“THE ITINERANT AMERICAN TRAVELLER” : SETTINGS AND LOCALES IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S FICTION - Somdatta Mandal Ernest Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. Few writers have lived as colourfully as him, and his career could have come out of one of his adventure novels. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and many other fine novelists of the twentieth century, Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest. Born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway spent his childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, was wounded and hospitalized for six months. After the war, as a war correspondent, he became part of the expatriate community in Paris, wrote of bullfighting in Spain, war on the Italian front, the Spanish Civil War, game hunting in Africa, rarely setting his key novels in the continental United States. Explaining his global aims, Hemingway wrote in 1933 to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Pfeiffer: “I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world - or as much of it I have seen.” This paper tries to analyse how Hemingway’s fiction is “a picture of the whole world” and pitted against the various episodes of his chequered career, becomes an illuminating study, as the novels and short stories then appear to reflect the life history of their author and consequently reveal the plane of reality that the author desires to represent. Both place and story have to do with where we are, with location, but the where of each is distinct. The poetics of place is preeminently sensory. Smell, sound, touch, and especially sight are attributes of place, which is consequently visual and spatial. Also, place and story are constructed through “symboling” and hence are reflexive; in both we feel surges of joy and grief and then shape those emotions into artefacts and words whose trajectory extends beyond the immediate, momentary occasion. But place, being visual, situates, while narrative, being verbal, displaces. Set against the biographical career, all Hemingway’s works appear to be a part of his life. As Deborah Tall aptly opines, to think about “sense of place” in relation to Ernest Hemingway, one must first revise the phrase into plural. In each of the places where he set down in different phases of his life and that he

2 experienced intensely - sometimes as a tourist, sometimes as a resident, he had a story to tell. Most of these locales turned up in his fiction as setting and some also became his subject. The ‘I’ of the first person narrative in some of the Nick Adams and many other stories are self-portraits raised to the level of art. In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and others are all narratives of “facts and motions” evoking in the readers the sensations and emotions experienced by the author. As J. W. Aldridge (1951,24) writes: the words he put down seemed to us to have been carved from the living stone of life. They were absolutely marked true because the man believed them and had reduced himself to the bare tissue of his soul to write them and because he was a dedicated man. And they told of strange countries we had never seen that were always white and clear in the sun, of savage, beautiful women and strong men, of good drinking , good companionship, plenty of lusty love. They also told of unforgettable horror and sadness of dead women in the rain, dead soldiers surrounded by torn personal pipes, sunken ships full of floating corpses, drowning mules with their legs cruelly broken, wounded hyenas eating their own entrails; horses gored by bulls, punch-drunk boxers waiting stolidly to be murdered; soldiers out of their minds with battle fatigue; nymphomaniacs, homosexuals and broken down prostitutes; and of times that might have been such good times ( if only Jake had not been sexually incompetent, if only Harry Morgan had better luck, if only Catherine had not died), of fine sunny days of Alpine skiing that had to end, of nights in a farmhouse up in Michigan, nights of the kind of incomparable conversation that comes to young men once only and that can never come again. (24) This felicitous mingling of life and art began right from his early literary career and continued till the end - probably till the end, when, discouraged by a troubled family background, illness, and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, so that he shot himself to death in 1961. The place was of course mainland American, Ketchum, Idaho. In any discussion of Hemingway’s works, the biographical details are extremely relevant because they conform and inform the portrait which the works so faithfully and aesthetically present. The background of violence, war-injuries, near-fatal shocks and death-defying adventures in war and the African jungles and the sensation of blood-curling scenes in bull rings, all offer a psychological explanation of some of the eccentricities of the Hemingway heroes. These were the result of his belief in the “cult of experience”, often set in exotic surroundings.

