Sorrow For Pleasure In Hemingway's Work

Sorrow For Pleasure In Hemingway’s Work
Ref.exp. Carmen VATAMANU
“I know about love. Love always hangs up
behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol.
To hell with love. Love is you making me
happy and then going off to sleep with your
mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to
say my prayers even because I know I have
no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty
little tricks you taught me that you probably
got out of some books. All right, I am through
with you and I am through with love. Your
kinds of pick nose lose…” [1]
To Have and Have Not
There are many authors who have written about love, all along the
gamut from embarrassment to enchantment. There are many who have
written about sex and have got rich and fat and pale at the job. But few can
write as Ernest Hemingway can, of a man and a woman together, their
completion and their fulfilment. And few can make melodrama as Ernest
Hemingway can, nobody else can get such excitement upon a printed
page.
Compared with Hemingway, for Fitzgerald “love” was essentially
yearning and frustration and there is consequently little consummated
genital love in his novels, though he identified himself with that sexual
revolution which the 20's thought of as their special subject. The
adolescents “kiss” is the only climax his imagination can really
encompass; and despite his occasionally telling us that one or another of
his characters has “taken” a woman, it is the only climax he ever realises
in a scene. Hemingway, on the other hand, is much addicted to describing
the sex act. It is the symbolic centre of his work; a scene to which he
returns when nostalgically evoking or illustrating the virtues of the sturdy
poor as in To Have and Have Not, reflecting on civil strife and heroism
as in For Whom The Bells Tolls, or projecting the fantasies of a man
facing old age as in Across the River and Into the Trees.

In his earlier fictions, Hemingway’s descriptions of the sexual
encounter are intentionally brutal, his later ones unintentionally comic;
for in no case, “can he quite succeed in making his females human, and
coitus performed with an animal, a thing or a met dream is either
horrible or ridiculous” [2]. If in For whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway has
written the most absurd love scene in the history of the American novel,
this is not because he lost momentarily his skill and authority “it is a
give-away-a moment which illuminates the whole erotic content of his
fiction” [3]. Hemingway is only really comfortable in dealing with
“men without women”. The relation of father to son of battle –
companions, fellow inmates in a hospital a boy and a gangster; these
move him to simplicity and truth. Perhaps his best of all with men who
stand alone – in night time scenes when the solitary individual sweats in his
bed on the verge of night more, or arises to confront himself in the glass;
“though he is at home, too, with the Pip Van Winkle archetype, with men in
flight from women” [4].
Certainly, he returns again and again to the journey to the war - this
traditional evasion of domesticity and civil life. Yet he feels an obligation
to introduce women into his more ambitious fictions, though he does not
know what to do with them beyond taking them to bed. All his life, he
has been haunted by scene of how simple it all was once, when he could
take his Indian girl into the clean - smelling woods, stretch out beside her
on the pine - needless and have no obligations at all.
In Hemingway the rejection of the sentimental happy ending of
marriage involves the acceptance of the sentimental happy beginning of
innocent and inconsequential sex, and “camouflages the rejection of
maturity and of fatherhood itself” [5]. This is at its worst in his fiction
that drives the tender - hearted husband of “Indian Camp” to suicide, or
which takes Catherine away from Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to
Arms.
Poor things, all they wanted was innocent love and only love on an
island of peace in a world at war, love - making without end in a scarcely
real country in which neither owed life nor allegiance was possible. But
such a relationship can, of course, never last, as Hemingway - Nick
Adams - Lieutenant Henry has always known: “They all ended the same.
Long time ago, good. Now, no good” [6].
Only the dead woman becomes neither a bore nor a mother; and
before Catherine can quite become either she must die, killed not by
Hemingway, of course but by childbirth. It is all quite sad and lovely at
the end: the last kiss bestowed on what was a woman and now is a statue,
the walk home through the rain. Poe himself could not have done better,

