"In Those Days the Distances Were All Very Different": Alienation

in Ernest Hemingway's 'God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen

Shannon Whitlock Levitzke

The Hemingway Review, Volume 30, Number 1, Fall 2010, pp. 18-30 (Article)

Published by University of Idaho Department of English

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hem/summary/v030/30.1.levitzke.html

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 “ i n t ho s e d ay s t h e d i s ta n c e s

were all very different ”:

a l i e n at i o n i n

e r n e s t h e m i n g way ’s

‘ g o d r e s t y o u m e r r y, g e n t l e m e n

shannon whitlock levitzke

The University of Georgia

crowning ernest hemingway’s bleak collection Winner Take Nothing,

“God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” is the story of a tormented Kansas City
youth who attempts to amputate his penis on Christmas day. Believing
that his “awful lust” is a “sin against our Lord and Saviour,” the boy begs
Drs. Fischer and Wilcox to castrate him, and when they refuse, crudely
and erroneously performs the operation himself, with a razor (CSS
299–300). The story’s few contemporary reviewers focused on this admit-
tedly shocking content, sensationalizing with their restrictive summaries
the youth’s grotesque attempt to purify himself, but recent scholars have
probed more deeply, exposing the story’s mythic substructure and
unearthing its complex negotiation of religion, music, and ethical engage-
ment.1
Almost uniformly, though, readers have been perplexed by the opening,
a one-paragraph description of Kansas City troubling for its narrative
point-of-view and, more importantly, for its obscure geographical refer-
ence.2 Stating that “Kansas City was very like Constantinople” at the time
of the boy’s mutilation, the narrator, who appears to have no obvious
function beyond the first paragraph, fails to justify this simile or explain
how the two locales are comparable (CSS 298). In light of these apparent
deficiencies, it is worth noting that Hemingway heavily revised this section
of the text, grappling with the setting in his two earliest drafts. The sub-
stantive changes he made to the opening paragraphs reveal a striking dis-
T H E H E M I N G W A Y R E V I E W , V O L . 30, N O . 1, F A L L 2010. Copyright © 2010
The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho.
 s h a n n o n w h i t l o c k l e v i t z k e • 19

similarity between his early conceptions of Kansas City and those that
were later incorporated into the text, indicating not only that Hemingway
relied on the introduction to contextualize the youth’s actions, but also
rethought their cultural implications as the crafting of the story progressed.
An increasing emphasis on alienation, evident in the Constantinople allu-
sion and the reconfigurations of Kansas City’s landscape, suggests that the
tragedy is not solely the result of adolescent insecurities or medical malfea-
sance, but is, rather, symptomatic of a more universal despair.
In October 1933, about a week before the publication of Winner Take
Nothing, Hemingway wrote a letter to his mother-in-law, Mary Pfeiffer, accu-
rately predicting the critical response to his work: “I don’t expect anybody to
like the present book of stories and don’t think you have to make an effort to
. . . . I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world—
or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading
it out thin. These stories are mostly about things and people that people
won’t care about—or will actively dislike” (SL 397). As anticipated, Winner
was not well received on the whole, and “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,”
one of its most troubling stories, was the target of sharp criticism.
Among the handful of reviews offering more than a brief mention of the
story, praise was slim and references pared down to meager and sometimes
misleading generalizations. In a November 1933 review for Nation, William
Troy summed up “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” as a story about a “sex-
crazed adolescent who commits self-mutilation” (182). Three months later,
an anonymous TLS reviewer characterized it as a “really terrible story in
which two doctors describe a case of self-mutilation to a friend” (378).
These reviews exemplify the standard response to what Earl Rovit has called
one of the “bitterest [stories] in the Hemingway canon” (70).
Hemingway arrived in Kansas City on 15 October 1917 to begin a brief
stint as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. Covering Union Station and
the Kansas City General Hospital for the Star, he quickly familiarized him-
self with the area, doubtless cataloguing details that he would later incorpo-
rate into short stories including “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” and “A
Pursuit Race,” both set in Kansas City. Despite this early stay, however, Hem-
ingway almost certainly did not conceive the plot of “God Rest You” before
his 1931 return to Kansas City for his son Gregory’s birth. While there, the
author befriended Dr. Logan Clendening, a syndicated medical columnist
whose “daily mailbag was crammed with instances of human woe” (Baker
227). Hemingway drew from a small batch of letters to Clendening while
20 • T H E H E M I N G W A Y r E V I E W

