CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Ernest Miller Hemingway, one of the best known and most

influential of modern American writers was born in Oak Park,
Illinios, on July 21, 1899. His father Dr. Clarence Edmunds
Hemingway, a physician, was fond of hunting and fishing and it was
he who introduced Hemingway to life, in the words & lakes. Thus he
grew up in Oak Park, hunting in the woods, rowing and fishing in the
lake and sleeping in a tent. He was educated in a local school and
graduated from Oak Park High School in 1917. He was, however,
more closely associated with Michigan than Oak Park as he spent
many summers of his boyhood there and eventually it provided the
setting of his stories.

He began to write while he was still in high school but as war

had broken out in Europe he wanted to join the army. He was however
rejected because of some defect in his eyes. He then went to Kansas,
where he became a reporter for the Kansas City “Star” which the
assignment provided him a valuable experience for his later writings.

He was always so fascinated by the war that even after being

rejected for his eye defect once he tried again and this time managed
to get into the World War 1 as an ambulance driver for the American
Red Cross and was stationed on the Italian front. But he found the
work dull and unexciting as he got canteen duty which involved going
to the trenches to deliver mail and edible goods to the soldiers. Here,
Hemingway was severely wounded when a mortar shell exploded
nearby. Before he was evacuated he helped to rescue a badly wounded
Italian soldier and was returning to help others when his left knee was
damaged by a machine gun bullet.

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 Hemingway was then awarded the second highest Italian
Military decoration for his bravery. But his wounds left deep physical
and psychological scars. Because of his near-death experience he was
afraid of sleeping in the dark. He developed a fear that his soul would
go out and never return. While he was recuperating from his wounds
in the Red Cross hospital in Milan he fell in love with an American
nurse Agnes H. Von Kurowsky. However, Hemingway’s love
remained unfulfilled. Agnes was much older than him and after
Hemingway returned to American Michigan, she wrote to him that she
was getting married to a Major (she didn’t later). This shocked
Hemingway and he actually got sick, remained in seclusion for
sometime. This emotional set back left a severe painful impact on his
mind.

In Michigan Hemingway took up writing again. He soon

became a reporter for The Toronto Star and went as a foreign
correspondent for the paper to Europe. He settled in Paris and came
into contact with some of the greatest literary writers of the day –
Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce etc. and was encouraged and
advised to become a creative writer. However, in the beginning his
literary works were not a commercial success.

But he didn't give up and continued writing relentlessly. He

first attracted attention when his early stories, a collection under the
title In Our Time was first published in 1924 from Paris and then in
1925 from America with some more short stories added to it. The
stoical mental attitudes that he depicted in these stories attracted the
attention of the critics, as did Hemingway’s technique which was
soon to become famous. He published his first novel The Sun Also
Rises in 1926, which is a disillusioned account of the “Lost
Generation” and deals with the aimless wanderings of a group of
expatriates in Europe after the First World War. Though his
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reputation was established by these works, he attained world wide
fame and critical acclaim after the publication of his next novel, A
Farewell to Arms in 1929, based on his personal experiences during
the war. Accounting the story of an American lieutenant in the Italian
army who is forced to desert the army, the novel became an instant
best seller all over the world.

With this success, Hemingway became an established writer.

He began traveling extensively. He went hunting in Africa and the Far
East; fishing in numerous oceans and seas. He became intensely
involved in all kinds of outdoor activities especially bull-fighting. He
spent several years in Spain and observed the game. He also covered
the Spanish civil war going to the extent of actively participating in
it. He joined the Republicans and fought to save the country from the
Fascists. He was a popular figure there amongst them and came to be
known by several names, most popular being “Papa”.

When the second world war broke out Hemingway had been
living in Cuba and because he was in the pursuit of adventure he
converted his cruiser into a submarine chaser to hunt down Nazi U-
boats. He even patrolled the Atlantic coast of the United States. In
1944, Hemingway became a correspondent with the Royal Force of
Britain. He flew as a member of mission aiming to spot the flying
bombs launching sites, and to destroy them. Towards the end of the
war in 1944 he was again among the troops who were involved in
Normady Beach.

Hemingway’s work of art are mostly based on his personal

experiences. From his experiences in Spain and his knowledge of
bull-fighting came the novel Death in the Afternoon published in
1932. This was followed by Green Hills of Africa published three
years later in 1935. It gives an account of big-game hunting seen

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during his days in Africa. His experiences during the Great
Depression of America in the 1930’s resulted in the novel To Have
and Have Not (1937) and this focused on his interest in social
problems. This interest which began here is further taken forward in
his interest in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). And as a result of
his long association with the Republicans came his longest and first
major work since 1929, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). In this
novel, Hemingway gives an account of an American Volunteer in
Spain and three days of his experience in the civil war. Hemingway
puts forward his idea of freedom. He says that the loss of liberty
anywhere reduces liberty everywhere.

During the second world war, Hemingway did not publish any
of his writings. After the war, he retired to Cuba to write. Then in
1950, Hemingway published Across The River and Into the Trees.
Coming after ten years of silence, this book is about an aging army
Colonel and his young Mistress in Venice. This book aroused a lot
negative response and some critics ever went on to say that
Hemingway’s literary career was over.

