Hemingway's Commedia Dell'Arte story?: "out of season".

Knodt, Ellen Andrews

Peduzzi, the drunken fishing guide in Hemingway's short story "Out of Season" has generated widely varying interpretations from critics and from Hemingway himself. Readers have tended to focus either on the quarreling married couple or on Peduzzi's point of view. However, an Italian language clue within "Out of Season" the young gentleman's reference to Peduzzi as a "vecchio," may integrate the story's three characters as a modernist version of cornrnedia dell'arte, Italian comic theater. The article examines this premise in light of Hemingway's extensive knowledge of Italian stock characters in literature and opera.

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The first short story Ernest Hemingway wrote after the 1922 theft of his manuscripts (MF 75), "Out of Season" is a modernist masterpiece that has generated widely divergent critical interpretations. Critics have much to work with, not only in the story itself, but also in a 1925 letter from Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald and in A Moveable Feast many years later. To Fitzgerald, Hemingway explains:

The only story in which Hadley figures is Out of Season which was almost a literal transcription of what happened. Your ear is always more acute when you have been upset by a row of any sort, mine I mean, and when I came in from the unproductive fishing trip I wrote that story right off the typewriter without punctuation. I meant it to be a tragic [sic] about the drunk of a guide because I reported him to the hotel owner ... and he fired him and as that was the last job he had in town and he was quite drunk and very desperate, hanged himself in the stable. (SL 181-182)

In A Moveable Feast, posthumously published in 1964, Hemingway repeats his assertion that "the real end" of the story was that "the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood" (75).

Paul Smith confirms that the original typed manuscript shows evidence of haste: "typed by Hemingway, its crossouts are struck so hard it is difficult to read the original words, and the dialogue between the young gentleman and his wife at the Concordia is not only unpunctuated and unparagraphed but is only slightly revised in the manuscript and setting copy" (Reader's Guide 16). Smith concludes that if Hemingway is telling the truth about transcribing the story "right off" on the typewriter, as the evidence suggests, then "Out of Season" could not have included Peduzzi's suicide, which had to have occurred after the story was written (17). Elsewhere, Smith notes that no one has confirmed that an actual fishing guide committed suicide in Cortina in 1923 ("Some Misconceptions" 238-239). Smith suggests that rather than focusing on Hemingway's remarks years after writing "Out of Season" readers should pay more attention to the story as "a work of fiction," (Reader's Guide 21).

Several critics have done just that, but with diametrically opposite conclusions. (1) Larry Grimes feels that "A dreariness, a skepticism, and a profound sense of emptiness are the best that can be offered up from life as viewed in 'Out of Season'" (28). Smith himself, in his later introduction to New Essays on Hemingway's Short Fiction, decides that "Nearly everything in the setting and action of the story, from its title to its final lines, points to the hopelessness of the marriage" (6). William Adair accepts Hemingway's comments about the story being a "tragic" with Peduzzi's suicide as "the thing left out" and sees the married couple's quarrel as relatively unimportant (342). On the other hand, James Steinke sees the story as "not tragic but comic; sober in tone, but not heavy, and occasionally very funny" (63). Furthermore, Steinke emphasizes that "the story is about all three characters--the husband, the wife, and Peduzzi" (63).

Focusing on all three characters makes the most sense to me, given the role all three have in the afternoon fishing trip in Cortina, Italy. Italian cultural clues in the story, largely overlooked, may provide a way for readers to integrate the actions of the three characters and settle tentatively on a positive (comic) or at least decidedly ambivalent ending for the young gentleman and his wife.

"Out of Season" begins when Peduzzi, who has drunk up his earnings from "spading the hotel garden" approaches a young gentleman and speaks to him "mysteriously" (IOT 97). The young gentleman replies that he "would be ready to go as soon as lunch was finished" (97). When the young gentleman and his wife emerge from the hotel after lunch, readers are not immediately aware that they have been quarreling. However, as the three walk down the street, the wife "sullenly" following the men and carrying the fishing rods (97), we get our first clue that all is not right with the couple. Hemingway repeats the word "sullenly" to describe the wife's first speech, emphasizing her dislike of

Peduzzi: "I can't understand a word he says. He's drunk, isn't he?" (98).

