As others read us: American fiction abroad; Ernest Hemingway, part one

This is the sixth of a series of programs entitled, As Others Read Us, American Fiction Abroad, produced and recorded by the Literary Society of the University of Massachusetts under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center in cooperation with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. The subject of this hour's discussion is the foreign reputation of Ernest Hemingway. The two critics who will discuss the impact abroad of Hemingway's books are Mr. Henry Pair and Mr. Charles Fenton, both of the faculty of Yale University. Moderator of the discussion will be Mr. Maxwell Goldberg, Chairman of the English Department at the University of Massachusetts and Executive Director of the College English Association. Mr. Goldberg. Thank you, Mr. Niedig. Today we are to talk about Ernest Hemingway and read from his works. Ernest Hemingway was born in 1898 at Oak Park, Illinois.

Today, 58 years later, the author of a collection of the most powerful novels and short stories by an American, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway is by some critics claimed to be the most distinguished living American novelist. The further claim is made of this author that more Europeans know Americans and American culture through Hemingway's works than through those of any other living American writer. What about these claims? To help us assess them, to help us clarify, substantiate, perhaps modify them, we have with us Mr. Henry Pair and Mr. Charles Fenton, both of Yale University. Mr. Pair, Chairman of the Department of French at Yale, is a well-known French critic and scholar and the author of a study called the Contemporary French novel published in 1955. Mr. Fenton of the Department of English is Mr. Hemingway's most recent biographer.

His work entitled The Apprenticeship of Hemingway was published in 1954. Together, our guests bring to us highly informed European and American opinion about Hemingway. Now as we start our discussion of the impact of Hemingway abroad, particularly in Europe, we're struck by a fact that seems to run the other way. It is that Europe has made a powerful impact on Hemingway, with the exception of to have and have not, all of Hemingway's major works are laid in settings outside the United States. So are many of his short stories. The action of his most widely read novels, the Sun also rises, a farewell to arms, and for whom the bell toes takes place in France, Italy, and Spain. Now this fact has the appeal of obvious paradox, but is there more to it? Is it more than a kind of coincidence attractive to the ironic biographer or critic?

Is there a cause-effect relationship significant for the theme of our colloquy? Perhaps one central clue to the importance of Hemingway in Europe lies in the way Europe has been pervasive in so much of Hemingway. Mr. Fenton, I know you've given much thought to this question. What do you say about it? I think that we could apply a quick kind of generalization to Hemingway, which would apply to many of his contemporaries. Those American writers who came into maturity in the 1920s, and for whom Europe represented a release and an escape from the confinements of America and from the stress of what they saw as the excessive puritanism of this country, the materialism, the Philistine attitude, all those things which were best summed up perhaps by the late Henry Mankin. So Hemingway, you remember as a very young man, persistently, virtually fought his way into the American Red Cross Ambulance Corps despite his poor eyesight.

This was not only to preserve democracy, but it was also to get him a trip to Europe, and it was a meaningful experience that he had in Italy in 1918. And I think in many ways it was with great reluctance that he was repatriated to the United States in 1919. And from that moment until 1922, when he persuaded the Toronto Star to send him abroad as a kind of a string correspondent in Europe, he was extremely restless in the United States and it wasn't until he got to Paris in 1922 that he really seems to have gotten his footing both as an individual and as a young writer with a momentum. I don't think it's possible to overemphasize the importance of Europe in Hemingway's education, personal or artistic. Well, now can you turn for a moment to the other aspect of it and suggest what if anything, this absorption by Hemingway of Europe has had to do with the impact of Hemingway on

Europe? Well, I think in the first place, like all of us Europeans have been pleased that Hemingway found their continent and their cultures so fruitful, and this has raised him in their estimation just as the French or the English or the Italians would like you and me better if we expressed our approval and approbation of their culture. But beyond this too, I think many literate Europeans have felt for generations that one of the great building flaws of our own American culture has been its formlessness. And in Hemingway, a man with an enormous attraction for a rather rigid, stratified code and a rigid society, they've seen an American with a sagacity, so to speak, to appreciate the richness of European formal living.

I suppose that Hemingway's addiction to the rigid, stratified code and the rigid society of which you speak is in some ways reflected in his frequent use of military men as protagonists. And of course, the presence of the American army officer in Europe permits Hemingway to show an American who does have the sagacity to appreciate the richness of European history or of European formal living as you put it. Do you remember Colonel Richard Cantwell in across the river and into the trees? Colonel Cantwell is a professional soldier. He has spent most of his life in the army and a considerable amount of it in actual combat. He fought in Italy as a volunteer before he was 20. He was present as an observer during the Spanish Civil War. And he was at the front in various major actions of World War II. He's been repeatedly wounded, he's been divorced by his wife, and he's been somewhat

