dividing the human dead according to gender, the narrator observes, “regarding
the sex of the dead it is a fact that one becomes so accustomed to the sight of all the dead
being men that the sight of a dead woman is quite shocking” (135). He then reports his
experience witnessing the “inversion of the usual sex of the dea ” at an exploded
munitions factory in Italy, the site of one of the young Hemingway’s transformative Red
Cross experiences (135). The factory was staffed by women, since the men of working
age were at war, and the author remarks upon “the shock it was to find that these dead
were women rather than men” (136). The author retains his imitation of Stanley’s polite
style, while graphically depicting the most disturbing horrors in the calmest of tones. He
notes,

I remember after we had searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we

collected fragments. Many of these were detached from a heavy, barbed-wire

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fence which had surrOunded the position of the factory and from the still existent

portions of which we picked many of these detached bits which illustrated only

too well the tremendous energy of high explosive. (136)

The reduction of human bodies to “fragments” is an illustration of the author’s
application of the objective, scientific language of natural history to the highly emotional
subject of human mortality, as is his reporting that the ambulance drivers “agreed too that
the picking up of the fragments had been an extraordinary business; it being amazing that
the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines,
but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive
shell” (137).

The classification and division of observations is continued throughout the essay,
holding to the stylistic imitation of Stanley. He carefully records the change in
appearance of corpses on a battlefield as they progressively decay. “The color change in
Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in
the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn.
and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence” (137). Hemingway indicates that the
purpose of this savage parody is to excoriate those naturalists like Stanley, who as
“natural historians” purport to be careful observers of the natural world, but who shut
their eyes to that which they do not wish to see. After his cataloging of the progressive
stages of decay of the battlefield dead, the author remarks, “One wonders what that
persevering traveler, Mungo Park, would have seen on a battlefield in hot weather to

restore his confidence. . . .Few travelers would take a good full breath of that early

I30

summer air and have any such thoughts as Mungo Park about those formed in His own
image” (138).

The reference to the idea presented in Genesis, and reflected by Park, Stanley, and
mocked here by Hemingway, is central to the nature/culture division that ecocriticism has
held up to such scrutiny. If, out of all creation, man alone is made in God’s own image,
man then is superior to and separate from all other animal life. However, the author
insists, people are not set apart in some separate component of the natural order, but are
subject to the same natural laws as the rest of creation. “Most men die like animals, not
men,” the author reports (139). Though he confines the bulk of his observations to those
who die in war, the author is careful to include natural death in his observations as well,
and does not shrink from including the most minute and repulsive details.

The author’s observations of natural death insist on the animal nature of human
life—and death. He reports, “the only natural death I’ve ever seen, outside of loss of
blood . . .was death from Spanish influenza. In this you drown in mucus, choking, and
how you know the patient’s dead is; at the end he shits the bed full” (139). At this point
in the story, the objects of Hemingway’s parody extend beyond natural historians like
Stanley to include the New Humanists. As Susan Beegel explains, “the Humanist school
insisted on the duality of man and nature and felt that human experience was basically
ethical” (“That Always Absent Something Else” 77). It was critics of the New Humanist
school who deemed A Farewell to Arms “garbage” and called its love scenes no more
meaningfirl than “what goes on in a brothel, hardly more than the copulation of animals”

(qtd. in Beegel, “Something Else” 78). Hemingway attacks the principal assumption on

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which the New Humanists base their aesthetic: the unique, superior, and distinctly
separate status of human versus animal life. He does this by insisting on the animal
nature of all human life, including, despite their objections, the Humanists as well:
Now I want to see the death of any self-called Humanist . . .and watch the noble
exits that they make. In my musings as a naturalist it has occurred to me that
while decorum is an excellent thing some must be indecorous if the race is to be
carried on since the position prescribed for procreation is indecorous, highly
indecorous, and it occurred to me that perhaps that is what these people are, or
were; the children of decorous cohabitation. (139)
In attacking this Humanist aesthetic, Hemingway is, despite the harshness of his tone,
consistent with contemporary ecological thought. Christopher Manes, in an essay
examining the claims of biocentrism, explains how such an outlook runs counter to the
humanist tradition evident in so much western literature. “From the language of
humanism,” Manes says, “one could easily get the impression that Homo sapiens is the
only species on the planet worthy of being a topic of discourse. Ecology paints a
different, humbling picture” (24). Manes explains that if fungi, a life form considered
low or unimportant in the human scheme of things, were to suddenly pass into extinction,
the biosphere would be devastated, because forests depend upon fungi to break down
plant debris into nutritive soil, and the loss of forests would upset the planet’s
precipitation, atmosphere, and temperature, thereby affecting all plant and animal life.
On the other hand, “if Homo sapiens disappeared, the event would go unnoticed by the

vast majority of Earth’s life forms. . . .No lofty language about being the paragon of

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animals or the torchbearer of evolution can change this ecological fact—which is reason
enough to reiterate it as often as possible” (24). In “A Natural History of the Dead,”
Hemingway deflates the arrogance of those who assign humanity a special, superior status
within the natural order.

Hemingway’s objection to the work of natural historians like Stanley, and to the
outlook of the New Humanists, is their presentation of a simplistic view of nature. But
the natural world, as ecological science has shown us, is anything but simple. To present
it otherwise is to engage in gross deception. The vision of the clockwork universe
proposed by some scientists in the Age of Reason, depicts the universe as a machine,
when, in fact it is alive, with myriads of life forms and geological objects interacting in a
vast web of interdependence, a system far too complex and vital to be represented by any
simplistic metaphor or mechanistic model. In his objection to the simplicity of the vision
of Stanley and the Humanists, Hemingway admits death into our vision of the natural
world, and exposes the distorting, simplifying aspects of pastoral.

Leo Marx notes that the pastoral dream of an easy relation between humanity and
a smiling nature is, in literary depictions, often broken by some intrusive element which
reminds us of the artificiality of the “illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture”
(25). This intrusive element Marx terms “the counterforce” and he makes this a
distinction between what he terms “sentimental” and “complex” forms of pastoralism.
Marx notes that

Among the more effective of the traditional counters to the pastoral dream have

been certain stylized tokens of mortality. . . . During the seventeenth century,

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Poussin and other landscape painters introduced the image of a speaking death‘s

head into the most delicate pictorial idylls. To make the meaning of this memento

111911: inescapable they sometimes inserted the printed motto, Et in Arcadia Ego,

meaning ‘1 [Death] also am in Arcadia’ (26)

Death does appear in much pastoral poetry, particularly in the form of the pastoral elegy.
But in this guise, as in the poems I have cited earlier of Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier,
the treatment of death is so highly traditionalized and stylized that the poems can hardly
be said to represent any realistic confrontation with death as a fact of nature.3 In “A
Natural History of the Dead” Hemingway replaces the stylized tokens with which death
has been traditionally represented with stark, detailed depictions of death, stemly insisting
that for all our squeamish evasions, death is real and unavoidable. It is the one thing man
can depend on. To achieve this aim, he focuses our attention on images anyone would
find repellent, such as the head of a general shot by a sniper with “a hole in front you
couldn’t put your little finger in and a hole in back you could put your fist in, if it were a
small fist and you wanted to put it there” (140). Or the sight of a young soldier lying on a
battlefield “in the hot weather with a half-pint of maggots working where his mouth had
been” (140).

One of the difficulties critics have faced with “A Natural History of the Dead” in
its publication as a separate entity is that in this way it is robbed of the explanatory
context Hemingway gives the work by its inclusion in Death in the Aftemoon. Here,
Hemingway explains that death was a necessary part of the investigation of nature that he

conducted in his writing of fiction. He wanted to confront in his writing that aspect of

I34

nature that so many other writers had evaded or ignored. He explains that his interest in
the bullfight is the acknowledgement of the immanent reality of death that it represents.
The people of Spain, he says, make the 9913114 an important part of their culture because
“as they have common sense they are interested in death and do not spend their lives
avoiding the thought of it and hoping it does not exist only to discover it when they come
to die” (264). He goes on to emphasize the importance that death has over life. “They
think a great deal about death and when they have a religion they have one which believes
life is much shorter than death” (266). Hemingway admires the people of Spain because
they acknowledge death as an unavoidable part of the natural order, and rather than reject
or hide from this part of nature, they make their peace with it. It is the refusal to see the
natural world as it is, and to present it justly and honestly, that so angers Hemingway
toward Stanley, and Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier as well. This anger accounts for
the virulent satire of “A Natural History of the Dead.”

Contemporary ecological thought has less trouble accepting the idea of death as
part of the natural order than did naturalists of Linneaus’s or Agassiz’s generations. As
Paul Shepherd explains, a biocentric viewpoint deflates the importance of the death of the
individual:

The traditional insistence upon the overwhelmingly tragic and unequivocal nature

of death ignores the adaptive role of early death in most animal populations. It

presumes that the landscape is a collection of mings. In this view the dissolution
of body and personality are always tragic and disruptive, and do not contribute to

the perfection of an intelligible world. But death, as transformation in a larger

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system, is an essential aspect of elegant patterns which are orderly as well as

beautiful: without death growth could not occur, energy could not flow beyond

plants, nutrient substances would be trapped forever. Without death the pond, the

forest, the prairie, the city could not exist. (Shepard 142)

This is a view that few of Longfellow’s time could accept (though Whitman, in “Song of
Myself,” is a notable exception). It is a view implicit in “A Natural History of the Dead,”
and accounts for the satirical zeal that characterizes this work. Hemingway adopts the
impatient tone of one correcting a person who, with eyes closed, insists that there is no
sun.

The acceptance of death as a necessary part of the natural order is an essential
component of an ecologically informed and environmentally responsible literature. A
number of recent writers, among the most respected figures in the field of nature writing,
confront death without evasion. Annie Dillard, in her _Ei_lgrim at Tinker Creek (1974),
examines the violence and death in the world and comes to accept it as part of the
inexplicable mystery that is essential to the beauty of creation, and does this from an
avowedly Christian perspective. Edward Abbey, never one to mythologize or romanticize
nature, makes the acceptance of death within the natural world an important component

of Desert Solitaire (1968), devoting an entire chapter to “The Dead Man at Grandview

 

Point.” Writing of a search for a missing tourist in Arches National Monument when he
was a Park Ranger there, Abbey treats the search for the corpse not as tragedy, but as a
chore made that much more unpleasant by the August desert heat. Invoking John Donne,

Abbey observes of the experience

I36

Each man’s death diminishes me? Not necessarily. Given this man’s age, the
inevitability and suitability of his death, and the essential nature of life on earth,
there is in each of us the unspeakable conviction that we are well rid of him. His
departure makes room for the living . . . The plow of mortality drives through the
stubble, turns over rocks and sod and weeds to cover the old, the wom-out, the
husks, shells, empty seedpods and sapless roots, clearing the field for the next

crop. A ruthless, brutal process—but clean and beautiful. (214)

Hemingway’s work, which accepts death as a part of the natural order, has helped to
make the perspectives of Dillard and Abbey possible.

Hemingway, conscious from his youth of the manifold ways in which literature
has misrepresented the natural world and the position of humanity within that world,
made the exposure of the various nature fakers a major focus of his work. A clear and
accurate picture of the natural world and our place within it is essential for the vitality of
our culture and Hemingway insisted on providing this accurate vision in his own work.
Any vision of the natural world which avoids or trivializes the role of human mortality
within that world is a dangerous endorsement of anthropocentrism. In insisting that we
die like animals, Hemingway reminds us that we live like them as well, and that is the
way it should be. As Glen A. Love has observed, an awareness of the role of death in the
natural world is particularly important in our age, when we face the very real risk of
environmental devastation.

