Ernest Hemingway’s writing deploys sport to a degree perhaps unmatched by any other literary modernist. The field of sport literature studies has long reserved a central place for Hemingway. It is hard to talk about how modern writers have used sport – as theme, motif, subject matter, or allusion – without coming to terms with Hemingway. Early issues of academic periodicals from the 1970s and 1980s, like Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature and the Lost Generation Journal, featured many contributions on Hemingway and sport, and produced rich connections between sport studies and literary scholarship.
Cultural studies of sport have changed greatly in the past 40 years. Ernest Hemingway – the embodiment of aggressively masculine Anglo-American values – may seem marginal now to a field that has embraced feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, disability studies, and hermeneutic skepticism in general. But that is all the more reason to approach Hemingway and sport from a twenty-first-century perspective that, while more critical about his centrality, acknowledges his looming presence as influence for better or worse – and his salient contribution in making sport a serious topic for English-language imaginative writers.
This special issue of Sport in History reconsiders Hemingway’s contributions to the rhetoric and literature of sport in the light of twenty-first-century critical concerns. Modernism is history now. Modernists speak to us from a time before living memory. The essays collected here view Hemingway from new angles, no longer taking for granted that our cultural assumptions are continuous with his. Hemingway’s fusion of sport, death, and violence no longer seems as noble as it once did. His prejudices about the relative value of various cultures are no longer current. His attitudes toward gender – long problematic in Hemingway criticism – now seem worthy of a more detached historical study, one that notes the datedness of Hemingway’s views, no longer considers them as revelatory of universal truths, and tries to elucidate them in context. New ways of approaching literature spatially and visually also figure in this volume, treating Hemingway’s peculiar constructions of geography and the city with critical distance but also critical respect. The picture that emerges from these seven contributions is still familiar, even iconic – but at the same time true to the historical gap between Hemingway’s knowledges and ours.
Thomas Bauer embarks on a historicist project. Can we check Ernest Hemingway’s accounts of his fascination with Parisian sport against the historical realities of Paris between the wars? Hemingway’s self-narratives can sometimes lead readers to suspect embroidery or even fabrication of the vast knowledge of the city that he claims in The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, and other texts. But Bauer finds that for the most part, Hemingway gives an intriguingly accurate account of the sporting world of the French capital in the 1920s. A period that most English-language writers know largely from Hemingway turns out to be based on a keen appreciation for the cultural nuances of Parisian sport.
Daniel Anderson uses another historicist approach to explicate a baseball allusion in an early story – with significant implications for how we read more familiar baseball references in The Old Man and the Sea, much later in Hemingway’s career. Professionalism in sport is a much-contested value, even in discourses entirely about professional sport, where one would think the term would be unambiguously positive. Hemingway’s much-cited invocation of the professionalism of baseball star Joe DiMaggio in The Old Man and the Sea may be less sanguine than readers usually suppose.
Scott D. Peterson focuses his interest on baseball too, especially on the Busher figure who was a recurring character found in both the mass-market fiction and sports journalism of the early twentieth century. The cultural significance of the Busher was explored in Hemingway’s early letters, high school and post-high school journalism, and a parody of Ring Lardner written for a Red Cross newsletter in 1918. In each instance, the Busher’s presence illustrated the figure’s role in linking the game of baseball to American culture.
Boxing and bullfighting dominate the rest of this issue. Hemingway, as Anderson and Bauer show, was an enthusiast of many sports, from baseball and football through hunting and fishing to racing on horseback and on bicycle. But as Stephane Hadjeras puts it, two sites are ‘evealing fascinations’ for Hemingway: the bullring and the boxing ring.
Hadjeras concentrates on boxing, which means far more to Hemingway than a mere sporting event or an occasion for appreciation of athletic skills. For Hemingway, Hadjeras shows, boxing was potentially tragic (linking it to bullfighting in a canon of sports that gain gravitas as they court mortal danger). Yet via an appreciation of Georges Carpentier, Hemingway could also see the artistic qualities of boxing (another link to bullfighting, in aesthetic terms). And for Hemingway, the quintessential artist is the writer – in fact, Hemingway himself, a fount of continual self-reflexions on his own literary art.
Continuing the historicist approach used by Anderson, Bauer and Hadjeras, Claire Carles-Huguet examines Hemingway’s near-obsession with death in the bullring. This fascination, Carles-Huguet argues, is not due to the appeal of bullfighting alone. As elsewhere in Hemingway’s work (one thinks of the fishing vacation in The Sun Also Rises), sport enables the writer to think through and process the trauma of confronting death during the First World War. The theatrical ‘tragedy’ of bullfighting, as Hemingway termed the sport, provides a peacetime analogue to both the horrors and the lessons of warfare. For all its trauma, Carles-Huguet shows, the war forced Hemingway and others to concentrate and come to terms with existential realities – a process available in few other activities, one of them being the bullfight.
Thierry Ozwald offers a closer reading of The Sun Also Rises in terms of the deep impression that bullfighting made upon its author. Sport is both setting and theme in the novel, and various sports are celebrated in its pages; all readers of Hemingway have noted this. Ozwald goes on to observe that sport is ‘unremittingly questioned’ in The Sun Also Rises, particularly in terms of constructions of masculinity. In a perceptive reading of the novel’s rhetoric, Ozwald notes that Hemingway often criticises sports, especially bullfighting, for not living up their own ideals. Those ideals are grand and austere, and it is only human to fail to live up to them – but Hemingway demands a transcendance of the merely human.
Approaches drawn from the digital humanities, including mapping and databases, inform Amy Dawn Wells’ reading of Hemingway’s bullfighting reportage in Death in the Afternoon. There is a sense in which Hemingway continually mediates his European experiences to other American visitors – one thinks, for instance, of the eatery on the Île Saint-Louis ‘on the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table’ which epitomises Hemingway’s savoir-faire by contrast to mere tourists.
In Death in the Afternoon, Wells argues, Hemingway does more than explain bullfighting to new initiates. He also interprets Spain itself, via a continual concern with geography – and what’s more, with how geography provides a framework for culture. Death in the Afternoon is not so much about Hemingway’s individual contingent experience as about how Americans categorically can and should experience the entire Spanish nation. Wells maps and catalogues Hemingway’s Spain in terms of bullfighting, showing how his text offers a highly ambitious ‘spatial intertextuality’ that transforms a culture and a sporting practice into art.
Ultimately, that may be Hemingway’s achievement: to take the raw materials of his own experience, using the extreme data of warfare and sport, and to melt them in a crucible of language till they became purified of received literary and journalistic traditions, and emerged as highly wrought, if seemingly artless, aesthetic objects. But if the twentieth century saw such modernist objects as hard and gemlike, twenty-first-century critics are keen to take apart the ideologies embedded in these artworks.