Deborah Tall

The Where of Writing: Hemingway's Sense of Place

(from THE SOUTHERN REVIEW)

To think about "sense of place" in relation to Ernest Hemingway, one must first revise the phrase into the plural. For Hemingway had a sense of quite a few places, the most obvious being Oak Park, Illinois, northern Michigan, Paris, parts of Italy and Africa, Key West, Cuba, Idaho, and especially Spain. The list is revealing: it begins with a hometown that Hemingway needed early on to escape the clutches of, and which he couldn't really return to, and continues as a litany of places where he set down in different phases of his life and which he experienced intensely, sometimes as a tourist, sometimes as a resident. Most of these places turned up in his fiction as setting, and some became his subject.
We speak of Hemingway's generation as a lost one, and the word "lost" resonates with the political and spiritual crises of the time. Yet to be lost is, of course, a geographical condition – we are lost when we cannot find our destination or way home. To be spiritually lost, then, draws on the anxious figure of physical displacement. In contemporary idiom, we have extended the metaphor to the psychological: we seek to "find" ourselves self-reflexively, in therapy, or via public confession over the air waves. But perhaps we doubt our place in the world, in part, because we are not adequately rooted in it, physically. As Paul Shepard puts it, "Knowing who you are is impossible without knowing where you are."
The freedoms bestowed by modern transportation and global economics have made mobility the norm in the U.S., and our sense of place has consequently both expanded and thinned. Hemingway, perhaps more than any other American writer, exemplifies the positive aspects of mobility, the romance of travel. His mythic stature as adventure-prone, wandering artist has defined, for many, the writer's relation to place.
But there are other models, of course. Despite this century's upheavals and temptations to decamp, there are numerous writers with a deep attachment to the soil in which they were reared, who remain tied – both in practical and artistic terms – to their home place. We ascribe some of the power in writers like Faulkner, Welty, Flannery O'Connor, or William Carlos Williams to their rootedness, the intimate knowledge of a place's physicality and culture that emerges in their work as a fully textured and suggestive world. For these writers, the adventures and perspectives of the expatriate are not alluring. I'm reminded of Wordsworth's affirmation in "To a Skylark" where he lauds the "Type of the wise who soar, / but never roam."
Another form of writerly attachment is epitomized by James Joyce, obsessed by a Dublin in which he could neither live nor write. Though he exiled himself to escape the oppressive strictures of his home culture, he knew that home – its streets, smells, and voices indelibly inscribed in his memory – was his life-long subject. In American literature, William Goyen offers a similar example of a writer who escaped the limitations of his rural Texas upbringing, but returned home repeatedly in his writing, most forcefully in his lyric, autobiographical novel House of Breath, where the characters emerge almost literally from the landscape – as voices rising from a well or as dreamy visions peopling the fields and rooms of his ancestral home with generations of kin.
Yet for every writer who draws nourishment from home, its landscape overlaid with personal history, there is another who just as passionately shuns it as a subject and removes him- or herself both physically and imaginatively from the place of origin. Some may try to recover the beloved landscape of childhood elsewhere, to relocate it to a place conveniently free of childhood history. Others seek an entirely new, different setting for themselves; such writers may feel as if they were born in the "wrong" place, so as adults try to correct fate by choosing a home more appropriate to their sensibilities. Richard Wilbur asserts that all artists,
approach the landscape self-centeredly or self-expressively, looking for what agrees with their temperaments, what seems to embody their emotions, what suits them as decor or theatre of action. Some have the luck to be born, and to remain, in country which is continuous with their personalities; other ramble about until they can say at last . . . "This is the place."

