The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels.

Miller, Linda Patterson

The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels. By Hilary K. Justice. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006.162 pp. Cloth $39.00.

Most scholars recognize Hemingway as a writer who wrote what he knew, which means he wrote what he lived--sometimes even as he was living it. Many scholars also recognize how readers too often misread Hemingway's texts, drawing direct parallels between Hemingway's personal life and the narrative life so as to perpetuate biographical fallacies that ignore artistic nuance. Hemingway himself, as Hilary K. Justice argues in The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels, came to understand that fame defined his reading public's expectations for his work, a recognition that then inhibited his ability to write truly, or truthfully. This idea that "fame became of him" is not a new insight. What is stunningly new about Justice's book is her recognition that Hemingway's conflict between his private and public selves (what she calls the "Writer" who writes Personal books versus the "Author" who writes what people see as Authentic books) determined the overarching stylistic and thematic configurations of his life's work (which she defines in the aggregate as the "Hemingway Text").

As Hemingway's fame escalated following the publication in 1926 of The Sun Also Rises (which thrust him into the public arena as an Author), he began to devise artistic innovations that would allow him to mine the mother-lode of personal material that had inspired his stories written between 1923 and 1927. He would side-step personal exposure as a writer to the degree that he discovered ways to embed and perhaps to deflect the personal material within the text. These acts of transformation, as Justice describes it, began to transcend individual texts by cross-referencing multiple texts, thus creating the larger meta-text that Hemingway himself could not have anticipated as a young writer. He "could not yet have the perspective On his own creative process to articulate what in retrospect would become obvious: that in his Personal writing, he would always represent his emotional response to his current situation by refracting it through his past, finding emotional points of contiguity between his present and his past, and using this doubled emotional intensity to make his readers 'feel more than they understand,' the purpose of Hemingway's 'theory of omission'" (4-5).

In the first chapters of her book Justice illustrates how Hemingway used this refractive process in his early stories, best seen as paired entities (the Nick Adams stories as aligned with the marriage tales, for example). Justice convincingly argues that Hemingway often worked almost simultaneously on two different stories, perhaps with one in the early generative stages as he worked to complete the other. This alignment allowed Hemingway to transform one narrative's conflict into the other narrative's resolution, thus deflecting the real personal issues in the material at hand.

As Justice recognizes, Hemingway's difficulty in completing books during his later, post-World War II period resulted from his juggling several works simultaneously, to the degree that "the experiences that informed [his] early works, as well as his experiences since writing them" complicated his collective artistic consciousness even as it led to an increasingly intricate and more opaque style as a high modernist. As Hemingway summed it up for Harvey Breit in 1950, "'In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus. If they don't understand that, to hell with them'" (57). He would also declare in The Garden of Eden manuscript the importance of knowing "'how complicated it is'" so as to "'then state it simply'" (55).

Hilary Justice's book Cannot be easily "dissected" primarily because its thesis underscores the interdependent stylistic and thematic relationships of all of Hemingway's writing. To the degree, then, that the reader must regard Hemingway's work collectively and also non-sequentially, this is not an easy read. Justice discourages readers from assessing Hemingway's art chronologically or as isolated or purely linear texts (assessments which she feels comprise the usual critical tendency). Instead, she encourages readers to "work backward through the text" while also considering how Hemingway's works, "published under different titles," become "writerly versions of each other" (44, 73). In particular, later works (including the posthumous works) are best appreciated as re-visitations or reconfigurations of Hemingway's earlier publications.

The savvy reader must approach the Hemingway Text so as "to hear all its parts simultaneously--to appreciate its intricacy as a kind of literary eight-voice fugue that ends with a gunshot" (11). In essence, this calls for an appreciation of the Hemingway Text as a cubist "canvas" that considers all points of view simultaneously, including cleverly embedded references and cross-references. Although Justice does not Use the term Cubism per se, she acknowledges a "fractal system" wherein a starting point for reading any Hemingway work becomes necessarily "arbitrary" (11).

Nonetheless, for the purpose of clarity in structuring her book, Justice does begin at the beginning with two chapters that address "The Personal Stories I (Paris, 1923-1925)" and "The Personal Stories II (Paris and Provence, 1926-1927)." These chapters determine the stimulus and center her book as Justice continues to illuminate how crucial this period was in Hemingway's creative life as a Writer (more than as an Author) and how Hemingway, through memory, came to transform much of his early fiction, "both draft and published versions" and "often varied only slightly," in the uncut The Garden of Eden (123).