From an ecological perspective, we find in this historical triumph of the

celebratory appeal of idyllic nature something of our present environmental

I37

dilemma. Despite the temporary comforts of denial, death has re-entered the
picture. The figurative death’s head of the Renaissance pastorals, a traditional
Christian memento mori, has emerged as a more universal and implacable
corrective to human evasion. Until recently, the fate of the individual human soul
was played out against a setting of natural grandeur and certainty. Now, it is the
death of that conception of nature itself that so troubles our pastoral dreams.

(Love, “Et in Acardia Ego,” 200)

 

' Sheldon Norman Grebstein calls “A Natural History” “very defective indeed” and comments that
“students of Hemingway’s career will find it mainly intriguing for its revelation of the writer with his craft
unbuttoned” (77). Sheridan Baker dismisses it as “a tricked piece of journalism” (87).

2 Paul Smith comments “The mood and narrative point of view of [the ending of “A Natural History of the
Dea ”] is enough to deny Lewis Weeks’s claim for some relevant similarity between the story and Mark
Twain’s chapter 20 in Life in the Mississippi, for it is precisely the sentimental piety to which Twain
retreats that Hemingway condemns” (236).

3 Marx explains in a footnote, “The device figures what Erwin Panofsky calls a discrepancy ‘between the
supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is.’ It is
typical of the unceasing metamorphosis of the pastoral mode that sometime around 1630 the original
meaning of this device was lost to view. . . Panofsky has shown that at this time the motto was reinterpreted
so that the words, instead of being attributed to Death itself, were taken as the sentiments of another
shepherd. Thus what had been intended as a dramatic encounter with death was replaced by a relatively
sentimental and tranquillizing idea, in consonance with the main drift of the age” (26). Hemingway offers
“A Natural History of the Dead” as a corrective to this “main drift.”

I38

Chapter Five
Being Extremely Accurate and Not Literary:

Green Hills of Africa as a Revision of Pastoral

One of the most valuable features of ecocriticism is the opportunity it presents to
read familiar works in new ways. The canon of the major works of Ernest Hemingway
has long been firmly established. Teachers of literature tend to use the works of
Hemingway as illustrations of what the academy has defined as high modernism rather
than paying attention to the challenges presented in the works themselves. An ongoing
project in Hemingway’s work is the investigation of the limitations and distortions
present in literary depictions of the natural world. A work central to this project, and one
which has been marginalized by Hemingway scholars, is the 1935 non-fiction work QED
Hills of Africa. This work plays a pivotal role in Hemingway’s argument with pastoral.
In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway defines his aesthetic, one which questions
traditional ways of understanding the relationship between humanity and the natural
world. Robert Trogdon, in a recent study, sees the work’s enduring value in providing a
clear articulation of “[Hemingway’s] artistic principles” (13). Central to these principles
is Hemingway’s faith in the value of literature as a clear and accurate presentation of the
natural world as it actually is, and not as literary convention or tradition would prefer it.
An ecocritical reading of this work exposes the reductive assumptions that have so long
plagued Hemingway criticism, and helps to liberate this complex and undervalued work

from the constructed apparatus the academy has for so long used to estimate the value of

I39

Hemingway’s work. In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway attempts to free literary
depictions of the natural world from the strictures of the sentimental version of pastoral.
Pastoral, as I have discussed in earlier chapters, is an enduring form, and its
endurance attests to the need people in western culture have long felt for some pleasing
connection to the natural world. However, the defining elements of the genre provide a
skewed and limited view of nature, one which endorses exploitive and potentially
dangerous environmental practice. The pastoral vision prefers a garden landscape over
wilderness, and so endorses the imposition of human regulation on wild nature. It is
associated with the lives of shepherds or other agricultural workers, rather than hunters or
fishermen, who take their living from the wild. It is characterized by an atmosphere of
Qtiu_m or leisure, which conceals the labor which is involved in agricultural production.
And it presents the natural world as a locus of restorative simplicity, when, in fact'
ecological science has shown us that the natural world is built of a system of
interdependencies so vast and intricate as to be indescribable. Pastoral, then, tames
nature. It reduces, confines, and simplifies the complex, irreducible, and utterly vital

wildness of the natural world. Green Hills of Africa is offered as a corrective to the more

 

sentimental and simplistic aspects of the pastoral vision. It attempts to replace the tamed
vision of pastoral with a vision of wildness. This aspect of the work has gone
unacknowledged, and is the principle reason for its relative critical neglect. Because the
central purpose of Green Hills of Africa has not been recognized, critics have

undervalued this odd and challenging work.

I40

Objections to the work generally focus on matters of genre and subject, rejecting it
as either inferior to Hemingway’s fiction or dealing with a subject of insufficient

importance. Carlos Baker, in his Hemingvay: The Writer as Artist (1952, rev. ed. 1972)

 

says, “the technical brilliance of the Green Hills of Africa can not compensate for the fact
that its subject matter--a hunting expedition in Tanganyika--lacks the seriousness and the

magnitude which Aristotle prescribes. . . .one may very much prefer to read The Sun Also

 

Rises or A Farewell to Arms” (xvii). The book is also filled with numerous barbs against
critics, whom Hemingway calls “the lice who crawl on literature” (109), which must have
contributed to the negative reviews.

To this day, the book suffers from relative critical neglect. While Hemingway’s
early novels and story collections have fed a critical industry for some seventy years, little
attention has been paid to Green Hills, and much of that is either dubious or disparaging.
There is one book-length study, Hemingway’s “Green Hills of Africa” as Evolutionary
Narrative: Helix and Scimitar (1990) by Carl A. Bredahl, Jr. and Susan Lynn Drake,
which becomes rather fanciful in its search for an “extra-dimensional quality”
Hemingway claimed the work contained in a letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins (qtd. in
Weber 71). Todd G. Willy, in “The Covenants of Venery: Political Mythopoeism in
Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa [sic]” (1985) dismisses the book as an
exercise in the safari book genre, and finds it “unfortunately a masterpiece” of the genre
(144). Robert Trogdon, in “Forms of Combat: Hemingway, The Critics, and Gregtfiilfi
of Africa” (1996), examines the book as Hemingway’s battle with the critics who gave

negative reviews to his two previous works, Winner Take Nothing (1932) and Death in

MI

the Afternoon (1933). “The book supposedly describes Hemingway hunting animals in
Africa, but under the surface is the story of Hemingway hunting the critics of his books,”
Trogdon says (2 ). Thomas Strychacz applies the gender-studies approach to the work in
“Trophy Hunting as a Trope of Manhood in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa”
(1993), making a comment regarding the size of kudu antlers--”inches don’t mean
anything”--take on a predictable new dimension. Robert Gadjusek, in “A Brief Safari

into the Religious Terrain of Green Hills of Africa” (1992), does the work a fair service in

 

granting the “extra-dimensional quality,” but in search of that dimension wanders rather
far afield. Gadjusek’s identification of the words of Hemingway’s tracker, Garrick—-”It is

finished”--with the consummatum est, the final words of Christ on the cross, seems

 

reasonable. But in finding religious significance in the three mounds of elephant dung
Hemingway finds on a road, the article strains credulity. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes
three mounds of elephant dung are only three mounds of elephant dung. Barbara
Lounsberry has contributed two valuable studies of the work. The first, “Green Hills of
_Af_rica: Hemingway’s Celebration of Memory” (1983), examinines the work’s treatment
of the fictive nature of memory. The other, “The Holograph Manuscript of Green Hills of
AM" (1993), traces how editorial additions and deletions were informed by literary
rivalries in which Hemingway was involved in at the time of composition. Lawrence H.
Martin, in “Hemingway’s Constructed Africa: Green Hills of Africa and the Conventions
of Colonial Sporting Books” (1999), analyses the work as an exercise in the safari book
genre which, like others in the genre, treats Africa as a commodity for the hunter to

exploit. Ann Putnam, in “Memory, Grief, and the Terrain of Desire: Hemingway’s

I42

Green Hills of Africa” (1999) understands the work as an exploration of memory. “It
chronicles the narrator’s attempt to fix an image, to bring home both trophy and text.
against the remorseless rush of time found on every page,” Putnam says (99). Putnam
sees the work as related to pastoral. However, she reads it as an endorsement of the
pastoral vision. “Green Hills of Africa begins as a pastoral evocation of Africa, given in
shimmering images apprehended in reverence and wonder,” Putnam says (103).
However, a necessary component of pastoral is the preference for a garden over a
wilderness landscape, and the setting of the opening scene of the work, the Serengeti
Plain, is hardly a garden landscape. The work is, in fact, sharply critical of the pastoral
vision. To this date, Green Hills of Afriga has not been recognized as the powerful and
intricate work that it is. Hemingway’s claims that the work achieved “that extra-
dimensional quality” he was working toward have gone unacknowledged. It is my
contention here that Hemingway’s argument with the restrictions of the pastoral vision
constitutes this extra-dimensional property.

Certainly many of the causes behind the books’ critical reception stem from
difficulties in the work itself. The complexities of this work remain unacknowledged.
Many of these result from Hemingway’s comments on literature in the book’s first
chapter, in which Hemingway is, as he later told George Plimpton in an interview,
“sounding off about American literature with a humorless Austrian character who was
forcing me to talk when I wanted to do something else” (Plimpton 124). In this
conversation (one of the most frequently cited and thoroughly misread passages from the

work) Hemingway lists Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Henry James as the best

I43

American writers. Critics have latched onto this remark and launched studies of the
influence of each of these writers on Hemingway’s work (treating Twain most
extensively and paying considerably less attention to James). Each of these writers can be
said to work toward an accurate depiction of life, as I show below. He rejects older
writers, “Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company” as derivative and prudish. Of
these predecessors, Hemingway singles one out. “There is one at that time that is
supposed to be really good, Thoreau. I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet
been able to read it” (21).

This remark has been taken at face value by critics and reviewers ever since. They
assume, with few exceptions, that Hemingway did not read Thoreau. Though some
scholars have compared certain aspects of Hemingway’s work to Thoreau’s, little
attention has been paid to the idea that Hemingway might be quite familiar with Thoreau,
or that the work of this arch-modernist might actually have been influenced by the
eminent Transcendentalist.

However, these remarks of Hemingway’s are deliberately disingenuous. Not only
had Hemingway read Thoreau by the time of the composition of Green Hills of Africa, he
was thoroughly familiar with Thoreau’s work. In fact, Green Hills of Africa is similar in a
number of ways to one of Thoreau’s most seminal and distinctive works--the 1862 essay,
“Walking.” Green Hills of Africa shares some of its central elements with “Walking”--its
sense of the American literary tradition, its concern with building an organic, rather than
consciously literary form, and its appreciation for literature as a means of involving

human culture in wild nature. Most notably, Green Hills of Africa shares with “Walking”

 

I44

its critique of the limitations of the pastoral vision. Both works reject pastoral as a
derivative literary form, one which is much too bound in convention and artifice to
apprehend the wildness that is, as Thoreau says and Hemingway seconds. “the
preservation of the world” (613).

