Hemingway: The Obsession with Henry James, 1924-1954
NB Houston - Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1985 - JSTOR
NB Houston
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1985•JSTORErnest Hemingway squirmed as his second wife, Pauline, read aloud in 1927 from Henry
James' novel The Awkward Age (Baker 243). Hemingway wondered why James bailed his
characters out of their frequent inactivity by inserting a drawing room scene; and, as he was
to do frequently during the next thirty years, he freely criticized the quality of James' works,"
and knowing nothing about James it seems to me to be the shit." Too, he was quick to
criticize the male protagonists of James,"... and the men all without any exception talk and …
James' novel The Awkward Age (Baker 243). Hemingway wondered why James bailed his
characters out of their frequent inactivity by inserting a drawing room scene; and, as he was
to do frequently during the next thirty years, he freely criticized the quality of James' works,"
and knowing nothing about James it seems to me to be the shit." Too, he was quick to
criticize the male protagonists of James,"... and the men all without any exception talk and …
Ernest Hemingway squirmed as his second wife, Pauline, read aloud in 1927 from Henry James' novel The Awkward Age (Baker 243). Hemingway wondered why James bailed his characters out of their frequent inactivity by inserting a drawing room scene; and, as he was to do frequently during the next thirty years, he freely criticized the quality of James' works," and knowing nothing about James it seems to me to be the shit." Too, he was quick to criticize the male protagonists of James,"... and the men all without any exception talk and think like fairies except a couple of caricatures of brutal outsiders"(Hemingway, Letters 266). 1 Carlos Baker observes that Hemingway, the" brutal outsider" himself, was at this time publishing Men Without Women, whose sales had reached 15,000 in the first three months after publication (Baker 243). But now Hemingway, the outsider, clearly in literary ascendance, was becoming acquainted with James' works; his artistic and personal recognition of James in future years was, for the most part, to take the form of a peculiar enmity. He was often to refer to James in highly derisive termsalmost to the end of his own life. 2 Hemingway's lse majeste towards him takes the form of a sporadic obsession that reveals more about Hemingway's maturity than James' imagined frailties. Young Hemingway vilified James for his choice of themes and characters, but more importantly, he viciously maligned him for the traumatic but obscure accident that had occurred in his youth. Leon Edel has summarized the known facts of the injury as gathered from James' writings and other sources. The" obscure hurt" was reported by James to have happened at the" same dark hour" of the onset of the Civil War, in other words, May 1861 (Edel, Years 176-77). But actually the causative factor, the fire at West Stables in Newport, occurred on the night of October 28, 1861 (177). James relates that he had jammed himself into" an acute angle between two fences" trying to make" a rusty, quasi-extemporised old engine work" in order to help put out the stable fire. Injured in this attempt, James later provided only incomplete details and stated that the disaster was" intimate, odious, horrid,[a] catastrophe, obscure, and most entirely personal"(175). Readers, critics, and other writers have often interpreted the result of the accident as castration, but Edel says the existing evidence
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