THIS is the fifth 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:
MOST of Hemingway’s short stories and all novels have been subjected to concentrated textual analysis, but some of the stories less so than others. The story God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, that was first published in 1933 in a standalone edition limited of 300 copies, then later that year included in Hemingway’s third collection of original short stories, Winner Take Nothing, initially received less attention. When it appeared, it did not find much favour — contemporary critics were less impressed by the collection of stories in which it was included than its two predecessors. Reviewing the volume in the New York Times, John Chamberlain wrote that Hemingway had
Like One Reader Writes, another story in Winner Takes Nothing, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen had an unusual genesis. While briefly living in Kansas City in 1931 awaiting the birth of his third son, Gregory, Hemingway had met and befriended a Dr Logan Clendening, who had written several popular books on
medicine and wrote a medical advice column that was syndicated in more than 380 US newspapers. Dr Clendening (right) passed on six of the hundreds of letters he received from readers seeking advice, and Hemingway worked two of them up into short stories.
Robert Paul Lamb believes the key to the story is that all four protagonists — the narrator, the two doctors and the 16-year-old — ‘misread’ everything about the situation and each other. Lamb begins by noting that at the time of composing his own analysis the story had so far attracted scant attention. He lists three previous analyses:
When the Jewish doctor Fischer asks the narrator for ‘news along the rialto’, this is, for Lamb, merely
But in a piece entitled Allusions To The Merchant Of Venice And the New Testament In God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, Horst Herman Kruse, disagrees. That reference is, in fact, to the put-upon Jew Shylock in the Merchant Of Venice. And although Kruse (left) concedes that the
evidently reached a point in writing where the sterile, the hollow, the desiccated emotions of the post-war generation cannot make him feel disgusted; he is simply weary of contemplation. He feels sorry for himself, but he has lost something of the old urgency which impelled him to tell the world about it in good prose.As for God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, Britain’s Times Literary Supplement described it as
a really terrible story. . .Several decades on, a handful of academics have analysed the story again and agreed the Times Literary Supplement was wrong; but that was as much as they could agree upon: their disparate conclusions and readings serve well to illustrate a ‘Rorschach effect’ at work, as well has highlight that shared compulsion to detect meaning and significance in Hemingway’s fiction come what may.
Like One Reader Writes, another story in Winner Takes Nothing, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen had an unusual genesis. While briefly living in Kansas City in 1931 awaiting the birth of his third son, Gregory, Hemingway had met and befriended a Dr Logan Clendening, who had written several popular books on
One Reader Writes was based on a letter from a woman who discovers her husband had contracted syphilis while away for a year stationed as a soldier in China and wonders whether it is still safe for them to have sex (she describes it as ‘being with him’). Apart from two brief paragraphs, one opening the story, the other concluding it, Hemingway quotes the woman’s letter to Dr Clendening verbatim.
The second letter Hemingway utilised was from a devout teenage boy distressed by his sexual urges which lead him to masturbate and which made him feel guilty as it was a ‘sin against purity’. These circumstances were fictionalised by Hemingway into God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.
The story is unusual in that despite being told by a first-person narrator (who appears to be recalling an incident that occurred when he was younger), unlike in many Hemingway stories, notably those featuring his alter ego Nick Adams, that narrator would seem to be irrelevant. Even the guilt-ridden teenager only appears in reference. Central to it are two ‘ambulance doctors’ manning a hospital reception room over Christmas, one of whom is competent, compassionate and Jewish, and the other incompetent, dismissive of the teenager and his woes, and Christian.
The story is unusual in that despite being told by a first-person narrator (who appears to be recalling an incident that occurred when he was younger), unlike in many Hemingway stories, notably those featuring his alter ego Nick Adams, that narrator would seem to be irrelevant. Even the guilt-ridden teenager only appears in reference. Central to it are two ‘ambulance doctors’ manning a hospital reception room over Christmas, one of whom is competent, compassionate and Jewish, and the other incompetent, dismissive of the teenager and his woes, and Christian.
Briefly, the narrator, referred to as ‘Horace’ by one doctor — this seems to have been a jokey nickname — makes his way to the hospital. A usual assumption is that he’s a local newspaper reporter doing his calls for the following day’s paper. His occupation is not stated in the published version, but according to the commentator, the academic Horst Herman Kruse, it was stated in one of the two early drafts but which Hemingway deleted as, Kruse believes, he did not want the story to be regarded as autobiographical.
After enjoying a free Christmas Day turkey lunch at a local saloon with his colleagues (‘confréres’), then admiring a silver car in a showroom on his way, he arrives at the hospital where he is reminded of the distressed teenager he had witnessed turning up the previous afternoon appealing to be castrated to rid him of his ‘impure’ urges. The boy had been sent packing by the Christian doctor, though the Jew had tried to comfort him by telling him his ‘urges’ were wholly natural.
Later, in the early hours, the boy had been re-admitted, bleeding badly after mutilating his penis with a razor; he had almost died from loss of blood because the Christian doctor was too incompetent to treat him. The rest of the story, which at just under 1,350 words is not long, is taken up by the Jewish doctor teasing his colleague about his incompetence and his lack of compassion, particularly on Christmas Day.
