10 - Barking at Death: Hemingway, Africa, and the Stages of Dying

Summary

Since in our unconscious mind we are all immortal, it is almost inconceivable for us to acknowledge that we too have to face death.

— Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying

Suddenly, he was afraid of dying.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

IN GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA, the first-person narrator says that Crane “was dying from the start” (23). In a way, so was Ernest Hemingway, whose fiction betrays what Frank Scafella described, without exaggeration, as an “extreme anxiety of death” (5). Not surprisingly, there has been a great deal written on the subject, much of it having to do with Hemingway’s love of the corrida and most of it harking back to Phillip Young’s interpretation of a famous Hemingway phrase: “grace under pressure” (Ernest Hemingway, 7–9, 14). Young saw the emergence of a “code hero” very early in Hemingway’s fiction, a hero whose message “is life: you lose, of course; what counts is how you conduct yourself while you are being destroyed” (8). For decades, critics subscribed to Young’s argument that Hemingway’s famous World War I wounding was the source of his alleged ambivalence toward death and the irresistible urge to confront it.

It’s worth remembering, however, that Hemingway was traumatized by death even before, as a nineteen year old, he was felled by a trench mortar and machine-gun fire in Italy. As biographer Kenneth Lynn observes, Hemingway’s early boyhood was haunted by death “for reasons that he could not bring himself to discuss with anyone” (22). This avoidance persisted throughout his life. Valerie (Danby-Smith) Hemingway, who became his friend and secretary in 1959, writes that Hemingway often voiced his fears to her but never talked about death (132). According to Idaho hunting companion Forrest MacMullen, Hemingway broached the subject only obliquely, in a manner that could be construed as colorful behavior or jesting: he used to bark at the mention of death. “He’d say, ‘Woof woof,’” MacMullen recalled, “more or less acknowledging that he heard it. The first time that I was around him and death was mentioned and he said ‘Woof woof,’ I asked him about it. And he said, ‘It’s an unpleasant thing’” (Plath and Simons, 129).

Unable to talk about death to his friends, Hemingway filled his writing with it.