I recently read a complete-Hemingway-short-stories book.<\/p>\r\n
(Spoilers here for a few Hemingway short stories.)<\/p>\r\n
There\u2019s a story fairly early on in it, \u201cThe End of Something\u201d (1925), in which Hemingway\u2019s semiautobiographical character Nick Adams goes fishing with his girlfriend Marjorie. Then they go sit on the beach and make a campfire, and Nick breaks up with Marjorie, for no clearly stated reason. Marjorie leaves\u2026 and then Nick\u2019s friend Bill suddenly shows up. \u201cBill didn\u2019t touch him either,\u201d the narration says. And Bill knows that Nick has broken up with Marjorie. And I was amused to think that without changing a word of this story up to the final few paragraphs, this could have been the story of Nick and Bill getting together.<\/p>\r\n
(\u2026In my experience, posting this kind of thing results in people commenting to tell me how ridiculous it is that I think that that Nick and Hemingway are gay. So, to be clear: no, I\u2019m not saying that Nick is gay nor that Hemingway was gay. I would be very surprised if Hemingway intended this story to be read as queer. In the above paragraph, all I\u2019m doing is engaging in a hobby of mine: amusing myself by overlaying a queer reading on a text that probably wasn\u2019t intended to be queer.)<\/p>\r\n
Anyway, so that story put me in the right frame of mind to enjoyably read some other Hemingway stories, or at least sentences, through a queer lens. Like in \u201cThe Battler,\u201d where the Nick\u2019s-POV narration says \u201cThey would never suck him in that way again.\u201d And: \u201cThe little man\u2019s wrist was thick and the muscles bulged above the bone. Nick felt the slow pumping under his fingers.\u201d And: \u201cI like to be with him.\u201d Or in \u201cSoldier\u2019s Home\u201d: \u201cBesides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him that.\u201d and \u201cI know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
(I expect that some commenter is now going to waste their time explaining to me what those sentences really mean. Please don\u2019t.)<\/p>\r\n
So I was happily continuing along\u2014reading about, for example, Nick and another guy having \u201cslapped the snow off each other\u2019s trousers,\u201d and how \u201cfond\u201d various male characters are of each other\u2014and musing about how Manly Man straight fiction can have a lot in common with fiction about gay men. But I continued to assume that of course Hemingway never wrote any actual gay characters.<\/p>\r\n
And then I got to \u201cA Simple Enquiry\u201d (1927), and was amused at my imposed queer lens on that, too\u2014until I realized that in fact, the military officer in that story is<\/em> gay.<\/p>\r\n And he\u2019s reasonably sympathetically portrayed. The story is more or less from his point of view. He does proposition a subordinate (not good), but at least he easily takes no for an answer.<\/p>\r\n I was startled, and delighted. An overtly gay character? In a Hemingway story? I had no idea such a thing existed!<\/p>\r\n So I kept reading, now with the understanding that a queer lens was justified for at least one story. And I reached \u201cThe Light of the World\u201d (1933), in which there were a couple of lines that seemed to suggest that the cook might be gay, though I wasn\u2019t sure whether I was reading too much into that or not. At the end, Nick\u2019s traveling companion Tom says something that I interpreted as a homophobic rejection of a quasi-advance from the cook; but Nick himself, from whose POV the story is told, doesn\u2019t say anything homophobic.<\/p>\r\n And that led me to another thought about all this: Hemingway\u2019s stories are full of racial slurs. Lots of them. They\u2019re sometimes used in a sort of affectionate-between-buddies way, sometimes not, but they appear frequently in his stories. But not once did I see him use a homophobic slur in these stories.<\/p>\r\n \u2026And then a couple of stories later, I came to one that really raised my eyebrows: \u201cThe Sea Change\u201d (1931). In which a young couple, a man and a woman, are arguing in a caf\u00e9, about a \u201cjam\u201d the woman has gotten into. The woman says she loves the man, but he continues to be upset, and he says \u201cIf it was a man\u2014\u2014,\u201d and it gradually becomes clear that the woman has fallen for another woman, and wants to go off and be with her, and possibly also wants to come back to the man afterward, only he doesn\u2019t want her back.<\/p>\r\n I was really not expecting that in a Hemingway story.<\/p>\r\n There ended up being only one other story in the book featuring an overtly queer character: \u201cThe Mother of a Queen\u201d (1933). I mentioned the lack of slurs earlier, so I should note that in this story, he does refer to a gay male boxer as a \u201cqueen,\u201d twice. But I\u2019m not sure whether to consider that term as a slur in this context; the word has had different connotations in different communities at different times. (And it\u2019s been suggested by at least one reader that the narrator of that story is himself gay.) And although the boxer in this story is not a good guy in various ways, his bad behavior doesn\u2019t seem to me to be directly linked to his queerness\u2014that is, I don\u2019t feel like the narrator is saying that the boxer is bad because<\/em> he\u2019s gay.<\/p>\r\n That was the last of the overt queerness in these short stories, at least as far as I noticed. But while I\u2019m on the topic, I feel like it\u2019s worth mentioning one other thing:<\/p>\r\n In Hemingway\u2019s posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden<\/cite>, which I haven\u2019t read, the female lead, Catherine, gets her hair cut \u201cas short as a boy\u2019s,\u201d and tells her husband David, \u201cI\u2019m a girl. But now I\u2019m a boy too.\u201d And then when they have sex, she tells David to call her Peter, and she tells him that he\u2019s Catherine now.<\/p>\r\n \u2026I\u2019m sure that lots has been written about Hemingway and queerness, but so far I haven\u2019t gone very far in looking for such writing. If any of you happen to have recommendations of works that discuss queerness in Hemingway\u2019s fiction, let me know. (No need to do searches for me, nor to provide exhaustive bibliographies; just if you have specific works on this topic that you recommend.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-queer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21889,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21888\/revisions\/21889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}