composing “One Reader Writes” and “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,”
and probably based the latter on a piece of correspondence “from a youth
in West Englewood, New Jersey, who had spent many years worrying
about the problem of sexual desire” (Baker 227). The manuscripts show
little reworking of the story’s events, so Hemingway seems to have solidi-
fied the plot before drafting “God Rest You,” a process that Paul Smith
suggests took place during summer 1932 (247).
Before “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” was finally published in 1933, it
underwent extensive revisions directed almost entirely at the introduction. In
fact, the Kansas City depicted in the Winner Take Nothing story bears little
resemblance to the one Hemingway initially sketched. As Steve Paul has
observed, “In some ways, we see more of Kansas City in those three previously
unpublished [before Paul’s article] paragraphs than we ever have in Heming-
way.” The second draft of the story, worth quoting at length here, provides a
snapshot of the city as Hemingway might have seen it as a young reporter:

In those days Kansas City was a strange and wonderful

place and, later, The New Union Station was a wonderful
building (above this scratched-out line he placed four words)
the finest in America.

You came to the Union Station from the Fifteenth Street

Police Station across a long viaduct that later was the Galata
Bridge3 and on the viaduct were the pawnshops with shotguns
and banjos and field glasses in the windows and many kinds of
watches and all sorts of jewelry and fur coats on (racks) on the
sidewalk and the proprietors always outside the door to make
a sale. Even in the coldest weather when some of them would
be inside you could not look in a window without bringing the
proprietor out. Between the pawnshops were the cut-rate tick-
et agencies with long lists of destinations and their prices
Tulsa, today $2.00, Tucson, Arizona $5.40, Fort Worth, $3.50,
and places further away . . . .

There were lunch wagons too off the viaduct lit up at night
and warm inside but the warmest places and the best to be in
were the saloons and as you crossed the viaduct trains passed
 s h a n n o n w h i t l o c k l e v i t z k e • 21

underneath and you would see ahead a cloud of smoke and

steam puffing up on each side of the viaduct as an engine passed.
The new Union Station was built all of marble inside and high
and vaulted in different corners were drug stores and restaurants
and a book store and the waiting room was back out of sight and
what was in sight was great space with an information bureau in
the center with a roll of white paper and an instrument that did
automatic writing in purple ink. (qtd. in Paul)4

These rough paragraphs reflect a lively, populous Kansas City contain-

ing both beauty and humanity. This is a city where people live, work, and
travel. More significantly, though, it is a city where people engage one
another. While the only specific humans mentioned are the “proprietors,”
references to the police station, pawnshops, ticket agencies, lunch wagons,
drug stores, and restaurants suggest a vigorous and active citizenry, inter-
acting as it goes about the daily business of living life.
The published story, however, omits these references, leaving readers with
a much darker picture: snow falls, “dirt [blows] off the hills,” smoke covers
the streets, and “early dark” assails the city as the narrator walks to the hospi-
tal (CSS 298). The automobile, represented by a single, static “racing motor
car finished entirely in silver” and displayed in an “automobile dealer’s show
window” replaces communal transportation—the moving trains “puffing
up” smoke as they pass beneath the viaduct (CSS 298). A single, general refer-
ence to the “buildings. . . of the town” replaces the early description of Union
Station, the “finest” building in America, with its marble ceiling and various
shops (CSS 298). The published story portrays a cold and barren place, not
the Kansas City that nurtures beauty and human connections in the early
sketches. Other noteworthy changes to the scene-setting occur as well. In the
first rough draft, the narrator says that the streets of Kansas City “have died
to nourish the new skyscrapers” (qtd. in Paul). Hemingway repeated this
image in a later version, writing but then crossing out a phrase about the rise
of the skyscrapers (JFK Folder 428). These references, part of the narrator’s
recollections of an older Kansas City, suggest that the now-dead streets were
livelier at the time of the youth’s self-mutilation. In the later manuscripts,
however, Hemingway completely excised these reminders of a more animat-
ed town, replacing them with a more somber picture.
These revisions have important implications. To begin with, they suggest
the need to portray the city as an unwelcoming, almost joyless place, where
22 • T H E H E M I N G W A Y r E V I E W