The idea of a connection between Hemingway and Thoreau has received a number
of brief mentions in critical studies, but is the subject of relatively few scholarly essays.
C. Hugh Holman in 1955 introduces the idea that Hemingway may be connected to
Emerson, but feels it necessary to apologize for the claim. “Indeed,” says Holman, “the
two seem so basically dissimilar that it appears almost ludicrous to link their names
together as I have done” (12). Holman claims that there are similarities between
Hemingway’s aesthetic and Emerson’s ideas of the value of organic form, on the value of
experience as a source of knowledge, of the importance of avoiding imitation, and on the
connection between word and thing. But Holman does not see behind Hemingway’s
claim that he has not read Thoreau. Donald J. Greiner, in “Emerson, Thoreau, and
Hemingway: Some Suggestions about Literary Heritage” (1971) also feels obligated to
apologize for the absurdity of “the suggestion that Emerson, Thoreau, and Hemingway
can be linked together in a serious study” (274). Greiner claims that Hemingway’s
aesthetic is similar to that of Thoreau and of Emerson in its views on “such artistic
principles as the use of symbol, idealism in art, experience in nature, the organic theory of
art, and self-reliance of the artist” (250). However, Greiner accepts Hemingway’s claim
that he has not read Thoreau, and offers himself a convenient escape. “Whether or not

Hemingway is consciously aware of [the Transcendentalist components of] this tradition

I45

is not crucial to this study,” Griener says (260). Kenneth G. Johnston, in “Journeys into
the Interior: Hemingway, Thoreau, and Park” (1972), focuses on the differences between
these writers. “Certainly a philosophical abyss separated Hemingway from Thoreau and
[Mungo] Park,” Johnston says. “Hemingway simply found no evidence of God, no
argument from design,” unlike Thoreau and Park, who took spiritual solace from the
natural world (30). In “Thoreau and Hemingway” (1979), Donald M. Murray, also
somewhat apologetically, carries out the most extensive examination to date of a
connection between the two authors. Murray sees correspondences between the two,
mainly in regards to Thoreau’s The Maine Woods (1864) and Green Hills of Africa, such
as a shared faith in the value of sanative or “tonic” wildness, an attraction to “spiritually
enriching locations,” and an attraction to “the dark knowledge possessed by folk not part
of contemporary white civilization” (1 7, 19). Murray says that in comparing the two
writers “it is mainly the differences that leap to mind. There is Hemingway’s joy in
killing animals and there is Thoreau’s revulsion at hunting, revealed dramatically during
his experience with big-game hunting in Maine” (l4)'. It is curious that he overlooks
Thoreau’s comment in the “Higher Laws” chapter of Wald—en: “I am compelled to doubt
if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for [hunting and fishing]; and when some
of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them
hunt, I have answered, yes--remembering that it was one of the best parts of my
education” (190). Hemingway and Thoreau are not so vastly different, after all. It is
curious that connections between these two writers have not been more extensively

pursued, particularly since F. O. Matthiessen, who has exerted a powerful influence on

I46

the study of American literary tradition, notes as early as 1941 in his American
Renaissance that “Thoreau’s convictions about the nature of art look forward to
Hemingway’s” (85). Matthiessen sees Thoreau’s statement in A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers (1849) that “a true account of the actual is the rarest poetry. for
common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view” as closely connected to
Hemingway’s insistence that abstract ideas and states of emotion be constructed by the
artist through a painstakingly minute and accurate recreation of physical reality
(Matthiessen 85).

To the extent that there has been any discussion of Thoreau’s influence on
Hemingway, it usually focusses on the same passage from Walden. Robert Slabey, in

“The Structure of In Our Time” links Thoreau to “Big Two-Hearted River.” “The mature

 

Nick,” says Slabey, “with his many wounds, returns to the Michigan woods for the same
reason Thoreau retired to Walden Pond--to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life” (70). Bernard Oldsey has a more developed comment on Thoreau, seeing in
the ending of “Big Two-Hearted River”

a solution according to Henry David Thoreau-«that countryman of Hemingway’s
who, in m and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers proves to be
his closest rival in the literary depiction of the solitary life in the American woods.
Although Hemingway’s remarks about Thoreau in Green Hills of Africa indicate
no direct line of influence, the two men wrote to the beat of related drummers.

(Oldsey 124)

I47

Carlos Baker sees a connection between Hemingway’s aesthetic and that of Thoreau,
though he too accepts as gospel Hemingway’s remark about his inability to read Thoreau.
“One might expect that Hemingway would be more sympathetic than he is toward
Thoreau, the man of the woods,” Baker says. However, Baker notes .
among the resemblances is Thoreau’s well-developed admiration for the writer
who is ‘satisfied with giving an exact description of things’ as they appear to him
and as they exert ‘their effect upon him’. . . . Under the surface of both Thoreau
and Hemingway one finds an operative consciousness of what Thoreau himself
called ‘dusky knowledge,’ a sense of the connotations of things existing in and
below their denoted shapes and colors. But Hemingway draws back from the

intrusion of the ‘literary quality’ in Thoreau. (Writer as Artist 178; Baker’s

 

emphasis).

Hemingway’s claim that he is unable to read Thoreau has been persistent in its
influence. However, Michael Reynolds has pointed out that there is much more going on
in Green Hills of Africa than critics have acknowledged.

When Ernest returned from safari to Key West, he took with him twenty-one

books ordered from Brentano’s in Paris. All were about Africa. . . . He read them

after the experience and before he wrote Green Hills. I think that there is no
obvious reference to any of his research in that book, but there, beneath the
surface, it supports the exposed tip. We have been taking the iceberg metaphor
too much at face value. There are more things to be left out of a story than we

have suspected. (Hemingway’s Reading 27)

I48

When Reynolds calls Green Hills of Africa “an African Walden” (Hemingway’s Reading
27), he comes closer than anyone else has in acknowledging the complexity of this
peculiar text. The thing left out of Green Hills of Africa, the key to the text which
Hemingway concealed under the doorrnat, is his thorough familiarity with the author he
claims never to have read. Green Hills of Africa is Hemingway’s effort to establish an
American literary tradition which merges human culture and wild nature. It is his search
for “the literature which gives expression to Nature,” as Thoreau phrases it in “Walking”
(61 9).

Hemingway is a highly complex, even contradictory figure. He projected in his
day (and continues to project today) an anti-intellectual posture, which Wyndham Lewis
named “The Dumb Ox” in a famous chapter of his Men Without Art (1934). HoweVer,
this famous “man of action” was a reader with a gargantuan appetite for books. He read
constantly and avidly on a wide array of subjectsnfiction, poetry, literary criticism,
biography, history--and not only in English, but in Spanish, Italian, and French as well.
His editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, once asked Hemingway why he ordered so
many books from the company’s bookstore. Hemingway explained that he frequently
suffered from insomnia and a sleepless night might be good for two books (Reynolds,

Hemingway’s Reading 24). His home in Cuba, now a national museum, still contains his

 

personal library of over seven thousand volumes. The supposed “dumb ox” was, in fact,
formidably erudite.
Hemingway also was highly conscious of the public persona he projected and

enjoyed manipulating this persona. He was especially interested in avoiding the

I49

 

conventionally bookish or academic image of the poet or man of letters. Unlike TS.
Eliot, who carefully cultivated an Oxonian accent to conceal his St. Louis origin,
Hemingway took pains to conceal his literariness behind a carefully cultivated “rugged
outdoorsman” persona. He once criticized a portrait painted of him by his friend Henry
Strater because he thought it made him look “too literary, like HG. Wells” (Strater 84).
The popular image we have of Hemingway is much the result of his efforts to influence
his public persona at around the time of the composition of Green Hills of Africa. At this
time Hemingway published several auto-biographical articles in the popular magazine
E91213 depicting himself fishing marlin in the Gulf Stream and big-game hunting in
Africa. Green Hills of Africa is very much concerned with Hemingway’s construction of
a public identity, an important fact which has been overlooked in criticism to date. We
should bear this in mind when considering Hemingway’s remarks on Thoreau.
Hemingway’s personal library in the Cuba house contains a 1929 edition of
Thoreau’s Complete Works in 5 volumes, so he certainly could have read Thoreau before
the time of the composition of Green Hills of Africa (Brasch & Sigman 367). The fact
that the library also contains two different editions of Wa_lden, one published in 193 7,
another in 1955, though they date from a time after the composition of Green Hills,
indicates Hemingway’s continuing admiration for Thoreau. It was not unusual for him to
own multiple copies of favorite books. The memoir of Hemingway's sister Madelaine
(“Sunny”) includes an appendix listing the contents of the library of Hemingway’s
boyhood home in Oak Park, Illinois. Unspecified titles by Thoreau are listed, so

Hemingway may have read Thoreau as an adolescent or young adult, given his father’s

ISO

fondness for nature writing. In the famous Paris Review interview conducted in 195 8.

 

Hemingway is asked to name his “literary forebears--those [he has] learned the most
from” (Plimpton 1 l8). Hemingway cites those criticism has since explored quite
thoroughly--Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Doestoevski, Chekov,
Maupassant-«and includes Thoreau. Despite Hemingway’s claim that he has not been
able to read Thoreau, there is abundant evidence that he did, attentively and with
admiration.

The distinction (or lack thereof) between truth and lies, between fiction and non-
fiction, is an important concern in Green Hills of Afn'cja. The book’s foreword lays the
groundwork for its tantalizing play with genre, removing any solid interpretive ground for
readers who insist upon the binaries of truth/lies, fiction/non-fiction, author/character.

Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary.

Any one not finding sufficient love interest is at liberty, while reading it, to insert

whatever love interest he or she may have at the time. The writer has attempted to

write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country or the pattern
of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the
imagination. (n. pag.)
This foreword teasingly mingles elements of fiction and nonfiction, hinting in the first
sentence that the work to follow both is and is not a novel, and stating that the “book” (a
significantly neutral term, not aligned with either fiction or nonfiction) contains
“characters,” which implies that it is fiction, yet insisting that these characters are not

imaginary. It also teases readers into involving themselves in the text by inserting the

ISI

requisite “love interest” considered a requirement for works of popular fiction. The last
sentence identifies the work as an experiment in the mingling of genres. This is the first
clue Hemingway gives us that he is up to something different here. He indicates this
work is a departure from established tradition, that it will not follow traditional generic
practices, but instead will keep its readers off-balance. Because this work does not follow
the established trail of convention, but casts off in a new direction, it is a wild text.

The slipperiness of the distinction between truth and fiction plays an important
role in Hemingway’s comments on literature. The context of these comments is
significant, as is the person (or character) to whom these comments are ostensibly
addressed. The book begins with an account of how Hemingway’s hunt for kudu is
ruined by the noisy passage of a broken-down truck): The game scared off by the noise,
Hemingway leaves his blind and heads back to camp. En route, he meets the owner of
the truck, an Austrian expatriate named Kandisky who wears lederhosen and a Tyroler
hat. When Hemingway introduces himself, Kandisky recognizes the name. “Oh, yes.
The _Di_cht_er,” Kandisky says. “You know Hemingway the poet?” (7). .

Kandisky had read Hemingway in the German periodical Der Ouerschnitt (“cross-
section”) which, Hemingway tells us, “I had written some rather obscene poems for, and
published a long story in, years before I could sell anything in America” (7). Kandisky,
delighted to have met one of “the great old Ouerschnitt group,” quizzes Hemingway on
the other contributors, such as Valery, Rilke, and Joyce, and is surprised to find that
Hemingway is here on a hunting trip. “Why should any man wish to shoot a kudu?” he

asks. “[Why would] you, an intelligent man, a poet, [want] to shoot kudu” (8)?

