Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion.

Fleming, Robert E.

Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion. Edited by Lauretta Conklin Frederking. Routledge Studies in Political and Social Thought. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. 203 pp. Cloth. $103.

Writing to Edmund Wilson in 1924, Hemingway explained the strategy of alternating the new stories in his forthcoming In Our Time with chapters from his earlier in our time by using the following metaphor: reading the book would be "like looking with your eyes at something, say a passing coast line, and then looking at it with 15x binoculars" (SL 128).

A similar image could be applied to Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion, a collection of essays by scholars of political science. While most readers of The Hemingway Review are accustomed to viewing the man and his work under powerful magnification, the writers chosen by editor Lauretta Conklin Frederking view their subject from a distance: some miss details of the Hemingway landscape but produce excellent insights into the overall territory, while others seem to have been looking at a different continent, Frederking writes in her introduction that:

   [B]ringing Hemingway to the table of political philosophy reminds
   us that politics can be found in more interesting places and in
   more interesting ways than our traditional divisions of labor.
   Furthermore, this volume insists on a consideration of political
   rebellion and the emerging political rebel in the experiences
   outside of formal politics. It follows then that we cannot rely
   solely on our tools or ways of thinking about political science to
   understand politics. While art may not be wholly determinative it
   can open our eyes to new ways of seeing politics. (15)

From the point of view of the literary scholar, it can be helpful to reverse this proposition: what can be learned about familiar texts from those from outside our field?

This collection is divided into three sections: "Hemingway in Liberal Times," "The Politics of Morality, Manliness, and God," and "The Impossibility of Politics." Hemingway scholars will probably consider the last section, the strongest of the three, the most enlightening. In essays on To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bells Tolls, and Across the River and into the Trees, Kerstin Haman, David Winston Conklin, and Frederking herself respectively illustrate the values on which the book is based.

In the first section, Catherine Zuckert's essay, "Hemingway on Being in Our Time," illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the outsiders' approach. She commits several factual errors--Nick Adams "runs away from home to join the war in Europe" (20); like Hemingway, Nick grew up "in the upper peninsula of Michigan" (24, 39); like Hemingway, Nick is an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I, not a participant in the Italian military campaign (21). However, in spite of these minor lapses, Zuckert competently traces Nick's progress from his father's retreat into the Michigan wilderness, through disillusioning experiences in the states, and on into the chaos of war. In his final state Nick depicts what Hemingway saw as the modern dilemma--humans cannot live alone, and yet they are unable to "form an enduring union that would not become an empty, inauthentic, and ... oppressive sham" (39). To Zuckert, Hemingway therefore becomes a rebel against political institutions that would cure the ills of humanity.

William Curtis's "Hemingway, Hopelessness, and Liberalism" will remind some literary scholars of the leftist attacks on Hemingway during the 1930s. Basing his argument on Plato's Republic and the work of Richard Rorty, Curtis views the best literature as that which can "inspire hope in liberal political progress" (51). A lesser category of literature, into which Hemingway's work falls, consists of works that are not "relevant to the public task of constructing a more liberally just society" (51). (An example of the first category is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and of the second Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Enough said?) Curtis concludes by ceding to Hemingway one possible virtue: his works may serve as "an historical artifact that bears witness to a time when liberal hope was desperately under siege" (70).

Sayres Rudy's "Ethics without Theodicy" is a nicely focused study of A Farewell to Arras redeeming Hemingway from the charge of nihilism. In contrast to Curtis, Rudy considers it "perilous to call literature 'political' or 'ethical" A valuable work of art rarely 'argues for' the moral ideas it takes up" (86). Rudy approaches A Farewell to Arms as a text which approves of political rebellion "not in any straightforward opinion about war or democracy or gender" (87) but as a tragic story of love and loss in which the war and its political causes serve as background. This is one of the essays that readers outside of the field of political science will find most useful.

Harvey Mansfield's "Manly Assertion" seems out of place in this collection. For one thing, it is a chapter from Mansfield's Manliness (2006), not an essay written with the present book in mind. It also seems to ignore recent gender studies of the Hemingway canon, although Mansfield qualifies his definition of manliness by including "the manly assertiveness of the women's movement in our day," which may form the basis of a "gender neutral society" (102).

Joseph Prud'homme's "Hemingway, Religion, and Masculine Virtue" takes up the question of whether Hemingway is a nihilist or an existentialist, beginning with John Killinger's Hemingway and the Dead Gods for the affirmative and progressing through the criticism of H. R. Stoneback and other defenders of Hemingway's religious sensibilities. Following Stoneback, Prud'homme traces the periods of intense Catholicism and rebellion against orthodoxy in Hemingway's life. Then, going to the texts of For Whom the Bell Tolls, "Today Is Friday," and The Old Man and the Sea (but not "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"), Prud'homme capably defends Hemingway against the charge of nihilism: "Catholic Hemingway Hero [sic] recognizes the harshness of the fallen world ... and the power of the physical world to crush man. Yet through this recognition he comes to be self-reflective. And he comes to show great strength and perseverance" (119).

Building on a foundation laid by historian William Braasch Watson and Allen Josephs, Kerstin Haman's "Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls: Rebellion and the Meaning of Politics in the Spanish Civil War" assesses the accuracy of Hemingway's depiction of the war's history and the aptness of the novel's love story. Haman explores the political and historical roots of the civil war and marshals evidence to support Hemingway's treatment of the Republic's failures. She defends the love story as an integral part of the political novel because it supplies the positive element lost in the course of the struggle. Haman praises the novel as a major work which "rather than offering support for a specific type of polity, or defending a specific political ideology" presents a "more nuanced," artistic response to the war (133).

David Winston Conklin, in "The Revolutionist," employs the rather unlikely short story of the same name (which he misreads) as a springboard to the question of why some people risk death to mount revolutions. He concludes that Hemingway is bringing readers to "respect and feel affection for the raw passion of the warrior ... whether or not we share his or her objectives" (152). Conklin is on more solid ground as he moves on to apply the social theories of Anthony Oberschall, Ted Gurr, and Timur Kuran to more appropriate texts-Across the River and into the Trees, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the introduction to Men at War. Overall, this essay embodies the goals of the book admirably.

To conclude her volume, Frederking juxtaposes the theories of German philosopher Theodor Adorno with Hemingway's depiction of the rebel Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not. Both the philosopher (1903-1969) and the writer mistrust the power of institutions and resist efforts to classify them politically (ironically, both became targets of FBI investigations). Frederking makes no claim of influence--Hemingway's novel predates her citations from Adorno's works--but the many parallels between the principles of the two men validate the depth of Hemingway's own philosophy, expressed in artistic terms.

While some literary scholars may be irritated by the occasional factual errors and the authors' tendency to accept quoted excerpts at second hand rather than go to primary sources, any Hemingway scholar interested in the author's politics will want to explore Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion.

Robert E. Fleming

University of New Mexico