the boy’s tragic self-mutilation is odd—newsworthy even—but not incom-

patible with the larger environment. The changes also broaden the scope of
the story, making Kansas City more generic and representative of urban life
in America as a whole. The Woolf Brothers Saloon (never mentioned by
name in the earliest drafts) remains in the published story, but emphasizes
alienation—the proprietors serve a free holiday dinner to those without
home or family, including the narrator. Hemingway removed the names of
other establishments that might mark the city’s specific identity.
Thus, the overall trend of the revisions, towards making Kansas City
more generic and less specific, makes the narrator’s opening assertion that
“Kansas City was a lot like Constantinople” more credible. Despite the fact
that “[i]n those days the distances were all very different” and despite the
physical remoteness of Constantinople, the two cities are not so far apart,
are not so very different after all (CSS 298). The narrator’s conspicuous
insistence that “[n]o one believes this; but it is true” speaks to the strength
of the comparison (CSS 298).
While even the earliest versions of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”
establish the centrality of the puzzling Constantinople reference, Heming-
way’s conception of Constantinople as a benchmark for understanding
Kansas City evolves in significant ways. Constantinople appears briefly in
the story’s earliest draft (a one-page fragment of the introduction),
demonstrating that the reference was a necessary piece of the story from
the outset. The allusion is more evocative, though, in the second manu-
script, where Hemingway refers to the Pera Palace and the Galata Bridge,
both famous landmarks recalling Constantinople’s rich history and cul-
ture (JFK Folder 427). When Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes discuss
the pairing of Constantinople and Kansas City in “God Rest You Merry,
Gentlemen, ” they draw on the Eastern city’s storied past. For them,
Kansas City represents “something quintessentially American, something
provincial, something historically insignificant,” while Constantinople
represents “the exotic, the cultured, the significant.” Comley and Scholes
conclude that “the point of these similes must lie in their very strangeness,
in what we might call their perversity” (78–79).
Yet Constantinople’s exoticism is notably diminished when the drafts
of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” are juxtaposed with the published
story. The draft in JFK Folder 427 connects the Pera Palace to Union Sta-
tion, emphasizing their similar physical structures and, with a reference to
 s h a n n o n w h i t l o c k l e v i t z k e • 23

Constantinople as the stopping point for the famous Orient Express, endow-
ing the newly built Union Station with historical significance by comparison.
When Hemingway excised references to the Pera Palace and Galata Bridge
during the revision process, he made the Constantinople reference more
obscure and left readers with a bare geographical comparison. Only the dry,
dusty hills—which appear in every draft—remain in the final version to pro-
vide an explicit correlation between Kansas City and Constantinople.
Hemingway understood how readily readers would associate Constan-
tinople with exoticism. While covering the Greco-Turkish War for the
Toronto Star in 1922, he wrote a number of articles undermining stereotypi-
cal portrayals of the city. In one such piece, “Constantinople, Dirty White,
Not Glistening and Sinister,” he writes that while based on popular repre-
sentations, the city “ought to have been white and glistening and sinister”; in
reality, it “doesn’t look like the movies. It does not look like the pictures, or
the paintings, or anything” (DT 227). The article captures the city’s diversity
but also its confusion, congestion, and physical deterioration, noting that
the houses are “dry as tinder, the color of old weatherbeaten fence rails” and
that the minarets “look like dirty, white candles sticking up for no apparent
reason” (DT 227). Hemingway also calls attention to the uninviting land-
scape, the “dusty, rubbish-strewn hillside of Pera” that later manifests itself
in Kansas City (DT 229). Further exposing how Western literature has
romanticized “Old Constan,” the writer acknowledges that “there may be a
happy medium between the East of Pierre Loti’s stories and the East of
everyday life,” but quickly tempers the concession, wryly noting that “it
could only be found by a man who always looked with his eyes half-shut,
didn’t care what he ate, and was immune to the bites of insects” (DT 239).
Calling Kansas City a “strange and wonderful place” in early drafts, Hem-
ingway later removed the marker, perhaps too suggestive of Constantinople’s
picturesque foreignness for his purposes. Instead, he established the compar-
ison via the prosaic, using only dusty hills to unite the two locales. The bar-
ren physical topography, then, signifies the emotional climate, not only unit-
ing cities as distant as Kansas City and Constantinople, but suggesting that
the impoverishment of modernity’s urban waste land underlies the tragedy
in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” The story’s waste land imagery has
received a great deal of attention, but few scholars have yet to articulate the
setting’s importance or note how Hemingway’s changes in manuscript reveal
the allusion’s ultimate role in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.”
24 • T H E H E M I N G W A Y r E V I E W