though he was haunted not by the memory of a plump little Indian on the
hemlock but a fantasy of a high - born maiden “loved with a love that
was more than love” and carried away by death.
“The dark Lady who is neither wife not mother, blends with the
image of Fayaway, the exotic servant, consort reconstructed by Mellville
in Typee, out of memories of an eight-year-Polynesian girl-child” [7]. In
Hemingway, such women are mindless, soft, subservient, painless
decisive for extracting seed without human engagement. The Fair Lady,
on the other hand, who gets pregnant and wants a wedding or uses her
sexual allure to assert her power, is seen as a threat and a destroyer of
men. But the females are Indians or Latins, black-eyed and dusky in hue,
or at least Anglo-Saxon, if not symbolically blond. Neither are permitted
to the virgins indeed, both are imagined as having been often possessed,
though in the case of the Fair Women promiscuity is used as a device for
humiliating and unmanning the male foolish enough to have entered into
a marriage with her.
Through the Dark anti-virgin, on the other hand a new lover enters
into a blameless communion with the other uncommented males who
have possessed her and departed, as well as with those yet to come. It is a
kind of homosexuality once-removed, the appeal of the whorehouse
(Eden of the world of men without women) embodies in a single figure.
“When Hemingway's bitches are Americans, they are hopeless and
unmitigated bitches; the British bitch is for Hemingway only a demibitch,
however, as the English are only, as it were, demy-Americans” [8].
Catherine is delivered from her doom by death; Brett Ashley in The Sun
Also Rises is permitted, once at least, the gesture of her mythical role.
But it is quite a feat at that, and Brett cannot have off congratulating
herself: “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a
bitch” [9]. Yet Brett never becomes a woman really; she is mythicized
rather than redeemed. And if she is the most satisfactory female character
in all of Hemingway, this is because for once she is presented not as an
animal or as a nightmare, but quite audaciously as a goddess, the
bitchgodess with a boyish bob (Hemingway is rather fond of women who
seem as much boy as girl); no man embraces her without being in some
sense “castrated” except for Jake Barnes who is unmanned to being with;
no man approaches her without wanting to be castrated, except for
Romero, who thinks naively that she is-or can easily become-a woman.
Indeed, when Brett leaves that nineteen-year-old bullfighter, one suspects
that, though she arrows, it is because she will not be “one of those
bitches who ruins children”, she is really running away because she
thinks he might make her a woman. Certainly Romero's insistence that

she let her hair grow out has something to do with it. “He wanted me to
grow my hair out. Me, with long hair, I'd look so like hell... He said it
would make me more womanly. I'd look a fright” [10].
To yield up her cropped head would be to yield up her emancipation
from female servitude to become feminine rather than phallic; and this
Brett cannot do. She thinks of herself as a flapper though the word
perhaps would not have occurred to her, as a member of the “Lost
Generation”; but the Spaniards know her, immediately as a terrible
goddess the avatar of an ancient archetype. She tries in vain to enter into
the circle of Christian communion, but is always turned aside at the door;
she changes her mind, she has forgotten her hat - the apparent reason
never matters; She belongs to a world alien and prior to that of the
Christian churches in which Jake finds a kind of peace. Incapable of
love, except as a moment in bed, Brett can bestow on her worshipers
nothing more than the brief joy of a drunken ecstasy-followed by
suffering and deprivation and regret. In the end, not only are the physical
lovers unmanned and degraded, but even Jake, who is her priest and is
protected by his terrible wound, is humiliated. For her service is a
betrayal not only of his Catholic faith but of his pure passion for
bullfighting and trout-fishing; and the priest of the “bitch-goddess” is on
the purely human level, a pimp.
Brett does not have some respect for Barnes, even a little tenderness,
though her actions scarcely show abiding love. At best she can affirm his
worth and share his standards and perception. When in public, she knows
how to keep her essential misery to herself; when alone with Barnes she
will express her feelings admit her faults, and even display good
judgement. Thus her friend Count Mippiopolous is introduced to Barnes
as “one of us”. The count qualifies by virtue of his war wounds, his
invariable calmness and his curious system values. He appreciates good
food, good wine, and a quiet place in which to enjoy them. Love also has
a place in his system, but since he's “always in love”, the place seems
rather shaky. Like Jake and Brett and perhaps Georgette, he simply bears
himself well among the post-war ruins.
Loving someone means wishing to do certain things for that person.
We wish to sacrifice ourselves; we wish to serve it, whatever it takes; if
all these things are not there, then it means that we don't really and truly
love. It will take some time till all these things happen but once they did,
we will be happy, we know we will. The same happens to Frederic; in his
relationship to Catherine he is the taker, because in a relationship, there
is always one who gives more than he takes or takes more than he gives.
In no way can Frederic's desertion at the river or his escape into

