Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story

1. Historical Genre, Dispassionate Presentation, and Authorial Judgment: The Legacy of Maupassant and Chekhov

1 Historical Genre, Dispassionate Presentation, and Authorial Judgment The Legacy of Maupassant and Chekhov The less you feel a thing, the more capable you are of expressing it as it is . . . Exhalations of the soul, lyricism, descriptions—I want all that to be in the style. Elsewhere, it is a prostitution of art and of feeling itself. —Flaubert to Louise Colet (1852), The Letters of Gustave Flaubert Car l’artiste ne note pas ses émotions comme l’oiseau module ses sons: il compose. [For the artist does not jot down his emotions as the bird modulates its sounds: he composes.] —Cézanne, quoted in Léo Larguier, Le Dimanche avec Paul Cézanne (Souvenirs), translation mine I was watching, freezing myself deliberately inside, stopping the excitement as you close a valve, going into that impersonal state you shoot from. —Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa By the time Ernest Hemingway commenced his career as a professional author, the short story had been developing for nearly a century, emerging from a variety of traditional short narrative forms—fable, myth, parable , tale, yarn, sketch, and anecdote. Such major innovators as Aleksandr Pushkin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Leskov, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Stephen Crane, and James Joyce had already made their influence felt. Other important writers had disseminated that influence, as well as their own, in their original short fiction, including Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman , George Moore, Joseph Conrad, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, Ivan Bunin, Jack London, Sherwood Anderson, James Stephens, Ring Lardner, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield. More difficult to locate within this mainstream tradition, such experimental authors as Gertrude Stein, Lu Hsun, and Franz Kafka had come upon the 14 Historical Genre, Presentation, and Judgment   15 stage. And still others were starting upon significant careers in the genre: Katherine Anne Porter, Bruno Schultz, Dorothy Parker, Isaac Babel, Jean Toomer, Liam O’Flaherty, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, Andrey Platonov, Sean O’Faolain, and Frank O’Connor. Hemingway, an avid if self-taught student of literature, was well read in the short fiction of many of these authors, and he learned a great deal from them, especially Turgenev, Maupassant, Chekhov, Crane, Anderson, Stein, and Joyce. With the exception of his innovations in dialogue—the subject of our eighth chapter—he was hardly the first to employ most of the techniques discussed in this book. But he drew upon the innovations of others —not just story writers but also novelists, playwrights, poets, and even painters, sculptors, and musicians—in highly original ways. In doing so, he forged one of the few original styles of his time, produced some of the finest stories of the twentieth century, and changed the genre forever. In an important essay on nineteenth-century narrative aesthetics, G. R. Thompson delineates “two major divergent lines of formal development of short ‘fiction’ in America from the earlier nineteenth to the later twentieth centuries—namely, the Poesque and the Hawthornesque.” As opposed to Hawthorne’s self-reflexive authorial presence—a tradition connected to such later metafictional, postmodern authors as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Paul Auster— Poe tried to establish an art of short fiction that centered on “a dramatic ‘effect’ via an overall organic unity conforming to a Freytag Triangle of carefully constructed sequence—an Aristotelian exposition, complication, crisis, climax, denouement—in which every word contributes to the ‘preconceived ’ effect.” Thompson rightly locates Hemingway’s stories within this tradition: “Poe’s concept of dramatized, presentational fiction anticipates Henry James’s famous dictum of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ and the general author-effacing mode of the earlier Ernest Hemingway” (171, 179, 172). In Hemingway’s youth, Poe, as well as most American authors, was absent from school curricula, but he was well represented in the Oak Park public library (HR 16). Poe’s stories were frequently anthologized and popular in the general culture. By the 1920s—due to his employment of symbolism and ambiguity, his representations of the unconscious, and his focus on the psyche in conflict—he had emerged as one of the major ancestors of modernism. In 1945, after reading The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Hemingway wrote to Malcolm Cowley: “I looked forward to reading Poe. 16  Art Matters Thought that would be good to do...