In early and influential assessments of the story, Peter Hays argues that it
is a retelling of the Fisher King myth. Although there are various versions of
the legend, many include a sexually wounded king whose injuries are
reflected in the infertility of his land. Hays notes that Hemingway probably
read about the legend in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, and goes
on to comment that in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “the roles in the
tale of a fisher king wounded in the genitals, and healed by a young, pure
knight, have been divided and reassigned: it is the young innocent who is
wounded, and it is the fis(c)her who is the healer” (“Fisher” 227). Even if
Hemingway had not read Weston’s book, he would have been familiar with
the use of the Fisher King myth in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem intro-
duced to him by Ezra Pound (Baker 107). Hays, who employs Frederick
Hoffman’s phrase “landscape as assailant” to help clarify the characters’
interactions, explains the function of the waste land in Hemingway’s story:
“The prevailing landscape . . . suggests fear and loss as consequences of the
disappearance of a vitally confident and passionately felt trust . . . . Persons
do not recognize each other, since they are not aware of the commitment
necessary to spiritual relationship” (Hays, Limping 76). Thus the physical
barrenness of the hills mirrors the emotional desolation of the characters.
In his Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Paul
Smith extends the Fisher King comparison, implying that the youth’s deci-
sion to mutilate himself is a result of the land’s sterility rather than its
cause, as is the case with the mythic king. He notes, “Doc Fischer’s sugges-
tion that . . . The Young Doctor’s Friend and Guide might also be cross-
indexed in reverse from treatments to symptoms . . . is not an offhand
remark” (249). Smith’s claim links the story’s setting with its action, sug-
gesting an alternative cause for the youth’s guilt and the doctors’ ineptness.
To understand why the boy wants to be castrated, the doctors need to
know what ails him. While the boy does attempt to explain, the doctors
fail to comprehend the seriousness and intensity of his underlying motiva-
tion. Furthermore, they fail to treat him successfully. As the on-call doctor,
Wilcox is responsible for his patient’s probable death. Wilson’s medical
incompetence is indicated not only by the early revelation that he has “no
business being a physician” (CSS 298), but also by his reliance on an
indexed reference book, The Young Doctor’s Friend and Guide, that under-
standably contains no description of the boy’s malady. Wilson’s desire for
a cross-indexed manual giving primacy to treatments also indicates his
 s h a n n o n w h i t l o c k l e v i t z k e • 25

unwillingness to identify the core problems of his patients; suggesting that

the youth “go and—[masturbate],” he endeavors to alleviate physical dis-
comfort but disregards the deeper ailment (CSS 300).
The manuscripts show Hemingway toying with various explanations for
the boy’s anxiety and abandoning references that would trivialize or explain
away his suffering. The story clearly articulates Dr. Wilcox’s deficiencies, but
Doc Fischer, the more adept physician, is also unable to save the boy, sug-
gesting that “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” is not just a tale of profes-
sional ineptitude. The fundamental failure of both doctors is their inability
to communicate with their patient. When the “excited and frightened” boy
comes in to the hospital asking to be castrated, the doctors refuse his
request—Fischer with sympathy and Wilcox with disdain (CSS 299). In an
early version of the story, Hemingway’s description of the boy included a
phrase about his eyes, hinting that he might be psychologically unstable
rather than merely scared (JFK Folder 428). The line was later crossed out,
and, as a result, the youth appears to be misguided in his piety and devotion
to purity, not understanding that his condition isn’t sinful. Moreover, he
lacks a paradigm that would reconcile his physical state with his religious
beliefs. In another rough, deleted passage, Hemingway included a short line
that sheds light on the narrator’s identity and offers an alternative context
for the events. Doc Fischer tells Horace that the boy will be an additional
adolescent to include in his writing (JFK Folder 428). The line offers a poten-
tial occupation for the narrator, indicating that he is a writer, and perhaps a
reporter. It also minimizes the boy’s individual suffering, as Fischer implies
that the anxiety is merely a byproduct of puberty. Hemingway’s decision to
excise both lines shifts the frame of reference and suggests that the boy’s state
is culturally induced, that his trauma reflects widespread emotional sterility.
The boy speaks directly to the doctors and thus is not physically isolated
from them, but the spatial proximity between the parties belies the emo-
tional distance. Doc Fischer tries to explain to the youth that his “awful lust”
is “a natural thing . . . the way [he] [is] supposed to be,” but the boy
responds by saying, “Oh, you don’t understand” and then tells him, “No. I
won’t listen. You can’t make me listen” (CSS 299–300). Later, when Doctor
Wilcox crudely tells him, “Oh, go and––,” the boy replies, “When you talk
like that I don’t hear you” (CSS 300). Each party, powerless to “hear,” “listen”
to, and “understand” the other, is tragically hindered by linguistic failure.5
Offering an extensive discussion of this failure, or what he calls “semiotic
26 • T H E H E M I N G W A Y r E V I E W

