JOHN HOLLANDER

Hemingway’s Extraordinary Actuality

O f all the Hemingway material to be posthumously unveiled, short

stories dating from before World War II would surely be the most welcome.
This awkward volume The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories brings
together four previously uncollected stories mostly set in Madrid during the
siege, with The Fifth Column, Hemingway’s play set in the same scene. This
last is already familiar to us through inclusion in the canonical old Modern
Library Giant edition of forty-nine short stories (until Scribner’s removed it,
for undisclosed reasons when they took over the collected stories reprint
again in the Fifties). These four stories are all a bit long-winded: they are not
of the genre of the World War I sketches. They propound a world of
desperation, military blunders, a senseless slaying of a civilian in a café, the
necessary dirtiness of turning in a spy, and the crippling aspect of the
International presence on the Loyalist side. Within that world, familiar
Hemingwayan acts of grace occur, in a kind of lowkeyed way, and the
genuine people are mostly being hurt. The Spaniards all speak the patented
Hemingway dialect, no contractions and muy formal. But the stories are
authentic enough, and are quite better than the worst of those in the
collected volume. It only seems a pity that these were not included in it,
instead of appearing in this somewhat artificial format: “The Denunciation,”
“The Butterfly and the Tank,” “Night Before Battle,” and “Under the Ridge”

From Ernest Hemingway (Modern Critical Views), edited by Harold Bloom. © 1985 by John
Hollander.

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together take up 62 pages. In any event, once the publishers were committed
to such a presentation, they might at least have included a note on the
publishing history of its contents. But such a selection does cause us to reflect
on the nature of his best stories. They belong to what may turn out to have
been, save for The Sun Also Rises, his major genre. Hemingway’s marvelous
delicacy, his wielding of the powerful right cross, as it were, of nuance after
so many jabs of apparent bald presentation of fact, his deployment of the
resonances of a conversational phrase that remains unmatched—except in
Joyce’s Dubliners—by all of his followers, including the frequently formidable
John O’Hara, are all more clearly manifest in his sketches than in his grandes
machines. His best stories reveal a narrator who is a much greater figure and
more clearly touched by a bit of nobility than any of his fictional heroes,
whether earlier anti-heroes or later naively sentimental ones to whom we
cannot help but condescend. It is not only the celebrated tone of voice of the
narration (troped, as always, by a palpable style—but what else is new?)
enabling it to personify itself so well, which accounts for these stories’
peculiarly lyrical power. (And even Nick Adams is characterized by the
sensibility which is internal monologue in, say, the “Big Two-Hearted River”
stories, and so which he shares with the putatively more distanced narration).
It is the very fabric of what some Frenchified critics would call the
narratology, the very telling of the tale of telling, which itself pitches these
accounts of episodes and moments at, and not above, the tension of the lyre.
Wallace Stevens wrote of Hemingway in 1942 as a poet; “the most
significant of living poets, so far as the subject of extraordinary actuality is
concerned.” In one of his Adagia Stevens observed that “In the poem of
extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination,” and he
might as well have been characterizing not only the stories themselves, but
the pregnant parataxis which forever refuses to allow of trivial connections,
and which marks several levels of Hemingway’s writing. The cursive
sentence structure manifests a refusal to subordinate clauses, not out of fake
naïveté, nor out of a weak misconstruction of Gertrude Stein, but rather, in
a language supremely conscious of persons in places, in order to avoid the
reductiveness that exposition and description, in their zeal to account for the
way things seem to be, often effect. A certain kind of trivial literary history
would link Hemingway’s manner to another sort of reduction, the stripping
of the rhetorical varnish demanded by the aesthetic programs of Continental
modernism. But any serious reader knows such rhetoric to be of the nature
of the wood itself, and that varnish, stain, paint, raw creosoted surfaces, or
whatever, merely represent differing rhetorical projections.
Yet beyond the styling of the prose, Hemingway’s parataxis stands
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between larger elements, full of possibility and silence like the white spaces
between printed stanzas of verse. The impossibility of allegorizing the
italicized interchapters (those beautifully crafted lyrical vignettes—or are
they more like dramatic monologues?) placed between the reminiscent
stories in In Our Time in order to make them fit the stories they precede or
follow, marks the effect of another level of poetical parataxis. Insofar as they
act like macaronic refrains in some other language, placed between stanzas
of a ballad, they seem to connect in one way while (or, perhaps, by) palpably
disconnecting even further. Insofar as they present an unmeditative present
in narrowed vignette, and a more fully realized past, they mediate between
the opening of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” say, and the standard vulgar
cinematic dissolve into flashback.
Nowhere is Hemingway’s poetry of “extraordinary actuality” more
fully realized, perhaps, than in a story which he once declared to be a
favorite, the one from Men Without Women called “Hills Like White
Elephants.” In this sketch, which Dorothy Parker rightly perceived as
“delicate and tragic,” an American couple waiting for a train at a small station
in Spain are overheard, in about six pages of dialogue, while a bout of what
must be a continuing disagreement about an abortion (the young man keeps
maintaining that “It’s perfectly simple;” the young woman knows that it, and
much else, is not) gradually decays. The dialogue is framed by bits of
description—rather like stage directions in their length and frequency of
occurrence, but also unlike them, for the most part, in that they keep cutting
away from the dialogue to describe a passage of scenery, or to recall such a
passage previously invoked. The story opens with an observation of a bit of
the landscape: “The hills across the Ebro were long and white,” and the
ellipsis of the more epistemologically plausible example—“Seen from the
small railroad station in Castile on a hot afternoon, the extensive ridge of
hills across the valley of the Ebro looked white”—moves the sentence from
the rhetoric of novelistic point of view into that of lyrical trope. After some
preliminary dialogue about ordering drinks, the narration observes that the
girl “was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the
country was brown and dry.”

