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

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

On the other hand, moving beyond small patches of blank canvas and omission of implied plot elements, we notice how a bold red brushstroke helps sharpen the central focus in Cezanne's Lake Annecy, heightening the canvas's elemental fusion of red roof and stone dwellings with trees, mountain, water, and reflected sky - and how in "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway introduces a similarly controlled focus as Nick peers from a bridge to where a fish "tightened facing up into the current" (210). Shortly, when "Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved" (210), Hemingway's repetition of tightened serves as a metaphoric spot of color linking Nick with trout that keep "themselves steady in the current with wavering fins" (209), subtly reminding us that "Nick's hand [is] shaky" (226)(8) when he later tries to reel in his catch. In the river, the water flows fast and deep in places that are "smooth and dark" (225), just as the stream of memory holds for Nick its own threats: like the trout, he must try to maintain his balance in both of these powerful currents.

Having prodded us with magnified visual detail and repetition of specific textual coloring in order to link these different portions of his verbal canvas, Hemingway has enabled us to comprehend at a deeper level just why the next day Nick "did not feel like going on into the swamp" (231), a looming Cezannesque swamp where "the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches" (231).

Indeed, these overarching cedars cannot help but remind us of that intriguing subseries of three Mont Sainte-Victoires in which Cezanne, across the top of his canvases, frames the scene with an extended pine limb in whose curve he has contrived to repeat the distant ridgeline of Mont Sainte-Victoire, subtly suggesting a unity in nature. Using similar meticulous paralleling of landscape elements in the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway comments symbolically on the withering, inescapable deadliness of war. Nevertheless, Alfred Kazin objects that these "opening lines... don't altogether make sense except as pure visual impressionism, repeated and echoing Hemingway's own effort to get these 'impressions' down." He feels that "as an impression it is static, for it calls attention to the beholder's effort to capture one detail after another rather than to the scene of war" (26).

Not so. Rather than a "static" impression formed by lines that "don't altogether make sense," the opening paragraph emerges as a highly descriptive vignette of purposeful fluidity and transition. If, as Thomas Hermann rightly asserts, Hemingway's style contains a "quantitative predominance of report and dialogue" in which "[p]ure description is relatively rare" (33), then we should be alert for the possible significance of such a break in pattern. In this case, Hemingway's detailed depiction focuses closely on two parallel (both physically and figuratively) scenes observed from the house window(9) that looks across the "bare and white" road (which runs directly under the window) and the river to the plain "rich with crops" and the "brown and bare" mountains in paragraph 2.