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Kandisky, who “kills nothing, you understand,” and prefers “the life of the mind,”
to hunting, misses the time when he received Der Ouerschnitt because “that gave you a
feeling of belonging, of being made a part of, to a very brilliant group of people. The
people one would see if one saw whom one wished to see” (I 8). Subscribing to %
Ouerschnitt made him feel part of this cross-section of European literati. Kandisky asks
Hemingway to fill him in on these citizens of the literary world. “You know all of those
people?” he asks. “You must know them.” Hemingway hides his initial response from
Kandisky, but shares it with the readers of this text. He tells us, “I did not wish to destroy
anything this man had, and so I did not go into those brilliant people in detail.” Then he
tells Kandisky, “‘They’re marvellous,’ I said, lying” (19).

Kandisky here stands in for Hemingway’s critics. He has constructed identities
for the Querschnitt authors he admires. The fictionality of these constructed identities is
shown up in Kandisky’s astonishment that the real Hemingway, this member of the “great
old Ouerschnitt group,” would do something as vulgar as hunt, when the text makes it
clear from the first page that is what the man is there to do. Kandisky subscribes to a
severe and rigid approach to art, one which insists that poets are devoted to what he calls
“the life of the mind,” and such non-intellectual pursuits as hunting, which he dismisses
as “this silliness of kudu,” (25) have no place in such a life. Kandisky’s thinking is
binaristic: nature is one thing, culture quite another.

The text is severely critical of Kandisky’s thinking. The fact that the work
appears in 1935, two years after Hitler’s rise to power, invites contemporary readers to

regard Kandisky, with his stereotypical Austrian garb, and exclusive devotion to a culture

I53

of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), as aligned with fascism. This impression is
supported by Kandisky’s explanation of why he finds Africa so wonderful.

I have more than anyone has in Europe. . . . In reality, I am a king here. It is very

pleasant. Waking in the morning I extend one foot and the boy places the sock on

it. When I am ready I extend the other foot and he adjusts the other sock. I step

from under the mosquito bar into my drawers which are held for me. Don’t you

think that is very marvellous? (3 1)
Africa affords Kandisky the opportunity to feel like a member of a master race.
Kandisky’s narrow ideas regarding the proper province of art and the proper life of the
serious artist provide an important context for Hemingway’s comments on literature.
Hemingway’s remarks on the American literary tradition are an answer to, even a
refutation of, Kandisky’s narrow aesthetic. When we consider Hemingway’s remarks on
Thoreau, we must remember this context. Hemingway is playing an elaborate trick here,
and we cannot take his words at face value.3

When Hemingway remarks to Kandisky that he is unable to read Thoreau, the
remark is part of an elaborate subterfuge. Hemingway is playing an elaborate joke on this
“humorless Austrian character,” and humor is an appropriate device to refute someone
whose aesthetic is so dependent upon binary distinctions. Hemingway once remarked in
a letter, “the bastards [critics] don’t want you to joke because it disturbs their categories”
(SL 385). Hemingway’s joking remarks addressed to a ‘humorless’ audience seem

contrived to disturb his ostensible audience; he is, in effect telling his readers that he is

l54

working in a genre whose rules are beyond the limited understanding of his critics. He is
working in a non-traditional form, producing a wild text.

In order to appreciate what Hemingway is up to in this work, it is important to
remember the context of Hemingway’s remarks on Thoreau. When Hemingway
comments on the pre-eminent nineteenth-century American authors, “Emerson,
Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company,” he notes that

There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good, Thoreau. I cannot tell

you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But that means nothing

because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate
and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone and some one else should

correlate their findings for them. Writers should work alone. They should see
each other only after their work is done and not too often then. Otherwise they

become like writers in New York. (21)

Hemingway scholars seem to notice only the first two sentences of the above passage, and
overlook the remainder. In claiming that he cannot read “other naturalists” Hemingway is
linking himself to Thoreau; though he “has not read” Thoreau, he knows that the writer is
a naturalist, and Hemingway considers himself a member of the same profession. And in
indicating that the life of the writer ought to be solitary, he also compares himself to
Thoreau, who sought a life of solitude at Walden Pond, and devoted a chapter of m
to “Solitude.”4 Being “extremely accurate and not literary” is an important component of
the aesthetic that Hemingway outlines in Green Hills of Africa. Presenting the natural

world in clear, vivid, sensual terms is the true business of literature, according to

155

Hemingway, and any work which deviates too far from the natural world and clings too
tightly to literary convention is dismissed as derivative and conventional. In claiming that
he has not read Thoreau, Hemingway archly suggests not only that he has read this “other
naturalist,” but is quite familiar with his work.

Hemingway’s remarks on the American literary tradition are very close to those of
Thoreau. This is evident in his comments on the major figures of the American literary
tradition, “Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company.” Hemingway describes these
associates and contemporaries of Thoreau as “those who wrote like exiled English
colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they
were making” (20). Hemingway, who confesses to having published some “rather
obscene poems” in Der Ouerschnitt, criticizes their work as excessively tame and
civilized (Leff 52-53, 118-119).

All these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable.

They did not use the words that people have always used in speech, the words that

survive in language. Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds,

yes. Nice, dry, clean minds. (21)

Not only is this very reminiscent of his remarks in “A Natural History of the
Dead” on the New Humanists, Hemingway closely mirrors a line of argument used in
“Walking”; Thoreau levels similar charges against the figures central to the English
canon. English literature, Thoreau says, is too closely bound to such traditional forms as

the pastoral

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from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets--Chaucer and Spenser and

Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh. . . and wild

strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and

Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood,--her wild man a Robin Hood. There is

plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. (619)
Hemingway levels the same criticisms against “Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and
Company.” As English literature was “essentially tame and civilized,” the centrally
canonical figures in the American literary tradition are “gentlemanly” and “respectable.”
As English literature was derivative of Greek and Roman precedent, so American
literature clings tightly to English predecessors. It is no doubt significant that several of
the authors Thoreau mentions are noted for their work in the pastoral genre, particularly
Spenser and Milton.

Thoreau’s central criticism of the literature of his day is that is too extensively tied
to civilization and culture, too exclusively bound to human concerns. He claims that
literature needs to be less bound to tradition and convention.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for

tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in ‘Hamlet’ and the ‘Iliad,’

in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in schools, that delights us. As
the wild duck is more swifi and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the
mallard--thought,'which ‘mid falling dews wings its way about the fens. A truly

good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair

I57

and perfect, as a wild flower discovered in the prairies of the West, or in the
jungles of the East. (618)
Thoreau calls for a literature more thoroughly infused with the vitality of the natural
world. He asks
Where is that literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet
who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who
nailed words down to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the
spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used
them,--transplanted them to the page with the earth adhering to their roots. (619)

Green Hills of Africa seems an answer to this question. This work is constructed to give

 

“expression to Nature,” to revive American literary tradition so as to move it farther away
from established modes and conventions toward more organic forms and structures.

Green Hills of Afiica is suffused with the influence of Thoreau. Several key passages

 

seem echoes of “Walking.”

Thoreau’s call for “a literature which gives expression to nature” seems to be
echoed in Hemingway’s remarks on the best American writers. He singles out one work
for particular praise: “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark
Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . .All American writing comes from that. There was
nothing before. There has been nothing as good since” (22). Huckleberry Finn is a
distinctively American work. Its setting is the Mississippi, a river that is the very aorta of
the American continent. Its central character and narrator speaks a distinctively American

idiom, he “nails words down to their primitive senses.” The language of the novel is

l58

transplanted to the page from the riversz of Missouri, not from classrooms or
libraries. The work is not derivative of English and continental models, but derides
English romantic fiction in the wrecked hulk of the steamship Walter Scott, and in the
chivalric romances Tom Sawyer lampoons in his playacting. The novel gives expression
to the wild, as does its hero, who, when threatened by the Widow Douglass’ efforts to
“sivilize” him, elects to “light out for the Territory” (321). Hemingway admires Twain
for his use of more natural language than the stylized forms of the traditional pastoral.

Crane and James, the other American writers Hemingway selects, also give
expression to the wild. Unlike Emerson and company, whose work, Hemingway claims,
is peopled by bloodless abstractions, Crane and James write as though they had bodies.
Crane’s M_aggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is rife with visceral anger and outrage.
“The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel,”(both 1898) which Hemingway specifically
praises, both show humanity at the mercy of the forces of the natural world, and depict
characters subject to physical needs and urges. And though James’ characters occupy
mansions and drawing rooms and are depicted in a very social, highly cultured milieu, the
forces which move them are visceral-Just and ambition and greed. The central principle
by which Hemingway selects his version of the American literary canon is borrowed
directly from Thoreau, namely inclusive truthfulness to natural phenomena in literary
depiction over the models of literary precedent, or, as Hemingway puts it, being
“extremely accurate and not literary.”

In contrast to Emerson and company, who, Hemingway says, write as though they

did not have bodies, Hemingway makes Green Hills of Africa a quite visceral book.

l59

Hemingway’s safari was interrupted by a severe attack of dysentery, contracted on the
boat from Marseille, for which he was hospitalized. The disease left him quite emaciated
and caused him to experience “the necessity of washing a three—inch bit of my large
intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an unnumbered
amount of times a day” (283). The central activity which the book depicts, hunting, is
also extremely physical. Hemingway includes vivid depictions of the evisceration of
game, such as this account of dressing out a reedbuck:

I felt for the heart behind the foreleg with my fingers and feeling it beating under

the hide slipped the knife in but it was short and pushed the heart away. I could

feel it, hot and rubbery against my fingers, and feel the knife push it, but I felt
around and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against my fingers. Once
bled, I started to open him . . . and emptying him neatly took out the liver, cut
away the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside

it. (54)

This emphasis on physicality suggests that Hemingway wants to distinguish his work
from that of “Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and company.”

Green Hills of Africa is similar to “Walking” not only in its literary aesthetics, but
is similar in structure as well. The Thoreau essay itself does not follow the rigidly logical
form one would expect of a philosophical or literary essay. Kenneth V. Egan, Jr. has
noted that “an apparent difficulty posed by ‘Walking’ is its seeming lack of structural
unity. The New Thoreau Handbook argues that ‘It is the least organized of his shorter

works and might well have been improved by having been split’ ” (22).5 “Walking” is

160

rambling and discursive; it wanders from point to point as its author wanders over the
landscape. Egan identifies “the structural pattern unifying the essay” as “the saunter. The
essay demonstrates the program of action that it advocates; that is, the essay proceeds
from the realm of Understanding to the ‘Holy Land’ by a meandering course of reflection
and association” (22). In using the pattern of the saunter or excursion as the structural
principle of the essay, Thoreau is turning away from traditional self-consciously literary
forms such as the pastoral and adopting a more organic, more natural form to his purpose.
He is, in effect, trying to “be extremely accurate and not literary.” Hemingway adopts a
similarly organic structural principle for Green Hills of Africa in his departure from the
staid pastoral pattern. As he says in the foreword, the principle on which the book is
constructed is “the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action,” rather than
singing contests between shepherds, a life of pleasurable leisure in a secluded Arcadian
bower, or a retreat into a past Golden Age so typical of traditional pastoral.

In following an organic, rather than literary structure for the book, Hemingway is
producing a “wild” text, one which does not follow the safe, pedestrian models of literary
precedent. In producing a text that uses the land as its structural cue, in commingling the
supposedly separate genres of fiction and non-fiction, Hemingway is breaking away from
the fascistic aesthetic of the Kandiskys of the world. “In wildness is the preservation of
the world,” Thoreau tells us in “Walking” (613). And in producing a text that is
thoroughly indebted to the writer he claims not to have read, Hemingway is playing an
elaborate joke on this “humorless Austrian character.” Kandisky’s narrow aesthetic

depends on a secure notion of the solidity of generic definitions. This aesthetic is

l6l

dependent upon binaristic thinking which divides nature from culture, European from
African, “us” from “them.” Kandisky’s aesthetic depends upon art which follows
established rules. Thoreau remarks in “Walking”:

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a rule which we may obey.

