from Masters Writing on Language,
Reading, and Representation: T. E. Hulme’s Subtext in Death in the Afternoon
Ernest Hemingway’s Key
West Years, extending from 1928 till 1939, were years of intense
reflection and work whose outcome was a literary product of the highest
quality. Hemingway’s 1930s writing was remarkably experimental and
successful. His work of these years includes Death in the Afternoon (1932), Winner Take Nothing (1933), Green Hills of Africa (1935), “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), and “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber” (1936). In addition there are the Spanish Civil War writings:
obviously his NANA dispatches, but also his one play The Fifth Column (1938), several
short stories, and the long novel For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), whose writing Hemingway started
already in 1939 before definitely leaving both Key West and his second
wife Pauline for a new life in Cuba.
The Key West years were for Hemingway both a period of recontextualization and translation of the literary ideas he had received in Paris between 1922 and 1930, ideas whose validity he questioned and tested anew on the American soil of Key West. Death in the Afternoon (1932) problematizes the influential set of literary tenets which were widely circulated among the American expatriates in Paris in the twenties including two central ideas that we now associate with Hemingway but which he found in Europe and used within the texts that he wrote in his new southern American home. What he learned and practiced in his Paris years about ethics and aesthetics was attuned to the Paris avant-garde literary thought and, once in Key West, might be revised and accommodated within the new cultural context, with Death in the Afternoon, a product of the new circumstances, being a key text we quote from when we speak about Hemingway’s iceberg theory or his literary treatment of death and art as inseparable. What we cannot find in that book is an explicit statement on the (sub)texts that provide a background for these central issues in Hemingway’s literary craft. We need to know that there are two fundamental imagist subtexts to Death in the Afternoon, the American Ezra Pound’s imagist Manifesto, which supports Hemingway’s iceberg theory, and the British Thomas Ernest Hulme’s imagist Speculations (1924), a collection of essays that lent its weight to Hemingway’s iceberg.
Here I will limit myself to drawing the main lines connecting Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon to the Hulme subtext as formed by the notes and essays on language and representation which Hulme wrote before WW I and which were published later about the mid twenties when Ernest Hemingway was in Paris and most needed to learn about his craft and to get published. Summarizing, we can cite Hulme’s “Notes on Language and Style” written c. 1907 and published in Criterion (1925), and both “Romanticism and Classicism” and “Bergson’s Theory of Art” written c. 1912 and published posthumously in the 1924 collection Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art.
In the act of writing Death in the Afternoon Hemingway is subtly testifying to his completion of a first phase in his artist’s life and career. He is telling his readers, present and future, how long the first learning phase in the artist’s career takes and how hard and necessary the whole process is. In the first pages of Death in the Afternoon Hemingway confesses to his former inadequacy as a writer when he writes
I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what
the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced . . . the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or,
with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)
In Hulme’s subtext we can read:
There are then two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them. This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold on infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Wherever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art. (“Romanticism and Classicism” 772)
In the Hemingway and Hulme passages there is the same insistence on associating truth, good art, and unconventional technique. Hemingway uses the past tense “[good writing] was beyond me” in reference to the past because now in his Key West present, he is a different man and a better writer. The fact that the reader is actually reading Death in the Afternoon tells her that the author has been successful. Having overcome his initial difficulties, now the writer finally knows what he did not know before. He knows what is important beyond appearances, he sees meaning outside himself because he is now able to know himself. He has learned to differentiate between his own real feelings and the feelings he is supposed to have and has been taught to feel. In other words, he has learned to disregard conventional emotions and ideas pressed on him by his upbringing in a WASP middle-class family and by a traditional American education.
After eight years spent in Paris and elsewhere in Europe watching other writers and learning from them as much as about them, years devoted to improving his writing, Hemingway considers himself to be experienced enough both in the art of the corrida and in the art of literature to start writing Death in the Afternoon. About ten years have been necessary for him to be able to tell in written form what he has slowly learnt to understand and appreciate, things that he never knew before he came to Europe and experienced the Paris literary circles, the war in Italy, and the Spanish bullfights. They are things that he knows now in 1932 but which have taken him time to see and understand before he has been able to state them “purely enough.”
