The Hemingway Review

This is the best book of criticism on Ernest Hemingway I have ever read.

Wyatt began his work in response to a challenge from a fellow professor at the University of Maryland. As a summer reading project for 2012, why didn’t he read all of Hemingway? So Wyatt did, and by all he included not only the published work but judicious investigation of the drafts—the false starts and serial attempts at right endings—that are preserved in the vast Hemingway [End Page 106] collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. He’d been teaching Hemingway for forty years, but had never so immersed himself before.

The summer stretched into fall and beyond, and along the way Wyatt decided that the writer he’d read from beginning to end was considerably different from either his popular or conventional critical image.

The gist of his argument, spelled out in the introduction, is that “Hemingway’s writing engage[d] in a career-long struggle with emotional vulnerability,” and that this assertion applied not only to the more openly expressed feelings of his later work but to those withheld (but not unfelt) in the first stories and novels. The other major point Wyatt makes is that Hemingway changed as a writer, shifting from an early art of omission toward an art of inclusion, and that “this development was, in many ways, a change for the better” (3).

Wyatt traces three stages of emotional reaction the Hemingway reader undergoes as he proceeds through the author’s corpus: Anxiety, Embarrassment, and Remorse. These emotional states are not entirely separable, Wyatt acknowledges, but by and large can be seen as applicable to Hemingway’s early, middle, and late career. First we are anxious about what will happen to a character (Nick, Jake, Catherine Barkley dreaming herself dead in the rain), next we are embarrassed as for the “braggart” (126) Hemingway of Green Hills of Africa and for Francis Macomber, and finally we share in the remorse of the narrator of A Moveable Feast and of David Bourne in The Garden of Eden.

The book follows the course of these emotions as they emerge in the writing, and adds a fourth section on Forgiveness, especially as articulated in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

This organization is useful, but the great virtue of Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion derives from Wyatt’s incisive, intelligent, and highly readable prose, from his perceptive attention to the actual published work and the omissions/additions, and from insights drawn from neglected sources, other writers in particular.

A few examples:

Wyatt examines the opening lines of “Indian Camp”: “At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.” He demonstrates how the lines both puzzle the reader—why “[a]nother rowboat?” why “two Indians?”—and involve him in the story with Nick, who gets into the boat with his father so that the story can tell us what happened next. The Hemingway reader thus becomes, in Owen Wister’s phrase, “a participating witness” (13–15). [End Page 107]

Wyatt reminds readers that this participation, as Tobias Wolff pointed out, could become uncomfortable. Wolff described “the man who lived” in Hemingway’s stories and novels – a far cry from “the Hemingway hero” – as “in most respects an unremarkable, even banal, man who got things wrong and suffered from nervousness and fear, fear even of the workings of his own mind, and who sometimes didn’t know how to behave.” But even as he judged that person, Wolff understood that Hemingway was allowing him to do so. “Knowing that readers like me would see him in Nick, he had given us a vision of spiritual muddle and exhaustion almost embarrassing in its intimacy” (126).

Wyatt admires “the art of digression” in the fiction, as in the fishing trip Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton take to Burguete as a respite from the frantic life in Paris and Pamplona. In strategies such as this, Hemingway demonstrated...