When the couple stops to buy some marsala wine at Peduzzi's urging, we learn that they have quarreled over lunch. The subject of the quarrel is not specified. According to biographer Gioia Diliberto, Hadley recalled that the actual argument between her and Ernest was about fishing without a license with a drunken guide (149). However, such an argument hardly seems serious enough to explain the following apology from the young gentleman in the short story and his wife's bleak reply:

"I'm sorry I talked the way I did at lunch. We were both getting at the same thing from different angles."

"It doesn't make any difference," she said. "None of it makes any difference." (IOT 99).

The young gentleman's mention of "different angles" implies different courses of action or different ways of looking at a situation. And the wife's response certainly suggests an argument about something more serious than whether to go fishing. In the story, Hemingway seems to have transmuted the actual "row" about fishing into something of more consequence. Hilary Justice suggests that this "first full-length story he wrote after that loss [of the manuscripts stolen from Hadley in the Paris train station] may be the first story he wrote by remate (2) refracting his recent anger at his wife Hadley through memories of a past fishing trip" (121).

Other readers drawing on biography believe that the argument at lunch is about the wife's pregnancy. (3) In the actual Cortina visit of April 1923, Hadley was several months pregnant with "Bumby," born on 10 October 1923 (Baker 109, 117). Kenneth Johnston says that the story "centers on the question of abortion" (42), citing language early in the text that may betray the wife's preoccupation: she misunderstands Peduzzi, believing he says he sees his "doctor" when he actually says he sees his "daughter" (IOT 100). M any rate, whatever the lunchtime argument was about, it clearly has not been resolved by the young gentleman's "apology."

After Peduzzi attempts to enter a closed wine store (IOT 98), he and the young couple stop to buy marsala at the ironically named Concordia. (4) Although the young gentleman offers his wife (named Tiny) a glass of wine, saying "maybe it will make you feel better," and expressing concern that she might be "cold," she just looks at the wine and shrugs off his concern, saying "I've got on three sweaters" (99).

However, this scene's language also contains a clue suggesting that all may not be lost for the young couple and that the name Concordia may not be so ironic after all. When the young gentleman orders three marsalas, "the girl behind the pastry counter" asks, "Two, you mean?" He replies, "One, for a vecchio" (IOT 99). The husband's use of the Italian word "vecchio" to describe Peduzzi creates an integral part for him in this story and may indicate a more hopeful outcome for the married couple. "Vecchio" can mean simply an "old man" but in the Italian literary tradition of commedia dell' arte, a vecchio is also a comic stock character who often comes between two lovers (the "innamorati"), causing all sorts of comic complications before the two lovers unite in the end with "forgiveness for any wrongdoings" ("Commedia dell' arte"). Indeed, the girl at the Concordia counter says, "Oh, a vecchio" and laughs (99), which might not be her reaction if she thought it simply meant "old man." (5)

The role of the vecchio or vecchi (plural) is common in Italian opera. Hemingway attended at least eight operas at La Scala in Milan in 1918, including Giaochino Rossini's The Barber of Seville, a comic masterpiece that ends happily for a couple in love (Letters I: 160). In 1920, Hemingway attended at least two Italian operas in Chicago in 1920, including Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci (trans. The Clowns) (Letters I: 221, 231). Although Pagliacci is a tragedy, its action takes place within a traveling troupe of actors performing in the comic tradition of commedia dell'arte ("Synopsis").

Peduzzi strongly resembles a stock character in the commedia dell' arte: II Capitano, described as "either a vecchio or a zanni" who "appears in a military uniform and carries a sword, proclaiming his war victories. He reveals his cowardice whenever challenged to some act of danger or daring, and usually attempts to take the credit for other characters' achievements" ("Commedia dell'Arte").

Indeed, the comic touches in Peduzzi's language and actions are many. As the young couple leaves the Concordia with the marsala now in a "quarter litre" bottle (IOT 99), Peduzzi says: I will carry the rods. What difference does it make if anybody sees them? No one will trouble us. No one will make any trouble for me in Cortina. I know them at the municipio. I have been a soldier. Everybody in this town likes me. I sell frogs. What if it is forbidden to fish? Not a thing. Nothing. No trouble. Big trout, I tell you. Lots of them. (100)

The young couple already realizes that stares from the "bank clerk" and the "groups of three or four people standing in front of the shops" as well as pointed lack of acknowledgement from the men "working on the foundations of the new hotel" (98), belie Peduzzi's claim that everybody likes him. His own daughter walks back into the house when she sees him passing by (100). The only person "who gave any sign to them" was "the town beggar ... who lifted his hat" (98). And Peduzzi's non sequitur--"I sell frogs"--has to be read as comic.

