7 - A “Sea Change” in Hemingway Studies (1986–1990)

Summary

ON SOME FRONTS, 1986 seemed to be another quiet year for Hemingway scholarship. The January 1986 issue of the Wilson Quarterly carried an article by Frank McConnell (1986) with the intriguing title “Hemingway: Stalking Papa's Ghost.” McConnell traced Hemingway's influence over two generations of American writers, finding the ghost of Papa lurking in the background of figures as diverse as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Additionally, he continued, “Both Hemingway and the Hemingway style have exercised a strong, probably determinative, effect on the whole course of the American detective story” (165). Unfortunately, while Hemingway himself was able to control through irony the tendencies toward cruelty and irresponsibility that characterized his vision, others had not always been so successful; witness, McConnell noted, the inane immorality of the work of Mickey Spillane. What had made Hemingway so memorable as both a person and a writer was his willingness to “live[] the vocation of art as risk, as a deliberate gamble with one's chances for sanity in a mad world” (172).

Another work appearing that year, Earl Rovit's (1986) second edition of Ernest Hemingway in the Twayne US Authors series, on which Gerry Brenner collaborated, did little to challenge traditional readings or advance critical understanding of Hemingway's work. Most of the text was repeated verbatim from the first edition, although notes were expanded and the bibliography updated to include recent commentaries. The one new chapter, on the posthumous work, gave Rovit a chance to explain how his “tutor and tyro” theory of the Hemingway hero extended to the later fiction, in this case Islands in the Stream. The Hemingway community may have been disappointed, though, to discover no serious acknowledgment of the changes in Hemingway criticism brought about by feminists and others who had for more than a decade engaged in a campaign to despoil Hemingway's reputation and legacy.

The tide changed radically in May 1986 when Scribner issued a previously unpublished Hemingway novel: The Garden of Eden. Edited by Tom Jenks, who had been hired by Scribner as part of its move to increase sales, the novel would generate radically new readings of Hemingway's fiction—and revaluations of his life.