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Article Excerpt
In A Farewell to Arms, informed by his study of modern painting, Hemingway creates a highly-coded visual text where objects frequently speak volumes. Hemingway's repeated focus on objects, especially in certain passages framed as still-life compositions, performs as a strategy for revealing characters' hidden desires, motivations, and anxieties. Specifically, Hemingway uses an array of still-life structures as a distancing strategy that allows the narrator, Frederic Henry, to both mask and reveal his emotional turmoil surrounding the death of Catherine Barkley. At the novel's conclusion, she becomes the narrative's most treasured "object on a table."
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IN HER MEMOIRS, Mary Welsh Hemingway, writing of her trip to Cuba to collect Hemingway's manuscripts, relates her dismay at discovering the theft of one of their favorite paintings, Georges Braque's Still Life with Wine Jug. Upon entering the Finca Vigia, she realized that
One of our treasures was missing. In his early days in Paris Ernest had bought a Braque still-life, one of a series of mostly tan, brown and black paintings, showing a covered table, a scrap of newspaper, some dice and a wine jug. Sorting papers in Ernest's study adjoining the bedroom, I suddenly noticed the vacancy on the wall. It had always stood, unframed, on top of the bookcases behind his desk. (505)
The image has implications for the study of the visual and the verbal in Hemingway's work. The unframed picture rests silently on top of rows of books that provide a base for the painting's display. The arrangement suggests the human form, and its construction reverses the traditional roles of the visual and the verbal, for the bodily presence of the image (the Braque still life) is placed in the position of the "head," while the verbal abstraction of language (the books) becomes the "body." (1) Such a transformative dynamic might have been especially appealing to Hemingway. From his earliest days as a young writer haunting the museums in Paris, he had been searching for the "secret" (2) of making literature as tough and modern as the new art shining forth in gallery windows throughout the city. Like many avant-garde writers, Hemingway thought that the appropriation of visual techniques borrowed from modern painting would allow him "to try to make instead of describe" and give more "body" to the fictional experience, turning literature lean and hard like the Imagist poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (MF 101).
Hemingway's 1949 interview with Lillian Ross while touring the Museum of Modern Art has provided scholars with his rather grandiose proclamation that "I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cezanne" (36), leading to a host of studies analyzing the formal similarities between Cezanne's landscape paintings and Hemingway's landscape scenes in the early stories and novels. (3) Recent scholarship has continued to investigate such tensions between the visual and verbal, and rightly so. Hemingway's dedication to the craft of writing is legendary, and his doubts, desires, and ideas about art often found expression in visual terms, a dynamic that accounts for the highly visual nature of his fiction. Although commentators have mined connections between Hemingway and Cezanne over the years, the focus has been on landscape passages exclusively, while the function of the still life--a genre that obsessed Cezanne throughout his life and led to many of his greatest canvases (4)--has yet to be examined. Hemingway's particular interest in the genre, like the stolen Braque painting, remains a noticeable gap or vacancy in the study of Hemingway's relationship to the visual arts.
Braque's Still Life with Wine Jug, as Mary Welsh Hemingway records, belongs to a group of still-life compositions Braque made during his experimental phase in Cubism with Picasso. The picture's iconography--"a coveted table, a scrap of newspaper, some dice and a wine jug"--places it firmly in the Cubist tradition of still life as a seemingly innocuous collection of objects displayed on a table for the viewer's perusal. Cubism's adoption of the largely moribund genre of still life reinvigorated a tradition largely ignored for decades in the age of state-sponsored academic Salon painting that dominated French art before the Impressionist revolution of the 1870s. Hemingway was drawn to the still life for a variety of reasons, including the sense of distance and objectivity the genre affords the artist. Arranging objects on a surface, comparing their scale, density, and texture, adjusting open and closed spaces, composing directional lines and competing shapes along the picture plane, artists like Braque and Cezanne created still lifes concentrated on pure form and were freed from empathic constraints to develop aesthetic worlds of their own. In Braque's still life, for instance, there are no signs of loss, human suffering, or emotive stress as in, say, one of Caravaggio's 16th century Baroque scenes containing a still life of rotting fruit. Instead, a common newspaper fragment suggests a cafe environment where one engages in pleasant pastimes such as polite gaming and the drinking of wine. Yet, as Guy Davenport has observed, even the modern still life of food and sustenance invokes the painful reminder of mortality historically attached to the genre. For Davenport, the still life is always a coded sign of anxiety, a memento mori, the objects in a still-life composition symbols of "what we shall have taken from us" (7).
In considering Hemingway's use of the still life as a visual partner to narrative, it is useful to place this strategy in the context of American Precisionism, a movement in painting that emphasized the "thingness of things," the essential power inherent in everyday objects, as in Williams's famed red wheelbarrow. While the movement's two most prominent painters were Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Hemingway's friend Gerald Murphy also adopted this hard-edged style. Murphy's "Razor" (1924) is an example of this highly stylized approach. Flat areas of bright colors are clearly outlined, with each shape intimately connected to its partners in a tightly-woven, almost claustrophobic spatial composition emphasizing the bodily presence of manufactured materials. Linda Miller has documented Hemingway's relationship with Murphy, characterizing their friendship as doomed from the start because it began when Hemingway, already married to Hadley Richardson, was falling in love with Pauline Pfeiffer. The subsequent divorce left the writer saddled with lifelong guilt and remorse, and Hemingway blamed Murphy for encouraging the affair even as his finances forced him to take up residence in Murphy's studio following the separation from Hadley. Thus, real life events, emotional trauma, and the aesthetics of the still life may have become enmeshed for Hemingway.
A Farewell to Arms is filled with anxious objects whose function is both to mask and reveal the emotional turmoil of the novel's protagonist, Frederic Henry, who desperately seeks to keep such matters under control. The novel's famous opening has been roundly admired by generations of readers and critics alike; however, towards the conclusion of this initial scene, Hemingway (unlike Cezanne, whose landscapes were always uninhabited) telescopes vision onto the troops working their way through the mud and rain, inching their way toward the fight in the mountains. Here Henry performs for readers an impossible visual task...
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