unappreciated by his superiors. Now he might suppose Colonel Cantwell at 50 to be a tough old vulture, but Hemingway shows him to us on his way to a holiday weekend in Venice riding through the Italian countryside in a staff car with an enlisted driver named Jackson. He saw beyond the line of close bunched brown trees ahead, a sail moving along. It was a big red sail, rake sharply back from the peak and it moved slowly behind the trees. I shouldn't always move your heart to see a sail moving along the country that Colonel thought, why does it move my heart to see the great, slow, pale oxen? It must be the gate as well as the look of them in the size and the color. But a good, fine, big mule or a string of pack mules in good condition moves me too. So does a coyote every time I see one, and a wolf, gated like no other animal, gray and

sure of himself carrying that heavy head and with the hostile eyes. Ever see any wolves out around Roland's Jackson? No sir, wolves were gone before my time. They poisoned him out. Plenty of coyotes though. Do you like coyotes? I like to hear them knights. So do I. Better than anything, except seeing a ship sailing along through the country. There's a boat doing that over there sir. On the sea lay canal. There's a sailing barge going to Venice. This wind is off the mountains now and she makes it along pretty good. It's liable to turn real cold tonight if this wind holds. Colonel was looking ahead now to see where the canal road joined the main highway again. There he knew that he would see it on a clear day such as this. Across the marshes, brown as those at the mouth of the Mississippi around Pylatown are in winter, and with their reeds bent by the heavy north wind, he saw the square tower of the church at Torchello and the high campanelli of Burano beyond it.

The sea was a slate blue and he could see the sails of twelve sailing barges running with the wind. I'll have to wait until we cross the days of river above Noguera to see it perfectly he thought. It is strange to remember how we fought back there along the canal that went to defend it and we never saw it. At one time I was back as far as Noguera and it was clear and cold like today and I saw it across the water but I never got into it. It is my city though because I fought for it when I was a boy and now that I am half a hundred years old they know I fought for it, him and Parona and they treat me well. There's the view Jackson, stop her by the side of the road and we'll take a look. Colonel and the driver walked over to the Venice side of the road and looked across the goon that was whipped by the strong cold wind from the mountains that sharpened all the outlines of the buildings so they were geometrically clear. That's Torcello directly opposite us.

That's where the people lived that were driven off the mainland by the Visigoths. They built that church you see there with a square tower. There were thirty thousand people lived there once and they built that church to honor their lord and to worship him. Then after they built it the mouth of the sealer river silted up or a big flood changed it and all that land we came through just now got flooded and started to breed mosquitoes and malaria hit them. They all started to die so the elders got together and decided they should pull out to a healthy place that would be defensible with boats and where the Visigoths and the Lombards and the other bandits couldn't get at them because these bandits had no sea power. The Torcello boys were all great boatmen so they took the stones of all their houses in barges like that one we just saw and they built Venice. Am I boring you Jackson? No sir. I had no idea who pioneered Venice. That was the boys from Torcello. They were very tough and they had very good taste in building. They came from a little place up the coast called Carly but they drew on all the people from the towns and the farms behind when the Visigoths overran them.

It was a Torcello boy who was running arms into Alexandria who located the body of St. Mark and smuggled it out under a load of fresh pork so the infidel customs guards wouldn't check him. This boy brought the remains of St. Mark to Venice and he's their patron saint and they have a cathedral there to him. But by that time they were trading so far to the east that the architecture is pretty Byzantine for my taste. They never built any better than that at the start there in Torcello. St. Mark's Square is where the pigeons are and where they have that big cathedral looks like a sort of moving picture pal that says no. Right Jackson you're on the ball if that's the way you look at it. Now you look beyond Torcello you will see the lovely Campanili on Burrano that is damn near as much list on it as the leaning tower of Pisa. The Burrano is a very overpopulated little island where the women make wonderful lace and the men make bambinis and work day times in the glass factories and that next island you see on beyond the other Campanili which is Murano. They make wonderful glass.

Now when you look past Murano you see Venice. That's my town. Take one good look at it. This is where you can see how it all happened but nobody ever looks at it from here. It's a beautiful view. Thank you sir. Okay. Let's roll. Mr. Fenton you were speaking a moment ago of the response of Europeans to Hemingway. Would you say that this response justifies the generalization I made in my opening remarks that claim made by some that probably more Europeans know Americans and American culture after Mr. Hemingway's works and through those of any other living American writer? Suppose no academic can really give a clear cut as sent to any question as straightforward as that and I would hedge to a degree and argue that and perhaps Mr. Parr could say more about this than I that perhaps does pass us certainly Faulkner in the last decade have perhaps surpassed Hemingway in their appeal to the intellectuals but certainly even an academic could agree that his influence and the sort of mirror quality that he has had