We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life

knows no law. . . . The man who takes his liberty to live is superior to all the laws,

by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker. (626)

In removing secure designations of genre from this text, Hemingway removes any secure
interpretive ground from his readers and from Kandisky. Despite Kandisky’s insistence
on the separation of the life of the serious artist and the life of the hunter, Hemingway
rejects such narrow definitions. “It was my own damned life and I would lead' it where
and how I pleased,” he tells us (72).

There are several significant passages in Green Hills of Africa which have much
in common with “Walking.” For instance, he often criticizes the tendency hunters have
to hunt from automobiles, and he points out that he much prefers walking.

I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery and it was a pleasure to

walk in the easy rolling country, simply to walk, and to be able to hunt, not

knowing what we might see and free to shoot for the meat we needed. . . . I liked .

. . to feel the grass under my soft-soled shoes and the pleasant weight of the rifle .

. and the sun hot enough to sweat you well as it burned the dew from the grass;

with the breeze starting and the country like an abandoned New England orchard

to walk through. (52)

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Hemingway’s description of the pleasures of walking is a playful hint to his audience that
“Walking” (Thoreau’s essay) as well as walking (the activity) is an influence behind
Green Hills of Africa. The comparison of the Serengeti Plain and the New England in
which Thoreau sauntered is another tantalizing clue.

Another indication that Hemingway is influenced by “Walking” is his reference to
his growing appetite. The dysentery that had interrupted his hunt earlier had caused to
lose a great deal of weight and his diet of game seems to be just the cure for such a
condition. Hemingway explains, “I had been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of
getting stronger each day. I was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat
all I wanted without feeling stuffy” (55). This passage seems to recall Thoreau’s
statement in “Walking” that

there is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere

gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo [sic] and other

antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the
summits of the antlers. . . and herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the
cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably

better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a

wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, --as if we lived on the marrow

of koodoos devoured raw. (613)

Each of these works develops a view of food as a means of gaining contact with wild
nature, preferring consumption of wild game with a minimum of preparation over the

elaborate creations of European cuisine. The elaborate Viennese desert which Kandisky

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contributes to the campsite dinner is precisely the sort of food Thoreau dismisses as that
eaten “from mere gluttony.” Green Hills is full of scenes, not only of hunting, but of
eating. Wild game is luxuriously consumed in scene after scene--cold teal “the best of
ducks to eat, fine, plump and tender, cold with Pan-Yan pickles” (134), Grant’s gazelle
chops, wild Guinea fowl, and a memorable meal of kudu liver roasted on a stick over a
campfire. Each of these meals is described as wonderfully restorative, as though
Hemingway is consuming the tonic of wildness itself.

In “Walking” Thoreau notes, “The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin
of the eland, as well as that of most otherantelopes just killed, emits the most delicious
perfume of trees and grass” (614). Hemingway’s library contained many volumes on
African big-game hunting, though Cummings is not listed in the Reynolds or Brasch &
Sigman catalogs. But this description of a kudu he kills closely echoes “Walking”: “I
looked at this kudu, measured his horns, smelled the fine smell of him, sweeter than an
eland, even” (234). Hemingway describes another kudu in a similar way: “he smelled
sweet and lovely like the breath of cattle and the odor of thyme after rain” (231). The
close attention to sensory detail apparent here is an effort to render experience onto the
page in words “with the earth adhering to their roots” (“Walking” 619).

Thoreau begins “Walking” with an etymological explanation of the term
“sauntering”:

which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country,

in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going W,

to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ 3

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Saunterer, --a Holy-Lander. . . . Some, however, derive the word from sans terre,
without land or home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no
particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of
successful sauntering. (597)
Hemingway echoes this sentiment in Green Hills. He says of Africa, “I loved this
country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is
where he’s meant to go” (284). Both works celebrate intense participation in landscape
as an effort toward connecting the individual self with the physical environment.
In “Walking,” Thoreau emphasizes the importance of his woodland excursions as
an escape from the demands of society:
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of
us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?. . . Of course it is of no use to direct
our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it
happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in
spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and
my obligations to society. . . . The thought of some work will run in my head, and
I am not where my body is,--I am out of my senses. (602)
Hemingway also values the wilderness of Afiica as an escape from the “obligations of
society.” He hunts in the early morning and at twilight and passes the hottest part of the
day with a siesta. “In the heat of the day,” he says, “I lay in the shade with a breeze in the
trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to write, happy in knowing that at

four o’clock we would be starting out to hunt again. I would not even write a letter” (55).

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Just as Thoreau finds that he is, at times, out of his senses, not where his body is,
Hemingway reports similar experiences in Green Hills: “All I wanted to do now was get
back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie,
listening, homesick for it already” (72). And Thoreau emphasizes the importance of
returning to one’s senses in the wilderness; Hemingway stresses his very sensual
involvement in the African landscape:

I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a

woman that you really love. . . . If you have loved some woman and some country

you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards it makes no difference. Now,
being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains
with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of
the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have
time to be in it and to move slowly. I had loved country all my life; the country

was always better than the people. (73)

Perhaps the most direct similarity between Green Hills and Thoreau’s “Walking”
is the passage with which Hemingway ends the book. “Walking” begins and ends with
references to walking (which is an analogy for writing) as a sort of spiritual quest:

They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed

mere idlers and vagabonds. . . . For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by

some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the

hands of the Infidels. (597)

Thoreau ends the essay with another invocation of the crusade/walking analogy:

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So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly
than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light
up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden
as on a bank-side in autumn. (632)
Green Hills of Africa ends with Hemingway, his wife Pauline, his friend Karl. and Karl’s
wife
sitting in the sun against a stone wall by the Sea of Galilee eating some lunch and
drinking a bottle of wine and watching the grebes out on the lake. The hills made
shadows on the water, which was flat calm and rather stagnant looking. There
were many grebes, making spreading wakes in the water as they swam, and I was
counting them and wondering why they never were mentioned in the Bible. I
decided that those people were not naturalists. (294)
Hemingway’s conclusion closely echoes Thoreau. Hemingway and his companions are
sitting on a bank-side, in the sunlight, in a serene setting, just as Thoreau describes. Yet
there is an important difference. While Thoreau urges us to go to the Holy Land,
Hemingway tells us he’s already been there and was not particularly impressed. His
observation of the natural scene before him avoids any spiritual reference. He examines
the Sea of Galilee--sacred to Christians because Christ walked on it, in violation of all
natural laws--as a home for wildlife. The implication is that Hemingway turns away from
the spiritual aspects of Thoreau’s vision; the physical world is all there is, and it is
enough for Hemingway. This marks a fitting conclusion to a book whose avowed

purpose is a careful examination of the natural world, a book whose aim is to be

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“extremely accurate and not literary,” as is the remark Hemingway’s hunting companion
Karl makes about the scene. “’I’m not going to walk on it’,” Karl said, looking out at the
dreary lake. “’It’s been done already’” (294).

The numerous similarities between “Walking” and Green Hills of Africa suggest
that there is much going on in this work which we have overlooked. Green Hills of
AM is not mere autobiography. It is not a mere safari-book. It is a work of literary
criticism which takes as its premise the rejection of the pastoral vision which Thoreau
makes in “Walking.” Hemingway shows us, carefully and repeatedly, that Green Hills is
an effort to revitalize the American literary tradition along lines very similar to those
which Thoreau articulates in “Walking.”

Hemingway offers Green Hills of Africa as an effort to inject into American
literature the essential wildness Thoreau claimed was missing from it. Thoreau demands
“something which no Augustan or Elizabethan age, which no em in fact can give”
(620, italics in original). And Hemingway attempts to provide this enlivened aesthetic in
constructing a work which refuses to endorse a “freedom and culture merely civil”(597).
Green Hills presents the life of the outdoorsman as a necessary component of the life of
the artist. When Kandisky asks Hemingway, “you really like to do this, what you do
now, this silliness of kudu?” Hemingway replies,

“Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.”

“One is not better than the other?”

“One is as necessary as the other,” Hemingway says. (25)

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Hemingway insists that involvement in the natural world is a necessary component of the
artist’s life, and rejects any artificial distinction between culture and nature.

It is precisely this distinction that Kandisky insists upon. Kandisky thinks of
literature-- “the life of the mind”--as something that links him to human culture, to
society. He evinces no interest in the animals of Africa, only the people. Kandisky’s
belief that human culture is separate from wild nature is an anthropocentrist view. I have
noted that Kandisky’s outlook may be seen as fascistic. His belief that the world of
human culture and the world of wild nature are separate is a belief that empowers and
endorses exploitation and, more importantly, domination. Terry Gifford has noted that
“the exploitation of the planet is of the same mindset as the exploitation of women and
minorities” (165). By linking supposedly undesirable races/people with “primitive
nature” the “cultured civilization” assumes a right to dominate them. Just as Kandisky
thinks it’s “wonderful” that he extends his foot upon rising and “the boy” places a sock
on it, his faith in the binarism of culture vs. nature enables him to view nature as inferior
to the world of human concerns. Kandisky is a labor recruiter--he hires African laborers
to work on the firm (plantation) of an Indian who raises sisal. The Indian, says
Kandisky, “values me. I represent European organization” (1 7). Kandisky is complicit in
the exploitation of the land, and of the native people who are exploited as cheap labor.
His management position as labor recruiter is made possible by his faith in his supposedly
superior culture. Kandisky is a character transplanted from the highly artificial tradition
of pastoral into the more realistic view of this “absolutely true book.” The traditional

quality of otium, in which Arcadia renders its gifts to shepherds without evidence of their

I69

 

labor, is here exposed. In order for the plantation to function, laborers are needed.
Kandisky’s function is to provide this labor, which pastoral normally conceals.

Just as Hemingway conceals his true impressions of “the great old Ouerschnitt
group,” he conceals from Kandisky his buried allusion to Thoreau. The opening passage
of “Walking” seems a refutation of Kandisky:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as

contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as an

inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society. I wish
to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are
enough champions of civilization: the minister, and the school-committee, and

every one of you will take care of that. (597)

Green Hills is designed to carry out this project, to present humanity as involved in
nature, rather than separate from it. And the work presents art not as a means of
dominating or controlling nature, but as a way of contacting and celebrating its essential
wildness.

In his book on Pastoral (1999), Terry Gifford raises a point relevant to
Hemingway’s dispute with Kandisky:

our art. . .may be a mode of feeling our way back into a balanced relationship with

external nature. The American poet Gary Snyder has suggested that culture i_s

nature, that our art is our natural way of thinking ourselves back into the natural

world from which much of our previous culture has alienated us. . . human

consciousness, which previously alienated our species from ‘unconscious nature’

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and from our animal selves, is nature at work in us. Snyder puts it like this:
‘Consciousness, mind, imagination a_nd language are fundamentally wild. “Wild”
as in wild ecosystems--richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly
complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information.’ (Gifford 161)

The sense of the vital importance of using the arts to build an
enduring connection between humanity and wild nature is also something
Hemingway borrows from “Walking.” Thoreau says

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with
such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so
early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an
inter-action of man on man,--a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most
a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit. (624)

A civilization built upon the aesthetic that Kandisky endorses is certainly destined to have

a “speedy limit.” A culture built upon assumptions of human separation from and

superiority to wild nature is doomed to starve and suffocate from its own rapacity.