The transplanted writer forges a new affiliation and may even take on citizenship in the surrogate home (think of T.S. Eliot, for example).
Yet another class of self-exiles embraces wandering, never finding the "right" place, or, in some cases, seemingly finding and discarding it repeatedly. Donald Hall notes that the twentieth-century writer has often acted "as if restlessness were a conviction, and has destroyed his own past in order to create a future." Hemingway himself insists that, "Every artist owes it to the place he knows best to either destroy it or perpetuate it." Alastair Reid typifies the wanderer's temperament. He professes a profound aversion to his home place – Scotland – and has only rarely written about it, but he has written revealingly about the many other places he has alighted. Reid thrives on "foreignness," the condition of not belonging. "The foreigner's involvement is with where he is," he explains. "There is no secret landscape claiming him, no roots tugging at him. He is, if you like, properly lost, and so in a position to rediscover the world, from the outside in."
This is a compelling argument for many, and it helps explain the abiding allure of the "lost" generation. The fact of foreignness, or otherness, is thought to sharpen the acuity of observation; the norms of elsewhere appear exotic, new. To not feel at home may awaken the eye and imagination and become a necessary condition of artistic creation and clear thinking. This idea goes back at least as far as the Greeks. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes it, "Aristotle counts homelessness as among the great advantages of the philosopher's way of life. A badge of the thinking person is this love of ‘nowhere' as though it were a country."
A number of contemporary writers concur. Edward Said, for instance, asserts that "perpetual exile" is ethically healthy, a necessary severance from the sentimentalities of nationalism. Salman Rushdie values what he calls the "migrant sensibility," people who "root themselves in ideas rather than places." Migrants, he points out, "must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world because of the loss of familiar habitats." Pico Iyer, on the other hand, a writer of Anglo-Indian-American background who defines his condition as "congenital displacement," and who flits about the globe so incessantly that he has dubbed himself a "transit lounger," wonders whether the detachment of the wanderer does indeed confer an artistic advantage. He acknowledges that although writers like himself are "seasoned experts at the aerial perspective," they "are less good at touching down."
Jet travel, space exploration, and the environmental movement have encouraged us to regard ourselves as citizens of the planet rather than merely of towns and countries. We're enjoined to "think globally," but, as the bumper stick has it, at the same time we must "act locally" – belong to a place in which to apply our values. For many contemporary American writers, though, the embrace of home is a moot point; we've moved so often that we have no home place to choose or reject, no experience of rootedness to draw on.
To dig in or range far – the choice excites extreme responses. Consider Simone Weil's assertion that, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul," versus geographer David Sopher's gibe that, "To be rooted is the property of vegetables." Hemingway on the subject sides with the garden metaphor: "Anyone who knows a damned thing about it is aware that the artist, like the cabbage and the head lettuce, which he often resembles in intelligence, needs transplanting. It is not where they work, but what they have inside of them."
Hemingway was, unmistakably, the kind of writer who needed to uproot himself in order to become a writer at all, and who formed, and evoked in his work, a passionate attachment to a number of foreign places. But there is, interestingly, at the same time, a nostalgic stance in some of Hemingway's work, the looking back at Michigan or Paris as lost worlds, unrecoverable landscapes that epitomize a period of his life. Paris will never again, he says at the close of A Moveable Feast, be what it was "when we were very poor and very happy." By the same token, Michigan looms edenically in his imagination, with every place after, perhaps, a post-lapsarian search for the raptures of childhood in the wild. Wallace Stegner's characterization of American writers fits Hemingway well in this regard: "We have made a tradition out of mourning the passing of things we never had time really to know, just as we have made a culture out of the open road, out of movement without place."
Hemingway is characteristically on the move; restlessness keeps him searching for the next place, the next subject. The need for the new – be it destination, wife, or physical challenge – is a strong urge throughout his life. The risk for a writer of that temperament is that the experience of place may prove shallow. Most agree that in Spain, Hemingway found a culture in which to be imaginatively at home, and the depth of that connection produced some of his greatest work. But for some readers, Hemingway's perspective too often remains the tourist's. The woman in "Hills Like White Elephants" complains – and the remark reverberates beyond that story – "All we do . . . [is] look at things and try new drinks."
