Still More Hemingway

Jan 10, 2023

For today’s post, I thought I’d put in another plug for my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word,” by providing an overview of some of the things that interest me in Hemingway’s writing and a preview of one of the episodes I’ve completed there (six episodes so far). Given my last post, “The Fish in the Log,” and my focus on Hemingway there, this seemed appropriate.

First, a little background. After I awakened to reading Hemingway with fresh eyes, unhampered by the ever-popular image of him as merely championing all things macho in his art, I started attending and presenting papers at Hemingway and American Lit. conferences and formalizing/pursuing what it was I started to glimpse as a graduate student learning to see his writing in a new way. I’ve also published some academic essays on his work, and—side note—one very cool thing about Hemingway scholarship is they have conferences in places relevant to his work; I’ve presented papers in Pamplona, Spain, St. Marie de la Mer, France, Havana, Cuba, Bimini, The Bahamas, Venice, Italy…. My hope is that the podcast will help lay the groundwork for a book.

A central theme to my podcast is the way Hemingway regularly envisions characters (mostly women) using artistic language and gesture to grapple with complex emotions/ideas. The first batch of episodes look to some of his early stories and his first collection, In Our Time, which average about 4 pages, so it is easy to take 10-15 minutes to read the story before listening to my critique.

In a 3-page story I address in Episode 4, “A Cat in the Rain,” we find American tourists, a man and his wife, stuck in their hotel room in a small, unnamed coastal town in Italy on a rainy day. The woman looks out the window to notice a cat huddled beneath a table trying to keep dry, and she suddenly decides she needs to get the “poor kitty stuck out in the rain.” She goes downstairs, stopping to notice the hotel keeper, listing things she “likes” about him: “she liked the serious way he took any complaints…she liked his big hands…,” but when she gets outside, the cat is gone. Coming back through the lobby, she again notices the hotel keeper, now referred to using the Italian word “Padrone.” At one point Hemingway writes: “Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important.” She later expresses a desire to grow her hair long, so she can make it into a “small, tight bun” that she can “feel.” The small, tight feeling the padrone gives her, somehow both small and large at the same time, her desire to grow her hair long in order to pull it into a small, tight bun and the cat who is curled up trying to make itself “small” and “tight” to keep dry but also evokes something big in her emotional response to it…all echo each other visually and also use the exact same words (“small,” “tight”). And it is the woman who is making these connections, who paints the picture for us of these echoing dynamics (not the man, who remains laying down, reading throughout the story). Seeing the cat in the rain trying to keep dry sparks a range of emotions in the woman, emotions she then works to express and understand—using the toolbox of an artist: imagery, repetition, metaphor.

The story shows us a woman working hard to unravel an emotion that, like the cat, lies small and huddled up inside her. The reader is pushed to contend with a story that evokes its meaning only through these simple (and not so simple) mirroring images; there are no abstract handholds—just the experience of the story, so we are left feeling something very much like the urgency the woman feels. Just like that thing which is small and tight but at the same time “of supreme importance,” the story uses simple, small language to evoke something much more than the sum of its parts. At the end of the story, the woman reflects on other things she wants alongside the cat, a table of her own, long hair she can feel when she pulls it into a tight bun, but she settles most emphatically on the cat, “If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I want a cat. I want a cat. I want a cat now.” She knows she is saying something more than that when she uses these words, especially given all the connections she has made, that she is expressing some deep, spiritual need. Notably, the male character, her husband, lays back on the bed, reading, tells her to “shut up” and to “get something to read.” But she has been reading the landscape all around her as a way of finding and expressing something essential….

I’ll stop there and invite you to read the story and listen to Episode 4 of my podcast if you’d like to hear more. 🙂

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Still More Hemingway

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