However, soon after, in 1952, Hemingway brought out The Old

Man and the Sea. It is a short novel but it won high critical acclaim
and was announced a masterpiece. This was a novel he had been
trying to write all his life. This story about an old fisherman,
struggling against the unrelenting force of nature won him the
Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was also largely responsible for the Nobel
Prize for literature which was awarded to Hemingway in 1954.
Hemingway was however unable to go to Sweden to receive the
award. He had been badly injured in the plane crash while hunting big
game in Africa. He therefore sent a letter to the Academy in which he
declared that the writer’s life was a lonely one and that if he shed or
shrank his loneliness the sensitivity in the portrayal his work would
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deteriorate. In Cuba, Hemingway continued writing but no major
work came out during his last years. He was growing old and when
Fidel Castro took over Cuba, he and his fourth wife Mary came back
to America. They lived in Idaho. Hemingway’s wounds were
troubling him and he got seriously ill and spent a lot of time in
hospitals. His creative abilities were on the decline. One morning in
2 nd July, 1961, he slipped on the stairs of his home and not wishing to
prolong his suffering killed himself with a gun. It was as though
Hemingway wanted to live life on his own terms and when he
couldn’t he lost his zest for life.

A constant search for values has been the main feature of the
modern novelists. As Irving Howe puts it, “It has been a major cause
for that reaching, some times a straining toward moral surprise, for
that inclination to transform the art of narrative into an act of
cognitive discovery, which sets modern fiction apart from a large
number of 18 th & even 19 th century novels.” 1 In the last few decades a
great change has taken place in American life. A mass society has
come into existence in which co-relation between different classes no
longer exist and the traditional centre of authority, family, is losing
its hold on its members. Again to quote Irving Howe

There's no longer a society to write about. In

former years you knew where you stood the
peasants read the Bible; the mamics read Mein
Kamf. Now people no longer have any opinions;
they have refrigerators. Instead of illusions we
have television, instead of tradition, the
Volkswagen. The only way to catch the spirit of
the times is to write a handbook on home
appliances.” (P. 133)

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 A group of recent American novelists has responded to
immediate American experience because they are aware of the things
………… new, different and extremely hard to describe ………
happening to them. They do not oppose it. They rather try to attack it.
Like other twentieth century novelists, Hemingway too is critical of
Modern American society ………. its urban culture, its industrial and
nuclear complexes. He shows an acute awareness of the ills of
society. In this study the primary purpose is to elucidate Hemingway's
– love and liking for Africa in the geographical sense – unspoiled
nature. Hemingway's fiction and non-fiction demonstrate that cultural
aspect is an inherent and central aspect of his work.

Before studying in detail the directions of the study made here,

it will be appropriate to review what critics have said on Hemingway.
Reading through the Hemingway criticism over the years, it is
discovered that his works have been subjected to a variety of
interpretations. A survey of the critical effort reveals that most of
these attempts have been concentrated on the few aspects of the
writer's work, such as the Hemingway hero, the Hemingway code, and
the Hemingway style.

Hemingway’s art is to a great extent a romantic art but his

realism spreads much beyond this aspect. His Torrents of Spring
(1926) is a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s two novels Many
Marriages & Dark Laughter. At the time, it attracted considerable
attention. It is a satirical piece of writing in which Hemingway mocks
at Sherwood Anderson, Henry James, Gertrude Stein and D.H.
Lawrence. Influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude
Stein whose style strongly affected him, Hemingway published Three
Stories And Ten Poems in 1923 and In Our Time in 1925. These early
stories very effectively exhibit the attitude of mind & technique for
which Hemingway later became famous. As the leading spokesman
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for the “lost generation”, he expressed the feelings of war-wounded
people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope.

Hemingway writes of what he knows – from his own

experiences – to be true and he depicts it honestly, directly and
clearly. His literary output is not as massive in bulk as that of many
other writers yet one wonders how he found time to write even that
much in a life full of shooting, big-game hunting, fishing, fighting
and about as much physical punishment in war, road and air accident
as the human body can take. As he writes only about what he knows,
and has given in the Green Hills of Africa a factual account of a big
game hunting trip in the form of a novel, readers tend to identify
Hemingway the man with the characters of his fictional novels.

In much the same way, the adventures which Hemingway

related were not always wholly and strictly autobiographical, for
literature does not work with life in quite that way. But investigation
shows that actually many of the stories about Nick are literal
translations of some of the most important events in Hemingway’s
own life, and that remarkably little has been changed in the narrative.
Indeed it would be hard to think of even an “autobiographical writer”
(Thomas Wolfe, for instance) who gave a more exact account of his
own experiences and of his own personality in the guise of prose
fiction.

Obviously, something was needed to heal the wounds that these

experiences had given to that personality, and it is for this reason that
there is another “I” in the Hemingway short stories, a minor figure
who is a kind of spectator or reporter. This man is not Hemingway, is
not the hero, and is not even a pivot of interest. Instead he just
observes – a man, not the hero, but rates second only to the hero
himself. This man changes from-his profession and even his

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nationality-much more than the hero ever will, but he is still a
consistent character in that he always introduces and exemplifies a
theme in the author’s work that has rightly been made a good deal of.
This is the Hemingway “code”-a “grace under pressure.” It is made of
the controls of honor and courage which in a life of tension and pain
make a man a man and distinguish him from the people who follow
random impulses, let down their hair, are generally messy, perhaps
cowardly, and without unbending, un-concessional rules for how to
live holding tight.

These distinctions between the hero and his tutor-the man

whom the hero emulates, who has the code he would like to operate
by as well, clarify and enrich a couple of Hemingway’s later, best,
and best-known stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” These long pieces are
both clearly ritualistic-one a ceremonial triumph over fear, the other a
rite in which a part of the self is destroyed. They present certain
difficulties, however, because of new approaches the author adopted
towards his material – his protagonists.