Switzerland be seen as a sacrifice for Catherine. It is Catherine who
makes the sacrifices, and who wishes to serve. It is Catherine who makes
a religion of love. As Frederic admits, he is always able to forget those
things which the priest knew – meaning that his relationship to Catherine
is reduced only to “passion and lust”. Going back to For Whom the Bell
Tolls, we can mention that: Within each step that she makes, we see more
clearly that Pillar had led a hard life and is as tough as an old eagle. Yet
the heart still beats for humankind even when the head coldly admits the
need for violent activity against the enemy. Pillar’s sentiments-but
Catherine's also - find many echoes among the more sympathetic
characters of the novel, still Maria is the one closest to Catherine's
feelings-and views of life.
One of the familiar Hemingway themes in For Whom the Bell Tolls
is the idea that a “same consciousness of death will give added depth and
meaning to the events of life” [11]. Jordan - for example shows a kind of
spiritual relationship to Pillar, in that he can be, by turns, both tender and
tough minded. He can love human beings and allow himself to become
involved with them, as in his love for Maria. The other entire extreme he
must be the cold minded and detached commander, reserving part of
himself in all human relationship so that the necessary job can be done.
He cannot often expand warmly; as soldier, he must contract coldly with
himself.
“‘I cannot have a woman doing what I do’, he tells Maria”! But thou art
my woman now”’ [12]. After one of their encounters, Maria observes that
he is now thinking of something else than love. On another occasion,
talking to Pillar the “men-without woman” idea emerges very clearl “you
are a very cold boy...In the head you are very cold” [13]. It is not a
liking for hard masculine comradeship which motivates the Hemingway
hero, but a preoccupation with the work a man must do where women
have no place and may even be in the way. The morning Jordan kills the
fascists cavalryman, Maria is still beside him and behind him, dressing
herself under the robe. “She had no place in his life now” [14].
The significance of Maria when she is seen in the light of such other
heroines as Catherine Barkley, Maria Morgan and even Dorothy Bridges,
is finally symbolic. In the lonely alien region of Guadarramas, she comes
to stand as the image of “home”. Most of Hemingway’s women tend to
take on this special symbolic meaning. Dorothy Bridges (a fairly
unsympathetic portrait) is explicitly equated with nostalgia a somewhat
untrustworthy reminder of the comforts and the joys which are so rarely
possible in a world besieged by the ideology of terror. Catherine Barkley
and Maria Morgan, though in different ways, represent a normal

domesticity vanquished by war and by the economic struggle for
survival. Similarly, Maria stands for the normal in the midst of a terrible
abnormality. She has been subjected to all sorts of outrages by her fascist
captures. The rape is an act of supreme brutality; only the true tenderness
of Jordan, as Pillar well, knows can erase the psychological scars the
fascist have left. The cutting of Maria’s hair is a symbol of her loss of
normal womanhood or girlhood, just as its growing-out indicates her
gradual return to balance and health.
One might argue, of course that the normal male-female situation in
Hemingway is something like “what took place in the Garden of Eden,
just after the eating of the fruit of the tree but before the malediction”
[15]. All these Eves are as pleasurably ductile as the Adams are hirsute
and sexually vigorous. Like all travesties, such a characterization would
have its element of truth. But it would tend to ignore the real tenderness
with which the “good women” in Hemingway are treated. The fate of the
heroines is that they are almost never at home; their virtue is that the best
of them carry the home-image with them wherever they go.
The episodes concerning the affair with Maria from the novel For
Whom the Bells Tolls have been condemned as extraneous, but looking
specifically at the theme of the earth and the machine, one notes that
Maria, Roberto's beloved “rabbit” is somehow identified with the Spain
earth that was then violated figuratively as Maria was violated literally.
Maria’s shaved head is so realistic a detail that one is surprised to see an
obvious symbolism as well. The least one can say is that “the story of
Maria, taken prisoner, raped, rescued from a troop train, and tanks of
the enemy, parallels certain aspects of Spanish history from 1936 to
1939” [16].
Paired with Maria, Pillar, a kind of Iberian Earth-mother, who is
proud that the world itself moved during her love-making, who had lived
nine years with three of the worst-paid matadors in the world, still
reminds us again and again of the love making and bull-fighting that
represent Spain, as it should have been. There is something pretty suspect
in the love story of the novel From Whom the Bell Tolls, which has so
stirred and charmed the reviewers. By now the relation between men and
women in Hemingway's novels has fixed itself into a rather dull
convention according to which the men are all dominance and
knowledge, the women all essential innocence and responsive passion.
These relationships reach their full development almost at the moment of
the first meeting and are somehow completed as soon as begun. Most
significantly one feels of love in the Hemingway novels that it can exist,
at all, only because circumstances so surely doom it. We do not have to