Many of Hemingway's characters are, in fact, tourists, people passing through, precursors of Pico Iyer's "transit loungers." Consider how often we meet them in train stations or taxis or in cafés, those temporary settings in which we behave in a half-public, half-private, anonymous fashion, in which we feel between places rather than in them. Alastair Reid describes the café as "a stage set for an Absolute Nowhere, a pure parenthesis in the swim of time." At the café or station, we can extract ourselves from the plot of the daily and dwell in suspended motion, in a kind of pause, detached from the surrounding landscape, located only within ourselves. Hemingway uses these ellipses to depict pivotal moments in his characters' lives. We feel their ennui as well as their fears and longings. It is where they'll go next that is confronted in so many of these charged, liminal scenes.
Consider that famous conversation in "Hills Like White Elephants," how it is set, how the surrounding landscape serves as metaphor as well as mundane circumstance. The station where the unhappy couple sits is a classic nowhere, in a treeless zone, "between two lines of rails in the sun." It is a place where an express train will stop for two minutes before going on to a somewhere – the capital city. There is no town described, no sign of life beyond the station café. Only the hills across the valley indicate a world that exists apart from the anaemic foreground. It's to those hills that the woman looks, attracted to their whiteness. Looking at them, she pronounces her metaphor: "They look like white elephants."
It's the paradoxical power of metaphor, of course, that the actual disappears even as it is riveted in our mind's eye by its likeness to something else. Metaphor hovers between "tenor" and "vehicle," another kind of nowhere. This metaphor at first feels incongruous enough that we may share the male character's response: "I've never seen one." But we don't need to have seen one to get the idiom, the metaphor behind the metaphor; we know a white elephant is a foolish purchase, a useless possession. Etymologically, the phrase offers even more food for thought: in ancient Siam, white elephants were sacred, royal property, not allowed to work. A king who wanted to bring down an out-of-favor noble would him make a gift of a white elephant, which could not be refused, but whose upkeep would quickly bankrupt the unlucky recipient. Thinking of the white elephant in this way resonates tellingly with the central circumstance of the story: an unplanned pregnancy, a "gift" which threatens to rupture, to emotionally bankrupt, Hemingway's couple. But the metaphor is specifically applied to the landscape – the hills – by the woman, and thus she implies that the physical world itself is a burden, a gift that overwhelms.
In fact, though, she rescinds her metaphor a page after announcing it, getting up to look at the landscape more concertedly, collecting more detail this time: grain in the fields, trees, mountains, a river, cloud, shadow – bringing the view into focus as a living and lived-in place. This transformation of the landscape – from an abstracted, metaphorized nowhere at the beginning of the conversation into a cultivated somewhere – is what seems to prompt her bitter lament: "And we could have all this" – the world, a place in it. Suddenly, it seems, she regards the abortion she's reluctantly agreed to as a fatal separation, an act of exile from the ongoing world. "It isn't ours any more," she says, still looking at those hills. "Once they take it away, you never get it back."
This is a moment of insight that gets dropped as quickly as it's won – a "gift" this couple cannot afford. The narrative returns to the station, more drinks, the inside of the café where everyone else is "waiting reasonably for the train," and where the woman will, in the end, don a false, obliterating cheerfulness. An opportunity has been lost, and it has something to do with the human place in the physical world, the connections of generations of lives to lived-in landscapes.
Hemingway magnifies such moments of desolation and longing by stalling the narrative, separating his characters from the daily and from their place in family or community. The world pauses and contracts into their distress. Hemingway thereby epitomizes the twentieth-century archetype of the uneasy, "lost" individual whose identity is crafted in isolation rather than communally enacted. The idea of making a home and attaching oneself to a place, with its inevitable limitations and mundane responsibilities, has no draw; the anonymity of drifting, with its occasional lightning bolts of insight, bespeaks the characters' condition – they are homeless, they are at a loss.
The conflict between wandering and settling, between escape and commitment, between private and public life, remains a pressing social and artistic issue at our end of the century. Reading Hemingway illustrates vividly what's at stake in the debate.

copyright, Deborah Tall