Hemingway distinguished between “true” and “made up”

stories. Both of these, though they use a great deal of autobiography,
are of the latter type. These are personal stories, but they are not
literal ones: in Africa in the Thirties Hemingway did not die of an
infection, nor was he chased by a lion and murdered by his wife. The
protagonists are also “made up” in that, in each of the stories the
writer adopted a mask that is for once grotesque, in-congruous and
truly a distortion. Both Macomber and Harry (in “Kilimanjaro”)
exaggerate some of the hero’s weaknesses, failings, shortcomings.
Harry is a failure as a man and as a writer; Macomber is a coward. It
is very much as if Hemingway was getting rid of things again, but
here he took a new and hypercritical attitude towards his protagonists.
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These men are not wholly unfamiliar as leading players in
Hemingway, but they are outside the pattern he built in that they are
seen through a glass very darkly or, to put it more cogently, they are
seen in a glass-as in a Coney Island funhouse-which mirrors into
magnified prominence the growing paunch, the receding hairline, the
sagging muscles.

“The Short Happy Life” is, among other things, a detailed

description of the process of learning the code and its value.
Macomber, a frightened man, is seen in the story learning the code
from Wilson, his professional hunting guide. He is presented as being
very ignorant at first, but he painfully learns and he becomes a man in
the process. Before that happens, however, it is apparent that
Hemingway was using this plot of instruction in courage and honor to
comment, as he had not done to this extent before, on many other
things. The story is, for example, an analysis of the relationship
between the sexes in America, and the relationship is in the nature of
declared warfare.

It was in the fifties that full-length studies of Hemingway’s

work were published. Philip Young’s Ernest Hemingway, 2 Carlos
Baker’s Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 3 and John Atkins’ The Art
of Ernest Hemingway His Work and Personality 4 – all of which were
published the same year, 1952 – manifest three different approaches
to the novelist. While Atkins’ book repeats the already established
Hemingway values of courage and honor and the economy and
simplicity of his style, Young’s and Baker’s are serious studies of the
writer’s personality and his work.

Richard K. Peterson’s Hemingway: Direct and Oblique, 5 which

is a stylistic study, had studied this aspect of Hemingway’s fiction.
Hemingway’s literary style, universally recognized as one of the

9
important innovations of 20 th century literature, represents one of the
great responses of that literature to an age of war and homelessness
and shattered faith. The Hemingway style is by now so famous and so
familiar that every student of American literature knows a good deal
about it.

There can not be many writers who stick so rigorously to

writing of themselves, and-in a way-for themselves. At the same time
, the writer in his writings expects the audience to take an interest in
what he is doing, and at the same time succeeds in it with a very large
part of the reading public. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is widely
read, widely anthologized, widely interpreted, and Hollywood paid an
all-time high for it. Despite the fact that several versions of what the
story is “about” are convincingly meaningful, this remains a special
and private thing; a statement by Hemingway of his aesthetic aims
and beliefs, and an analysis of his past failures as a writer of prose
fiction, as of 1936, a year that was crucial for him. It can be read
quite legitimately as a more objective and generalized piece of prose-
as, for instance, a story of a writer dying on a safari in Africa,
reviewing his past and previewing his future. But for its author it was
an exercise in personal and aesthetic hygiene.

In the Green Hills of Africa Hemingway speaks of a fourth &

fifth dimension which prose could acquire. The phrase “a fourth and
fifth” dimension is rather vague. The fourth dimension perhaps has
something to do with the concept of time and with fictional
techniques of describing it.

Alfred Kazin, 5 Lionel Trilling, 7 and W.M. Frohock, 8 who gave

more importance to technique than to theme, saw in Hemingway’s
later works a serious decline from his earlier masterly craftsmanship.
They thought that Hemingway had moved from the earlier art of

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indirection and implication to the direct and obvious parading of
ideas. Hemingway’s later work, in their view, was an imitation, even
a parody, of his earlier tight-lipped philosophy and his famous style
of the twenties.

Foremost among the principles was that each writer must forge
his own style. “I could have written old prose as it should be written,”
Ernest told Charles Poore, “But it had been done so well and I
thought we needed a new prose to handle our time or that part of it
I’ve seen.” 9 His new prose did not so much abandon the past as built
on it, and especially on the ground-work of such immediate
predecessors as Sherwood Anderson and Gertude Stein, but such
borrowing were inevitable. The great writer, however, seemed to
possess such experience instinctively; he could go “beyond what has
been done or known” to make something of his own.

Hemingway practised at least two styles, moving from an early

economy of language and objectivity of presentation to a much
longer, more discursive, and for most all observers, less successful
later style. 10 It was the first style that became famous and much
imitated: the wiry short sentences based “on cablese and the King
James Bible” 11 (as John Dos Passos thought) that Hemingway
struggled to perfect during his young manhood in Paris. This was the
style whose words, “Ford Madox Ford remarked, “strike you, each
one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook,” 12

Hemingway wanted to write an antiliterary literature, after the

model of Mark Twain, and his admiration for Twain is on record.
What Ernest meant when he said that “all modern American literature
comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’. 13
Was that Twain had there reclaimed the common language and
reoriented American writing from the rhetorical to the colloquial.