confusion,” Robert Lamb asserts, “Hemingway’s odd tale is all about the
problems of reading a text and the consequences of misreading. Specifically,
it is about . . . the failure of signifiers to point to the appropriate signifieds . . .
and about characters who employ the wrong intertexts or misapply sign sys-
tems in their efforts to interpret signifiers” (25). Misunderstandings are pres-
ent throughout the entire story: the narrator misreads “Dans Argent,” the
youth misinterprets both his sexuality and the tenets of Christianity, and
Doc Fischer cannot communicate with Doctor Wilcox or the boy because of
his “cultural ‘otherness’” (Lamb 28).
Rather than attribute the problem to the failings of individual characters,
Hemingway shows that such detachment was not uncommon. The story
begins with a definitive declaration about the nature of space (“In those
days the distances were all very different”) and grammatically connects it to
specific geographic locales (“Kansas City was very like Constantinople”),
suggesting, on one level, a physical connection between the cities mentioned
(CSS 298). The mileage between Kansas City and Constantinople has obvi-
ously remained unchanged from the time of the boy’s tragedy, though, so
the opening line also functions metaphorically as a commentary on the state
of humanity, on the way people communicated with one another when the
events took place. This emphasis on interaction has led Peter Hays to argue
that in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” the “setting is not important; the
human relations are” (“Fisher” 228). The two need not be exclusive of one
another, however. While the Kansas City-Constantinople pairing is admit-
tedly unusual, it also encompasses East and West, youth and historicity.
Given Hemingway’s reworking of the introduction and knowledge of both
places, it is likely that the cities serve as points of reference that indicate the
distressing extent of modern despondency.
Establishing the initial comparison between the two cities, the narrator
furthers the motif of isolation through his position as an observer. When
he comes into the hospital reception room after his free turkey at Woolf ’s,
Doc Fischer asks if he can call him “Horace,” and the use of a nickname
blurs his identity, distancing him from the other characters and from the
action. His unclear role has been the subject of much speculation, with
some scholars arguing that the first-person narration is a structural weak-
ness.6 Finding fault with the “nested narrative structure” of the piece, for
example, George Monteiro claims that the second remove added by the
narrator creates a sense of disconnection (212). Importantly, though, it is
 s h a n n o n w h i t l o c k l e v i t z k e • 27

the very distance created by the narrator that ultimately unites the open-
ing description with the subsequent action.
Horace’s primary function is to recount the episode of the youth, and
the narrative layers stylistically convey the emotional disconnect between
the characters. Unable to save the youth, the doctors are reduced to dis-
cussing him and “Horace” to writing about him. And as a mere spectator
who does not act, the narrator perpetuates the isolation experienced by
the other characters. Although physically present when the boy originally
comes in asking to be castrated, he does not participate in the discussion
or attempt to persuade the boy to abandon his pursuit of religious purity.
Instead, he functions as a “witness” (P. Smith 250), simply stating, “I had
been there when he came in” (CSS 299). As such, he is both literally pres-
ent and figuratively absent, able to see but not to act.
And because he tells the story with retrospective distance, he can reflect
on it unobtrusively, exposing his own naïveté. “[The story] is not only a re-
telling of an earlier event, but a recollection in which the narrator in the
present sees the event in a much different light than he did in his earlier
years,” says Rick Moss, challenging most of the dominant criticism by
affirming the centrality of the narrator (169–170). The narrator’s mistransla-
tion of “Dans Argent” and Fischer’s teasing assertion that Horace does not
have “much tendency” towards intelligence reveal that he was, at the time of
the story’s actions, a bit ignorant (CSS 298, 301). That he tells the story and
draws attention to his inadequacies at all, though, suggests that he realizes
his previous failures and that he takes some responsibility for his inaction.
The narrator’s distance is echoed in the plot as well. It is noteworthy
that the event most central to the work occurs when the other characters
are absent. Although the boy comes to the hospital asking for a castration
and returns after he has mutilated himself, neither the doctors nor the
narrator is present when he amputates his penis. Furthermore, the narra-
tor hears about the episode from Doc Fischer and Doctor Wilcox, shifting
the focus of the story from the boy to the physicians and their attempts to
reconcile their professional remissness. Wilcox is only vaguely troubled by
the case and is more concerned about his colleague “rid[ing]” him than he
is about the boy’s probable death (CSS 300).
Fischer, on the other hand, the doctor who treated the youth with sym-
pathy and compassion, is clearly troubled by the occurrence. He jokes with
“Horace” and tells him, “We’ve had an extremely interesting case,” but by
28 • T H E H E M I N G W A Y r E V I E W