The Spanish bullfight has been one of the things difficult to understand and to write on, but now that Hemingway has managed to write a long book on them, Death in the Afternoon, and tackled well a difficult subject matter, he knows he has passed a test and proved his expertise in the art of writing. Good writing is, for him, the art of “putting down” on paper what one knows well from one’s own real experience. Hemingway elaborates in the passage quoted above a theory of writing as derived from experience which philosophers like Henri Bergson would subscribe to, a theory expressed in Hulme’s essays “Romanticism and Classicism,” “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” and “Notes on Language and Style.” In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway gives a step-by-step account of a process that should be more or less consciously followed by every writer: (a) exposure to external action: watching, listening, (b) internalization: feeling, experiencing, having emotions, liking, disliking . . . , (c) selective recalling: isolating the elements in the external action that provoked the emotion, and (d) selective telling: stating purely. The process follows a movement from the outside to the inside and to the outside again: the transmutation of external action into internal experience and then the transmutation of experience into text by means of the art of writing which allows the reader to have an aesthetic way of knowing reality more special than the everyday non-artistic knowledge we have of it. For Hulme too art is a special mode of knowing made accessible to the reader by the writer’s love of accuracy: “The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description . . . But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts” (“Romanticism and Classicism” 772). These last words are Hulme’s but they sound like Hemingway’s.
After reading Death in the Afternoon in the light of its Hulme subtext it becomes clear that Hemingway’s genuine interest in the bullfight as an art was always subordinated to a higher interest, Hemingway’s interest in writing about the bullfight, or what is the same, his interest in the art of literature as it helps to represent another world or another art, the world of Spain and the art of bullfighting.
The bullfight answers to a theory of spectacle based on a very general theory of art and representation which appeals to Hemingway greatly for its truth and simplicity. In the bullfight Hemingway sees a living reminder that all creativity and all art rely on destruction in a more or less obvious manner. The bullfighter’s art clearly “deals with death and death wipes it out” (Death in the Afternoon 99). The bullfighter kills the bull to make art. Then the monosabios come for the spoils and the plaza sweepers wipe out the traces of the fight printed in the arena. The artistic effect remains in the memory of the spectator, like the memory of things gone. In the case of literary writing, a permanent art, the association between art and destruction exists as essentially, though perhaps less obviously, as in the bullfight. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway stresses the important role that the desire for permanence plays in literature and more specifically in his own writing. It is the desire not to lose anything that was once experienced and loved and treasured as memories are treasured before they can be recalled in the writing. Hemingway writes: “We’ve seen it all go and we’ll watch it go again. The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after” (278, my emphasis). Hemingway is alluding to a process that goes from the impermanence of experience to the permanence of the written record. The written record, the literary text, springs from the artist’s memory of past emotion and depends on his ability to verbalize his reminiscence. Hemingway clearly associates the need to write with an awareness of the passing of time that brings with it our own human passing. The desire to make it last, to make permanent what is impermanent by nature is the trigger of art and of his own literature. But the question whether the artistic replica can supplant reality remains.
Chapter twenty in Death in the Afternoon is a perfect example of the workings of memory, desire, and literary imagination in Hemingway’s text. In this memorable concluding chapter we perceive the artist’s awareness both of his success and at the same time failure at having managed to make Death in the Afternoon “enough of a book” (278).
There is no contradiction here. He is telling his readers that he has nearly finished a book that he only dared to write after he felt he was ready, a book he is proud of because it has been difficult to write. He knows he has nearly completed a book which he has written following the rules of his own theory of art, a good true book on the bullfight. He also knows how difficult and rare it is to write one true sentence. In Hemingway’s theory “Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be” (By-Line 215). Hemingway’s theory of literature uses high standards to measure what good writing is. As he puts it, the artist-writer must sacrifice all he has, time and experience, at the altar of writing;
[good writing] must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. . . . A good writer should know as near everything as possible. . . . There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. (191-92)
But Hemingway is bigger than his theory when he acknowledges the limits of all theory, including his own. He shows his readers that life is bigger than art in the last chapter in Death in the Afternoon. Chapter twenty contains precisely his very explicit lament at the impossibility to “make it all come true again” (272) while writing about the past. For Hemingway life and love are beyond art. For him, and in contrast to Hulme, the truth of the truest art is inferior to experiential truth because art gives only a representation of “reality,” a translation of it in the written medium which lacks immediacy but which should “feel” like “reality.” This “effect of the real” is what Hemingway calls “true writing.” Hemingway’s is a disillusioned theory of literary truth. With Hulme he is aware that it is by means of the writing as much as in spite of the writing, that the writer as artist must achieve self-expression and communicate with his readers.