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 Although quite voluminous, the critical work on Hemingway
over the last fifty years turns out on close reading a set of repetitions
in different vocabularies, The seminal Hemingway criticism can be
said to have appeared in the nineteen thirties. The critics of the
thirties generally considered Hemingway an “unintellectural” writer
who believed in the “code” of manliness - a code of courage and
honour. Lincoln Kirstein’s The Cannon of Death (1932), 14 Max
Eastman’s Bull in the Afternoon (1934). 15 Wyndham Lewis’s Ernest
Hemingway: The Dumb Ox (1934), 16 and Delmore Schwartz’s
Earnest Hemingway’s literary situation (1938), 17 all stressed
Hemingway’s concern with death and physical courage and thought
that his “code” was rather sophomoric. 18

What is true of his stories applies to Hemingway’s novels as

well “Death,” as Vance Bourjaily commented, “was a country he
knew how to hunt, and from which he brought back the great trophies
which are in major books.” 19

What interested Hemingway most was the question of how to

die. Dying itself was easy, for it meant “no more worries.” But a man
had a duty to lose his life “intelligently, the way you would sell a
position you were defending, if you could not hold it, as expensively
as possible, trying to make it the most expensive position that was
ever sold.” 20 A man should not submit too easily, go too gently.

Critics like Edgar Johnson 21 and Maxwell Geismar 22 who were

primarily concerned with theme, saw in Hemingway’s later works a
“major re-orientation of his values,” a movement from the early
“atomic individualism” and “defeatism” to a positive affirmation of
social values. 23 Keeping in mind Hemingway’s suspicion of ultimate
doom and his extreme fondness for being alive, it is no surprise that
his philosophical preoccupation is primarily ethical. Extinction may

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well be the end of all, but for Hemingway and his heroes this merely
emphasises the need to live each moment properly and skilfully. The
focus is on conduct.

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a tragedy of a different order. 24

Its setting is the final afternoon and evening in the second life of a
writer named Harry, dying of gangrene in a camp near the edge of the
Tanganyika plains country. “Francis Macomber” proceeds through
and by action; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is an experiment in the
psychology of a dying man. Like Across the River and Into the Trees,
it contains almost no overt physical activity, though much is implied.
Judged in terms of its intention, it is a triumphant piece of writing.

Like Hemingway, the writer Harry in the story has been

“obsessed” for years with curiosity about death, feeling only a great
tiredness and anger over its inexorable approach. “The hardest thing,”
Hemingway had written in The Green Hills of Africa, is for the writer
“to survive and get his work done.” 25 This is mainly because the time
available is so short and the temptation not to work is so strong.
Harry has succumbed to the temptation not to work at his hard trade.
Now his time is over, and possessive death moves in.

Like the literal-minded Nick, Hemingway was wary of symbols

artificially applied. As he said of The Old Man and the Sea, “I tried to
make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real
sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean
many things.” 26 He was after what was real, and took a pragmatic
approach to the problem of transforming the real into the fictional.
Art could not reproduce life, but it was important to observe the
probabilities. Thus he regarded Shirley Jackson’s famous short story.
“The Lottery,” 27 a failure because its ending-the ritual of stoning one

13
member of the community-was incredibly harsh. You had to write, he
thought, so people could believe it.

For all his pragmatic devotion to the actual and probable, he

still insisted on the value of invention. “The only writing that was any
good,” he said, “was what you made up, what you imagined.” 28 The
difficulty was that you could only create out of what you knew. “You
invent fiction, but what you invent it out of is what counts. True
fiction must come from everything you’ve ever known, ever felt, ever
learned.” 29 What you had learned at one place could be used in
another, just as Tolstoy could write War and Peace after having been
at the battle of Sevastopol, 30 though not, like his Prince Andrei was at
Borodin. But if you had been at some Sevastopol of your own and if
you were, like all good novelists, a “superliar,” 31 the fiction you
invented out of your experience and talent would become truer than
what actually happened. What Hemingway sought, finally, was more
than the facts, more even than the empirical truth itself: “From things
that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things
that you know and all those you cannot know you make something
through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new
thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if
you make it well enough, you give it immortality. 32

The most significant contribution to Hemingway criticism

during the forties was made by Malcolm Cowley 33 and Edmund
Wilson. 34 They suggested that Hemingway’s literary kinship was not
so much with the naturalists as with the symbolists like Hawthorne
and Melville. This made an important departure from the earlier
critical concern with Hemingway’s realism and naturalism. Thus,
while the thirties gave birth to the concepts of “code” and the
“autobiographical hero,” the forties made current the notions that
Hemingway’s (and his hero’s) growth had reached its culmination in
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the twenties and that his prose had deeper levels of meaning beneath
its tight surface. Many critics afterwards began to lay emphasis on
Hemingway’s symbolism. The sleeping bag in For Whom the Bell
Tolls has been regarded as a symbol of the womb and a ketchup bottle
in The Killers a symbol of blood.

Harry’s glorious ambition, on the one hand and the grim reality
of his inglorious death (which is imminent), on the other, create the
central tension in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. This tension is also
projected through the juxtaposition of various symbols, such as the
mountain and the plane, the leopard and the hyena or the birds.

Many critics have hunted for the source of Hemingway’s use of

the mountain and the leopard symbolism While Douglas Orrok names
Victor Hugo and Revelation “as Hemingway’s source” 35 ; William B.
Bache 36 argues that it is Conrad’s Nostromo, Robert O. Stephens 37
asserts that Hemingway took a suggestion for his symbols from Hans
Meyer’s account of the African mountains in his Across East African
Glaciers (London 1891). But Young accepts Dante and Flaubert as the
sources of Hemingway’s symbols without any attempt to look into
any particular use that each of these writers makes of these symbols.

