THIS is the concluding part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:
USEFULLY for the various academics analysing the text of God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, Hemingway wrote several drafts for the beginning of his story before settling on the version which was published. In the first two drafts, Kansas City, where the story occurs, is compared with Constantinople in some detail, but in his final version Hemingway cuts out almost all the references to the Turkish city. All that remains are the — in context cryptic — opening three sentences
In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople. You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true.There is no further reference to Constantinople or any explanation as to what relevance mentioning that city might have except, as Kruse tells us,
The published story retains and highlights only those details that help to make up the allusive subtext with its critical thrustand he insists that this is not a ‘loose end’ but simply
represent the author’s typical process of foreshortening along with a gradual sharpening of the story’s focus.Possibly. But given that that opening left rather a lot of commentators, critics and readers wondering what Constantinople had to do with anything, ‘focus’ was perhaps not quite as ‘sharpened’ as it might have been.
The two original drafts held by the JFK Library in Boston indicate the story was likely to have begun life as a quasi-autobiographical piece, with Hemingway (who had lived and worked in Kansas City for eight months) reminiscing about how the city had changed; then in the third draft, which appeared in print, he changed his mind, cut out such memories and left the reader with the bald three sentences quoted above, They were intended, says Kruse, to highlight allusions to the New Testament. He adds that the
More fundamentally, given the essence of the Nativity story — for Christians an ‘inspiring’ and ‘joyous’ story of the birth of their ‘Saviour’ — quite what relevance might it have to a unhappy teenage boy plagued by impure thoughts mutilating himself and possibly dying from a loss of blood?
sequence shows Hemingway moving towards a sentence that combines the formulaic opening of the Biblical Christmas story — ‘Indiebus illis…,’ according to the Vulgate; ‘In those days…,’ according to the King James Version — with deliberate alliteration, carefully chosen words, and fine cadences. By quietly evoking a foil that will grow in significance as the story moves along, the sentence, in both wording and tone, points to the legendary quality of what follows and, together with the quotation in the title, introduces the author’s own contemporary version of the Christmas story.This is plausible enough — though we might again reflect that there’s often rather less to ‘plausibility’ than meets the eye — and especially so given the title of the story which indicates ‘a Christmas theme’; but it would also serve as a good example of a putative Rorschach effect: why apart from Kruse did other academic analysts and commentators not seem to have picked up on that and other allusions highlighted by Kruse?
More fundamentally, given the essence of the Nativity story — for Christians an ‘inspiring’ and ‘joyous’ story of the birth of their ‘Saviour’ — quite what relevance might it have to a unhappy teenage boy plagued by impure thoughts mutilating himself and possibly dying from a loss of blood?
Yet Kruse is determined to interpret all aspects of the story as meaningful allusions either to the New Testament or Shakespeare’s Merchant Of Venice and to demonstrate that Hemingway’s tale has a religious dimension. Thus the ‘confréres’ with whom ‘Horace’ shared a free Christmas turkey lunch are not his colleagues (possibly on the local newspapers), but highlight a
parallel between doctors and Christian ministers. The doctors are called ‘confrères,’ and their sharing the dinner is described formally as ‘partaking’ in a meal.Kruse goes on that this
parallel is strengthened by Doctor Wilcox’s carrying with him a conveniently cross-indexed volume called The Young Doctor’s Friend And Guide, a booklet ‘bound in limp leather’ that fits into his coat pocket and serves him as an indispensable vade mecum, just as a prayer book of similar appearance will serve a minister in his quotidian routine. After these suggestions, it emerges that Fischer’s account of how the two doctors dealt with the case of the young boy and his presumed lust actually dramatises the responses of two ministers with differing interpretations of their duties.He tells us that
Fischer’s reference to [the incompetent and uncharitable] Wilcox as ‘the good physician’ would seem to point to the Good Samaritan of Luke 10: 30–37, but Wilcox — in a typical inversion of most of such references throughout the story — is the very opposite of a compassionate person and anything but generous or ready to help people in distress.This passage also demonstrates Kruse’s zeal to parade instances of Hemingway’s ‘challenging complexity’ and the ‘story’s artistry’, and he resorts to insisting there is even significance when — possibly even because —Hemingway ‘inverts’ conventions. Thus
Hemingway’s description of Doc Fischer as ‘thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth, amused eyes and gambler’s hands’, for instance, breaks up a traditional stereotype. In fact, as the story progresses and the Jewish doctor is set up as its true moral center, the portrait of his perspicacity and humanity might be viewed as an attempt on Hemingway’s part to atone for his former anti-Semitism.