3 Carlos Baker’s (1961:1) brilliant summary of his career reveals how well Hemingway matched and blended his experiences in real life with his fiction and how actual experiences and locations have become the undisguised material for creative writing. At eighteen he was busily scribbling reporter’s notes in the police courts and hospital wards of Kansas city. At nineteen, with one leg nearly destroyed by Austrian shrapnel he was carried from a blown up dug-out near Fossalta on the Italian front ….. to an American hospital at Milan. When he was twenty and twenty-one, he turned back…..to the hard trade of writing in Petoskey, Chicago and Toronto. At twenty-two, he was watching tuna fishermen at Vigo, Spain, exploring the tourist resorts of Switzerland and discovering for the first time that colony of American expatriates which had already sprung up in the Montparnasse section of Paris. In Thrace and Anatolia during his twenty third year he gazed curiously at the dead men wearing while ballet shirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them while the Turkish army swept the ill-equipped Greek soldiery before their charge. By the age of twenty-four he had interviewed Clemenceau, Mussolini and Lloyd George, discovered that Spanish bull-fighting was more tragedy than sport, fished for trout in Swiss, French and Italian rivers and learned the joy of Alpine skiing. If we set Hemingway’s fictional career side by side with these biographical details we find that most of his creative writing was shaped by these personal experiences - so much so that it is often difficult to distinguish between the real and the imaginative world. He went to Europe from Michigan, U.S., at first as a volunteer in the World War I only to return home to realize that war in Europe and peace back home were all devoid of meaning to life. Stricken by this “unreasonable wound” of war, he called his first real book In Our Time ( 1924, Paris & 1925 U.S.). With the use of symbolism, he laid bare the reality as it was manifest then. The figure of Nick Adams recurs in many of the stories, Nick as a boy full of illusions about life living with his parents in the Michigan countryside, Nick as an adolescent with a growing boy’s problems and finally Nick as a soldier in Europe making his separate peace. The horrifying aspects of the contemporary war scene has been portrayed with compelling force in the stories.

In some of his earliest reflections on writing, Hemingway had insisted on the primacy of place. Commenting on his Nick Adams stories, he wrote to Edward O’Brien in 1924, “ What I’ve been doing is trying to do country so you don’t remember the words after you read it but actually have the Country. It is hard because to do it you have to see the country all complete all the time

4 you write and not just have a romantic feeling about it.” In another letter to his father in 1925, he noted, “I’ve written a number of stories about the Michigan country - the country is always true what happens in the stories is fiction.” Hemingway was, unmistakably the kind of writer who needed to uproot himself, and who formed, and evoked in his work, a passionate attachment to a number of foreign places. But there is, at the same time, a nostalgic stance in some of his work, the looking back at Michigan and according to Deborah Tull, “Michigan looms Edenic in his imagination, with every place after, perhaps, a postlapsarian search for the raptures of childhood in the wild.”(341)

In Our Time was followed by the publication of Torrents of Spring, a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter. In 1926, Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises was published. Apart from the fictional element this book may be treated as a document of post-war society in Europe in the early 1920s. A story of frustrated love set against the backdrop of Paris and Spain during this time, Hemingway captures the sights and sounds and smells of his settings better than any other writer. The bohemian Paris during the great expatriate days and the maniac week long feria at Pamplona with the running of the bulls are captured brilliantly. The novel is expository in nature and it lays bare with characteristic Hemingway detachment the malaise, futility and jaded unrest of the period as witnessed in the indetermination of Robert Cohn, in Brett Ashley’s fevered excitements and in Jake Barnes’ ineffectual love for Brett. What T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land did in poetry, Hemingway tried to do it in prose. And in order to give his theme credibility, Hemingway moulded the language in such a manner - precise, unemotional and detached, fitted with sharp dialogue and understatement - that there could be no confusing this Paris of pernod and parties with the romantic Paris of Alexander Dumas or Balzac. In the short story “Soldier’s Home”, Harold Krebs goes home from the war to his small town in Oklahoma in 1919, having fought at Belleau Wood, Soissons, San Mihiel, and the Argonne but finding himself a misfit in a world of pre-war values, he lights out for his own territory. It is an entropic, topsy-turvy, chaotic territory without certainties, without ideal and with relative, not transcendental values.

