The American Pictorial Vision: Objects and Ideas in Hawthorne, James, and Hemingway

THE AMERICAN PICTORIAL VISION: OBJECTS AND IDEAS IN HAWTHORNE, JAMES, AND HEMINGWAY Viola Hopkins Winner Near the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream, the painter-hero Thomas Hudson promises to make a picture forBobby, the island barkeeper. Endiusiastically, Bobby starts to offer Hudson suggestions, becoming increasingly graphic and grandiose. All of the projected scenes are turbulent, violent, threatening, progressing from waterspouts, to hurricanes, to the sinking of the Titanic, and finally to a vision of the last judgment: "Don't shear off from it," Bobby said. "Don't be shocked by its magnitude. You got to havevision, Tom. We can paint theEnd of the World," he paused. "Full Size." "Hell," Thomas Hudson said. "No. Before hell. Hell is just opening. The Rollers are rolling in their church upon the ridge and all speaking in unknown tongues. There's a devil forking them up with his pitchfork and loading them into a cart. They're yelling and moaning and calling on Jehovah. Negroes are prostrated everywhere and morays and crawfish and spider crabs are moving around and over their bodies. There's a big sort of hatch open and devils are carrying Negroes and church people and rollers and everyone into it and they go out of sight. Water's rising all around the island and hammerheads and mackerel sharks and tiger sharks and shovelnose sharks are swimming round and round and feeding on those who try to swim away to keep from being forked down thebig open hatch thathas steam risingout ofit." After more of the same, Bobby concludes, "That would make a hell of a painting, Tom, if we can get all the movement and grandeur into it."1 The picture Hudson actually paints is of waterspouts, not Bobby's end-of-the-world vision. He prefers not to compete with the "old timers" Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, who had worked along Bobby's lines and would be, as Hudson says, "pretty hard to beat" (p. 21). Although Hudson later views tradition as helpful, here he feels the "anxiety of influence;"2 unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hilda, who, realizing her inadequacy before the Old Masters, gave up painting to become as a copyist their handmaiden, Hudson has persevered but he has succeeded by not trying for supernal meanings in the grand style. He 144Vioh Hopkins Winner paints only what he actually sees and knows: "... pictures of Uncle Edward. Pictures of Negroes in the water. Negroes on land. Negroes in boats. Turtle boats. Sponge boats. Squalls making up. Waterspouts. Schooners that got wrecked. Schooners building" (p. 17). Hudson's avoidance of the monumental and the sublime is more than a sign that he, as a modern artist, feels the difficulty of competing with achievements of the past. There are metaphysical reasons for his self-imposed limits. The romantic vision of God in nature that inspired the appalling ambiguities of Moby-Dick as well as the awesome serenities of Lake Glimmerglass and Thomas Cole's The Ox-Bow has faded away; the orthodox God and the eschatology of Bosch and Brueghel are dead. The naive Bobby, without having seen the Old Masters, creates a vivid last judgment out of Bimini material: the Negro revivalist church, the rummies, the sharks and whales—sharply defined realistic detail in a framework of cosmic upheaval. For the sophisticated Hudson, however, there is only the realistic detail without the frame: God and nature are sundered; good and evil too complexly interfused to be allegorized; the only finality, death. Transcendence exists only in the object itself, as in the brief description of potato salad "covered with rough-ground black pepper" (p. 91), which has the luminosity and radiant clarity of a Dutch still life. Hudson aims for the kind of truth in painting that Hemingway strove for in writing: he plans to paint the scene of David's epic struggle with the big fish "truer than a photograph" (p. 148). This conception of realism is less clichéd than it seems; "photograph" is comparable to "instant recording," Hemingway's phrase in Death in the Afternoon for newspaper writing. To make "very simple things . . . permanent, as, say, Goya tried to make them in Los...