Vaudeville philosophers: "The Killers." - short story by Ernest Hemingway

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Ron Berman

From this dilemma came James's famous statement about American tough-mindedness, a quality that seems to me to describe Hemingway's philosophical stance. The tough-minded were empirical, and in rejecting any systems they rejected not only explanation but also the "idea" of explanation. It may have been only fitting that in 1926 Hemingway too should turn to murder as a philosophical test. James knew that all theories, empiricism among them, and all stances, tough-mindedness among them, were what he called remedies for the world of facts. I believe that Hemingway understood that, but his fiction needed what it found in radical empiricism, which is disguised here as vaudeville philosophy. Or rather, it takes on the appropriate form of vaudeville philosophy.

NOTES

1 See Benson, "The Killers," in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Originally published in Brooks.

2 Seldes cites Eliot on Chaplin (41). See Lynn, Charlie Chaplin (254-55), for the discussion of his appeal to "the New York intelligentsia." Lynn notes (260) that Waldo Frank's Our America of 1919 assigned to Chaplin a place among Dreiser, Frost, Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, and Van Wyck Brooks because he exemplified, as they did, the new movement "beyond traditional definitions of culture."

3 Hemingway did not give Seldes credit for his ideas, although he was not above using them. For the Hemingway-Seldes relationship see Baker, Life Story 128, 587-88, 612-13; Baker, Selected Letters 111, 203-04, 276, 305; Lynn, Hemingway 226, 235, 240, 242, 326, 351-52; and Reynolds 200, 311. Hemingway disliked Seldes because he was thought to be Jewish, a Harvard intellectual, a publishing success, and an editor who may have turned him down - in many respects, a Robert Cohn without boxing gloves. There is a brief passage in Lynn's biography (235) that suggests that Hemingway's ideas about the lively arts agreed with those of Seldes.

4 This refers to what Wilson called the "intellectual chaos" of postwar France and the "bewildering confusion" of postwar New York. Supposedly illogical comedy (Wilson likened it to dada) became the objective correlative of its incomprehensible moment ("Gilbert Seldes" 162-63).

WORKS CITED

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner's, 1969.

-----, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Scribner's, 1981.

Benson, Jackson J., ed. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham: Duke UP, 1975.

Beuick, Marshall D. "The Vaudeville Philosopher." The Drama 16 (Dec. 1925): 92-93. Rpt. in Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 153.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. "The Killers." Understanding Poetry. New York: Appleton, 1959. 303-12. Cited in Benson.

Canfield, Mary Cass. "The Great American Arty Selected Vaudeville Criticism. Ed. Anthony Slide. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1988. 225.

Commager, Henry. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950.

Dewey, Johnu John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1952. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. 17 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1981.