Robert Paul Lamb believes the key to the story is that all four protagonists — the narrator, the two doctors and the 16-year-old — ‘misread’ everything about the situation and each other. Lamb begins by noting that at the time of composing his own analysis the story had so far attracted scant attention. He lists three previous analyses:
Peter Hays reads the story as a modern revision of the legend of the Fisher King; Julian Smith sees it as an analeptic tale told by Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises with the narrator’s identity withheld; and George Monteiro believes that its main interest lies in the light it sheds on Hemingway’s attitude toward Christianity and the medical profession but faults it for having an unnecessary and insubstantial first-person narrator who is not meaningfully connected to the plot.All three are on the wrong trail, Lamb tells us. The story is, in fact, specifically
about semiotic confusion, a confusion caused by the failure of signifiers to point to appropriate signifieds (not merely the subtle forms of slippage that concern deconstructionists, but the sorts of wholesale aberrations that would bother most folks), and about characters who employ the wrong inter-texts or misapply sign systems in their efforts to interpret signifiers.As far as Lamb is concerned the theme of ‘semiotic confusion’ was certainly fully intended by Hemingway who, he argues, begins his story
[by employing] a narrative strategy of presenting a description that describes nothing: ‘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 Constantinople’. This sentence presents a non-map with which to locate the story by informing the reader that a present-day sense of spatial relations is unhelpful; that the one concrete image in the sentence no longer exists; and that Kansas City can best be imagined through an inter-text, Constantinople, which – even if the reader has seen it – would be of no use since the narrator does not say, aside from the dirt, how the two cities are alike. As if this were not frustrating enough, the reader is immediately told: ‘You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true.’Once the narrator arrives at the hospital and meets the two doctors
the theme of semiotic confusion is further advanced by the problematizing of cultural stereotypes. Fischer is Jewish, but has sand-blond hair and ‘gambler’s hands’; Wilcox is gentile, dark, and carries a book. The book, a medical guide, gives symptoms and treatment on any subject, and is also ‘cross-indexed so that being consulted on symptoms it gave diagnoses’. The incompetent Wilcox is sensitive about the book but cannot get along without it. Fischer, who holds Wilcox in contempt, has sarcastically suggested that future editions of the book ‘be further cross-indexed so that if consulted as to the treatments being given, it would reveal ailments and symptoms’. This would serve, he says, ‘as an aid to memory’. Wilcox’s dependence on the book reveals his inability to read the physical symptoms of the body on his own. Memory (competence within the sign system) enables Fischer to read these physical symptoms, but what if the illness is emotional and cultural rather than physical? This takes us into the heart of the tale.Lamb warms to his theme of ‘semiotic confusion’, with all involved misunderstanding everyone else which, additionally, explains other ‘oddities’ in the story: the narrator on his way to the hospital after his free turkey dinner who spots a silver car in a showroom windows ‘misreading’ the sign ‘Dans Argent’ (‘in silver’). These are all (says Lamb)
the failure of signifiers to connect with proper signifieds, the faulty mastery of sign systems, the employment of inappropriate sign systems, and the triumph of a false sign systemand
this answers the questions of those critics who have seen the story as scant and/or pointless.
. . .
When the Jewish doctor Fischer asks the narrator for ‘news along the rialto’, this is, for Lamb, merely
a jocular reference that further defamiliarizes the Kansas City street.
loose ends that remain have nearly always induced scholars to call the story a failurehe insists that there are, in fact, no ‘loose ends’ in the story, and he is determined to show that
Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice and the New Testament thus would seem to combine — and ingeniously to complement each other — in Hemingway’s effort to transform the ‘raw stuff’ of experience into a highly complex story in which an incident at the Kansas City General Hospital carries the burden of an outright attack on puritanical attitudes in contemporary America.Not only can the alleged oddities be accounted for, but Kruse insists that what some critics found incongruous, in fact, demonstrated Hemingway’s artistry. He is convinced the story is essentially a religious tale, and he finds relevant allusions everywhere and also believes he ‘proves’ that Hemingway was not the anti-Semite he was charged with being.
Like Baker and other commentators, Kruse will, metaphorically, not take no for an answer, and he is determined to discover significance everywhere. In his analysis of the story, Kruse begins by attempting to show that the alleged ‘loose ends’ are nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he says, the story is one
of challenging complexity with a well-developed allusive subtext that accounts for most of its seeming disparities.In view of that claim, it might be worth quoting the story’s opening paragraph in full:
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. On this afternoon it was snowing and inside an automobile dealer’s show window, lighted against the early dark, there was a racing motor car finished entirely in silver with Dans Argent lettered on the hood. This I believed to mean the silver dance or the silver dancer, and, slightly puzzled which it meant but happy in the sight of the car and pleased by my knowledge of a foreign language, I went along the street in the snow. I was walking from the Woolf Brothers’ saloon where, on Christmas and Thanksgiving Day, a free turkey dinner was served, toward the city hospital which was on a high hill that overlooked the smoke, the buildings and the streets of the town.
Part VI: William of Occam writes
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