. . .
More recently Shannon Whitlock Livitzke, who confirms that scholars have exposed
Livitzke goes on to observe that
I have previously appealed to the advice of the 14th-century friar William of Occam (or Ockham) that
the story’s mythic substructure and [unearthed] its complex negotiation of religion, music, and ethical engagementreturns to the story’s opening that
In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that have now been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinopleand suggests that the reference to distance is part of the story’s theme of ‘alienation’. She takes Robert Paul Lamb’s lead about ‘semiotic confusion’ to work up her analysis that each of the story’s four protagonists — the narrator, the two doctors and the teenage boy who mutilates himself — forever ‘misunderstand’ each other and don’t ‘hear’ what they other three protagonists are saying. She says
That the boy’s panic is rooted in a misguided moralism is less significant than the revelation that the characters are all walled off by private barriers that prohibit true communication, incapacitated by the great ‘distances’ that leave them isolated from one another.Warming to her purpose, she then works in the cryptic reference to Constantinople and writes (perhaps slipping into intellectual overkill) that
An increasing emphasis on alienation, evident in the Constantinople allusion and the reconfigurations of Kansas City’s landscape, suggests that the tragedy is not solely the result of adolescent insecurities or medical malfeasance, but is, rather, symptomatic of a more universal despair.A sceptical reader might query that if ‘alienation’ is so ‘evident’, why had other commentators not picked up on it: Lamb had reminded us that Peter Hays read the story as a modern take on the Fisher King legend, Julian Smith saw it as an analeptic tale told by Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, and George Monteiro believed it shed on Hemingway’s attitude toward Christianity and the medical profession. None had anything to say about ‘alienation’.
Livitzke goes on to observe that
The story begins with a definitive declaration about the nature of space (‘In those days the distances were all very different’) and grammatically connects it to specific geographic locales (‘Kansas City was very like Constantinople’), suggesting, on one level, a physical connection between the cities mentioned. The mileage between Kansas City and Constantinople has obviously remained unchanged from the time of the boy’s tragedy, though, so the opening line also functions metaphorically as a commentary on the state of humanity, on the way people communicated with one another when the events took place. . . While the Kansas City-Constantinople pairing is admittedly unusual, it also encompasses East and West, youth and historicity. Given Hemingway’s reworking of the introduction and knowledge of both places, it is likely that the cities serve as points of reference that indicate the distressing extent of modern despondency.She concludes that
The ultimate tragedy in God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen then, is not only that the doctors cannot save the youth from self-mutilation, but, more broadly, that the fundamental impossibility of human connection leaves one human unable to save another.Some might be convinced by her reasoning, others less so. So there you have it: several different and often distinct interpretations of the same story, all of which are ‘plausible’.
. . .
I have previously appealed to the advice of the 14th-century friar William of Occam (or Ockham) that
of all possible explanations, the simplest is the most likely.
This view is also referred to as ‘Occam’s Razor’ and ‘the Principle (or Law) of Parsimony, in Latin ‘novacula Occami’ and ‘lex parsimoniae’. It is a simple and useful rule of thumb, and does not preclude that the ‘real’ explanation could well be revealed as more complex; but it might work as a useful departure point when trying to understand anything.
Applying Occam’s Razor to the various readings of Hemingway’s story would tell us that we can’t, in fact, be sure of much, especially when one analysis contradicts another. For example, Kruse confidently tells us that Doc Fischer’s cheery greeting to Horace ‘What news along the rialto?’ is a deliberate allusion to Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice because Fischer is quoting from the play ; Lamb, who is keen to demonstrate that the theme of the story is ‘semiotic confusion’, tells us it is, in fact,
a jocular reference that further defamiliarizes the Kansas City street.So which is it? Some will point out that it is perfectly feasible for the accounts to work on both levels and that Kruse and Lamb could both be ‘right’. Friar William of Occam — and I — might, though, opt for a simpler, more likely explanation: the greeting by Doc Fischer (‘What news along the rialto?’) is simply and example of the quite common practice of folk to use a phrase which originated with Shakespeare but which has over the years bedded into common usage (with, most probably, most users having no idea of its origin).
Other examples might be (from Macbeth) ‘Lay on Macduff’ (when encouraging someone to action), ‘What’s done is done’, ‘Come what [come] may’; (from Hamlet) ‘Clothes make the man’ and ‘The lady doth protest too much’; (and from The Tempest) ‘Fair play’, ‘In a pickle’ and ‘Such stuff as dreams are made on [of]’. There are many more. Doc Fischer might well have ‘deliberately’ been quoting Shylock, but Occam’s Razor suggests initially we might opt for the simplest explanation.