Hemingway admires Tolstoi’s story “The Cossacks” because it communicates a

sense of palpable physical connection to a vivid natural scene, it recreates nature: “In it
were the summer heat, the mosquitoes, the feel of the forest in the different seasons, and
that river that the Tartars crossed, raiding, and I was living in that Russia again.” (108).
He also credits Turgenieff , Thomas Mann, and Stendhal with the ability to make the

reader feel bodily present in the scenes they describe. In Hemingway’s aesthetic, the

I71

function of the artist is to recreate nature, to make the reader feel powerfully connected
to a particular natural scene.
For we have been there in the books and out of the books--and where we go, if we
are any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and
the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance
permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now wish to cease
their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable. (109)
This sounds much like the “literature which gives expression to Nature” which Thoreau
calls for in “Walking.” These writers fitllfill the poetic function Thoreau calls for:
He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to
speak for him. . . . whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they
would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay
half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,--ay, to bloom and bear fruit
there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with
surrounding nature. (619)
Hemingway conceives of art as a means of gaining contact with the natural world.
This lengthy passage demonstrates that Hemingway thinks of writing as an essentially
solitary act, one which of necessity moves the individual artist away from social and
political concerns that bind them to human culture, toward an intimate connection with
the rhythms of nature:
If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and

declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you

I72

exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can
never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot yet define
completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and
know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it
and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its
value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a
serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always
been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you
are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing,
learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it
has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island [Cuba] since
before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that
have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow,
as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the
Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments. . .are
gone. (149)
This vision seems a corrective to that of Kandisky. Kandisky’s preference for a human
culture over nature amounts to an arrogant inflation of the power and significance of
humanity, and Kandisky’s notion of literary culture as exclusively human culture amounts
to a perversion of the true purpose of art. Hemingway here presents the natural world--
metonymically expressed as the Gulf Stream--as vast and powerful, while the highest

achievements of human culture--Iove, victory, discovery--are reduced to the merest

I73

 

flotsam in the face of the indomitable, immortal stream. “The palm fronds of our
victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great
loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing--the stream” (150).

Both works celebrate wildness not only in art, but in nature as well. In
“Walking,” Thoreau deliberately denigrates the productive farmland-type landscapes that
most of his New England neighbors would find valuable and attractive. Such pastoral
landscapes are tamed landscapes--nature bent to human purposes. Always eager to
thwart convention, Thoreau celebrates the swamp:

Hope and the future are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities,

but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my

partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently
found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and
impenetrable bog,--a natural sink in one comer of it. That was the jewel which
dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround

my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. (615)

A central feature of the pastoral vision is the garden landscape-mature tamed. In revering
the swamp, Thoreau rejects pastoralism. The nature he values most highly is that which
is least subject to human influence or control. “I enter a swamp as a sacred place,--a

sanctum sanctorum,” Thoreau says, “there is the strength, the marrow of Nature” (616).

 

As William Howarth remarks in the essay “Imagined Territory: The Writing of
Wetlands” (1999), “A wetland is not just alien to human life; it provides little basis for a

life beyond subsistence. One may hunt or forage there, but a wetland is not solid enough

I74

to allow farming or building, the ground of civilization” (521). Farms and fences, and
land which bears the marks of human utility, are disparaged in “Walking.”
Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses
and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the
landscape and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would
begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half
consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldy miser with
a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him,
and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-
hole in the middle of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the
middle of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds
without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking
nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor. (602)
Here, Thoreau associates the work of the surveyor, who imposes artificial regulation upon
the very earth itself, with corruption itself. The surveyor plays a primary role in
relegating land to human utility. The process by which wild land is divided up into
sections is a necessary first step in the clearing of forests, draining of swamps, the
building of roads, farms and settlements. In portraying the surveyor in these terms,
Thoreau is indicting the pastoral vision of nature as subject to human utility.
In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway also celebrates wild landscapes. The part of
Africa which gives him the keenest enjoyment is “a beautiful country of virgin timber”

(223), a “virgin country” where the animals show no fear of people, “an un-hunted pocket

I75

in a million miles of bloody Africa” (218). It is land which has not been bent to human
purposes, but is wild, untouched by human hand or foot or plow. And, in keeping with
Thoreau’s anti-pastoral vision, Hemingway associates farmland with environmental
despoliation. Farmland in Africa he consistently describes in terms of contempt. At one
point, Hemingway describes driving
south on the Cape to Cairo road, here well graded, smooth, and carefully cut
through wooded hills overlooking the long yellow stretch of plains of the Masai
Steppes, down and through farming country, where the dried-breasted old women
and the shrunken-flanked, hollow-ribbed old men hoed in the cornfields, through
miles and dusty miles of this, and then into a valley of sun-baked, eroded land
where the soil was blowing away in clouds (I43).
Repeatedly in Green Hills, Hemingway associates farming with land that is “red and
eroded and . . . blowing away” (90). “The soil, once the-sod is turned under, is cropped
out, and, next, it starts to blow away” (284). It is of some interest that Hemingway
composed these passages in 1934, when American newspapers were filled with accounts
of the the Dust Bowl, caused by exploitive farming practices based upon what Donald
Worster has described as “an environmental ethic of conquest” (Worster 226). This
contempt for farming, for making wild landscapes subordinate to human utility, for
converting lush, green hills to barren, red dust, is yet another link to Thoreau and

“Walking.”

I76

However, in Green Hills, Hemingway goes Thoreau one better. The landscape
Thoreau saunters about is America of the mid-nineteenth-century. “Eastward I go only by
force; but westward I go free,” Thoreau explains.

It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness

and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a

walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon

stretches uninterruptedly towards the setting sun, and that there are no towns nor

cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. (607)

But by Hemingway’s time, the American west had lost much of its wildness. Hemingway
had hunted elk, bear, pheasant, and chukar in Idaho and Wyoming in the late 1920’s and
early 30’s, so he was familiar with this landscape, much more so, in fact, than the
homebound Thoreau, who boasted in Walden, “I have travelled a good deal in Concord”
(6). Even Wyoming and Idaho were dotted with resorts and villages and crossed with
roads by Hemingway’s time. In order to find wild country, Hemingway found it
necessary to go to Africa.

Hemingway takes pains to depict this Africa as a much more wild landscape than
Thoreau’s New England. In “Walking,” Thoreau presents America as a place ideally
suited for Europeans. “Where on the globe can there be found an area. . .so habitable by
the European, as this is?” (610). He presents American wildlife as non-threatening:

I think that in this country there are no, or at most, very few, Africanoe bestioe,

African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect it is peculiarly

fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the centre

I77

of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried

off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere

in North America without fear of wild beasts. (611)

In contrast, Hemingway’s picture of Africa is full of wild beasts. Hemingway emphasizes
the wildness of the landscape and of the African beasts within it. He tells of an occasion
when Dan, one of his guides’ employees, was watching kudu feed, while, unbeknownst to
Dan, a lion stalked him “and [had] nearly gotten him” (159). And Hemingway tells of the
time he stalked a lion into dense cover. Unable to locate the animal, but close enough to
hear its breath, Hemingway cautiously retreats, and confesses to having been scared “pea-
less” [sic] the whole time (142).

In rejecting the pastoral vision, and in emphasizing the wildness of the landscape,
Hemingway demonstrates an important link to Thoreau. “In wildness is the preservation
of the world,” says Thoreau in “Walking.” Both writers feel that wild nature is intimately
linked with human culture, that a culture divorced from wildness is robbed of its vitality.
Thoreau says

The civilized nations,--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the

primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as

the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a

nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make

manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his

own superfluous fat, and philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones. (617)

I78

Yet in this essay, Thoreau seems to feel that, despite the best (or worst) efforts of farmers
and surveyors, that the New England landscape was still, in his time, relatively
undamaged. “An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any
afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a prospect as I expect
ever to see” (602). Hemingway presents the natural world as inevitably subject to the
encroachment of humanity, particularly people of European origin.
A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But
the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water
supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is
cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old
country and as I had seen it start to blow away in Canada. The earth gets tired of
being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his
residue and that of all his beasts. . . . We are the intruders and after we are dead
we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next
changes are.
Our people went to America because that was the place to go then. It had been a
good country and we had made a bloody mess of it and I would go, now,
somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we
had always gone. . . . Let the others come to America who did not know that they
had come too late. (285)
Hemingway’s vision of wilderness as falling prey to western exploitation may strike

many as defeatist or reductive. But it is a realistic view for someone of Hemingway’s

I79

background, who saw the prairie around his home town of Oak Park, Illinois slowly give
way to manicured lawns and paved streets, and who spent his boyhood summers in the
“false wilderness” of Northern Michigan, where acres of stumps memorialized the vast
stands of white pine that fed a ravenous logging industry (Svoboda 16-18). And it may
be regarded as realistic, even pr0phetic, today, when South American rain forests are
being decimated, when much of Africa is devastated by famine, when lakes are acidified
by the rain and greehouse gasses alter the weather patterns of the planet. As Susan
Beegel has pointed out in a recent essay,

to love the land as Hemingway loved it, perhaps especially to love the land w_hg

Hemingway loved it, in the early years of the twentieth century, when the coming

of the automobile and urban sprawl driven by a fully mature Industrial. RevOlution

rapidly transformed the rural and wilderness areas of the United States into a web
of highways and destroyed landscapes, was to live in a state of continual
bereavement. (“Eye and Heart” 57, Beegel’s emphasis)

Green Hills of Africa irritated many readers and reviewers upon publication and
continues to be a difficult and challenging text today. Many readers express revulsion
over the book’s attention to hunting, and other instances of the book’s ecological
incorrectness. However, the book has much in common with one of Thoreau’s most
seminal works, “Walking.” Green Hills of Africa is clearly Hemingway’s effort to lay
down an aesthetic, one which envisions literature as a means of drawing humanity into a
more intimate connection with the wild, natural world, a means of, as Thoreau puts it,

speaking “a word for Nature--for absolute freedom and wildness” (597). The fact that

180

this neglected book has much in common with an important work of Thoreau, who is
revered as a saint in the environmental movement, suggests that there is much to
Hemingway’s work that we have overlooked. Hemingway may well have seen himself as
working in the same tradition as Thoreau, the “other naturalist,” and appreciating
Hemingway’s sense of indebtedness is a vital step in understanding the true value of his
work as an ongoing investigation of the relationship of human culture to the natural

world.

 

' Murray’s article appeared before the publication of Hemingway’s posthumous “An African Story” (1987),
which depicts the death of an elephant from a fusillade of hunters’ bullets as an appalling waste of life.

2 Ann Putnam refers to this incident as an example of the “machine in the garden” image which Leo Marx
uses to mark a distinction between “complex” and “sentimental” forms of pastoral (Putnam 103 ). However,
I contend that the setting of this scene, while not untouched wilderness, is no garden.

3 Ironically, Kandisky’s name echoes that of Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian avant-garde painter, who was
on the faculty of the Bauhaus from I922. His work, like that of other members of the Blaue Reiter group,
was branded “degenerate art” [entartete Kunstl by the Nazis. Kandinsky fled Germany in I933 when the
Nazis closed the Bauhaus. Perhaps Hemingway, who certainly would have known of Kandinsky even
though they apparently never met, is using this allusion as a submerged criticism of Kandisky’s view of the
proper role of the serious artist.

’ There is evidence that Hemingway thought of Thoreau as an exemplar of the solitary life. Carlos Baker
notes that in 1945, during a time when he was living alone at the Cuba house, Hemingway wrote to his wife
Mary that he was going to read Thoreau “who always revelled in solitude” (A Life 447). Mark Spilka notes
that the name given to the protagonist of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (which was composed around the
same time as Green Hills) in early drafts of the story was Harry Walden, which makes him “a loner in this
marriage” (Quarrel 24 l ).

