Vonnegut and Hemingway , livre ebook

Vonnegut and Hemingway
Vonnegut and Hemingway
Writers at War
Lawrence R. Broer
2011 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Broer, Lawrence R. Vonnegut and Hemingway : writers at war / Lawrence R. Broer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61117-035-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Vonnegut, Kurt-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961-Criticism and interpretation. 3. War and literature-United States-History-20th century. 4. American fiction-20th century-History and criticism. I. Title. PS3572.O5Z555 2011 813 .54-dc22
2011012508
Portions of Lawrence R. Broer, Duty Dance with Death: A Farewell to Arms and Slaughterhouse-Five , in New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut , edited by David Simmons, 2009, Palgrave Macmillan, are reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN 978-1-61117-109-9 (ebook)
In Memory of Verlinda and Wallace Wolfrum
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Vonnegut s Secret Sharer
Part 1 Broken Places
One
Family Secrets: The Absent Mother and Father
Two
Hemingway s Sun , Vonnegut s Night: The Spoils of War
Three
Duty Dance with Death: A Farewell to Arms and Slaughterhouse-Five
Four
Spiritual Manifestos: Breakfast of Champions, Death in the Afternoon , and Green Hills of Africa
Part 2 The Androgynous Turn
Five
From Jailbird to Canary Bird: To Have and Have Not and Jailbird
Six
Anima and Animus in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Slapstick
Seven
A Soldier s Confessions: Across the River and into the Trees and Hocus Pocus
Eight
Now It s Women s Turn: The Rescue of Eurydice
Nine
A Literary Farewell: Timequake and Under Kilimanjaro
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I am foremost thankful for the encouragement and editorial assistance of Jerome Klinkowitz, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Christian Moraru, who read Vonnegut and Hemingway in manuscript. I am grateful as well to those scholars whose work informs this study: Frank McConnell, Carl Eby, Ann Putnam, Susan Beegel, Linda Miller, Mark Spilka, Michael Reynolds, Debra Moddelmog, Gail Sinclair, Loree Rackstraw, Kathryn Hume, James Meredith, Marc Baldwin, Kathleen K. Robinson, and J aim Sanders. I wish also to thank my research assistants, Scott Neumeister and Gloria Holland, as well as the many students whose enthusiasm for Hemingway and Vonnegut and thoughtful insights proved invaluable. I would especially like to thank Kevin Boon, whose book At Milennium s End was a major stimulus for Vonnegut and Hemingway: Writers at War . My thanks go to David Simmons for allowing me to reprint parts of my essay from New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut . I am especially grateful for research grants from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and the Office of Research and Scholarship at the University of South Florida and specifically for the kindness of Sandra Justice, Denise Burgan, and Susan Wrynn. Special thanks go to Lee Davidson and Karen Rood for their editorial acumen and careful preparation of this manuscript, and finally love and thanks to Beatrice Froute de Domec and my new friends Tom and Pam Purol, whose steady encouragement and support I could not have done without.
Introduction
Vonnegut s Secret Sharer

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
We are healthy only in so far as our ideas are humane.
Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard
When Kurt Vonnegut described the soul s condition in a man at war as hideously deformed, 1 he indicated the plight of his and Ernest Hemingway s protagonists alike. The horrors of war and the idiocies of battle permeate the works of both writers. However, while Frank McConnell accurately views Vonnegut as the most recognizably Hemingwayesque of the new generation of writers to emerge after World War II, 2 my subtitle, Writers at War , refers also to Kurt Vonnegut s near-unceasing hostility toward Hemingway, his tormenting alter ego and his career-long nemesis. As this book explores each writer s embattled psyche, my subtitle assumes a third meaning as well: that of writers at war with themselves in the ceaseless combat of anima and animus for control of the writer s creative imagination. When I first wrote of Vonnegut s antagonisms toward Hemingway in an article titled Vonnegut s Goodbye: Kurt Senior, Hemingway, and Kilgore Trout, 3 I said that it would take a book to explain properly why the writer whose life and work so strikingly resembles Hemingway s should speak so disdainfully of Hemingway s humanity. This is that book.