William of Occam might also raise an eyebrow at Kruse’s claim that
his theme (according to what Debra Moddelmog might describe as his ‘ideological consistency’). Why would Hemingway sometimes make a straight comparison, but at others make an ‘inverted’ comparison for no very apparent reason?
whereas Shakespeare’s Jew is characterised by his business acumen, his greed, his thirst for revenge, and his insistence on the principles of his religion, Hemingway’s counterpart is the exact opposite: Fischer has never given his Jewishness ‘its proper importance’, as he himself remarks. All of Shylock’s negative and supposedly Jewish traits are shown to be those of Fischer’s Christian antagonists rather than his own.This — another example of ‘inversion’ being usefully adopted by Hemingway according to several analysts — might strike William of Occam as nothing but attempted legerdemain by Kruse to allow him to pursue
A similar inconsistency is pointed out above where Baker has ‘the mountains’ symbolising what is ‘beautiful and natural’ and the valley and plains what is ‘ugly’ and ‘unnatural’ in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, but ‘inverts’ the symbolism in his short story Alpine Idyll for no apparent reason. This is frankly very close to playing with a marked deck of cards.
Those who come across analyses such as the above can certainly subscribe to whichever ‘explanation’ they like; but each faces the obvious questions: is this what Ernest Hemingway intended? And if the answer is ‘yes’, we can then inquire: how do we know?
Those who come across analyses such as the above can certainly subscribe to whichever ‘explanation’ they like; but each faces the obvious questions: is this what Ernest Hemingway intended? And if the answer is ‘yes’, we can then inquire: how do we know?
Those questions remind us of the insistence on ‘verifiability’ in the sciences. In the presentation of each analysis, the affirmative response — ‘yes, this is what Hemingway intended’ — is implicit; it has to be or why else has a particular analysis been put forward?
Then we might ask: how do we verify that was the intention? At this point an English literature academic might perhaps lose patience and again invoke the useful escape clause: ‘I’ll think you’ll find it’s a little more complex than that’. To this there is, of course, no adequate response: in simpler language the sceptic is being told to make her or himself scarce and stop being a nuisance.
In fact, the suspicion is the sceptic is possibly getting uncomfortably close to revealing the circular logic implicit in many academic studies: that ‘Hemingway was a great writer so this is excellent writing’ and ‘this is excellent writing so Hemingway was a great writer’.
What might William of Occam make of Hemingway’s story God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen? He might suggest there is, in fact, less to it than the assortment of academic analysts have claimed. Basing his story on the account passed on by his friend Dr Logan Clendening of a 16-year-old who mutilates himself, Hemingway (suggests William) composed a small, ironic tale of how on Christmas Day, a major festival which Christians celebrate as a day of goodwill to all, it was not the Christian doctor who behaved charitably and with compassion, but Doc Fischer, a member of the outcast Jewish race which does not even celebrate Christmas.
. . .
William of Occam might even stick his neck out and suggests the irony is further underlined by the ‘inversion’ of stereotypes: the Jew is presented as a white, Anglo-Saxon — ‘thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth’ — whereas the incompetent Doctor Wilcox is portrayed as a stereotypical Jew — ‘short, dark’.
As for other elements in the story, the reputed loose ends such as comparing Kansas City to Constantinople, the free turkey dinner with ‘confréres’ at Woolf’s saloon, the silver car in the showroom, Doc Fischer referring to the narrator as Horace, William of Occam would choose to remain silent. They are indeed loose ends for which there is no obvious explanation despite the disparate ingenuity of the assorted academics.
If pressed, William might cite Hemingway’s self-declared method of composition of starting a story without a plan to see where it might take him — he wrote, then discarded two openings to his story before drastically cutting them and proceeding to the essence of his story.
What about the comparison of Kansas City and Constantinople? one might inquire of William. At first tactfully disinclined to comment, he might eventually be coaxed to give his view that Hemingway, himself by now familiar with the genesis of his story, believed that, according to his ‘theory of omission’, the reader would pick up on whatever he, a writer writing ‘truly’, knew. It had, though, (William might declare, sotto voce) just not come off, and Hemingway had perhaps not shown the care expected of a great writer.
. . .
At the end of the day, whatever one makes of this or that interpretation and analysis by this or that academic is irrelevant. What is relevant is that academia had nominated Hemingway as a writer worthy if its attention, and this was an important — perhaps the most important — staging post in his progress from famous, best-selling author to his status as ‘one of America’s greatest writers’. From there on there was no going back.
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