Hemingway's debt to Cezanne: new perspectives - Ernest Hemingway; Paul Cezanne

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Theodore L. Gaillard, Jr.

OMISSION AND FOCUS, REPETITION AND PERSPECTIVE SHIFT

Examination of sample scenes from his novels and short stories reveals how Hemingway adapted artistic methods embodied in representative Cezanne landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. In completing "Big Two-Hearted River," for example, Hemingway first really began to feel he was "getting the words right." Excited, he wrote in his oft-quoted August 1924 letter to Gertrude Stein that he had been "trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit" (qtd. in Lynn 102). And he did. Emily Watts shows how in various landscapes Hemingway employs Cezanne's overlapping planes and underlying geometric shapes to reveal a natural environment in which the land emerges (as it did for Cezanne in his depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire) as "solid, substantial, and orderly. It is a kind of idyll in the midst of confusion and chaos in 'Big Two-Hearted River' and For Whom the Bell Tolls" (44).

But let us complement Watts's panoramic vision with a closer focus on how both Cezanne and Hemingway manipulate detail to achieve an intensified depth of feeling and a heightened clarity. For example, in several of his later paintings, Cezanne would intentionally leave small areas of canvas blank in the midst of a sea of roofs or on the side of a hill, causing viewers to fill spaces with preconscious constructs of complementary line and color, subtly moving toward the substitution of impression and feeling for cognition. As he reveals in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway began to incorporate a similar technique(5) into his work in the first story he wrote following the loss of all his typescripts when Hadley's suitcase was stolen at Gare de Lyon. In the conclusion of "Out of Season," there is no mention that the old man hanged himself, for Hemingway's new theory postulated that "you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood" (75; my italics). Even though clear understanding of such stories as "Out of Season" and "Hills Like White Elephants" (where studious avoidance of the word abortion only increases tension in the strained dialogue between the man and the woman) might not come as easily, Hemingway assured himself that people "will understand the same way that they always do in painting. It only takes time..." (75).

Written shortly thereafter, "Big Two-Hearted River" embodied a far more ambitious application of omission theory: "The story was about coming back from the war," Hemingway tells us, "but there was no mention of the war in it" (Feast 76). The unspoken goal of his fishing trip is for Nick Adams to relive pleasures of the distant past in order to blot out anguish of recent events. Indeed, Hemingway's precise description of ritualistic movements in the preparation of"coffee according to Hopkins" (Short Stories 218) and of the small bubbles forming along the browning edge of a cooking flapjack have us view through the close-up lens of Nick's eyes two instances in which he concentrates on minute details in order to avoid "the need for thinking" (210) about the blur of recent combat images he is barely suppressing (and which Hemingway intentionally avoids mentioning).(6) Only in his tent on the meadow above the river does Nick feel safe, camped where "nothing could touch him" (215).(7)