In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

102 The “Matter of Being Expatriots” Hemingway, Cuba, and Inter-American Literary Study scott o. mcclintock As a comparatist specializing in U.S.–Latin American relations in literature and culture, I view Ernest Hemingway’s greater-than-two-decade association with Cuba as one of the most compelling cases for inter-American study. Hemingway ’s affiliation with Cuba supervenes in the experience of the Paris exile as the acme of the high modernism memorialized in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which Hemingway began in the fall of 1957 at the Finca Vigía in Cuba, twinning the Cuban and inter-American context of expatriation with European relations. In a piece written from Cuba and published in Look magazine the previous fall, in September 1956, Hemingway called the Finca Vigía and Cuba his home, a place to which he and Mary would always return, one not yet “overrun” like Spain, Africa, or “the places in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho that I loved” (“Situation Report” 471). Ironically, a few paragraphs later in the same article, Havana appears inescapably “overrun” in Hemingway’s list of the plethora of “compatriots” inhabiting the city during the prerevolutionary period: All you have to do to see your compatriots is to get into the car after work and go into the Floridita bar in Havana. There are people from all of the states and from many places where you have lived. There are also Navy ships in, cruise ships, Customs and Immigration agents you have known for years, gamblers who are opening up or have just closed or are doing well or badly, embassy characters, aspirant writers, firmly or poorly established writers, senators on the town, the physicians and surgeons who come for conventions, Lions, Elks, Moose, Shriners, American Legion members, Knights of Columbus, The “Matter of Being Expatriots” 103 beauty contest winners, characters who have gotten into a little trouble and pass a note in by the doorman, characters who get killed next week, characters who will be killed next year, the F.B.I., the former F.B.I., occasionally your bank manager and two other guys, not to mention your Cuban friends. (“Situation Report” 475) After defending himself from criticism of his expatriate status in Cuba by noting his regular attendance at “wars in which my country participates” and his payment of federal taxes, Hemingway pretends to confuse the spelling of the word expatriate, first writing “There is the matter of being expatriots,” and later seeming to correct his spelling error by commenting, “I looked up the spelling” (“Situation Report” 474).1 At home in Cuba from 1932 (when he began commuting between Key West and Cuba) to 1960, Hemingway is an unavoidable figure for inter-American study. More than this, his Cuban fiction challenges his readers to adopt a point of view similar to his own inter-American outlook. In 1980, speaking at a Hemingway conference on Thompson Island in Boston Bay that would herald not only the launching of the Hemingway Society and the renaming of Hemingway Notes, the flagship Hemingway journal, as The Hemingway Review but also, more broadly, the professionalization of Hemingway studies , Michael Reynolds observed that in the “Hemingway terrain” there was “much unexplored territory yet to be mapped,” referring to “that future” research and scholarship as an “act of the imagination” (Reynolds, “Unexplored Territory” 189). In his 1980 address, Reynolds forecast many of the directions Hemingway study would take not only over the next decade but over the next two and a half decades. Among these directions for future research, he indicated specifically the study of Hemingway’s correspondence (just then becoming available) and of Hemingway’s literary relations with other authors; pointed out the underutilization of archival materials and urged scholars to “[b]ring back all the data” (191); recognized the problems of textual study that his own Hemingway’s Reading (published that year) would begin to address; and noted the need for a true, critical literary biography of Hemingway—a mention that turned out to be the advance notice of his own five-volume biographical project. While acknowledging that Hemingway’s early years had already been extensively covered by previous biographies, notably Baker’s, Reynolds asserted that the Key West period and the decade of the 1930s (the focus of this paper), which was Hemingway’s “most productive . . . and his most stable,” had always been given “short shrift” (194), an observation the truth of which has not changed very much, even today. In terms of...

Share