6 - Calm before the Storm (1980–1985)

Summary

THE PROBLEM HEMINGWAY's critics faced in the early 1980s was summed up succinctly by James Cox (1984) in a review of several of the titles discussed below: scholars are “now, or should be, at the point of comprehending Hemingway” (486), he said. Unfortunately, surveying recent criticism leads one to conclude that “Hemingway was better understood at the outset” than he has been in recent years, “because good early reviewers were actively engaged in the business of making value rather than being burdened by it” (488). Whether Cox is correct may be open to question. However, a review of the literature of the five-year period before the publication of The Garden of Eden reveals that many critics were covering the same ground already well plowed during the previous fifteen years, offering nuanced readings but doing little to change perceptions among either Hemingway's admirers or those who had written him off as outdated and irrelevant.

There were exceptions, of course. David Lodge's (1980) exhaustive examination of “Cat in the Rain” in “Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text” applied what he described as “the whole battery of modern formalism and structuralism to bear upon a single text” (6). There were also advances in textual study. The opening of Hemingway's manuscripts to scholars in 1976 ushered in a new round of criticism that allowed academics and others to address age-old questions such as: Which of the writer's texts is the ‘authorized’ one, the one he most wanted to leave as his testament? How did the published text evolve from draft to printed work? Why did some works remain unpublished—and should they stay, or have stayed, that way?

Scholarly and Critical Books

The first responses to some of these questions were provided at a 1980 symposium held under the auspices of the Kennedy Library in Boston. The gathering included an imposing array of scholars. Presentations from that conference, assembled by Bernard Oldsey and published as Hemingway: The Papers of a Writer (Oldsey 1981), included George Plimpton's essay on Hemingway and President Kennedy, observations on Hemingway's relationship with Ezra Pound and on his work for the Toronto Star, comments on his library, historical studies of Hemingway in Europe during the 1920s, an intriguing and definitely not feminist study of Hemingway's women (by Linda Wagner), and some reminiscences by Philip Young.