Hemingway’s Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway by Matthew Nickel (review)

Matthew Nickel argues in Hemingway’s Dark Night that critics who have seen Hemingway’s Catholicism as pro forma or incidental are mistaken. The book examines all Hemingway’s major writings chronologically, from his earliest stories to the unfinished works published after his death. Nickel’s work is rooted deeply in that of his mentor, H.R. Stoneback (twenty-six of the entries in Nickel’s bibliography are to Stoneback’s work). He relies on Stoneback to establish prima facie the biographical detail underlying most of his assertions of Hemingway’s Catholic practice without explicitly making that case in this book.

Nickel’s analysis is a determined effort to demonstrate that Hemingway was not a “passive” Catholic but an “active” one, not only during his marriage to the Catholic Pauline Pfeiffer, but from the time of his being wounded in Italy during the First World War and his receiving from a priest something that might have been baptism or extreme unction or both (if a conditional baptism preceded the anointing) or neither. Despite the ambiguity, Hemingway obtained permission to marry as a Catholic in the 1920s. Nickel does not deny that biographers and critics have noted Hemingway’s attachment to Catholicism persisted after his divorce from Pfeiffer, but he does not think it has ever been given its due weight, especially as it affected Hemingway’s writing.

Nickel names his method as close reading, and most of the text consists of discussion of Hemingway’s novels, explicitly supplemented by Nickel’s conviction (following Stoneback) that tracing Hemingway’s footsteps by visiting key locales, especially in Spain, Italy, and France, offers unique additional insight. Nickel’s aim is two-fold: he wishes to demonstrate the centrality of Catholicism to Hemingway’s work, but he insists equally on the intensity, persistence, and earnestness of Hemingway’s Catholicism. The detailed textual analyses offer considerable evidence that anyone inclined to dismiss Hemingway’s Catholicism as irrelevant (or anyone to whom it comes as a surprise) will be obliged to wrestle with.

Readers looking for a wider context for understanding Hemingway’s Catholicism will be less satisfied. Nickel reiterates key concepts, themes, and images to the point that there seem to be no references to fish in the novels that are not invoking the ichthys symbol of the early Christians, no references to darkness or night or nada that are not explicitly to Juan de la Cruz and the dark night of the soul. The analysis strikes the same limited notes again and again, rather than exploring how Hemingway’s sharply honed sense of irony interacted with the culturally multifaceted and historically tumultuous nature of Catholicism. Fuller context might have been provided by stronger secondary sources, both historical and theological, related to Catholic belief and practice, especially in the early twentieth century. Nearly all the secondary references related to Catholicism in the book’s bibliography are to the 1907–1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, a plausible primary source for practices and concepts that have changed significantly over the past century, but it cannot bear the analytical weight necessary to address the topics Nickel correctly identifies as important in Hemingway’s fiction.