Read It Here

Here we go, the first story — except, it isn’t the first story. As Hemingway states in the preface to the The First Forty-nine:

The first four stories are the last ones I have written. The others follow in the order in which they were published.

Why? I don’t really understand the rationale for this; perhaps in 1938, at the time The First Forty-nine was released, they thought it a good idea to put the four newest stories at the beginning of the volume, to entice bookstore browsers, who may flip open the front cover and skim the first few pages, to purchase it. However, the stories were printed along with a play entitled The Fifth Column, and the play might have come first in the volume (I don’t know), so maybe that’s not the reason. In any case, I find it annoying. Call me old-fashioned, but when I read an anthology, I want it in chronological order; I want to be able to follow the writer’s thought and style progression as he/she made his/her way through his/her career.

But, alas, it’s not to be here. Instead we will read some of the last ones he wrote, followed immediately by the first sixteen, which were published thirteen to fifteen years earlier. Weird.

And I have to say, I wish we had started with those first sixteen, because ‘Francis Macomber’ is not the Hemingway I remember from university; it could be because it’s a later story — or maybe my stylistic-decoding skills have simply improved with age — but it just seems really obvious. I mean, I specifically mentioned in the Introduction/Overview post how the thing about Hemingway is subtext subtext subtext, but in this story, it’s almost all, um, sur.

Almost all, because it starts out promising enough, right? The first paragraph is fantastic:

It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

Right away we know there’s a problem, but we’re not told what it is. We’re simply left to eavesdrop on this normal-enough conversation, looking for anything that might be a clue as to what happened (the gun bearers did not take part in carrying Macomber into camp . . . hmm . . .). Finally, a few pages in, we have it revealed to us, through dialogue, not exposition, that Macomber’s crime had been to run away from a lion. We are given Wilson’s thoughts, however, and from these get both his opinion of Macomber and his attraction to Margaret. If we are very clever readers, we might deduce that Margaret’s attacks on Wilson are actually to cover up her attraction to him (or, at least, her attraction-by-default to him as a reaction to her disgust for her husband). So far there are plenty of sub-currents running through the story, and at this point I was quite enjoying it.

And then the wheels came off — I can tell you exactly where too:

The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward this object that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some superrhino. There was no man smell carried toward his and he watched the object, moving his great head a little from side to side. Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating before going down the bank to drink with such a thing opposite him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it and he turned his heavy head and swung away toward the cover for the trees as he heard a cracking crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach . . .

Et cetera. First of all, we didn’t need to know, at all, the details about Macomber bolting from the lion; it really adds nothing more to the story from a thematic standpoint, and is simply pandering to the average reader who might feel they need it so as to ‘follow what’s going on.’ I’m wondering if he was thinking more along these lines — pleasing the average reader — the more famous he became, and so planted more of the iceberg above water as his career went on (exactly the reason I would want to read these in strict chronological order, but anyway), because the story gets more and more obvious and explicit towards the end.

Secondly, switching to the lion’s POV? I don’t understand the stylistic reasoning behind that. All it does is drive the whole story into the realm of the absurd, really, and unfortunately, it ends up staying there, what with Macomber’s sudden, and, let’s be honest, extremely overdone and simplistic ‘epiphany,’ and Margaret’s ‘was it on purpose or not?’ murder of him.

A critic at the time, Frank O’Connor, has this to say about the story:

“Francis runs away from a lion, which is what most sensible men would do if faced by a lion, and his wife promptly cuckolds him with the English manager of their big-game hunting expedition. As we all know, good wives admire nothing in a husband except his capacity to deal with lions, so we can sympathize with the poor woman in her trouble. But next day Macomber, faced with a buffalo, suddenly becomes a man of superb courage, and his wife, recognizing that [...] for the future she must be a virtuous wife, blows his head off. [...] To say that the psychology of this story is childish would be to waste good words. As farce it ranks with “Ten Nights in a Bar Room” or any other Victorian morality you can think of. Clearly, it is the working out of a personal problem that for the vast majority of men and women has no validity whatever.” Source

All perfectly true, except the point is that the Macombers are not the vast majority of men and women — they are rich and famous. Remember, Margaret is described as “an extremely handsome and well-kept woman of the beauty and social position which had . . . commanded five thousand dollars as the price of endorsing . . . a beauty product she had never used.” They are written about by society columnists. To wit, they are type of people who always get what they want and are completely and utterly accustomed to that, and so — Margaret more so, obviously — they demand their own version of perfection from everything and everyone. To Margaret, if four men go into the grass to kill a lion and only one runs away, the one who ran away is worthless, even if it is her husband. And of course Wilson views him negatively too, because what they were doing was his job — of course he thinks lowly of anyone else who can’t take it.

So don’t go looking for some sort of deeper meaning to take out of this story — it isn’t there. It’s mainly just a sort of darkly-comic morality tale, and it just goes to show that even the greats sometimes have their off days.