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

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

For a representative Hemingway still life, we have but to look at the conclusion to A Farewell to Arms. As Catherine Barkley waits in the early morning hours to be wheeled into the delivery room, Frederick Henry returns up an empty street. Seeing a dog nosing for food in a garbage can, Frederick tries to help - but, significantly, uncovers what for us seems the perversion of a Cezanne nature morte: rather than the dark, vertiginous emptiness felt as we peer down the throat of the green vase in Still Life with Apples, here we see in the near distance the garbage can's elliptical opening, with "nothing on top but coffee-grounds, dust and some dead flowers." Frederick responds, "There isn't anything, dog" (315). And when he arrives at the hospital, there will be nothing for him, either: Catherine's room is empty; their son is delivered dead, strangled by his umbilical cord; Catherine dies shortly thereafter.

Similarly, the opening of "In Another Country" offers an example of Hemingway's use of a striking still life in the trompe l'oeil tradition - perhaps to be associated more with a Chardin or with a William Harnett than with the fruits and bottles of a Cezanne. As winter approaches, invalided soldiers go for physical therapy to a hospital in Milan. On the way to their treatments, the men stop to warm themselves before the glowing coals of the woman selling roasted chestnuts (Short Stories 267); later, returning to their barracks down dark and windy streets, they try to stay close to the "light and singing coming out of the wine shops" (269). But during the sessions themselves, gleaming machines lurch at patients' stiffened knees and ineffectually flap paralyzed fingers. His hand shattered, the Italian major will be unable to continue as the world-class fencer he had been before the war. Confident he cannot be returned to the front, however, he marries - only to have his wife die of pneumonia. Hemingway foreshadows this grim conclusion with the highly symbolic nature morte with which he begins the story:

There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. (267)

In parallel with Cezanne's carefully placed brushstrokes of identical color that often link his portrait subjects with the larger context of their backgrounds, here Hemingway's repetition of "the wind" also reinforces the pervasiveness and kinesthetic impact of the imagery of coldness that is further emphasized, like complementary colors, by the stiffness of the deer carcasses and by the powder of dry, cold snow that, rather than coating the carcasses, has lodged "in the fur of the foxes" (my emphasis). Likewise, the wind "turned [the] feathers" of the small birds, deftly and symbolically linked with the wounded narrator and the soldiers undergoing therapy who are later compared to "hunting hawks" (270). In this tale there is clearly no escape from disability, cold, and death.