5 Not all readers have this difficulty with “Walking.” Scott Slovic, for instance, calls it “one of Thoreau’s
most polished works” (39). Of course, there is no real inconsistency between highly polished work and
organic form.

l8l

AF TERWORD

My major aimin this dissertation was to respond to the observation Richard
Ellman ascribes to Joyce, that “there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than
people know” (695). I have long felt that Hemingway, as perhaps the most canonical of
modern American authors, was also among the most misunderstood. His carefully
constructed public persona, and the sheer abundance of critical studies of his work, have
given us a falsely secure sense that we understand Hemingway, that we have him figured
out. I have often, in conversation at conferences and in classrooms, heard people make
derogatory or dismissive statements about Hemingway, statements which are often based
on a falsely secure sense that the Hemingway persona constructed by the academy, by the
popular press, and to no small measure, by the man himself, is a reliable tool for
interpreting the work. However, this persona is an artificial creation, quite separate from
the actual person, and separate as well from the work which the persona obscures.
Hemingway’s work, I felt when beginning this project, was larger, richer, more complex
than any of the explanations critics have offered so far. The present study has only
confirmed this belief.

When I began this project, I felt that Hemingway’s engagement with the natural
world was a major feature of his body of work. However, I could find no sound basis for
interpreting his engagement with nature, no useful lens for bringing this aspect of his
work into focus. I thought of using genre as an interpretive tool, hoping to find one or

another of the various sub-genres falling under the general heading of “nature writing” a

I82

useful starting point for investigating Hemingway’s presentation of the natural world in
his writing. Quite by accident, I noticed how certain portions of Hemingway’s work
reflected pastoral convention, particularly the fishing scene in The Sun Also Rises and the
short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” When I recalled Hemingway’s description of the
theme of his novel The Garden of Eden as “the happiness of the Garden that a man must
lose," I thought that pastoral would provide a useful central focus to begin my inquiry
(Baker, A Life Story 460).

I found that pastoral presented its own set of problems. One problem was that the
body of scholarship on classical and renaissance pastoral was so enormous as to prove
daunting. Another problem was that pastoral was a term so freely used that it had no
secure meaning. The work of Alpers, Marx, and Williams were particularly helpful in
negotiating the labyrinth of pastoral scholarship. In order to make of pastoral a useful
interpretive tool, I had to adopt a definition which was somewhat rigid and arbitrary. In
future work, I will examine this definition and consider whether it requires revision.
However arbitrary my definition of pastoral, it did provide me with a useful inroad into
this aspect of Hemingway’s work. I did find that much of Hemingway’s work could
profitably be read as a version of pastoral.

Whether Hemingway himself was familiar with pastoral is a question which
seems easy to settle. Michael Reynolds's catalog of Hemingway’s reading shows that as a
student of Oak Park High School, Hemingway would have been required to such
practitioners of renaissance pastoral as Spenser and Milton (Hemingway’s Reading 41).

Oak Park High School also required its students to read and even to memorize such

I83

sentimental American nature poetry as Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” and “To a Water Fowl”
(Hemigyvay’s Ream 104). The pastoral is such a ubiquitous form that a person of

Hemingway’s erudition certainly would have encountered it. Marita, a character in the
posthumous novel The Garden of Eden, specifically mentions pastoral, applying it to a
story written by the novel’s central character, David Boume, though the novel does not
give us any details about the content of the story, so what specifically Marita means by

pastoral is left in doubt (156-158). However, such works as the posthumous story “The

 

Last Good Country” and The Sun Also Rises so closely echo the conventions of classical
pastoral that Hemingway surely was familiar with Theocritus and Virgil.

While much of Hemingway’s work invokes pastoral convention, and
Hemingway’s use of pastoral provides a useful means of approaching his treatment of the
natural world, there are several of Hemingway’s works which do not seem to directly
involve pastoral. For this reason, I have left out of this study A Farewell to Arms (1929).
While the novel contains what could be called a pastoral interlude, in which Frederick
and Catherine escape from the war in Italy to a peaceful mountain village in Switzerland,
this interlude is brief, and the focus is clearly upon the war and its effect on the lovers. I

leave To Have and Have Not (193 7) and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) out

 

of this study because they do not invoke conventions of pastoral and do not deal directly
with the natural world. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) does invoke pastoral convention.
The principle setting of the novel, the mountain retreat of a band of Spanish guerrillas,
has some similarity to Arcadia. The novel invokes the pastoral convention of retreat,

since the guerrillas enjoy a respite from the war churning around their forest enclave.

I84

The brevity of the interlude away from the war (the main plot line of the novel unfolds in
a mere four days) emphasizes the transitoriness and fragility of this island of peace amid a
world at war. and, as such, has much in common with the more complex versions of
pastoral. However, I omit this work from my study because For Whom the Bell Tolls has
already been the fortunate recipient of ecocritical attention.I The Old Man and the Sea
(1952) does directly concern itself with environmental themes. Santiago seems the least
anthropocentric of any of Hemingway’s characters. He feels a part of the biotic
community of the Gulf Stream, a citizen of the stream on an equal footing with the fish
and birds who, like him, make their livings there. However, the novel falls outside the
scope of this study. Pastoral of necessity is set in Arcadia, which is located on dry land.
Santiago's role as a fisherman makes him subject to the whims of the sea and the habits of
the fish to a much greater degree than are the shepherds and goatherds of pastoral, who
derive their living from domesticated animals they have raised. The pastoral landscape is
a garden—nature bent to serve human utility—and the Gulf Stream from which Santiago
earns his precarious living is in no way tamed. I have not paid attention to posthumous
works, with the exception of some of the stories included in The Nick Adams Stories,
because the posthumous works have been heavily edited and do not clearly represent the
intentions of the author. Although Hemingway never assembled The Nick Adams Stories
into a unified collection, the stories do clearly interconnect into a coherent whole, so I
feel Phillip Young's assemblage of them into a single volume marks no gross violation of

authorial intention.

I85

I remain confident in my initial contention that one of Hemingway’s major
concerns in his work was the critique of literary representations of the natural world.
This is evident in Hemingway’s remarks concerning his conception of the purpose of
literature in presenting a clear and accurate picture of the world, and in the views of his
fictional characters as well. Nick Adams’s trouble with the game wardens in “The Last
Good Country” is a result of bad advice from irresponsible nature writers. Nick had been
“reading in a book about how you could crease something with a bullet and it wouldn’t
do it any harm. It would just stun it and [Nick] wanted to try it . . .. Then he hit the buck
and broke its neck. He felt awful about it. He felt awful about trying to crease it in the
first place” (NAS 106). In Hemingway’s work inaccurate portrayals of the natural world
are dangerous, since we cannot know how we are to interact with the natural world unless
we have a clear and accurate picture of that world to begin with. In Hemingway’s
aesthetic, accurately rendering the natural world is the greatest moral obligation of the
artist. In the fragment excised from the end of “Big Two-Hearted River” and published in
The Nick Adams Stories as “On Writing," Nick thinks of Cezanne as the prime example
of the artist able to communicate the awesome reality of the natural world. “Nick wanted
to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting . . . .
Nobody had ever written about country like that. He felt almost holy about it. It was
deadly serious” (NAS 239). Hemingway's devotion to the truth, his obsessive care in
rendering an accurate vision of the natural world, is a valuable contribution to the
literature of nature. A clear appreciation for the vitality, complexity, and fragility of the

natural world is a necessary prerequisite for enlightened environmental practice.

186

 

While Hemingway emphasized the importance of accuracy in literary visions of
the natural world, this is not to say that his own vision of the world remained absolutely
clear and consistent. As early as 1923, in an article for the Toronto Star called “Game
Shooting in Europe,” Hemingway shows that he was conscious of the importance of
conservation. Hemingway explains that the reason game populations remain reasonably
high in Europe while in America “game is rapidly being exterminated” is due to European
policies which ensure

careful protection, rigidly enforced closed seasons, and the fact of govemment-

owned forests, which are really farmed for timber rather than being cut over and

denuded of trees. Indiana was once a timber country. So was the lower peninsula
of Michigan. Today there is hardly a patch of virgin timber in the Upper

Peninsula of Michigan. (Dateline Toronto 359)

This environmentally conscious viewpoint is difficult to resolve with some other aspects
of Hemingway’s behavior. Hemingway engaged in such egregious environmental
practices as the shooting of grizzly bears and eagles, and the taking of excessive
quantities of fish. On fishing trips aboard the Pilar, he routinely sprayed sharks with
bullets from a Thompson submachine gun. On his 1934 African safari, he made a point of
shooting hyenas because these "hermaphroditic, self-eating devourer[s] of the dead"
represented to him some sort of biological obscenity (GHOA 38). Ecologically unsound
practices appear in his fiction as well. In "The Last Good Country" Nick Adams engages
in the marketing of game, catching trout and selling them to Mrs. Packard so she can

serve them in her restaurant. The narrative perspective of the story does not seem to

I87

 

indict Nick for this practice, but instead presents Nick as a wronged party unfairly
hounded by bumbling and unscrupulous game wardens. While it is unfair to judge past
behavior according to today's ecological sensibilities, Nick’s behavior seems

incompatible with the conservation-minded viewpoint expressed in the Toronto Star

 

article. It is naive to expect an absolute consistency of outlook from a writer of any
measure of sophistication. Such a complex matter as that of interaction between
humanity and the natural world is one that can only grow out of a developing, evolving
vision. One is reminded of Thoreau, who, after he abandoned hunting, still considered it
“one of the best parts of my education” (Walden 191) and of Aldo Leopold, who only
learned the value of “thinking like a mountain” as a result of his participation in predator
eradication programs (Sand County 137).

This dissertation has confirmed my initial contention that ecocriticism provides a
useful way of uncovering previously unacknowledged aspects of Hemingway’s work. It
recovers from obscurity such undervalued works as Green Hills of Africa and offers us
new ways to appreciate such war-horses as The Sun Also Rises. Viewed from an
ecocritical perspective Green Hills reveals itself as no mere safari book, but a powerful
articulation of Hemingway’s aesthetic, a passionate and convincing call for using
literature as a means of bringing human culture into closer connection with wild nature.
Ecocriticism reveals an important, overlooked aspect of The Sun Also Rises. The novel
presents the ennui of the central characters as the result, not only of the First World War,
but of a disconnection between human culture and the enduring rhythms of nature. As

ecocriticism develops in sophistication, it will become an even more valuable tool for

188

exploring Hemingway’s work, and will reveal more of the intricacies hidden beneath the
surface of the text.