Hemingway was as important and certainly as unsettling a force in Vonnegut s fiction as Dresden, or as the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, or as the gun-loving nut of a father, who in Timequake is described as looking like Trout himself. Certainly Vonnegut recognized Hemingway as an artist of the highest order, a first-rate musician, 4 and a superb craftsman with an admirable soul the size of Kilimanjaro. 5 In Fates Worse than Death he praised Hemingway s brushwork, his simple language, and his power of omission and repetition, and he applauded Hemingway s much deserved Nobel Prize. 6 Yet here as elsewhere-in Happy Birthday, Wanda June; Palm Sunday; Deadeye Dick; Bluebeard; and Timequake -it was to separate himself from Hemingway, to damn not praise, that Vonnegut usually spoke of his fellow artist-warrior. While admiring Hemingway s best stories, Vonnegut scorned the Hemingway mystique, his idealization of valor and physical prowess. If Hemingway s soul was large, it is also in Vonnegut s critique a soul corrupted by a primitive delight in the killing of animals and so-called arts of war. It is probably with Hemingway in mind that Vonnegut quipped in Timequake , I can t stand primitive people. They re so stupid. 7
In Timequake (1997)-but especially in his prolonged treatment of Hemingway in Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) and Fates Worse than Death (1991)-Vonnegut decried Hemingway s passion for blood sports, so alien to Vonnegut s own conservationist sympathies. Viewing the shooting of big animals for pleasure as inhumane and outdated, Vonnegut asked us to imagine nowadays boasting of killing three lions and reporting delight at the prospect of killing a fourth one. As to the glamour of big-game hunting, Vonnegut explained that it is predicted that the last East African elephant will die of starvation or be killed for its ivory in about eight years. 8 Vonnegut also looked askance at what he called the greatest reward for a character in a Hemingway story, the celebration of male bonding, the feeling one man has for another in the neighborhood of danger. 9 Vonnegut wrote to me: In a nutshell: The anthropologist Margaret Meade was asked when men were happiest, most satisfied with their lives, and she said it was when they were on a war or hunting party, leaving the women and children behind. It was that sort of happiness Hemingway not only wrote about but managed to experience almost incessantly. 10 Vonnegut contrarily shared the view of a female friend who found it ridiculous that men had to get outdoors and drink and kill before they could express something as simple and natural as love. 11
In Happy Birthday, Wanda June , which Vonnegut described as a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing and those who don t, he delivered his most impassioned assault on what he called the part of Hemingway which I detest-the slayer of nearly extinct animals which meant him no harm. 12 The bully ghost of Hemingway permeates the character of Harold Ryan from first to last-from such surface resemblances as their favorite pastime of twitting weaklings, their sexual attitudes about male and female roles, and their open joking about death to more revealing spiritual parallels in their attitudes toward death and killing and toward a defiant, chin-protruding brand of heroism. Like Vonnegut s Harold Ryan, Hemingway held honor, pride, and the demonstration of worth through physical strength as ultimate priorities and killing as noble behavior. Harold Ryan boasts that, as a professional soldier, he has killed perhaps two hundred men and thousands of animals as well. 13 He relishes matador-like displays of manhood-choices between fighting and fleeing-and as a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war, glories in his nickname: La Picadura-the sting.
Though the critique in Happy Birthday, Wanda June is directed at Hemingway s work as a whole, Vonnegut might well have had in mind Philip Rawlings, the protagonist of Hemingway s play The Fifth Column , as a likely candidate for what Norbert Woodly, the Vonnegut persona in Happy Birthday, Wanda June , derides as Harold Ryan s macho posturing, heroic balderdash. Both Ryan and Rawlings represent that unwelcome image of himself that Vonnegut attributed to Hemingway late in life, a Shakespearean buffoon of hyperventilating manliness. Vonnegut wrote after Hemingway s death, I would in fact make such a man, modeled as much after Odysseus as Papa, a buffoon in my play Happy Birthday, Wanda June . The play is about the decline of the ancient system of patriarchy, in which women are the property of men. 14
By contrast Norbert Woodly, whose age difference from Rawlings and Harold Ryan matches that between Vonnegut and Hemingway, ridicules Ryan as a living fossil, as obsolete as cockroaches