Justice's definition of what comprises the Hemingway Text includes the posthumously published materials (including their related manuscript holdings). In particular, she devotes a significant portion of her analysis to The Garden of Eden (both in published and unpublished form) as a "textual autobiography" that illuminates Hemingway's lifelong concern with questions of authorship. In Eden, which he began working on during the late 1940s, "he writes the story of the writer writing, as well as the story of the stories that writer writes" (58). Hemingway resurrects or reconstructs through David Bourne his own creative process from the 1920s, evoking the process he actually undertook to recreate, at a mad-cap pace during 1924, the manuscripts that Hadley had left on the train in late 1922. In a chapter called "Hemingway's Lost Manuscripts," Justice makes a provocative and convincing argument, based on sophisticated textual analysis of Hemingway's stories in conjunction with The Garden of Eden, that Hemingway actually "reprised" those stories that now comprise the bulk of In Our Time. As such, these stories are more found, or reclaimed, than they are forever lost to time, and it is precisely Justice's brilliant textual unearthing as demonstrated in this book that allows us to understand how "the bones of the others" (by which I think she means all of Hemingway's texts both as he realized them and came to imagine them) determined his creative process and his identity as a writer in the face of public impediments.

I had just been rereading Eden as I contemplated including it in a course I am teaching this fall on the art of the Lost Generation. My reading of Justice's book was timely in this regard for she has convinced me of the intricacy of this work and its just place in understanding Hemingway's complicated relationship to authorship. Furthermore, it allows us to see how Hemingway looked backward to incorporate, accumulatively, earlier experiences that he transformed into art. This is not to disregard the controversy over any text that has been published posthumously in edited form. Nonetheless, The Garden of Eden in both published and manuscript versions provides Hemingway scholars insight into Hemingway's Creative process. Justice's assessment of this work in context with the Hemingway Text illuminates "the problem of authorship and textuality" in appreciating Hemingway's writing.

Justice's book takes us into the larger context of theoretical studies on the whole issue of authorship that argue, as does Jerome McCann (who seems to be just one of the key influences on Justice's scholarship), "for a broader understanding of the role of the author as one of many nodes within the network of relationships involved in textual production" (129-130). As Justice describes it, "McGann's theory, as he himself has stated it, does not attempt to erase the author; rather, it restores to authorship its intrinsic social context. Within textual studies, this restoration allows other factors to affect editorial decisions regarding which text, among many, to use as copy-text (that is, as the basis for a new edition)" (130).

Despite the intricacy and interconnectedness of Justice's book, the interested reader can well mine sections of it independently. Justice's reading of "Hills Like White Elephants" runs counter to just about every other scholarly reading of this story (and there have been many as this seems to be one of the most anthologized and critiqued of Hemingway's stories) in arguing (convincingly but with some qualifications) that Jig has not so much decided to have the abortion or to leave the relationship as her male companion has decided they should have the baby and stay together. In addition, Justice's reading of Death in the Afternoon as one of Hemingway's "Authentic" (that is public) books illuminates Hemingway's growing awareness of just how far by 1932 the public self had set up roadblocks for his writing. His critique of the profession, however, and the degree to which this book was more about writing than bullfighting, was too cryptic for the public to understand and like. Ironically, the cryptic embedding Of references and cross-references, and insider recounting (particularly as demonstrated in the nuanced dialogue between the Author and the Old Lady) would come to define Hemingway's most sophisticated and emotionally resonant art. All of Hemingway's art, in that sense, spoke collectively to his concern with the creative process itself. Accordingly, Justice might be said to consider him as both a Modernist and a Post-Modernist writer, one who was exquisitely aware of the intricacies and the difficulties associated with writing that needed to be contrived in order to be true.

The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels is a model of its kind, and it will become a book that every serious Hemingway scholar will want to read. Although it has theoretical underpinnings, it does not flaunt them for their own sake, thus setting up road-blocks in the text. In fact, I like the way Justice includes a succinct appendix that summarizes separately the pertinent theoretical issues related to any study of authorship and textuality. This work is taut (a slim 153 pages including notes and bibliography), modulated, and absolutely new. Not unlike Hemingway's work, Justice's book succeeds to the degree that she does understand the theoretical and textual complexities of the issues at hand so as to present it all simply, and with style. I agree completely with Linda Wagner-Martin's blurb that adorns the back cover of the hardback edition: "There is no work that competes with this.... Every chapter is fresh--and always interesting. The Bones of the Others is a strikingly contemporary way to approach this never-dated modernist. Justice shows how Hemingway got where he was trying to go, perhaps even before he knew the direction himself."

--Linda Patterson Miller

Penn State Abington