for Europeans is almost as substantial as any contemporary. Mr. Parr you've exercised admirable restraint thus far and now I'm going to turn to you and ask you whether you agree with Mr. Fenton in his comments whether you differ and what respects you you agree and in what respects you differ. I hesitate not to agree with such an admiral specialist as Mr. Fenton who knows more about Hemingway than probably any other man alive and certainly more than I do myself but it's very hard for a Frenchman to agree with anybody and not even to agree with himself so that I'm afraid perhaps I shouldn't like to point out a few other points which Mr. Fenton has in part left out. It is true I believe that the fact that Hemingway has laid so many of his stories in Europe helped the Europeans be initiated into a keen understanding and appreciation of his works. That being said in my own opinion the greatest influence perhaps that Europe had on Hemingway

was an artistic influence that is to say Hemingway seems to me to have absorbed the greatly especially of two European novelists or storytellers one being the Frenchman Mary and the other one the Italian Verist as the college in Italy writer Giovanni Verga and to some extent of course he brought back to the French and to the Italians who liked him better than any other two nations in Europe to some extent I think he brought back to them something which was already familiar to them. I would not however go quite so far Mr. Fenton seems to go in saying that the fact that Hemingway stories are laid in Europe helped very much the understanding of Hemingway in Europe because up to all we have some parallel cases and yet different ones like the one William Forkner. William Forkner's novels are laid as you know in a certain state the state of Mississippi for the most part extremely different from anything the French have but just for that very reason he had the appeal of strangeness to the French and the Europeans and on the hold they have liked Forkner about as much perhaps even more than they have Hemingway.

Any comments on that Mr. Fenton? No I suppose really all I could do would be to hedge one thing I would add and I think Mr. Pierce points about a mirror may in particular well drawn there is a good deal of evidence that Demopus was perhaps even a strong a positive direct influence. Hemingway hasn't always been generous in his acknowledgement of artistic debt but Demopus he paid an extraordinarily strong debt in one of his articles about the short story and he linked Demopus as being as important to him. As Ring Lardner for example which was quite a concession for Hemingway to make. The other point I would make would simply be that I think it's always a dangerous force though tempting to discuss Forkner in Hemingway side by side in any connotation and I think it's all in some ways I think the appeal to Europeans of Forkner has been the appeal of

the exotic in America and the appeal of Hemingway has been that his people have always been primarily Americans but acting out their dramas against a European background I wouldn't press it beyond that. You're probably right there is also of course the atmosphere of a visionary view of life as it were on nightmare in both writers even more marked in Forkner which has been greatly to the Europeans. Absolutely. You're certainly quite right also about Mopassan although I think on the whole Hemingway is the greatest storyteller myself that Mopassan ever was obviously like Gauls were there and many others in the English language he owe the great deal to Mopassan and of course to Stardal especially in his portrayal of war in his wrong and novels and he did acknowledge that he had some debt to Stardal and even that he ought to lick him. Mr. Perry you've made some important generalizations right in the preceding several moments I'd like to come back to my teasing question or how do you feel about that statement that probably more Europeans know Americans and American culture through Mr. Hemingway's works than

for those of any other living American writer. I believe that on the whole is probably true. We might have brought of course another case which is somewhat parallel to it and that is the case of St. Louis. Forty-wide and a few years before Hemingway came into Vogue in Europe more Europeans probably saw America through the eyes of St. Louis than through Hemingway but then Hemingway stepped in and from 1930 on I think he was probably lead to the Europeans most faithful mirror to the life in America than any other American writer. Now that we've had Mr. Hemingway step onto the center of the stage would you give us a picture of how Hemingway fared among the Europeans say from the moment of his first entrance on through perhaps to the present. Certainly I should try at least it's always extremely difficult to generalize about any influence because influences of several kinds and on many levels to some extent Hemingway was probably more widely read than even Faulkner, Dors Pazos and even St. Louis. But now the quality of an influence often matters more than the quantitative number of copies

sold. Or rather I should have said the quality of the peoples who have been influenced by Hemingway. And in this sense Hemingway I think meant a great deal because a number of important European writers began after 1930 also to be powerful influence by his technique, by his way of writing prose and also by what we make all the content of his works. If I may perhaps say a few more words about this because it is a very complex question. I think that the history of the influence of Hemingway over say French fiction and Italian fiction which will some they have to be written might be divided into two periods. And I would say one would be the decade from 1930 to the break out of World War II in Europe, 1939 or 1940. And the second would be the events during World War II and especially the aftermath of World War II. In 1930 also Europe, France especially was sick of the psychological novel and of the novel of analysis full of introspection and sometimes written in cork line room as was the case as you know with Proust.