the end of the story he seems both serious and thoughtful. After Wilcox’s
taunt, “The hell with you,” he responds, “All in good time, Doctor. All in
good time. If there is such a place I shall certainly visit it. I have even had a
very small look into it. No more than a peek, really. I looked away almost at
once. And do you know what the young man said, Horace, when the good
Doctor here brought him in? He said, ‘Oh, I asked you to do it. I asked you
so many times to do it’” (CSS 301). While his “small look” into hell could sig-
nify any number of troubling experiences, he qualifies his statement by an
immediate reference to the boy, suggesting that his “peek” was occasioned by
the guilt he felt after the boy’s reminder that he “asked [him] so many times
to do it.” Furthermore, the three sentences in which Fischer sees and reacts
to hell are missing from all manuscript versions. The addition of the passage
increases the severity of the event, turning it from a mere topic of reception
room conversation into a tragic failure of humanity.
While Doc Fischer’s personal “hell” is a manifestation of his professional
guilt, the youth’s torment is both physical and epistemological. Like Freder-
ic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, the boy feels “trapped biologically” (AFTA
139), unable to stop “the way [he] get[s],” but he is also terrified by the
implications of his condition (CSS 299). Fischer tells him, “It’s a natural
thing” and reminds him that “what [he] complain[s] of is no sinful state
but the means of consummating a sacrament” (CSS 300). Despite Fischer’s
various explanations, the boy simply cannot accept his inability to curb the
changes taking place within his body. His lack of control and the apparent
irony of the title and date seem to lend themselves to a straightforward nat-
uralistic reading.7 As the two doctors recall the events, Doctor Wilcox, dis-
turbed by the marring of a holiday, even laments the boy’s choice to muti-
late himself on Christmas day (CSS 301). Doc Fischer, however, concludes,
“The significance of the particular day is not important” (CSS 301). Wilcox
sees this as an opportunity to insult Fischer on the basis of his Judaism, but
his affront is clearly just a reflection of his personal immaturity and feel-
ings of professional inadequacy. Fischer’s revelation, then, gives weight to
an otherwise ironic event, suggesting that it is of great import.
Wirt Williams argues that the hospital in “God Rest You Merry, Gentle-
men” is a “metaphor for the world” and that Hemingway, in this piece,
“views the human situation as virtually hopeless” (100–101). And the story
does offer a bleak view, if we are to accept the geographical scaffolding, of
the entire world, or “as much of it as [Hemingway] ha[d] seen” while trav-
 s h a n n o n w h i t l o c k l e v i t z k e • 29

eling between Kansas City and Constantinople. That the boy’s panic is
rooted in a misguided moralism is less significant than the revelation that
the characters are all walled off by private barriers that prohibit true com-
munication, incapacitated by the great “distances” that leave them isolated
from one another. The story ends with a boy who will probably die of
blood loss, two guilt-ridden doctors, and a narrator who could do nothing
more than stand idly by. Although each doctor has a different handicap—
Wilcox lacks basic sympathy and Fischer professional persuasiveness—
they are both unsuccessful in the end, failing as doctors treating a patient
and as men trying to relate. The ultimate tragedy in “God Rest You Merry,
Gentlemen,” then, is not only that the doctors cannot save the youth from
self-mutilation, but, more broadly, that the fundamental impossibility of
human connection leaves one human unable to save another.