As Hulme says:
The artist has a double difficulty to overcome. He has in the first place to be a person who is emancipated from the very strong habits of the mind which make us see not individual things but stock types. His
second difficulty comes when he tries to express the individual things which he has seen. He finds then . . . that language, or whatever medium of expression he employs, also has its fixed ways. It is only by a
certain tension of mind that he is able to force the mechanism of expression out of the way in which it tends to go and into the way he wants. (“Bergson’s Theory of Art” 779)
What is all this effort for? As Hulme says in one of his notes, “Literary man always first completely disillusioned and then deliberately and purposely creative of illusions” (“Notes on Language and Style” 53). Writing gives Hemingway plenty of reasons to feel both fine and sad. He is aware of the possibilities and also the limitations of his métier, written language is his means of creation and his means of destruction. Hemingway knows that all fiction, even his own true writing, can only create a fanciful illusion of reality for the reader if not for himself. It is a creation that relies on destruction, destructing the transient wave of life by fixing it in a verbal-textual model. This is an allusion to Hulme’s words: “The artist by making a fixed model of one of these transient waves enables you to isolate it out and to perceive it in yourself. In that sense art merely reveals, it never creates” (Hulme, 1998: 151-52). This is a cause for sadness. But this disillusioned vision of his art does not prevent the artist-writer from enjoying the language fight while he is striving to achieve the impossible and inventing new ways of telling and writing. In Hulme this issue is expressed in the following terms: “the creative activity [comes] in the effort [ . . . ] which is necessary to break molds and to make new ones” (“Bergson’s Theory of Art” 776).
Like Hemingway, who felt “very sad but very fine” (4) not only after watching the artistic bullfight, but also while practicing his own creative-destructive art, Hemingway’s readers can feel both sad and fine after reading chapter twenty. It is a poem in prose, a piece of writing exceptional within Death in the Afternoon. It displaces bullfighting from the center of attention. It even displaces Hemingway’s theory of art from our contemplation to let us contemplate love. Hemingway reverts to himself and the residual feeling of nostalgia arising from finding himself absent from places and separated from faces once loved and now gone. The movement of memory and writing makes present what is already past and brings Hemingway back in time and also in touch with a past version of himself. Chapter twenty is therefore about Hemingway, the man he was years before and the artist he has become then at the moment of remembering and writing Death in the Afternoon when he was older, wiser, and finally able to write his book on bullfighting, a book which had been too difficult for him to write the first time he came to Spain and saw a bullfight in 1923.
. . . .
The Key West years were for Hemingway both a period of recontextualization and translation of the literary ideas he had received in Paris between 1922 and 1930, ideas whose validity he questioned and tested anew on the American soil of Key West. Death in the Afternoon (1932) problematizes the influential set of literary tenets which were widely circulated among the American expatriates in Paris in the twenties including two central ideas that we now associate with Hemingway but which he found in Europe and used within the texts that he wrote in his new southern American home. What he learned and practiced in his Paris years about ethics and aesthetics was attuned to the Paris avant-garde literary thought and, once in Key West, might be revised and accommodated within the new cultural context, with Death in the Afternoon, a product of the new circumstances, being a key text we quote from when we speak about Hemingway’s iceberg theory or his literary treatment of death and art as inseparable. What we cannot find in that book is an explicit statement on the (sub)texts that provide a background for these central issues in Hemingway’s literary craft. We need to know that there are two fundamental imagist subtexts to Death in the Afternoon, the American Ezra Pound’s imagist Manifesto, which supports Hemingway’s iceberg theory, and the British Thomas Ernest Hulme’s imagist Speculations (1924), a collection of essays that lent its weight to Hemingway’s iceberg.
Here I will limit myself to drawing the main lines connecting Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon to the Hulme subtext as formed by the notes and essays on language and representation which Hulme wrote before WW I and which were published later about the mid twenties when Ernest Hemingway was in Paris and most needed to learn about his craft and to get published. Summarizing, we can cite Hulme’s “Notes on Language and Style” written c. 1907 and published in Criterion (1925), and both “Romanticism and Classicism” and “Bergson’s Theory of Art” written c. 1912 and published posthumously in the 1924 collection Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art.