5 Paris, the scene for his late memoir A Moveable Feast (1964, posthumous) was also the seat of the expatriate American writers, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. As a war correspondent settled there, and as a member of the “Lost Generation”, Hemingway went to Paris fully convinced that he could learn the art of writing in Paris. Apart from frequenting Gertrude Stein’s salon, Hemingway also schooled himself in the art galleries of the Louvre. In A Moveable Feast he wrote: I went there everyday for the Cezannes and to see the Manets and the Monet and the other Impressionists that I first came to know about in the Art Institute of Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimension I was trying to put in them.(13) This preparatory school atmosphere of Paris is also replete with other factual details in his writings. The vibrant portrait of Paris in the 1920’s is vintage Hemingway - evocative, selfmocking and frank- an extraordinary chronicle of the sights, sounds and tastes of the city in a bygone era. At the close of the memoir, Hemingway writes that Paris will never again be what it was “when we were very poor and very happy.” This passionate attachment to a foreign place is at the same time replete with a nostalgic stance. Incidentally, at an International Hemingway Conference meet in Paris a few years back, the delegates were taken on a walking tour of the literary cafés like Le Rotonde, Le Dome, Le Select, Le Closerie de Lilas and several other places in the Left Bank Montparnasse area which were associated with Hemingway and where the writer tells us, he went to get away from the poseurs scribbling at those most popular cafes. The walk was reminiscent of the places where the author once treaded - up the Notre-Dame des Champs to Avenue de l’Observatoire and down its leafy alley to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he claimed he hunted pigeons with a slingshot - a vital necessity, if not of the family economy, then of the legend he built. Among the other places visited were the Saint Germain Quarter, the Brasserie Lipp, Café de Flore, Sylvia Beach’s ‘Shakespeare & Company’ book shop, Saint Sulpice Church and the apartment at 74, Rue de Cardinal Lemoine, where Hemingway had lived with his first wife Hadley . This last site became more significant for all Hemingway aficionados when Gregory Hemingway unveiled a commemorative plaque for posterity to remember the location.

6 A Farewell to Arms (1929) returned to the Italian front of the war, with its mud, disease, slaughter and retreat. Its hero, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, is another stoic modern stylist. His love affair with the British nurse, Catherine Barkley is his attempt to find a path of escape from the treachery of war through love. By the end of the novel, Lieutenant Henry, conscious of the cruel indifference of nature, the danger of abstract illusions, the brutal mortality of all human life, is driven into stoic isolation and a ‘separate peace’ - in the idyllic escape to Switzerland. During the 1930’s, along with his generation, Hemingway moved away from the stoic isolation of his early novels towards more social and communal themes. He left Paris and in time moved to Key West, then Cuba, and recognized the changing mood of the times. To Have and Have Not (1937) tells of Harry Morgan, who tries to make a living by smuggling; as he dies he expresses the new Hemingway lesson: “No matter how a man ain’t got no bloody fucking chance”. With its heavy social satire, Hemingway next turned to Spain.

Hemingway went to Spain in 1937 to report on the Spanish Civil War for a multitude of reasons because he was looking for new material for use in fiction, because he was interested in war journalism. Also, he had the ideological reason which he shared with a generation of American writers - John Dos Passos, Archibald McLeish, Lillian Hellman - that the Spanish Civil War symbolized the last assertion of individualism in Europe. From the point of view of an expanding literary tradition, it was necessary to preserve a form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism, “for fascism is a lie told by bullies”. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) came of his experience and observations of the Spanish war from 1937 to 1939. The novel was published in 1940 when the war was over and Fascist ‘bullies’ had won. It tells us, in its own way that the writer refuses to take sides either with the Loyalists or the fascists. Apart from several short stories, Hemingway’s involvement with Spain culminated in various forms - the play The Fifth Column, located in a hotel in Madrid, the non-fictional NANA (North American News Alliance) despatches; the despatches to the Ken magazine; the commentary for the documentary film The Spanish Earth and prefaces to novels written about the war by veterans. All his works are replete with names of real Spanish places- Madrid, Pamplona, Gudalajara, Valencia, Bilbao etc. In Spain, Hemingway seemed to have found a culture in which he felt imaginatively at home.