n ote s
1. Two foundational analyses are Peter Hays’s “Hemingway and the Fisher King” and George
Monteiro’s “Hemingway’s Christmas Carol.” Hays discusses the king/healer role reversal in the
piece, while Monteiro examines the story’s narrative layers. Gary Harrington offers an insight-
ful explanation of Wilcox and Fischer’s relationship based on The Merchant of Venice, while
Robert Lamb also addresses anti-Semitism and explores the consequences of various “mis-
readings” that take place throughout the story. More recently, Nicole Camastra has demon-
strated the story’s musical allusions, arguing that the piece is “a profound and complex prose
hymn, celebrating the defeat necessary to negotiate faith in the modern world” (51).
2. Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes have called the Kansas City-Constantinople comparison
one of “Hemingway’s strangest analogies” (78). Peter Hays, on the other hand, argues that the
“setting is not important” because the piece is “based on universals” (“Fisher” 228). While
George Monteiro doesn’t address the setting at length, he does find the narrative structure
problematic: “Having built his story around perspectives, Hemingway fails to weld the narra-
tor’s to the others. The consequence, one concludes, is that the structure of ‘God Rest You
Merry, Gentlemen’ sets up expectations that are not satisfactorily fulfilled” (213).
3. Here, in an early indication of his desire to pair the two cities, Hemingway directly equates the
Kansas City viaduct with Constantinople’s centuries-old Galata Bridge.
4. I examined the manuscripts of the story and refer to those when paraphrasing or summariz-
ing passages. All direct quotations, however, are taken from Steve Paul, who was granted per-
mission to reproduce the drafts in his article “Heretofore Unpublished Hemingway Observa-
tions Give Character, Sense of Place to KC.”
5. Gerry Brenner discusses the “motif of confusion” (53) that runs throughout the Hemingway canon.
6. Nicole Camastra suggests that the most “‘puzzling’ aspects of the story rest in its narrative struc-
ture and not in its content,” but situates the narrator within the context of her argument by call-
ing attention to his humility (64). Julian Smith proposes an alternative explanation, reading
“Horace” as a young Jake Barnes who later realizes the story’s relevance in his own life.
30 • T H E H E M I N G W A Y r E V I E W

7. Carlos Baker calls “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” a “sardonic Christmas tale” about “mis-
taken piety” (36). George Monteiro cites Baker’s work as an example of a naturalistic reading
while reviewing the story’s criticism in “Hemingway’s Christmas Carol.”

wor k s c i te d
Anon. “Review of Winner Take Nothing.” Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography.
Ed. Audre Hanneman. Princeton, CT: Princeton UP, 1967. Item 232. 377–378.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner’s, 1969.
Brenner, Gerry. Concealments in Hemingway’s Works. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
Camastra, Nicole. “Hemingway’s Modern Hymn: Music and Church as Background Sources for
‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.’” The Hemingway Review 28.1 (Fall 2008): 51–67.
Comley, Nancy, and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. New
Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994.
Harrington, Gary. “Hemingway’s ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” Explicator 52.1 (1993): 51–53.
Hays, Peter. “Hemingway and the Fisher King.” The University Review 32.3 (1966): 225–228.
———. The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature. New York: New York UP, 1971.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Constantinople, Dirty White, Not Glistening and Sinister.” 1922. In Dateline
Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920–24. Ed. William White. New York: Scribn-
er’s, 1985. 227–229.
———. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribner’s, 2003.
———. “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New
York: Scribner’s, 1987. 298–301.
———. “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” JFK Folder 427. The Ernest Hemingway Collection.
John F. Kennedy Library. Boston, Massachusetts.
———. “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” JFK Folder 428. The Ernest Hemingway Collection.
John F. Kennedy Library. Boston, Massachusetts.
———. “Letter to Mary Pfeiffer.” 16 October 1933. In Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters. Ed. Car-
los Baker. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. 396–399.
———. “Old Constan.” 1922. In Dateline Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920–24.
Ed. William White. New York: Scribner’s, 1985. 239–240.
Lamb, Robert. “Hemingway’s Critique of Anti-Semitism: Semiotic Confusion in ‘God Rest You
Merry, Gentlemen.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33.1 (1996): 25–34.
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Matthew Bruccoli and C.E. Frazer Clark, Jr. Washington, D.C.: Microcard, 1973. 207–213.
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way Review 9.2 (Spring 1990): 169–173.
Paul, Steve. “Heretofore Unpublished Hemingway Observations Give Character, Sense of Place to
KC.” The Kansas City Star. 27 June 1999. http://www.kcstar.com/hemingway/ehkc.shtml .
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Meyers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. 181–183.
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