At its best, as in “Big Two-Hearted River,” this device worked

brilliantly. Did you know, 38 Ernest asked a correspondent in 1951,
that the story is about a boy who had come home badly wounded from
the war and yet the war is never mentioned? Perhaps not, but one can
see how such a trauma might account for Nick’s slow, careful,
ritualistic way of working and fishing and eating in the story.

Dr. Bhim S. Dahiya has compared Hemingway with

Shakespeare. He writes:

15
 Both Shakespeare and Hemingway appeared on
their respective literary scenes to confront the
dominant literary tradition of their times
……………. If Shakespeare trained himself in
the art of drama from his experience in the
theater and self-schooling, Hemingway learned
his prose style from his experience in reporting
and self reading. Both learned to write as well as
to think from experience rather books; they
contemplated life, not words, and wrote about
what they saw, not what they learnt. 39

Like Shakespeare, Hemingway had to face adverse criticism

from his own contemporaries, including even close friends like Ezra
Pound and Gertrude Stein, the latter calling him and his generation
that grew up during World War I as “the lost generation”. Besides
calling Hemingway a “dumb Ox”, a “man without art” Wyndham
Lewis described “Hemingway’s art. ..an art of surface” (M.W.A,
19). 40 Lewis insinuates that, like Shakespeare, Hemingway is a simple
writer catering to the taste & leaning of the simpletons. What is being
implied in both cases is the absence in both Shakespeare and
Hemingway of the referential art that showcases the writer’s own vast
knowledge. Like Jonson’s neoclassical wit, thriving on indirection
and implication, we know, Eliot and Joyce, too, relied on myth and
allusion, which like Shakespeare, Hemingway rejected. And, like
Shakespeare., Hemingway willfully departed from the dominant style
and invented his own as observed by Carlos Baker in Hemingway: The
Writer As Artist.

If he had wished to follow the mythological

method of ‘Waste Land’ or Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,
Hemingway could obviously have done so. But
16
 his own esthetic opinions carried him away from
the literary kind of myth-adaptation and over
into that deeper area of psychological symbol-
building which does not require special literary
equipment to be interpreted. One needs only
sympathy and a few degrees of heightened
emotional awareness. The special virtue of this
approach to the problem of literary
communication is that it can be grasped by all
men and women because they are human beings.
None of the best writers are without it. It might
even be described as the residuum of ‘natural
knowledge’ and belief, visible in every artist
after the traditional elements have been siphoned
off. (Baker, 88)

Hemingway’s heavy reliance on dialogue and reduction of

description to an uninterrupted account make his narrative as superbly
dramatic as the dramas of Shakespeare. Hence, As You Like It and
Make-What-You-Will method of The Sun Also Rises signify a
common poetics and a common view of life. Just as the titles carry
similar connotations, so do the heroines represent in their respective
ways the new woman of their times. Just as Hamlet is meant to
represent the new man of the Renaissance, radically different from the
medieval man, so is Rosalind meant to represent the new woman of
the Renaissance as against the medieval woman. In the same vein, if
Jake Barnes represents the post-war generation of men, Brett Ashley
represents the post-war generation of women. Here, the modern
equivalent of the medieval era is the Victorian period in England and
the Puritan period in America. Both the heroines carry new
confidence, depicting self-reliance and a fresh outlook, free from the

17
chains of orthodoxy and constraints of tradition. If we place side by
side the woman of the medieval romances and Rosalind, and if we
place side by side the woman of the Victorian novels and Brett
Ashley, the historical significance of the two heroines, their common
characteristics of self-reliance and self-respect become all the more
pertinent.

The critics’ undue concern with the writer's biography has led
them to assert that in Hemingway's fiction there is neither any healthy
outlook on life, nor any kind of variety in themes, nor any objective
concern with the historical, social or cultural issues. The fact of the
matter is that Hemingway's work is resplendent with a large variety of
international situations and historical concerns as shown in his
treatment of several wars. In fact, one way of looking at Hemingway's
fiction is to view it as a running commentary on the history of his
times beginning with the 20's and ending with the second World War.
It gives a vivid picture of First World War in A Farewell to Arms, of
the attitudes and values of the post war generation in The Sun Also
Rises. Running alongside his historical concerns is the writer's
depiction of the cultural milieu of his times. Beginning with A
Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, reflecting the cultural
situation of the 20's, the writer continues depicting the cultural and
political scene of the 30's, the 40's and the 50's through his
subsequent works, namely To Have and Have Not, For Whom The
Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees, The Snows of
Kilimanjaro, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Green Hills
of Africa and True At First Light. What is of great-significance is the
fact that the cultural scene is not just that of America alone;
Hemingway uses a larger canvas which spreads across the western
and African world, and that gives to his writings a truly international
literary scale & span. His fiction is so extensively inclusive that it

18
gives to the reader a glimpse of different cultural trends in Europe,
America and Africa of his time such as Puritanism and bohemianism,
primitivism and modernism. Like Shakespeare, Hemingway is a
versatile genius whose writings have multiple dimensions and varied
canvas. Beginning with domestic conflict in The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber, we have a writer's dilemma in The Snows of
Kilimanjaro, moral pangs in Green Hills of Africa and different set of
cultural ethics is presented in True At First Light. The sheer breadth
of Hemingway's canvas and the complexity of his concerns belie the
wound theory and the biographical readings, which have been rather
damaging to the writer's reputation though only for a while.