7

Spain was also significant in Hemingway’s life and art for various other reasons. In the early years of the post World War I decade Hemingway, questing for a life of action and passion on the continent, had turned to Spain, where in the age-old institution of bull-fighting he discovered a way of life with which he could completely identify for a fairly long period until, tired of matadoring as a spectator game, he took to participant sports like big-game hunting and deep sea fishing. In 1932, he had defined his earlier urge to go to Spain: “The only place”, he declared, “where you could see life and death, i.e. violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bullring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it”, where, “I could see certain definite action which would give me the feeling of life and death that I was working for”. And Hemingway’s hopes were not false. Spain afforded him a magnificent opportunity to study in depth the phenomena of living and dying to which he had been earlier initiated. For more than a decade, bullfighting provided him an “emotional substitute” for the violence of war. In it he explored a philosophy of life that could be equated with his personal code of living. Jake Barnes voices Hemingway’s irresistible fascination for the bullfighter’s life when he remarks: “Nobody ever lived their life all the way except bullfighters”. If Hemingway felt himself drawn to the bullfight, the simple reason was that it afforded him intense emotional delight. “I feel very fine while it is going on”, he asserted, “and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality”. And his predilection for the tragic spectacle of the bullfight was governed by his own notion of morals: “I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after”. This hedonistic, rather un-Christian approach was reconfirmed when in 1925 he had written from Burguete to his friend Scott Fitzgerald that his idea of heaven was a big bullring in which he owned two barrera seats. This was not just sentimentalizing but glorying in an ecstasy sincerely and deeply felt. So in Death in the Afternoon(1932), generally regarded as the best manual available in English on the subject of bullfighting, he made an attempt, not to defend it against the charge that it is “a stupid brutal business” but “only to tell honestly the things I have found true about it”. In a favourable review by Malcolm Cowley he says the book deals with “the art of living, of drinking, of dying, of loving the Spanish land” and called the book “an elegy to Spain and vanished youth”.

8 Hemingway’s search for ‘truth’ was further explored fifteen years after the Spanish Civil War, the country he said to loved more than any other except his own, in a later volume entitled The Dangerous Summer. With a vivid evocation of Spain itself, and the dramatic depiction of a great and deadly rivalry between the two bullfighters Antonio Ordonez and his brother-in-law, Dominguin, Hemingway once again reiterated that within his violent, indifferent and tragic world view, individual courage, love, skill and endurance were certainly positive values to be pursued. In such a nihilistic universe, no rewards were expected or could be expected because of the gnawing awareness that everything finally succumbed to a sense of nada or nothingness. Hemingway’s safari trip to Africa, where he was badly injured when his small plane crashed, once again inspired some of his best work. Green Hills of Africa, apart from dealing with the insights into the minutiae of big-game hunting, also reveals how Hemingway rejects the great American tradition of naturalistic writing with Stephen Crane at its peak, closely followed by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sherwood Anderson and others. Deviating from a course of cloying emotionalism and grandiose manner, he stressed on physical facts. Rejecting symbolic descriptions, his language was simplistic but implicit in every line with layers of meaning. Further, as he stated in the preface, it was “an attempt to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination”. He even goes on to establish a seminal analogy between a place and a woman stating that “…if you have loved some woman and some country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards it makes no difference.” Considered in this context, stories like “The Snows of Killimanjaro” or “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” can be interpreted on various planes of reality. As suggested by “The Snows of Killimanjaro”, that most geographical of his stories, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographic visions. The attraction to Africa gave issue to the “Juma” story in The Garden of Eden and the latest “fictional memoir”, True At First Light. Having become established as a war-writer, a heroic stylist, Hemingway’s 1950 venture Across the River and into the Trees was once again set in Venice, Italy during World War II. The

9 legendary Colonel Richard Cantwell of this novel, a fiercely proud man whose body has been ravaged by war and who falls in love with a young Italian countess as he struggles to decide what his future will be, is a thinly disguised self-portrait. Cantwell has an instinctive comradeship for “those who had fought or been mutilated”, an insider’s deep knowledge of war, sport, food and love-making. He reaches “accurately for the champagne bucket”, “stands straight and kisses true”,: he is the Hemingway hero as embittered success. In the novel, the young Italian countess Renata, asks Colonel Cantwell whether he feel remorse about having killed men in battle. Though ostensibly untroubled, Cantwell confesses that he has had “combat dreams” and then “strange dreams about places mostly.” He explains, “We live by accidents of terrain, you know. And terrain is what remains in the dreaming part of your mind.” Whatever its relevance to the military unconscious, Cantwell’s observation conveys keen psychological insight and exposes a basic principle of Hemingway’s narrative method, inviting us to consider how place - both the physical environment and our conception of it - influences the unfolding of our lives, haunts our dreams, and indeed shapes the stories we tell. In the anti-radical post war climate, Hemingway’s pre-war sense of political commitment faded; whatever he was left with was his own legend and a sense of life’s fundamental struggle. His affection for the Florida Keys, Cuba and the Gulf Stream spawned To Have and Have Not and Islands in the Stream. Having moved to Havana, Cuba and comfortably settled in the Finca Vigia farmhouse, his story The Old Man and the Sea(1952) is a tale of ritual encounter that surrounds the old Cuban fisherman and the destructive natural forces that surrounds him as he battles first with the giant marlin and then with the sharks, who strip his prize to a skeleton. It is an affirmative work: “But man is not made for defeat… A man can be destroyed but not defeated”. That message was to take on a darker look as the legendary author-hero reaches his last years. A man of action battered by action, his body was bruised, his brain damaged. He worked on five more book-length manuscripts which were left incomplete. Among them, The Garden of Eden (1986, posthumous) once again returned to France and ends on a note of literary confidence. The novel is significant because in it we can get a glimpse of the transformation into text of the everyday poetics of place and story. First, there are the places present in the narrative and, in The Garden, the place where an author within the story writes. Thus we are shifted