“They look like white elephants,” she said.

“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”

Even were it not for the synecdochal title, the apparent-white-

elephantness of the hills has become a counter in their conversation, and
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leads to the first indication of the trouble between them, the passage from
disillusion to dissolution which the vignette of talk and scene embraces:

“Well, let’s try and have a fine time.”

“All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white
elephants. Wasn’t that bright?”
“That was bright.”
“I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it—look
at things and try new drinks?”
“I guess so.”
The girl looked across at the hills.
“They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like
white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through
the trees.”

The girl’s looking at the hills describes a totally different act from the
disaffected sightseeing of the “look at things and try new drinks,” of course,
and the hills have been privileged by the narration to begin with. Even when
she retracts her formulation about the white elephants, in the interests of
maintaining the surface of the “fine time,” she cannot abandon her
observation entirely. What for the reader of novels constitutes her slip about
the “skin” of the hills, operates in the poem of the sketch to reaffirm the
truth and rightness and brightness of the original and originating trope:
The ridge of hills, low peaked and undulant, lined up in circus fashion,
trunk to tail, parade across the middle-high horizon, calm, beneficent,
reaffirming the health of distant vision. The narration, and the girl, both
know this. But this image of possibility and delight is tragically and
inevitably linked, by the ways of the world, to a darker, narrower emblem,
and as soon as the conversation moves to the matter of the abortion, the
girl’s pregnancy itself becomes part of the matter. Proverbially, the “white
elephant” of unwanted possession, the objectified burden (which comes, as
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable elegantly puts it, from the story of a
Siamese king who “used to make a present of a white elephant to courtiers
he wished to ruin”), the ugly and useless bric-a-brac, gets allusively stuck to
that pregnancy, even as the girl’s momentarily repressed sense of her body
(what will she look like to herself in her ninth month?) may perhaps be
reflected as well.
And it is this touch of a more narrowed emblem which darkens the
long, white symbole of the hills. After a later turn of unsatisfactory false
resolution (she agrees to the operation, he returns with “I don’t want you to
 Hemingway’s Extraordinary Actuality 83

do it if you feel that way”) the narration again cuts away (and again, one can
hardly avoid the cinematic verb) to what is there:

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across,
on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks
of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The
shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the
river through the trees.
“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have
everything and every day we make it more impossible.”

This is a more pictorial landscape now, and less of a visionary one. And yet,
its mode of accessibility to the reading eye, the nearby growth of grain and
tree, the promise of plenitude and the promise of continuity in the glimpse
of the river—all of these lost before to the beyondness of the elephantine
hills—now comprise a full figure of what the girl calls “all this.” The
parataxis of what should in more expository narrative be the adduced moral,
and which is here replaced by the girl’s statement, seems far more delicate
than another famous moment of cutting from dialogue to glimpse of scene
in American literature. The cloud about to pass in front of the moon in
Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” fills in a few minutes of the
wife’s waiting for her husband to report on the condition of the old man who,
it will turn out, has died. The wife says:

“I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud

Will hit or miss the moon.”
It hit the moon.
Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.

The ad hoc omen (“It hit the moon”) decays into a schematic trope in the last
line, explicitly connecting the phenomenon and the interpeting observer. But
Hemingway’s glimpse is more elusively parabolic than this, and certainly
more Wordsworthian in one mode even as it is less so in another.
In general, the riddling power of a figure like that of the hills lies in the
way Hemingway’s narrative controls the mode of figuration. The hills are, at
the outset, simply there, as given as given can be; then they are grasped by the
girl, become more and more rhetorically problematic as the brief dialogue
unrolls, and finally vanish behind a later, sadder kind of landscape. And yet
their beauty is nobler than their narrowed emblematic meaning, and that
84 John Hollander

beauty calls up a wider and stronger evocation (like that of, say, the shadow
of the distant poplar tree falling across the face of Tennyson’s sleeping
Mariana). I have twice used the term “cut” to describe the movement away
from dialogue to glimpse of scene in this story. I should not have thought
that early readers of it would have felt anything cinematic about it—indeed,
what became momentarily celebrated about the story was the girl’s string of
seven pleases in her request, at the end of all their discourse, that the young
man stop talking. (Virginia Woolf, in a singularly obtuse review of Men
Without Women in 1927, expresses nothing but impatience with the dialogue,
and sneers; “At last we are inclined to cry out with the little girl ‘Would you
please ...’” How she can call the quite grown-up young woman, fully
equipped with a dose of Weltschmerz, a “little girl” is most curious and
suggests that she thinks the operation in question to be a tonsillectomy.) It
would not be until the days of 1960’s Italian cinema that the amazing
resemblance of this story to an Antonioni shooting script—in the relation of
dialogue and shots of landscape cut away to as a move in the dialogue itself,
rather than as mere punctuation, and ultimately in the way in which dialogue
and uninterpreted glimpse of scene interpret each other—would become
apparent. But the poetics of that kind of film, and the poetics of
extraordinary actuality in Hemingway, are connected by more than analogy,
for the literary-historical line from Hemingway to the novels of Pavese and
on to the films of Antonioni is quite clear.
In stories like this one, like “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” like
“The Light of the World” and, inevitably, like “A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place,” the unfolding of the central tropes has the kind of power of lyrical
movement and tells a tale of the genesis of complex meaning which the more
familiar chronicling of the longer stories may not be able to achieve. They
may make even the Kilimanjaro and Macomber stories seem, some day, like
anecdotes.