In the act of writing Death in the Afternoon Hemingway is subtly testifying to his completion of a first phase in his artist’s life and career. He is telling his readers, present and future, how long the first learning phase in the artist’s career takes and how hard and necessary the whole process is. In the first pages of Death in the Afternoon Hemingway confesses to his former inadequacy as a writer when he writes
I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what
the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced . . . the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or,
with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)
In Hulme’s subtext we can read:
There are then two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them. This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold on infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Wherever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art. (“Romanticism and Classicism” 772)
In the Hemingway and Hulme passages there is the same insistence on associating truth, good art, and unconventional technique. Hemingway uses the past tense “[good writing] was beyond me” in reference to the past because now in his Key West present, he is a different man and a better writer. The fact that the reader is actually reading Death in the Afternoon tells her that the author has been successful. Having overcome his initial difficulties, now the writer finally knows what he did not know before. He knows what is important beyond appearances, he sees meaning outside himself because he is now able to know himself. He has learned to differentiate between his own real feelings and the feelings he is supposed to have and has been taught to feel. In other words, he has learned to disregard conventional emotions and ideas pressed on him by his upbringing in a WASP middle-class family and by a traditional American education.
After eight years spent in Paris and elsewhere in Europe watching other writers and learning from them as much as about them, years devoted to improving his writing, Hemingway considers himself to be experienced enough both in the art of the corrida and in the art of literature to start writing Death in the Afternoon. About ten years have been necessary for him to be able to tell in written form what he has slowly learnt to understand and appreciate, things that he never knew before he came to Europe and experienced the Paris literary circles, the war in Italy, and the Spanish bullfights. They are things that he knows now in 1932 but which have taken him time to see and understand before he has been able to state them “purely enough.”
The Spanish bullfight has been one of the things difficult to understand and to write on, but now that Hemingway has managed to write a long book on them, Death in the Afternoon, and tackled well a difficult subject matter, he knows he has passed a test and proved his expertise in the art of writing. Good writing is, for him, the art of “putting down” on paper what one knows well from one’s own real experience. Hemingway elaborates in the passage quoted above a theory of writing as derived from experience which philosophers like Henri Bergson would subscribe to, a theory expressed in Hulme’s essays “Romanticism and Classicism,” “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” and “Notes on Language and Style.” In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway gives a step-by-step account of a process that should be more or less consciously followed by every writer: (a) exposure to external action: watching, listening, (b) internalization: feeling, experiencing, having emotions, liking, disliking . . . , (c) selective recalling: isolating the elements in the external action that provoked the emotion, and (d) selective telling: stating purely. The process follows a movement from the outside to the inside and to the outside again: the transmutation of external action into internal experience and then the transmutation of experience into text by means of the art of writing which allows the reader to have an aesthetic way of knowing reality more special than the everyday non-artistic knowledge we have of it. For Hulme too art is a special mode of knowing made accessible to the reader by the writer’s love of accuracy: “The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description . . . But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts” (“Romanticism and Classicism” 772). These last words are Hulme’s but they sound like Hemingway’s.
After reading Death in the Afternoon in the light of its Hulme subtext it becomes clear that Hemingway’s genuine interest in the bullfight as an art was always subordinated to a higher interest, Hemingway’s interest in writing about the bullfight, or what is the same, his interest in the art of literature as it helps to represent another world or another art, the world of Spain and the art of bullfighting.
The bullfight answers to a theory of spectacle based on a very general theory of art and representation which appeals to Hemingway greatly for its truth and simplicity. In the bullfight Hemingway sees a living reminder that all creativity and all art rely on destruction in a more or less obvious manner. The bullfighter’s art clearly “deals with death and death wipes it out” (Death in the Afternoon 99). The bullfighter kills the bull to make art. Then the monosabios come for the spoils and the plaza sweepers wipe out the traces of the fight printed in the arena. The artistic effect remains in the memory of the spectator, like the memory of things gone. In the case of literary writing, a permanent art, the association between art and destruction exists as essentially, though perhaps less obviously, as in the bullfight. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway stresses the important role that the desire for permanence plays in literature and more specifically in his own writing. It is the desire not to lose anything that was once experienced and loved and treasured as memories are treasured before they can be recalled in the writing. Hemingway writes: “We’ve seen it all go and we’ll watch it go again. The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after” (278, my emphasis). Hemingway is alluding to a process that goes from the impermanence of experience to the permanence of the written record. The written record, the literary text, springs from the artist’s memory of past emotion and depends on his ability to verbalize his reminiscence. Hemingway clearly associates the need to write with an awareness of the passing of time that brings with it our own human passing. The desire to make it last, to make permanent what is impermanent by nature is the trigger of art and of his own literature. But the question whether the artistic replica can supplant reality remains.