Like any great writer, Hemingway is concerned not only with

the immediate interests on the cultural and historical planes, but also
with the universal problems of human nature and life. His vision of
life is healthy rather than sick, and his concerns are humanistic rather
than existentialist. While his comedies reflect his healthy outlook on
life, and embody the humanistic ideal of striking a balance between
the contraries of human nature and life, his tragedies reveal the ironic
vision which acknowledges the inherent gap between man's
aspirations and his achievements, between man's desires on the one
hand and life's denial on the other. Hemingway to be sure, subscribes
to the Renaissance concept of the balanced personality projected
through his central characters. Hemingway, in fact, manifests a more
balanced outlook on life than is done by any of his contemporaries.

A psycho archetypal study of the sixties is Robert W. Lewis’s

Hemingway on Love, 41 which argues that Hemingway wrote his
fiction for psychic relief and that his hero progresses through five
stages of love: from using love as “release of repressed
aggressiveness” (Nick) to becoming capable of love (later Nick and
Henry) to adult morality (Jake) to narcissism and increasing capacity
19
for love (Jordan and the heroes of subsequent works). 42 When Lewis
distinguishes between the early hero and the later hero as the one
seeking selfish love and the other the love of humanity, the one
dominated by “libido” and the other by “agape,” he is not far from the
traditional distinction between the individualistic early hero and the
socially involved and devoted later hero.

The notion of raising the mere gratification of the physical

senses to a question of principle can be best seen or best illustrated in
discussing the presentation of love. This principle or cult of sensation
developing into a cult of love can be seen in A Farewell to Arms.
Henry’s love from a casual sexual indulgence grows into a passionate,
true love. A similar pattern can be seen in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in
the relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria with Pillar the
gypsy woman who understands love taking the place of the priest, in
the pattern two isolated lovers against the world with a confidant or
interpreter. These couples can be seen as examples of those initiates
who are aware of Nada and are now in a quest for some kind of
meaning to substitute Nada. And in this attempt, this search for
meaning love takes on a religious connotation.

The significance of love in Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also

Rises is too obvious to be missed by any sensitive reader. What
Lionel Trilling has said about the love scenes in The Sun Also Rises:
that they “glow into an island of bliss with the ultimate dramatic
purpose of making fully apparent the cold surrounding darkness; it is
the moment of life in the infinitude of not being” (Trilling, 18) is a
tribute as well as a beautiful thing explained beautifully. The
disturbing memories of war that Jake and Brett carry even in
Pamplona – although far removed from the war zone of Paris now –
constitute the dark surrounding to the love scenes in The Sun Also
Rises. Love is projected as the life-sustaining force that steers the
20
protagonists through the “sea of troubles” they encounter in the
journeys of life.

Although the Hemingway criticism has almost assumed the

proportions of an industry it has largely remained focussed on either
the technical aspects of his fiction such as symbolism, style, or his
narrative technique. It has been based on such non-literary disciplines
as psychology, philosophy, and religion. Above all, most studies of
Hemingway's thematic concerns have been so much dominated by the
writer's biography that the merit of his work as literature and of his
genius as an artist have not received the highly deserved critical
attention. Robert P. Weeks sums up this tendency when he observes
that Hemingway and his works “exist in a synergetic relationship, re-
enforcing and fulfilling each other; he has created a personal legend
which serves as an ambience in which we read him.” 43 The legend
which emerged during the twenties, and has continued thereafter
without showing any signs of its disappearance is that “of Hemingway
the blowhard, of Hemingway posturing with movie queens, bull-
fighters, and big fish, or of Hemingway the hard drinker who made
pompous male pronouncements in men's magazines.” 44 This larger
than life image, which Hemingway so assiduously cultivated, has
hampered the proper understanding and evaluation of his fiction. A
brief survey of the Hemingway criticism shows how the critics'
excessive concern with the artist's life and their frequent tendency to
interpret his fiction with the aid of extra-literary schemata have led to
serious distortions of the novelist's art. Consequently, many aspects
of the writer's versatile genius unrelated to his biography or unsuited
to extra constructs have remained almost unacknowledged.
Hemingway's cultural aspect reflected in his various works is one
which has received very scanty recognition from the writer's
interpreters.

21
 There are of course, some writers like Richard K. Peterson,
Chaman Nahal, Linda Welshimer Wagner, and Sheldon Norman
Grebstein who have consciously deviated from the major critical
streams outlined above, and have focussed their attention on the
hitherto neglected aspects of Hemingway's fiction such as, style and
narrative technique. Nahal's study is concerned with Hemingway's
Method of telling a story.

The foregoing brief analysis of the Hemingway criticism

clearly reveals that there has been an extreme narrowing of the
critical focus on the writer's work, and the accompanying
simplifications of the issues involved in the writer's fiction.

There are still some areas which have not been adequately
addressed by his critics and which can be instigated to bring out some
new dimensions of his fiction. Since Hemingway located most of his
novels outside America, his own country, various nationalities and
their native lands are represented in his fiction. It seems therefore
meaningful to look into Hemingway’s attitude to the non-American
people & their places.

Africa is one such location which figures in several fictional

works of Hemingway e.g. the two famous long short stories namely: A
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber` and The Snows of
Kilimanjaro are both located in Africa. A posthumous novel named
True at First Light is also located in Africa. Hemingway wrote a non-
fiction book in the middle of his writing career called Green Hills of
Africa.

These works put together can give a fairly adequate view of

Hemingway’s attitude to the African people & their life in different
places. Since Hemingway belongs to the white race and to imperial

22
country – America, his attitude to the colored people of Africa
belonging to a different race and colonized continent, the cultural
questions of racial national and cultural differences become pertinent
in such a study.