10 between the two locales in the story - the African savannah and back to Camargue in France. As the androgynous games continue and as Marita joins David and Catherine to constitute a triangle, David abandons the honeymoon narrative to take up a story of elephant hunting in Africa. David the writing self thus become Davey the narrating self, the young boy who recounts his own journey alongside his father’s dedicated pursuit to kill an old elephant.

The other manuscript which is more moving, and which appeared in 1970 as Islands in the Stream was first intended as a trilogy about the World War II, but it became three stories about Thomas Hudson, a painter in Bimini in the 1930’s and a sailor living in Cuba, a broken stoic who keeps passing beyond the limits of his control as wear and tear breaks his grip on art, sport, strength, sexuality, comradeship, marriage and fatherhood. The book is a dark self-portrait, the more moving because it, too, was never quite completed. Though set in the Caribbean islands, Paris intrudes into the story in a significant way via the history of the Hudsons: the boy Thomas Jr. is allowed to recall the family’s Parisian paradise in brilliant - if implausible - detail. Autobiographical to a great extent, the boy describes how they lived above a sawmill, and how Hudson would wheel Tommy in his pram down to the Lilas for coffee and croissants and from there down the alley of chestnut trees into the Jardin du Luxembourg, with the old men playing boules off to the left and the autumn wind cold in the little boy’s face and the gravel dry on top but wet underneath. Young Tom can recall the warmth of fresh- roasted chestnuts and how Papa killed pigeons with a homemade slingshot over the Medici Fountain because they were poor and how the still-warm birds would feel beneath the blankets of his pram. He recalls Joyce and Pound and the dreary Ford Madox Ford with his loose teeth and the white slaver at the corners of his mouth. Later, as the beautiful wife of Hudson’s Paris days is about to make a cameo reappearance in his life, he is shown telling a cock-and-bull story to a person in a Cuban bar. But when does the love come in, Honest Lil interrupts Hudson to ask. Any time you want it, he tells her:” But you’ll like it better if you know the sort of place it happened in.” This is the lost love’s cue to walk on.

Interestingly, the posthumous True At First Light, edited by Patrick Hemingway, which was published by Scribner’s on the occasion of Hemingway’s birth centenary on the 21st of July

11 1999 is a fictionalized account of Hemingway’s 1953 safari to Kenya, Africa. One of Hemingway’s greatest strengths is the ability to place readers so deeply in the physical location of his stories that all five senses are engaged. Plot-wise the book is fairly subdued, simply following the daily activities of the African hunting camp. In the story, the first person narrator “Papa”, essentially Hemingway himself, acts as a game ranger and medic for locals natives while his wife Mary, who is the aggressor, is determined to kill a lion. The book opens with a prolonged movement in which Papa and his retainers are long suffering in service of Miss Mary, who insists on killing a lion of her own, though she’s a poor shot and tends to flinch from the kill. Papa will have to do it for her while trying to give her credit and bearing her resentment. Typical of his best fiction, the story is set against a political backdrop - the Mau Mau insurgency - and features a protagonist involved simultaneously with two women: Mary and Debba, a young native girl, who could be a metaphor for Hemingway’s love of Africa itself. Splicing his depictions of human longings with sharp humour, the author captures the excitement of big-game hunting and the unparalleled beauty of the scenery - the green plains covered with grey mist, zebra and gazelle traversing the horizon, cool dark nights broken by the sound of the hyena’s cry. As Michael Rogers, a reviewer of this last novel aptly commented, (Library Journal May 1,1999 p.79) “Hemingway’s unequaled power to describe a locale is in full vigor, and readers will feel the sun hot on their necks, the weight of the rifle in their hands, and the taste of the gin after the hunt.”