As the young couple walks toward the river, Peduzzi's farcical actions continue to annoy them. He "talked rapidly with much winking and knowingness" and once "nudged [the wife] in the ribs" (IOT 100). Peduzzi switches between Italian and German because "he could not make out which the young gentleman and his wife understood the best" but settles on German because the young gentleman says "Ja, Ja" (100). Speakers of American English may laugh at this, recognizing that the young gentleman is not speaking German at all, but actually saying "Yeah, yeah." In any case, the story once again emphasizes miscommunication: "The young gentleman and his wife understood nothing" (100).

Still the couple continues to follow Peduzzi, but the river, their destination, is not yet in sight: "They walked down the hill across the fields and then turned to follow the river bank" (IOT 100). The young gentleman worries that "We're probably being followed by the game police now. I wish we weren't in on this damn thing" (100). His wife, described by Hilary Justice as the "moral compass" of the story (125), criticizes him: "Of course you haven't the guts to just go back" (100). He urges her to "Go on back," but she persists, "I'm going to stay with you. If you go to jail we might as well both go" (100). Although some feel that Tiny's comments predict an impending break-up of the marriage (Waldhorn 45), she does display a kind of solidarity in her willingness to go to jail with her husband. Her sarcasm seems more comic than tragic.

Then the river finally comes into view, and the whole adventure collapses: "They turned sharp down the bank and Peduzzi stood ... gesturing at the river. It was brown and muddy. Off on the right there was a dump heap" (IOT 100). This time the wife does agree to leave when her husband urges her to go:

"Go on back, Tiny. You're cold in this wind anyway. It's a rotten day and we aren't going to have any fun, anyway."

"All right, she said, and climbed up the grassy bank." (101)

As James Steinke says, "The husband is finally starting to see things as they are" (69). The sight of the river provides a reality check that becomes the turning point of the story.

The ability of a landscape to carry this type of meaning is a basic characteristic of Hemingway's works, according to Emily Stipes Watts in her landmark study Hemingway and the Arts. Landscape, says Watts, "although realistically described, still represents something more, some metaphysical or emotional or symbolic expression of the artist himself" (42-43). She emphasizes the economy of language Hemingway employs to suggest the connection between landscape and character: Hemingway often sketched in only enough landscape so that the reader is aware of the immediate physical relationship between nature and the fictional character ... (29) On one level, Hemingway was employing a technique of imagist poetry in creating these scenes. That is, he was isolating and describing a specific image as precisely as possible. The carefully chosen words of physical description are made to stand for the emotional or intellectual significance ... (48)

Thus, the reader feels that the muddy river with its dump heap represents more than an unattractive place to fish.

Dante's Divine Comedy may be another possible Italian literary source for "Out of Season" Hilary Justice points to "Mary and Patrick Hemingway's separate assertions that Hemingway rarely traveled without his copy of Inferno, [which] now allows for the speculation that Dante figures earlier and more centrally in his thinking than critics have considered" (9). In Inferno, the first section of the Divine Comedy, the word "vecchio" is used six times, with Dante's guide also commenting on their approach to a river: "When we have stopped along/the melancholy shore of Acheron/then all these matters will be plain to you" (Dante III: 76-78). Although there may be parallels in "Out of Season" to Dante's guide leading him to a melancholy river, Peduzzi, as the drunken guide for the married couple, is more buffoon than wise seer. As Hemingway's story continues, the comic actions and miscommunications between Peduzzi and the young gentleman cast this "vecchio" more in the commedia dell'arte or comic opera tradition.

It is not immediately apparent how this story will end. As the wife leaves, readers get no clue about how to read her "All right." Sarcastic? Recognizing that her husband has realized the folly of the fishing trip? Resigned? Because this is the last time we see the wife, we have to look for resolution elsewhere.

Hilary Justice believes that the young gentleman "surrenders" himself to Peduzzi after his wife's departure (125). After she leaves, the young gentleman continues his preparations to fish. The narrative reports that he is "uncomfortable and afraid that any minute a gamekeeper or a posse of citizens would come over the bank from the town" (IOT 101). However, the narrative adds "He could see the houses of the town and the campanile over the edge of the hill" (101, my italics).

