Hemingway's Laboratory: The Paris in our time, and: Hemingway's Italy: New Perspectives (review)

REVIEWS Cohen, Milton A. Hemingway's Laboratory: The Paris in our time. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2005. xiv + 267 pp. Cloth: $38.75. Sanderson, Rena, ed. Hemingway's Italy: New Perspectives. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2006. xii + 252 pp. Cloth: $39.95. These two books, despite their somewhat similar titles, are quite different in purpose and yet alike in the quality of their accomplishment. Milton A. Cohen's Hemingway's Laboratory is the first extensive study (and will no doubt be the definitive one) of Hemingway's two earlier In Our Time works. These smaller, almost identically named books are In Our Time: Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923) and in our time (1924), which preceded the better-known In Our Time (1925), itself one of the leaststudied Hemingway texts, being the central focus ofonly three full-length studies, which include Wendolyn E. Tetlow's admirable Hemingway's In Our Time: Lyrical Dimensions (1992). Cohen achieves three important accomplishments. First, he provides a useful and comprehensive guide and reference to these bafflingly-titled works for Hemingway students and scholars alike; then he demonstrates how Hemingway blended his youthful approaches, whether avant-garde or popular, into a single distinctive style embodying both. Finally, by shedding so much new light on these rare texts, he makes a strong case for the need for them to be reprinted. Hemingway's Italy: New Perspectives, edited by Rena Sanderson, is a selection of eighteen essays (and Sanderson's introduction) chosen from one hundred ten papers read at the Tenth International Ernest Hemingway Conference in Stresa, Italy, in 2002. Given the beauty of its location and the quality of scholarship demonstrated in the volume, one would have to assume the conference was a great success, and Sanderson and the organizers of the conference deserve our gratitude for providing this useful collection of fresh essays. Sanderson apportions the essays into three sections, "Hemingway and Italy: The Early Years," "Italian Politics and Hemingway's Literary Response ," and "Hemingway's Craftsmanship: The Italian Works," with a concluding piece on "Hemingway and Italian Literature." In a brief review , one can mention only a few ofthe striking papers in this collection. Nancy R. Comley in the lead essay, "The Italian Education of Ernest Hemingway," points out that "Italy was the site ofhis first war, first wound, and first love affair" (41) and that the young Hemingway, before his arrival , would have been aware both ofprejudice against Italian immigrants (although not from his own observation) and of the Italian operatic and 114Reviews literacy tradition ofgreat lovers such as Romeo and Don Giovanni. Indeed, he attended several operas at La Scala after his arrival in Italy. Despite his lack ofpredisposition to despise or stereotype Italians, however , Kirk Curnutt, in "OfMussolini and Macaroni: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Expatriate 'Italianicity,'" points to Hemingway's use of "racist slurs" (87) to describe Mussolini. Still, one cannot escape the fact that Hemingway chose the Italian service when there were other options, and Jeffrey A. Schwartz in "Who's the Foreigner Now?" makes a case for Hemingway's growing expatriate outlook. Looming large in the third section ofthe book, "Hemingway's Craftsmanship ," are two essays by H.R. Stoneback and Miriam B. Mandell. Stoneback, while uncharacteristically brief here, is also characteristically on target, "with particular attention to the landscape of the novel and the actual place" (131). Once again he demonstrates Hemingway's precise use of "local knowledge": rural terrain, weather patterns, actual locations of hotels and other urban landmarks. Stoneback convincingly maintains that "Hemingway's mastery of local knowledge, which he always gets right... leads into a symbolic landscape that can be decoded with exactitude" (133). For her part, Mandell offers a stunning new interpretation ofthe novel in her essay, "Internal Structures: The Conservatism ofA Farewell to Arms," making a strong case that the key point of reference in the book is not the individual but rather the group. She takes the unusual step ofdiscrediting both Rinaldi and Frederic, leading to her conclusion that the book "is not a war novel but a postwar novel" (183). Elmira CollegeThomas K. Meier Hoffmann, Donald. Mari Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2006. ii...