The present is an attempt to focus on the concept of ‘otherness’

which can appear in different forms such as racial, ethnic, national or
cultural. Africa – one of the third world countries is inhabited by
black people & has long remained a colony of the white people of
Europe. The question of ‘otherness’ assumes a certain pertinence as
Hemingway is white American belonging to an imperial nation. He
might have been going to Africa for his fascination for the naturalness
of the place especially for his love of hunting but his several visits to
the place each for a long span of time brought him in contact with the
African people as well. It is therefore intended in the study to
examine Hemingway’s representation of Africa, its people which
would certainly reflect his response to both at different levels
including the cultural, the physical and the moral.

It is rather surprising that some important aspects of

Hemingway's work have been totally ignored by the critics. Cultural
aspect in Hemingway makes one such area of neglect. There does not
seem even a single piece of critical writing dealing exclusively with
Hemingway's cultural aspect. Most Hemingway critics do not seem to
consider this aspect of the writer's work worthy of consideration and
relational analysis.

Over the last thirty years, Cultural Studies has developed into a
diverse and lively international intellectual field. As Stuart Hall, one
of its founders, has put it: ‘Today, cultural studies programmers exist
everywhere, especially in the United States… where they’ve come to
provide a focal point for interdisciplinary studies and research, and

23
for the development of critical theory. 45 Cultural Studies initially
developed in Britain as a reaction against specific disciplinary and
political positions. The most important of these were (1) liberal
humanism, specifically the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition in
literary studies; (2) orthodox Marxism- cultural Studies developed as
part of an engagement with the New left in the 1950s and 1960s; and
(3) the mass society thesis and the related tradition of media effects
research in mass communications studies.

In the 1970s the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies not

only set the agenda for what Cultural Studies might include, it also
defined a particular type of critical intellectual practice which has
remained central to subsequent debates about the nature of the field.
At stake are questions of knowledge and power, meaning,
subjectivity, identity, and agency. Cultural Studies, in this view, is
more like women’s studies and Black studies-at their best-than like
anthropology, literature, or history. It is a radical, critical practice
that distinguishes what is critical in intellectual work from what is to
be taken as critical in the field of academics and is contextually and
historically located. With the expansion of Cultural Studies beyond
the Birmingham Center and its institutionalization in higher education
in UK and beyond, the ongoing struggle to define the specificity of
the field continued. It became a feature of the separate development
of Cultural Studies in the USA, Australia, Canada, and many other
countries.

As such, culture is a site of conflicting meanings and values,

which represent different conflicting and discriminating class
interests. Culture is thus a locus of a class's survival struggle and
assertion of identity. From this perspective, the constitution of
subjectivity in culture becomes a crucial area in Cultural Studies.
Cultural Studies ‘is concerned with the struggles over meaning that
24
reshape and define the terrain of culture. It is devoted, among other
things, to studying the politics of signification. Cultural studies is
committed to studying the production, reception, and varied use of
texts, not merely their internal characteristics. 46

While Cultural Studies is now an internationally recognized

discipline, it does not have universally accepted frame of reference.
National differences reflect both particular institutional and
disciplinary contexts and the theoretical and methodological
perspectives against which Cultural Studies developed. Cultural
Studies is also located variously within schools of humanities, schools
of social science, faculties of philology, and departments of English
and American Studies. The degree of institutional support between
countries is varied. Comparing the rise of Cultural Studies in the
United States with Britain, Stuart Hall commented in 1985 on its
rapid professionalization, institutionalization, and textualization in
the United States, where it was and is much better resourced. Given
this, Hall argues that ‘in a way, the States is the leading case now, not
Britain. In terms of current practice, America dominates. Thus, what
is the form that cultural Studies has evolved in and acquired in the
American context is the key question. 47

Despite national, regional, and institutional variations, certain

patterns in the development of Cultural Studies have begun to emerge
in the non-English-speaking world. With the exception of
Scandinavia, Cultural Studies is developing largely in the context of
English departments, where attempts are being made to extend the
curriculum into the area of popular culture and look at questions of
culture and power. Cultural Studies in English departments in non-
English-speaking countries has tended to mean that the topics studied
remain those connected to English language culture-for example,
British popular music, post-colonial writing, and popular culture. In a
25
editorial statement in the journal Cultural Studies written in 1999,
Lawrence Gross berg and Della Pollock commented:

Cultural Studies Continues to expand and flourish, in large part

because the field keeps changing. Cultural studies scholars are
addressing new questions and discourses, continuing to debate
longstanding issues, and reinventing critical traditions. More and
more universities have some formal cultural studies presence; the
number of books and journal polished in the field is rapidly
increasing. We understand the expansion, reflexivity and internal
critique of cultural studies to be both signs of its vitality and
signature components of its status as a field. 48

The present study is confined to an examination of only the

cultural aspect of Hemingway's work, only those novels will be taken
up for study and analysis which are based on writer's experiences in
Africa. The novel ‘True At First Light, non-fiction work Green Hills
of Africa and two short stories The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro only will be discussed at
length and in depth. The study does not have the unreal ambitious
plan to say everything that can be said on the subject.

Even with the ever emerging bulk of critical evaluation of the

creative writer however original, no study can claim to have
pronounced the last word. Even while focussing on the same aspect,
the perspectives will vary. These perspectives again have so many
formative perspectives behind – some individual, some related to
class & groups – social, economical, political, historical,
geographical, religious and ethical – that the analysis cannot but be
partial and limited.

26
 True At First Light, Green Hills of Africa, The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber and The Snows of Kilimanjaro are all
located in Africa. The back drop and the characters there in are bound
to be interactive in relationship. The present study is an effort at
elucidating what emerges from this relationship – is it a dominant
dominated or a mutually mellowing encounter. Is Hemingway
fascinated by what it is and as it is? Does this fascination have an
American frame of reference? Which concept of culture is he
adhering to or formulating?