The campanile (a bell tower, usually of a church) is another Italian cultural clue hinting at considerations quite different from fishing. There is no reason why the church would be concerned with the young gentleman's illegal fishing. However, if he is thinking of his wife's pregnancy and considering an abortion to end it, then the church (and the laws of Catholic Italy) would be a concern. The young gentleman's observation of the campanile gives away his underlying worry. As Paul Smith has remarked: "What is unconventional [in a Hemingway story] and so inscribes his fiction as modernist, is that the scenes often are juxtaposed with little transition and less logic to effect or explain their sequence or rationale" ("Introduction" 8). The young man's observation of the campanile among the houses of the town is one such scene.

The point of view in "Out of Season," as Justice indicates, is "primarily that of ... Peduzzi, switching only momentarily to the male protagonist's at key moments in the Concordia and again at the riverbank" (123). In this way, Hemingway reinforces the significance of the scenes in the Concordia (with its discussion of the quarrel and reference to a vecchio) and at the river (with its dump heap, muddy waters, and view of the campanile just over the hill).

After the wife leaves, the "shocked" Peduzzi is desperate to salvage the fishing trip and begins joining the fishing rods together, claiming that the muddy river is a great spot to fish: "It is good here ..." (IOT 101). More comic miscommunication follows. Neither the young gentleman nor Peduzzi has any lead (piombo) for the fishing line. (6)

"You must have some lead." Peduzzi was excited. "You must have piombo. Piombo. A little piombo. Just here. Just above the hook or your bait will float on the water. You must have it. Just a little piombo ... I would have brought some. You said you had everything" (101-102).

According to William Adair, Peduzzi uses the word piombo "nine times in less than half a page" and concludes that the lead weight "used to hang at the end of fishing line ... implies the hanging" [the guide's mode of suicide mentioned in the letter to Fitzgerald and in A Moveable Feast] (345). Others see the piombo discussion in sexual terms (see DeFalco 167). When we view Peduzzi as the "vecchio" of Italian comedy, this by-play over the lack of lead for the fishing line becomes another farcical event in the day filled with mishaps. Peduzzi searches for lead "desperately ... in the linings of his inside military pockets" (IOT 101, my emphasis), connecting him again with the Il Capitano character. The whole discussion is comic, but the lack of piombo provides a plausible excuse for the young gentleman to get out of this uncomfortable situation. He quickly concludes, "We can't fish then" (101).

Although the young gentleman repeats twice "We'll get some piombo and fish tomorrow" between the first and second statement falls this sentence: "The young gentleman looked at the stream discolored by the melting snow" (IOT 102). His observation further reinforces the idea that the muddy stream with its dump heap may be analogous to his consideration of aborting (dumping?) their unborn child. As Watts says of Hemingway's technique, "The carefully chosen words of physical description are made to stand for the emotional or intellectual significance ..." (48). Seeing the stream "out of season" seems to trigger the young husband's realization of what is at stake.

His decision, unstated but I think implied, comes once the fishing is abandoned: "The sun came out. It was warm and pleasant. The young gentleman felt relieved. He was no longer breaking the law" (IOT 102). Significantly, Hemingway added these last two sentences to the initial typescript (Smith, "Some Misconceptions" 240). After his decision is made, Nature seems to smile on the young gentleman and his relief is apparent. He takes out the bottle of marsala (in celebration of his decision?) and shares it with Peduzzi (102). The protagonist's relief seems to be on two levels: he will not break the fishing laws, and he will accept his wife's pregnancy, thus not breaking another kind of law. Although the story's ending is inconclusive, the young gentleman's begging off the next day's fishing trip, "I may not be going ... very probably not" (103) may be the final word on both decisions. Peduzzi, in his role as a "vecchio" proposes a "mysterious" (illegal) fishing trip out of season and leads the young couple, the innamorati, through an afternoon of comic misadventure. The experience may actually resolve a serious problem for the married pair: how to come to terms with the wife's unplanned pregnancy. Although integrating Peduzzi with the young couple in this way unifies the story, it does not settle all questions arising from the story (enigmatic endings being another mark of modernist fiction and Hemingway's characteristic technique). The story's ambivalent ending does not tell us the wife's attitude toward the day's events, whether she still feels that "None of it makes any difference" as she said at the Concordia. But if her husband's efforts to show concern for her well-being, however lamely expressed, have registered with her, it may be that her stated "All right" as she left the river was sincere. And if he has changed his attitude toward her pregnancy after seeing the muddy stream and its dump heap and reflecting on the moral position of the Catholic Church, represented by the campanile, their argument may have a positive resolution, a "treaty" represented by the name of the Concordia, now not ironic.