Chapter twenty in Death in the Afternoon is a perfect example of the workings of memory, desire, and literary imagination in Hemingway’s text. In this memorable concluding chapter we perceive the artist’s awareness both of his success and at the same time failure at having managed to make Death in the Afternoon “enough of a book” (278).
There is no contradiction here. He is telling his readers that he has nearly finished a book that he only dared to write after he felt he was ready, a book he is proud of because it has been difficult to write. He knows he has nearly completed a book which he has written following the rules of his own theory of art, a good true book on the bullfight. He also knows how difficult and rare it is to write one true sentence. In Hemingway’s theory “Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be” (By-Line 215). Hemingway’s theory of literature uses high standards to measure what good writing is. As he puts it, the artist-writer must sacrifice all he has, time and experience, at the altar of writing;
[good writing] must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. . . . A good writer should know as near everything as possible. . . . There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. (191-92)
But Hemingway is bigger than his theory when he acknowledges the limits of all theory, including his own. He shows his readers that life is bigger than art in the last chapter in Death in the Afternoon. Chapter twenty contains precisely his very explicit lament at the impossibility to “make it all come true again” (272) while writing about the past. For Hemingway life and love are beyond art. For him, and in contrast to Hulme, the truth of the truest art is inferior to experiential truth because art gives only a representation of “reality,” a translation of it in the written medium which lacks immediacy but which should “feel” like “reality.” This “effect of the real” is what Hemingway calls “true writing.” Hemingway’s is a disillusioned theory of literary truth. With Hulme he is aware that it is by means of the writing as much as in spite of the writing, that the writer as artist must achieve self-expression and communicate with his readers.
As Hulme says:
The artist has a double difficulty to overcome. He has in the first place to be a person who is emancipated from the very strong habits of the mind which make us see not individual things but stock types. His
second difficulty comes when he tries to express the individual things which he has seen. He finds then . . . that language, or whatever medium of expression he employs, also has its fixed ways. It is only by a
certain tension of mind that he is able to force the mechanism of expression out of the way in which it tends to go and into the way he wants. (“Bergson’s Theory of Art” 779)
What is all this effort for? As Hulme says in one of his notes, “Literary man always first completely disillusioned and then deliberately and purposely creative of illusions” (“Notes on Language and Style” 53). Writing gives Hemingway plenty of reasons to feel both fine and sad. He is aware of the possibilities and also the limitations of his métier, written language is his means of creation and his means of destruction. Hemingway knows that all fiction, even his own true writing, can only create a fanciful illusion of reality for the reader if not for himself. It is a creation that relies on destruction, destructing the transient wave of life by fixing it in a verbal-textual model. This is an allusion to Hulme’s words: “The artist by making a fixed model of one of these transient waves enables you to isolate it out and to perceive it in yourself. In that sense art merely reveals, it never creates” (Hulme, 1998: 151-52). This is a cause for sadness. But this disillusioned vision of his art does not prevent the artist-writer from enjoying the language fight while he is striving to achieve the impossible and inventing new ways of telling and writing. In Hulme this issue is expressed in the following terms: “the creative activity [comes] in the effort [ . . . ] which is necessary to break molds and to make new ones” (“Bergson’s Theory of Art” 776).
Like Hemingway, who felt “very sad but very fine” (4) not only after watching the artistic bullfight, but also while practicing his own creative-destructive art, Hemingway’s readers can feel both sad and fine after reading chapter twenty. It is a poem in prose, a piece of writing exceptional within Death in the Afternoon. It displaces bullfighting from the center of attention. It even displaces Hemingway’s theory of art from our contemplation to let us contemplate love. Hemingway reverts to himself and the residual feeling of nostalgia arising from finding himself absent from places and separated from faces once loved and now gone. The movement of memory and writing makes present what is already past and brings Hemingway back in time and also in touch with a past version of himself. Chapter twenty is therefore about Hemingway, the man he was years before and the artist he has become then at the moment of remembering and writing Death in the Afternoon when he was older, wiser, and finally able to write his book on bullfighting, a book which had been too difficult for him to write the first time he came to Spain and saw a bullfight in 1923.
. . . .