“venture very deep into unexpressed meanings to find a connection
between Hemingway's social myth and the pattern of his love stories”
[17] - in both, there is a desperation which makes a quick grab for simple
perfection. This desperation makes understandable the compulsive
turning to courage as the saving and solving virtue. The whole complex
of attitudes is, we might say, a way of responding to the imminent idea of
death.
Most of Hemingway’s characters especially female characters from
the novel The Sun Also Rises are in continuous search for more, for
better, though they are all abandoned people, abandoned by the
reasonability of time and left to struggle as they may with the disastrous
prospects of living. Brett, Lady Ashley speaks about by her passions, or
Jake Barnes, unsexed by the war, or Cohn, who crumbles to pieces
beneath the weight of his desire for Brett, are also abandoned people.
Brett, the heroine, might have stepped out of The Green Hat; she is the
sentimentally regarded dare-evil, and she never becomes real. Lady Brett
Ashley moves in a set of Montparnasse Americans, drinks, sleeps with
men and is bored. ‘She is engaged to a ruined Englishman and is loved
by the American newspaper man who tells the story’ [18]. She goes to
San Sebastian with a Jewish boxer and leaves him for a young matador.
They do not talk about their souls, - as we saw it was the case with Maria
or Catherine - they do not unravel their feelings, they are not in love,
they do not suffer, they do not get hurt or even die - as Catherine - for a
well defined cause: love and passion; they do not know those words; no,
they merely order drinks and dinners, swear, have a good time; they do
not have meaning in their life, they are as we said before abandoned and
left to struggle as they may with disastrous prospects of living.
Hemingway is a novelist of the expatriated. The Sun Also Rises
showed us a group of Americans and one Englishwoman being violently
idle, first in Paris and then in Spain. They went to bull-fights, they made
love, and they drank. Above all, they drank. They well not congenital
company even in a book, but they knew how to get the utmost out of
their emotions, and of their emotions, and though bored and desperate,
they were seldom dull. The same characters or others like them reappear
in A Farewell to Arms. There is an English woman serving as a nurse in
the Italian army for no better reason than that she speaks the language.
This particular unmarried couple - Catherine and Frederic - rejoicing in
their sin, present a brood target to the censorious, and even to a less
jaundiced view, there is something wanton and wasteful in their
happiness. But if it is an offence to be happy, they certainly pay for it, a
thousand fold; the concluding scenes are unbearably painful, and would

wring tears from a stone. The hypercritical may question whether Henry
would have been granted such freedom of access to Catherine’s
accouchement; but he was headstrong and hard to cross and had no
respect for circumstances:“If people bring so much courage to this
world, the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them.
The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the
broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good
and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of
these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special
hurry” [19].
Closing the book, the reader will agree that the narrator had every
reason for espousing this gloomy view and we think there is no better
commentary than the text itself. Sooner or later almost every single
character draws the conclusion - not before having faced some of the
bitterest experiences - that we have to pay the highest price for loving or
being loved; this is what happens, if we must love ...
Notes and references
1. Hemingway, Ernest, To Have and Have Not, New York, Viking
Press, 1977, p. 88.
2. Fielder, Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel, New
York, Stein & Day Publishers, 1966, p. 316.
3. Ibidem, p. 317.
4. Ibidem, p. 318.
5. Ibidem, p. 317.
6. Hemingway, Ernest, In Our Times, New York, Athenaeum, 1965,
p. 141.
7. Fielder, Leslie A., cited edition, p. 319.
8. Ibidem, p. 320.
9. Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises, London, Hunt Bernard
Princenton Ltd, 1983, p. 111.
10. Ibidem, p. 118.
11. Trilling, Lionel, An American in Spain, London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 82.
12. Hemingway, Ernest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, New York,
Vintage Books, 1979, p. 110.
13. Ibidem, p. 111.
14. Ibidem, p. 115.
15. Trilling, Lionel, c.e., p. 52.
16. Ibidem, p. 60.

17. Ibidem, p. 62.
18. Meyers, Jeffrey, Hemingway’s first War Criticism, 1997, Review
– essay of Reynolds book, p. 134.
19. Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms, New York, Princeton
University, 1998, p. 280.
Bibliography
1. Baker, Carlos, Hemingway, The Writer as Artist, Princeton, 1952,
4th revised ed., 1972.
2. Baker, Sheridan, Ernest Hemingway, New York, University of
Chicago Press, 1981.
3. Faulkner, William, Selected Letters, edited by Joseph Blotner,
New York, Dell, 1966.
4. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The letters, edited by Andrew Turnbull, New
York, Dell, 1968.
5. Hardy, R.E. and Cull, I., Hemingway, A Psychological portrait,
New York, Pyramid - second edition, 1987.
6. Meyers, Jeffrey, Hemingway’s first War, Criticism, 1977,
Review-essay of Reynolds book.
7. Young, Philips, Ernest Hemingway, Reconsideration, New York,
Farrar & Strauss & Giroux, 1988.