Hemingway and Brooks: The Mystery of "Henry's Bicycle"

HEMINGWAY AND BROOKS: THE MYSTERY OF "HENRY'S BICYCLE" Fred D. Crawford Pennsylvania State University Bruce Morton Carleton College In both The Sun Also Rises and The Torrents of Spring, Ernest Hemingway parodies derision of the American expatriate who wanted to write. During a fishing trip to Burguete with Jake Barnes, Bill Gorton comments, "You know what's the trouble with you? You're an expatriate. . . . Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing."1 After Bill parodies arguments against expatriate art, he alludes to impotence blocking creativity and then adds, "That's the sort of thing that can't be spoken of. That's what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry's bicycle" (p. 115). (The original manuscript shows that, before deletion, this had read "Henry James's bicycle.") Hemingway also mentions James in The Torrents of Spring: . . . HenryJames. That chap who had gone away from his own land to live in England among Englishmen. Why had he done it? For what had he left America? Weren't his roots here?2 Henry James seemed to appear from nowhere in these 1925 novels. Hemingway, as an expatriate, had been outraged by Van Wyck Brooks's The Pilgrimage of Henry James, particularly Brooks's statement "A man always pays, in one way or another, for expatriation, for detachment from his plain primary heritage."3 Hemingway disproved this thesis, both by writing a novel of high quality and by mocking Brooks's arguments in an ironic dialogue. Hemingway undoubtedly read and reacted to Brooks's book. Brooks won the Dial Prize for three pre-publication chapters of The Pilgrimage of Henry James, printed in three 1923 numbers of The Dial. As early as May, 1924, Hemingway responded to this in The Transatlantic Review: For every writer produced in America there are produced eleven critics. Now that the Dial prize has gone to a critic [Brooks] the ratio may be expected to increase to 1/55 or over. As I have always regarded critics as the eunuchs of literature. . . .* Bill Gorton's allusion to Henry's bicycle as the possible source (his "obscure hurt") for James's rumored impotence, Hemingway's allusion Studies in American Fiction107 to critics' impotence, and Jake Barnes's injury have much in common. Perhaps even this early Hemingway had determined to refute Brooks in the novel, possibly after encountering this sentence in The Dial: The great writer is the voice of his own people: that was the principle , the principle of which every European novelist of the first order had been a living illustration, and James had been too intelligent not to perceive it.s If not, Hemingway was given further exposure to Brooks's work by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Hemingway had met early in May, 1925. "Fitzgerald wrote to Brooks from Paris in June, 1925, announcing his 'thrill' at the receipt of a copy of The Pilgrimage of Henry James. . . . Everybody over there, including Hemingway, had read it."e If Hemingway had not reacted negatively to the pre-publication chapters of Brooks's book the previous year, or had forgotten them, then he reacted to them in their final form. Bill Gorton and Jake Barnes's fishing trip to Burguete is based on one which Hemingway actually took in late June, 1925, shortly after reading Fitzgerald's copy. Still seething over a critic's suggestion that he, as an expatriate, could not write, Hemingway inserted some of Brooks's argument into Gorton's ironic commentary. Gorton exaggerated Brooks's statements. Hemingway paraphrases two in particular . Gorton informs Jake that "Fake European standards have ruined you" (p. 115). Brooks, describing James's self-doubt and analyzing what he feels is a deterioration in James's late art, asks of James, . . . had he not subscribed, as only a probationer can subscribe, to the codes and scruples, the conventions and prejudices, the standards (held so lightly by everyone else) of the [English] world he longed to possess? In adapting himself to this world, he was to lose his instructive judgment of men and things; and this explains ... the gradual decomposition, more and more marked the more his talent grew, of...