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15 A Lifetime of Flower Narratives Letting the Silenced Voice Speak Miriam B. Mandel “‘I remember everything we ever did and everything we ever said on the whole trip,’ Hadley said. ‘I do really.’” Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Like most writers, Ernest Hemingway used the same material in more than one place.1 As Rose Marie Burwell has argued, “reiterated thematic links” recur frequently in the prose Hemingway wrote in the last years of his life, even though the settings of the ¤ve books that those years produced range from France to Spain to the Caribbean to Kenya, and the represented events re®ect a time span of thirty years. In spite of disparate settings, events, and even genres, these books must be considered together , she claims, because they were written within the same time span. Burwell notes that an image or psychological issue that occupied Hemingway ’s mind at a certain period was likely to recur in whatever he was writing at that time, be it ¤ction, non¤ction, or a letter to a friend.2 Clearly, when a problem or image captured Hemingway, he explored it in a variety of venues. Such repetition certainly encourages us to link synchronous works. But repetition also joins works written at very different periods of time. We have, for example, the story of Agnes von Kurowsky, told in “A Very Short Story” and partially retold several years later in A Farewell to Arms; and the story of the ¤sherman who lost his large ¤sh, which ¤rst showed up in the April 1936 “Gulf Stream Letter” and resurfaced in 1952 as The Old Man and the Sea.3 Readers interested in Hemingway’s creative and psychological development are inevitably drawn to a comparative reading of these repetitions. I would like to trace Hemingway’s use of a minor event, which oc- curred when he was in his early twenties. The event is Ernest and Hadley’s only springtime visit to Chamby-sur-Montreux, near Aigle, in the Swiss province of Vaud, from 7 to 14 May 1922. Ernest and Hadley had been married about six months, but the honeymooners were really a threesome because Hemingway had invited his war-time buddy, Eric Dorman-Smith (Chink), to come along. Chink had gone straight from the military academy at Sandhurst to the battle¤elds of 1914. By the time Ernest met him in 1918, Chink had been wounded several times and been mentioned in three dispatches. Recovering from his own wound, Ernest was impressed by the young man, only four years older than himself, who wore a Military Cross with a star and carried the rank of Major. The two became fast friends, with a shared interest in war, military history, and literature. Ernest introduced Chink to Agnes von Kurowsky, the American nurse he was hoping to marry. A few years later, the two men met again at Chamby and decided to cap their two-week vacation with a mountain trek over militarily important ground (Chink loved such walks), and to visit again the Milanese cafes where they had last sipped cappuccino with Agnes. They wanted to renew their friendship, to drink and talk as they had in 1918. Again, Ernest would introduce Chink to the new woman in his life. Like most of the events of Hemingway’s early life, this springtime visit to Chamby and Aigle was transformed into literature. Over the next thirty-¤ve years, the ®owers of that setting and the activities of that May—the ¤shing, drinking, talking, and mountain trekking—surfaced in at least four different pieces of writing, in which the three principals (or four, if we count the memory of Agnes) are variously con¤gured. The narratives are linked by clusters of ®owers—an unusual motif for Hemingway , who is more likely to use animal than plant imagery. But in these narratives, he employs the narcissus, the blooms of the horse chestnut tree, and a ®owering wisteria vine. All three plants produce showy clusters of ®owers, and all produce white ®owers. Most interestingly, these romantic ®owers do not appear in any of his short stories, not in those that are synchronous with these narratives, nor in those that deal with the same subjects: ¤shing, drinking, love, and marriage. The ®ower narratives are thus more closely related to each other than they are to any other narrative. And although they are most fully developed in pieces we label as journalism or non¤ction, they are so artfully...

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