Proust and G.D. and Cotto and D.R.M.L. and Moriak and so on and had their influence in French fiction and people wanted to turn elsewhere. They then became aware of two immense problems which again loomed in the horizon of Europeans. One was the emergence of the threat of a new World War which was conspicuous from 1930 and especially 1933 on. The other of course was the political and social problem of misery, unemployment, starvation in many lands and so on. The French writers then felt that they could not be content with their eternal novel of analysis which was content with analyzing a few motives valid only for a very small number of smart people in the intellectually elite. And that's when they discovered Hemingway after the Sonorzo rises and even after farewell to Ames and Hemingway of course helped them shake off that influence and for a while try to seize the inner man through and now to an approach as it were. The influence was very great then upon people like Malro, like Gionneau, like Morte Arlan, like Bernanau's and the greatest writers of that decade 1930-40. After 1940 another group of writers came up and I suppose we may well say that the most

typical of them would be those whom we call the existentialists. They also came to South and their followers write the great deal of Hemingway but in somewhat a new light what was most impressive for them then in Hemingway was I think a sense of the futility of war, a sense of the absurdity of life and also that tragic, nocturnal as it were a sense of life and of death and that obsession with death which Malcolm Cowley and other American critics at the same time were pointing out as so very significant in the works of Hemingway. In a way I suppose one might say that there is in Hemingway to some extent the substance of an existentialist and I'm sure some Frenchman as soon as Hemingway is dead which of course we hope will be very many years from now we write a dissertation about the existentialism of anist Hemingway. He does exist and he thinks after he has existed when he tries to think at all and he doesn't put of course thought before existence. Toward the end of a farewell to arms there's a passage that your hypothetical French scholar might want a sight in this connection.

Lieutenant Henry is sitting in the hospital at Luzanne just after Catherine's baby has been taken by Cesarean section. The baby is dead and Lieutenant Henry has already had more than a strong premonition that Catherine herself may die too. Here's the passage. I sat down on the chair in front of a table where there were nurses reports hung on clips at the side and looked out of the window. I could see nothing but the dark and the rain falling across the light from the window. So that was it. The baby was dead. That was why the doctor looked so tired. But why had they acted the way they did in the room with him? I suppose he would come around and start breathing probably. I had no religion but I knew he ought to have been baptized. But what if he never breathed at all? He hadn't.

He had never been alive except in Catherine. I felt him kick there often enough. But I hadn't for a week. Maybe he was choked all the time for a little kid. I wish the hell had been choked like that. No, I didn't. Still, there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You didn't know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules, and the first time they caught you off base, they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Amel, who gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi, but they killed you in the end. You could count on that, stay around and they would kill you. Once in camp, I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants warmed out and went first towards the center where the

fire was, then turned back and ran toward the end. When they were enough on the end, they fell off into the fire. Some got out. Their bodies burnt and flattened and went off not knowing where they were going, but most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off the ground, but I didn't do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water and the burning log only steamed the ants. Upstairs I met the nurse coming down the hall. I just called you at the hotel. What's wrong?

Mrs. Henry has had a hemorrhage. The doctor is with her. Is it dangerous? Very dangerous. Wait here. The nurse went into the room and shut the door. I sat outside in the hall. Everything was gone inside me. I knew she was going to die and I prayed that she would not. Don't let her die. God please make her not die. I'll do anything you say if you don't let her die. You took the baby. That was all right, but don't let her die. Mr. Henry, you can come in now. I'm going to go to the bathroom. Poor darling. You're all right, Cat. You're going to be all right. I'm going to die. I hate it. Don't touch me. Oh, poor darling, touch me all you want. You'll be all right, Cat, I know.

I meant to write you a letter to have if anything happened, but I didn't do it. Do you want me to get a priest or anyone to come and see you? Just you. I'm not afraid. I just hate it. You won't do our things with another girl. Say the same things, will you? Never. I want you to have girls, though. I don't want them. Doctor. You're talking too much. Mr. Henry must go out. He can come back again later. You're not going to die. You must not be silly. All right. I'll come and stay with you, Nate. Please go out of the room. You cannot talk. I'll be right outside. Don't worry, darling. I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick. I'll be outside.

Call me. I waited outside in the hole. I waited a long time. The nurse came to the door. I'm afraid Mrs. Henry is very ill. Is she dead? No, but she's unconscious. It seems she had one hair red after another. They couldn't stop it. I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died. She was unconscious all the time. And it didn't take her very long to die. Mr. Henry, is there anything I can do tonight? No. There is nothing to do. Can I take you to your hotel? No, thank you. I'm going to stay here a while. I know there is nothing to say. I cannot tell you. No, there's nothing to say. Good night.

You won't let me take you to your hotel? No. Thank you. It was the only thing to do. The operation told. I don't want to talk about it. Good night, Mr. Henry. You can't come in the room now, Mr. Henry. Yes, I can. You can't come in yet. You get out. The other one too. But after I got them out and shut the door and turned off the light, it wasn't any good. It was like saying goodbye to a statue. After a while, I went off and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.