In his shorter works Hemingway evoked many other beloved places - the Swiss Alps, Austrian Vorarlburg, Wyoming - locations that can all be found on “The Ernest Hemingway Adventure Map of the World,” issued several years ago by Aaron Blake, an enterprising California publisher. According to Gerald Kennedy, though Hemingway “briefly spoofs the National Geographic Society in “Homage to Switzerland,” one suspects that the society’s famous yellow-clad journal was something of a model for his own ambitious project. Insofar as he mapped many enticing places for American readers between the World Wars, converting his encounters with new country into ‘adventure’ narratives, Hemingway participated in the promotion of tourism and the commodification of places like Pamplona and Key West.”(327)

12 In spite of such un-American settings of his stories, Hemingway is still arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. Before concluding, it needs to be mentioned of course that because of the exotic settings and locales of Hemingway’s fiction, his short stories provided instant story material for Hollywood producers and till date the maximum number of adaptations have been done from his stories ( currently twenty-two in number and it grows almost yearly). Though Hemingway had a personal distaste for the motion picture industry, and most of the adaptations met with his disapproval, his plots, characters and action seemed particularly adaptable on screen. His safaris, wars, bullfights have more than enough promising materials. Whether a given account takes place in Africa, Cuba, Constantinople, Lausanne, northern Michigan or in a clean well-lighted place in a café in Madrid, Hemingway’s wilderness seems replete with audio-visual appeal - just the right stuff for movies. As John Raeburn rightfully says, Hemingway was a ‘star’ - a cultural hero to millions of his countrymen, not all of them intellectuals or even readers of his books and the average American came to know the writer only after watching the exotic locales of his movies - however far they may be removed from their original source material.

To conclude we can say that Hemingway was intensely aware of the relationship between place and politics. Yet, his travels, his recurrent displacements, tended to be motivated not by a voyeuristic fascination with the spectacle of war nor, certainly, by a touristic flaunting of privileged status but rather by his intuitive need for creative replenishment. Hemingway drew so many of his narrative ideas from terrain that he needed to relocate periodically both to take in new landscape and to clear his vision of previous scenery. He could “see the country all complete” only by leaving it, by relying on the mind’s eye. “In one place you could write about it better than in another,” he wrote in A Moveable Feast, adding, “That was called transplanting yourself….and it could be as necessary with people as with other sort of growing things.” Going to another place allowed him to write truly and simply about the countryside just departed, without the distraction of its overwhelming presence. He composed the luminous passage about Africa, for example, at his desk in Key West, just as much later he wrote about the left bank in Ketchum, Idaho. The conflict between wandering and settling, between escape and commitment,

13 between private and public life, remains a pressing social and artistic issue at our end of the century. Salman Rushdie values what he calls the “migrant sensibility” of people “who root themselves in ideas rather than in places.” Migrants, he points out, “must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world because of the loss of familiar habitats.” Hemingway was, unmistakably, the kind of writer who needed to uproot himself, and who formed, and evoked in his work, a passionate attachment to a number of foreign places. With so much of emphasis given to the diasporic nature of creativity at present, reading Hemingway at the hundredth year of his birth illustrates vividly what’s at stake in the debate.

REFERENCES Aldridge, J.W.

After the Lost Generation. New York: McGraw Hill, 1951.

Baker, Carlos. Ed. Hemingway and His Critics. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. -------------. Ed.

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters. New York: Scribner’s, 1981.

Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s, 1932. ------------.

A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s, 1964.

------------.

The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s, 1952.

Kennedy, Gerald J. “Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination”. The Southern Review 35.2, Spring ’99.pp.325-329. Raeburn, John.

Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as a Public Writer. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984.

Ruland, Richard & Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York & London: Penguin, 1991. Tull, Deborah.

“The Where of Writing: Hemingway’s Sense of Place.” The Southern Review.35.2:Spring’99.pp338-343.

Somdatta Mandal teaches English and American Literature at Vivekananda College, and the

14 post-graduate department, University of Calcutta. She is also Guest Lecturer at Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta. Among her several publications are two edited volumes F.Scott Fitzgerald: A Centennial Tribute (II Vols), 1997; William Faulkner: A Centennial Tribute (1999)