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

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

River and road are both conduits - the river for the water (an archetypal image of life) that is "swiftly moving and blue in the channels," the road (whose dry dust, traditionally an image of infertility and death, is mentioned three times in three lines) for the "troops marching along the road" (3). Hemingway links the contents of these two conduits not just by the grammatical structure of their descriptions, but also (as Cezanne would have) by repeating the color "white" (3) that he applies both to the boulders in the riverbed and to the dust in the roadbed.

The river and its blue water are thus associated with the second paragraph's "plain rich with crops" in the near distance; the road (whose dusty troops have disappeared by the end of the paragraph), now "bare and white except for the [dust-powdered] leaves," is similarly linked both symbolically and verbally (through the repetition of "bare") with the second paragraph's "brown and bare" mountains in the farther distance. By interposing these visions of"troops marching... dust rising and leaves... falling," Hemingway projects almost holographic overlapping images of the dust-covered troops and dust-powdered leaves to which the "falling" participle now subliminally attaches itself. At the end of that paragraph, our mind's eye sees the river still flowing, but the road is now bare "except for the leaves" (3) that have fallen just as the soldiers, who have disappeared, will also fall: the narrator tells us that in the autumn, after the rains came, "things went very badly" (4).

To be sure, one cannot ignore the elements of "pure visual impressions" noted by Kazin (26), but too often critics forget that this novel is, in fact, a first-person narrative told in retrospect by a protagonist who knows about war and death: he has treated the dying, has been wounded, and has lost his wife - and son - in childbirth. Emily Watts observes in relation to Cezanne's treatment of Mont Sainte-Victoire vis-a-vis Hemingway's use of mountains in his novels: "[t]he quality of realism, inextricably intertwined with symbolism, is common to both" (47). In this opening paragraph, Hemingway's deft blending of highly realistic detail with implied symbolism is unmistakable, and his ironic establishment of such a fertility/death continuum in nature stands in contrast to the more peaceful unity evoked as Cezanne's pine limb echoes the curved outline of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

As we move from these techniques to an examination of perspective shifts, we must exchange our detail-oriented focus for a more panoramic vision. With such an outlook, we realize how water surfaces can seem, in fact, to curve away from us as we shift attention from objects floating nearby to those more distant - as we might if we were admiring receding water lily clumps in a Monet. With Cezanne, however, perspective planes change far more abruptly. Consider his Still Life with Apples (1893-94), where we first look obliquely across the open mouth of the centrally positioned blue-gray glazed ginger jar but, almost eerily, down the throat of the nearer green vase to its left. (And to their right, the plate of apples seems also to be tilted toward us.) And so it is with Hemingway in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," where first we view the lion from Macomber's perspective only to experience a diametric reversal shortly thereafter, in which we see Macomber and the car "bulking like some super rhino" (Short Stories 15) through the eyes of this soon-to-be wounded, rage-driven animal whose courage and single-minded determination present him as an important foil to Macomber, who "bolt[s] like a rabbit" (4).(10)