Hemingway's later assertion that Peduzzi's suicide was the thing left out may reflect his retroactive thinking about "Out of Season" after he learned of the guide's death, itself a disputed event, if Smith's speculation is correct. But even if Peduzzi's desperation after being fired from the hotel and his later death do color the story, the events of the afternoons out of season fishing trip involve three characters in a comedy of errors that may possibly end happily for the young couple. Although it may be risky to link "Out of Season" with "Cross-Country Snow" the story that follows in In Our Time (for one thing, the stories' characters have different names), still Nick's answer in "Cross-Country Snow" when asked if he is "glad" that Helen is "going to have a baby" seems relevant: "Yes. Now" (111). Perhaps the wife's pregnancy is the real thing left out of "Out of Season" and the reason for the couple's quarrel after all. The abortive fishing trip led by a drunken "vecchio" seems to trigger the husband's recognition that the pregnancy is something to be "glad" about and suggests that the young gentleman and his wife, in the role of the innamorati, may be reconciled once again.

WORKS CITED

Adair, William. "Hemingway's 'Out of Season': The End of the Line." In New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Jackson Benson. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1990. 341-346.

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner's, 1969.

"Commedia dell'arte." Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http:// www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/comm/hd_comm.htm.

Dante Aligheri. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Digital Dante. Institute for Learning Technologies. New York: Columbia University, 1992-1997. http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ DeFalco, Joseph. The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1963.

Del Gizzo, Suzanne. "Redefining Remate: Hemingway's Professed Approach to Writing A Moveable Feast." The Hemingway Review 28.2 (Spring 2009) 121-126.

Diliberto, Gioia. Hadley. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992.

Flora, Joseph M. Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Grebstein; Sheldon Norman. Hemingway's Craft. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1973.

Grimes, Larry. The Religious Design of Hemingway's Early Fiction. 1974. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1985.

Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. London, UK: Granada, 1981.

--. In Our Time. 1925. New York: Scribner's, 2003.

--. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Vol. 1. :1907-1922. Ed. Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U P, 2011.

--. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner's, 1964.

Johnston, Kenneth G. "Hemingway's "Out of Season' and the Psychology of Errors." Literature and Psychology 21 (November 1971): 41-46.

Justice, Hilary. The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels. Kent, OH: Kent State U P, 2006.

Nolan, Charles. J., Jr. "Hemingway's 'Out of Season': The Importance of Close Reading." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 53.2 (Fall 1999): 45-58.

Smith, Paul. "Introduction: Hemingway and the Practical Reader." New Essays on Hemingway's Short Fiction. Ed. Paul Smith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U P, 1998.1-18.

--. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989.

--. "Some Misconceptions of 'Out of Season" In Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. Ed. Michael S. Reynolds. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1983. 235-251.

Steinke, James. "'Out of Season' and Hemingway's Neglected Discovery: Ordinary Actuality." In Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction. Ed. Susan Beege]. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1989. 62-73.

Sylvester, Bickford. "Hemingway's Italian Waste Land: The Complex Unity of 'Out of Season."' In Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction. Ed. Susan Beegel. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1989. 75-98.

"Synopsis of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci." The Metropolitan Opera. http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?id=10

Waldhorn, Arthur. A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

Watts, Emily Stipes. Ernest Hemingway and the Arts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.

ELLEN ANDREWS KNODT

Pennsylvania State University-Abington

NOTES

(1.) See also Nolan for additional perspectives and other critics' interpretations.

(2.) See Suzanne Del Gizzo for definitions and analysis of Hemingway's remate technique.

(3.) See also Flora, Grebstein, and Paul Smith. Bickford Sylvester also thinks it likely the quarrel in the fictional story was over the fishing trip and sees parallels to Eliot's The Waste Land (97).

(4.) See also Paul Smith, "Some Misconceptions" 247-248.

(5.) See Paul Smith on the girl's laughter as deriding Peduzzi ("Some Misconceptions" 249) and Steinke on the girl's laughter as deriding the couple for being deceived by Peduzzi (68).

(6.) According to Hadley, the actual fishing trip ended for Hemingway because the guide forgot bait, not lead for the fishing line (Diliberto 149).