Ecocriticism can do much to reveal Hemingway’s relationship to previous
authors. Comparisons between Hemingway and such predecessors as Stephen Crane
have often been madez. Hemingway’s portrayal of the natural world is an outgrowth of
the vision Crane has laid down. Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) offers a harsh
corrective to anthropocentrism. The narrative voice remarks, “When it occurs to a man
that nature does not regard him as important, and she feels she would not maim the
universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and hates
deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples” (294). Hemingway’s work also
corrects anthropocentrist views of nature, but in a less harsh and combative manner.
Rather than the flat indifference of nature which Crane emphasizes, Hemingway finds a
locus of lasting value in the rhythms of the natural world, in the indomitable permanence
of the Gulf Stream, in “a million miles of bloody Africa” (GHOA 218), in the earth which
abideth forever. In this sense he shares much with such prominent figures of nature
writing as Aldo Leopold. Leopold’s idea that land “yields a cultural value” (Sand County
xix) is quite close to the point that Hemingway emphasizes in Green Hills of Africa that
in order to remain viable, a culture must own its connection to the wild. Leopold’s
statement that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a
world of wounds” (Sand Coung 197) is very close to Hemingway’s statement that “the
earth gets tired of being exploited” (GHOA 284). Hemingway’s heartbreak over the

ecological wounds he witnessed, such as the development and devastation of the prairie

I89

 

country around his boyhood home of Oak Park, Illinois and the woods of Walloon Lake
and Horton’s Bay in Michigan, also suggests he shares this aspect of Leopold’s outlook.
Wallace Stegner’s pronouncement in his famous “Wilderness Letter,” that “we need to
demonstrate our acceptance of the natural world, including ourselves; we need the
spiritual refreshment that being natural can produce” is very close to the claim
Hemingway makes in Green Hills of Afi'ica for the sanative value of wild country
(Stegner 534). Stegner’s assertion explains the spiritual ennui that afflicts the central
characters of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway, far from being the archetypal despoiler of
nature that is such a prominent part of his public persona, has much in common with
some of the most important contributors to that disparate body of work called “nature
writing.”

Hemingway’s relation to fellow modernists can also be more firlly appreciated
through ecocriticism. The relationship between humanity and the natural world, a central
theme in Hemingway’s work, is also a prominent feature of the work of William
Faulkner. Though Hemingway wrote of a number of places--Michigan, Paris, Spain,
Italy, the Gulf Stream and Cuba-~while Faulkner for the most part devoted his attention to
his own “little postage stamp of native soil” in Mississippi, there are significant
connections between the authors (Oates 62). A tone of despair over the destruction of the
wilderness pervades much of Faulkner’s work, a sense of loss of the land which has been
“deswamped and denuded and derivered” (in Ike McCaslin’s words) hangs over the
novels and stories (Go Dom Moses 364). This loss is deplored in Faulkner’s work as

another part of the massive program of blind exploitation which underlay the plantation

I90

system of agriculture upon which the southern economy was based. The plantation
system encouraged the monocropping of cotton and led to exhaustion of the soil. The
destruction of the wilderness is presented in Faulkner’s work as another of the sins for
which the South will have to atone, along with Indian genocide and Negro slavery.
Farmers figure much more prominently in Faulkner’s work than in Hemingway’s, but
these farmers are not idealized pastoral figures, and Mississippi is not presented as an
idealized Arcadia. Such poor white sharecroppers and small-time farmers as Abner
Snopes and Anse Bundren certainly are no exemplars of agrarian virtue. Snopes’s violent
anger and Bundren’s ignorance and selfishness make them individualized characters
rather than the idealized figures of the more sentimental versions of pastoral. Faulkner
reveals, even emphasizes the labor the farmers perform, exploding the pastoral
convention of QM. Faulkner’s realistic treatment of pastoral and his sense of despair
over the loss of the wilderness are connections between his work and that of Hemingway.
“A continent ages quickly once we come,” Hemingway writes in Green Hills of Afiica,
emphasizing the fragility of the wilderness before the onslaught of European immigrants

(284). Faulkner illustrates how this applies to the wilderness of Mississippi in Go Down

 

Moses (1942). In the “Delta Autumn” section of the book Ike McCaslin is old enough to
recall the time when much of the area around Jefferson was wilderness, and he mourns its
passing. Ike “saw plain its ultimate doom, watching it retreat year by year before the
onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and tractor plows” (354).
Eventually, the wilderness was so denuded that “the untreed land [was] warped and

wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into

l9l

shells to shoot at one another” (3 54). The idea of wilderness as a locus of value, and the
elegiac tone with which the loss of wilderness is portrayed, are significant connections
between Faulkner and Hemingway.

Hemingway’s attention to the natural world has much in common with the work
of two poets of the modernist era: Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens. Jeffers’s plain,
concrete diction, as well as his close attention to the details of landscape, share much with
Hemingway. Jeffers’s admonition to “be in nothing so moderate as in love of man”
(Selected Poem_s_ 168) is close to Hemingway’s statement in Green Hills of Africa that “I
had loved country all my life; the country was always better than the people” (73). The
rejection of anthropocentrism that figures so prominently in much of Hemingway’s work
receives even greater emphasis in the work of J effers, who announced in his The Double
fig (1948) that he wished to present “a certain philosophical attitude which might be
called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the
rejection of human solipsism” (vii). This idea figures in many of Jeffers’s poems, from
his statement in “Hurt Hawks” (l928)--“I’d rather, except the penalties, kill a man than a
hawk” (SP 198)--to the late poem “Carmel Point” (1954), which ends,

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from. (M 1145)

While Hemingway’s rejection of anthropocentrism is not as “inhuman” as Jeffers’s view-
-his Robert Jordan, for instance, dies defending his band of guerrillas from an

approaching fascist patrol, giving his life for his fellows--the two writers share a concern

I92

 

with demoting humanity from a position of dominance over nature. The often cited
passage from Green Hills of Afi'ica which compares the undauntable permanence of the
Gulf Steam, which “will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the British, after
the Americans, after all the Cubans” (149) have passed from the earth to the transitoriness
of human life is echoed in Jeffers’s poem “The Eye” (1941). In this poem Jeffers gazes
on the Pacific, and the enormity of the ocean makes him think of vast stretches of human
history as the merest jot of geologic time:

Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs [the Japanese]

Nor any future world-quarrel of westering

And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of faiths--

Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan. (Mm 436)
Another connection between the two writers is their acceptance of the violence of the
natural world. Hemingway stresses this point most stridently in “A Natural History of the
Dead.” Jeffers’s poem “The Bloody Sire” (1941) not only accepts violence, but presents
it as a creative force:

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine

The fleet limbs of the antelope?

What but fear winged the birds, and hunger

Jeweled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?

Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values. (M I 143)
One of Jeffers’s most stark and lovely poems, “Vulture” (1963) is something Hemingway

would surely have admired. It is a calmer, more accepting statement of the message

193

Hemingway harshly and caustically articulates in “A Natural History of the Dead.” In
this poem Jeffers tells of sitting down to rest on a hilltop after a long hike along the
California shore. A vulture flies past, checking to see if the body at rest is a potential
meal. As the bird flies off, Jeffers notes

how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light

over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--

What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.

(He—ath 1145)
The view of human death as an inevitable and necessary part of the natural order, one
which links us to the animals rather than placing us above them as the pinnacle of all
creation, is precisely the point Hemingway urges in “A Natural History of the Dead.”

The work of Wallace Stevens, while its diction is often elaborate and abstract, in
constrast to the concrete plainness of Jeffers and Hemingway, yet has much in common
with Hemingway’s work. Stevens felt, like Jeffers and Hemingway, that institutionalized
religion had become outmoded in the modern age. The Church had once provided an
explanation of humanity’s relation to the natural world: the world was the creation of a
kind God as a home for humanity. With the loss of faith, this explanation, this sense of
connection, was lost. The sense of connection between humanity and the natural world

which religion had once provided had to be replaced by poetry, the “supreme fiction”

I94

 

(Collected Poems 380). Poetry had to help us understand our relation to the world around
us. As Stevens says in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1947):

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves.

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. (CP 383)
In this sense of the high purpose of poetry, Stevens has much in common with Jeffers,
who says in “The Beauty of Things” (1954):

to feel

Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural

Beauty, is the sole business of poetry. (flea_th_ 1144)
Stevens echoes as well Hemingway’s idea that “a writer should be of as great probity and
honesty as a priest of god” (“Introduction” 7). Another point of similarity is Stevens’s
acceptance of death as a necessary component of the natural world. In “Sunday Morning”
(1923) the persona speaking in the poem rejects institutional religion in favor of an
appreciation for the real, immediate earth as real, physical fact. The occasion of the poem
is a Sunday morning, when a woman lounges on a chair in the sun, lingering over a late
breakfast while her dutiful neighbors are gone to church. The persona asks

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

I95

 

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? (CP 67)
The poem rejects Christianity, portraying the Crucifixion as “that old catastrophe” and
rejecting the Resurrection as a supernatural (therefore unnatural or impossible)
occurrence (CP 67).

The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay. (CP 70)
The poem rejects the idea of heaven as unnatural as well. The persona asks

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging? (CP 69)
In accepting the natural world as ultimate fact, the persona urges acceptance of death as
well. Since the natural world is characterized by change (one of the requirements for
poetry which Stevens lays out in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is “it must change”
[C P 389]), in contrast to the stasis and permanence of the Christian heaven, death
becomes a necessary part of the natural order. Since death is part of the pattern of change
which marks the natural order, “death is the mother of beauty” (CP 69), intimately bound
up with the vitality and mutability of the natural world. In his view of literature as a

means of understanding the natural world, in his rejection of institutionalized religion,

I96

and in his view of death as a necessary and proper part of the natural order, Stevens has
much in common with Hemingway.

Stevens’s work is concerned with human perception of the external world, and the
ways in which people find it necessary to weave a net of interconnecting emotions,
metaphors, and associations to feel connected to the world around them: “the poem of the
act of the mind” (CP 240). Stevens explores the contradictory impulses we feel to alter
the world in perceiving it, while longing for some direct contact with the “fluent mundo”
in all its otherness, a return to “the plain sense of things” (CP 502). Hemingway’s work,
in its investigation of the fictive quality of memory, in its effort to present a sharp, clear
picture of the world as it is, has much in common with the work of Stevens.
Hemingway’s project in investigating the ways in which literary depictions of the natural
world limit, conventionalize, or distort our understanding of the world around us, may
well take its cue from Stevens’s “The Latest Freed Man” (193 8), who was “tired of the
old descriptions of the world” (CP 204). Hemingway set out to develop a vision of the
natural world that was conscious of its own limitations, and which acknowledged the
natural world as the vital, complex, intricate web of interlocking systems which
ecological science has begun to reveal.

As this project has shown, Hemingway’s work has much in common with that of
those authors deemed “nature writers,” not the least of which is an obsessive devotion to
accuracy. However, many environmentally-conscious writers make explicit calls for
political action within their work. Edward Abbey, for instance, urges his readers to pull

up survey stakes and burn down billboards which desecrate scenic natural areas.

I97

Hemingway makes no such explicit call to action. However, his concern with careful
observation and accurate reportage of the natural world is a necessary prerequisite to
responsible environmental action. Hemingway conceives of his role as artist as
analogous to that of John the Baptist--preparing the way for the action of others. As he
says in Death in the Afternoon, “Let those who want to save the world if you can get to
see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made
truly. The thing to do is work to make it” (278). Until we know something of the
intricacy and complexity and vitality of the natural world we cannot find our place within

it or our responsibility toward it. Hemingway’s careful vision is a place to begin.

 

' See Lisa Tyler, “Dead Rabbits, Bad Milk, and Lost Eggs: Women, Nature and Myth in For Whom the
Bell Tolls”; Rod Romesburg, “Shifting Orders: Chaos and Order in For Whom the Bell Tolls”: and
Cecelia Conchar Farr, “Moving Earth: Ecofeminist Sites in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and
Gelhom’s A Stricken Field” in Hemingway and the Natural World, Ed. Robert F. Fleming. Moscow:
University of Idaho Press, 1999.

2 This comparison dates back to the very beginning of Hemingway scholarship. Phillip Young, in his
seminal study Ernest Hemingway (I952), remarks, “Crane’s whole dark view of existence, of man damaged
and alone in a hostile, violent world, of life as one long war which we seek out and challenge in fear and
controlled panic--it is all an amazing forecast of Hemingway” (I63).

I98

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