Hemingway's critique of anti-Semitism: semiotic confusion in "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Robert Paul Lamb

Works Cited

Hays, Peter L. "Hemingway and the Fisher King." The University Review 32 (1966): 225-28.

Hemingway, Ernest. "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen." Winner Take Nothing. [19331 New York: Scribner's, 1961. 43-50.

Monteiro, George. "Hemingway's Christmas Carol." Fitzgerald/Himingway Annual (1972): 207-13.

Smith, Julian. "Hemingway and the Thing Left Out." Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1970-71):169-82.

Smith, Paul. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: Hall, 1989. (1) There are occasional brief mentions of the story in Hemingway scholarship, and Paul Smith devotes a chapter to it (246-51) in which he reconstructs the circumstances of its creation, recounts its publication history, and offers a shrewd critique of Hays, Julian Smith, and Monteiro. Nevertheless, despite a generally positive response to the story by Hemingway scholars, the deeper significances of "God Rest You" have failed to engage the critics.

(2) Most critics identify the narrator as a reporter, presumably because Hemingway was a reporter in Kansas City. But there is no textual evidence to support such an assumption. The conflation of the author with his narrators and focalizers has long been an occupational hazard in Hemingway studies.

(3) "God Rest You" was first published in 1933 as a limited, first-edition pamphlet. In that version, Wilcox tells the boy, "Oh go and jack off." When the story was reissued by Scribner's later that year, as pan of the collection Men Without Women, a dash replaced the words "jack off" against Hemingway's wishes, and this has been the case in all subsequent reprintings. See Paul Smith (247).

(4) The only other possibility that suggests itself is euthanasia, but that would have fallen under the criminal code and not the federal statutes. Also, had that been Fischer's crime, it is difficult to believe that he would have avoided jail and/or the loss of his medical license. Of course, abortion would have fallen under state rather than federal statutes, but it is quite possible that Hemingway was simply unaware of this.

(5) There is even a small hint that Fischer may literally be Wilcox's subordinate. Although Fischer is clearly concerned about the boy in their first meeting, when Wilcox orders his colleague to "Get him out of here," and the boy replies, "Don't touch me. I'll get out" (48), Fischer remains uncharacteristically silent. (6) "God Rest You" may have been Hemingway's attempt to apologize for his treatment of Harold Loeb--writer, founding editor of Broom, and former member of Hemingway's circle in early 1920s Paris-who was deeply hurt by Hemingway's nasty and anti-Semitic portrayal of him as the hapless Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises. Like Cohn, Loeb was a Jew who had misread the social codes of his circle and was subsequently excluded from the group. Perhaps Hemingway--who often felt retrospective remorse about his truculent behavior, vicious comments, and violent feelings toward people close to him, and who occasionally expressed this guilt in self-accusatory fiction (e.g., "Cat in the Rain," 'A Canary for One," "Fathers and Sons")--was unconsciously atoning for his insensitivity toward his former friend in his portrayal of Wilcox and Fischer.