The present study is an attempt at seeking and not pronouncing

definitive answers to these queries. Any answers emerging in the
process will be gainful knowledge. It is not proposed to seek
confirmation of any existing theories of culture nor to subscribe to the
list.

27
 REFERENCES
1
Irving Howe, “Mass Society and Post Modern Fiction”, in The
American Novel since World War II ed. Marcus Klein (Greenwich
Fawcett Pub., 1969), P. 126. (All references are cited by page in the
text)
2
New York: Rinehart, 1952.
3
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1952. (All
references are cited by page in the text)
4
London: Peter Nevill, 1952.
5
Studies in American Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
6
In On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American
Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), pp. 393-399. rpt. in
McCaffery, pp. 190-204.
7
“Hemingway and His Critics,” Partisan Review, 6 (Winter,
1939), 52-60; rpt. in McCaffery, pp. 61-70. (All references are cited
by page in the text)
8
The Novel of Violence in America 1920-1950 (Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1950), pp 167-199; rpt. in McCaffery, pp.
262-291.
9
Quoted in Aldon Whitman, “Hemingway letters Reproach
Critics,” The New York Times (9 March 1972), p. 36.
10
“At least two styles” See John McCormick, The Middle
Distance: A Comparative History of American Imaginative Literature:
1919-1932 (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 141-142.
11
Sentences Dos Passos, pp. 141-142.

28
 12
“……….pebbles………brook.” Quoted in Philip Young,
Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966. P. 32.
13
“Anti-literary” Daniel Fuchs, “Ernest Hemingway, Literary
Critic”, American Literature, 36 (January, 1965), 433.
14
Hound and Horn, 6(1933); 336-341; rpt. in McCaffery, Ernest
Hemingway: The Man and His Work (Cleveland: World Publishing
Company, 1950), pp. 59-65.
15
New Republic, 75 (June, 1933), 94-97; rpt. in McCaffery, pp.
66-75.
16
In Men Without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), pp. 17-40.
17
Southern Review, 3(1938), 769-782; rpt. in McCaffery, pp.
114-129.
18
The pharase is Max Eastman's; McCaffery, P. 66.
19
“Death……… country” Quoted in Edward” L. Galligan,
“Hemingway’s Staying Power”, Massachusetts Review, 8 (Summer
1967), 436-37.
20
“Dying ……… intelligent” Quoted in Rovit, p. 29.
21
“Farewell the Separate Peace,” Sewanee Review, 48(1940),
289-300; rpt. In McCaffery, pp. 130-142.
22
“Earnest Hemingway: You Could Always Come Back,”
Writers in Crisis: The American Novel Between Two Wars (Boston:
Houghton, Miffin, 1942), pp. 39-85; rpt. in McCaffery, pp. 143-189.
23
See McCaffery, pp. 142, 180-183.
24
Hemingway once told Roger Linscott that he regarded “The
Snows” as “about as good as any.” Of his work in fiction, “On the

29
Books” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, December 29, 1946.
The story was finished April 7, 1936. EH to MP, 4/9/36.
25
Green Hills of Africa, p. 27.
26
“……… real old man” Sanderson, p. 114.
27
“The Lottery” EH to Lillian Ross, 28 July 1948.
28
The only writing EH, “On Writing,” Adams Stories, pp. 237-
38.
29
“You invent” Quoted in Hotchner, p. 103.
30
Sevastapol EH to Charles Poore, 23 January 1953.
31
a “superliar” Baker, pp. 505-506.
32
“From things……… immortality.” Plimpton p. 239.
33
“Introduction,” Hemingway, Viking Portable Library (New
York: Viking Press, 1944), pp. i-xxxiv.
34
“Hemingway: Bourdon Gauge of Morale,” in The Wound and
the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,
1941), pp. 214-242; prt. In McCaffery, pp. 236-257.
35
Orrok, Douglas Hall, “Hemingway, Hugo and Revelation.”
Modern Language Notes, 66 (1951), pp. 441-445.
36
Bache, William B. “Nostromo and The Snows of
Kilimanjaro.” Modern Language Notes, 72(1957), pp. 32-34.
37
Stephens, Robert O., 105, 147.
38
“Did you know” EH to John Robben, 6 December 1951.
39
Bhim S. Dahiya, “Shakespeare's As You Like It and
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises”. Journal of Drama Studies. Vol. 3
No. 1 (Jan, 2009). PP. 15-16.

30
 40
Wyndham Lewis, ‘Hemingway's Art’ in Men without Art
(London, 1934), P. 19.
41
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965.
42
Ibid., pp. 3-5.
43
Hemingway A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth
Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Prentice Hall
inc.1962), P. 7.
44
Jackson J. Benson, Hemingway The Writer's Art of Self
Defence: Minnesota Paperbacks. (Minneapolis University of
Minnesota Press, 1969), P. 47.
45
Stuart Hall, ‘Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking
Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies’, in J. Storey (ed.)., What
is Cultural Studies? Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), p.37.’
46
Cary Nelson, ‘Always Already Cultural Studies’, in Storey
(ed.), What Is Cultural Studies?, pp.273-86, at pp. 273-4.
47
‘Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization: An
Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen’, in Morley and Chen
(eds.), Stuart Hall, p.396.
48
Lawrence Grossberg and Della Pollock, ‘Editorial Statement’,
Cultural Studies, 13/1 (January 1999).

31