5 - Turbulence (1970–1979)

Summary

THE 1970S WAS A TURBULENT decade for Hemingway studies. In the academy, a growing number of young Americanists trained in the principles of New Criticism, taught to value literature that dealt with existential issues, and predisposed to admire works where style and substance seemed joined at the hip, gravitated toward Hemingway's work as fertile ground for serious scholarship. His mistakes from the 1930s and 1940s and the “disastrous” Across the River and Into the Trees were acknowledged but often ignored in favor of extended analysis of the stories and novels that had made him the darling of the moderns. At the same time, the emergence on campus of “new critical theory,” as the collection of theoretical (and political) approaches to literary study came to be called, led to a backlash against Hemingway's work and the philosophy underlying it.

Islands in the Stream

The same kind of controversy that erupted at the publication of A Moveable Feast greeted the publication of Islands in the Stream in 1970. The book was reviewed in dozens of newspapers, periodicals, and academic journals and was a Book-of-the-Month Club special selection. In reporting to club subscribers, Clifton Fadiman (1970) gushed that reading Islands in the Stream “is a moving experience.” Its finest episodes “are at least as good as any comparable ones to be found in [Hemingway's] entire body of work” (2). Robie Macauley (1970), whose laudatory assessment appeared in the New York Times, believed the novel was “a contender with [Hemingway's] very best” (51). The United Press International review that was published in newspapers across the country called the novel “very, very good” (“Last by Hemingway” 1970, E8). Outdoorsman and writer Archie Satterfield (1970) made even larger claims, insisting that this was the “big book” Hemingway had promised. Satterfield thought Scribner and Mary Hemingway were wise to issue the three stories that make up Islands in the Stream in a single volume so “the reader can feel the full impact of Hemingway's genius as a storyteller”—a talent that extended to his ability to write love scenes, which “no one” can do “more convincingly” (H4). Satterfield ranked Islands in the Stream as one of Hemingway's three greatest novels.