4 - Canonical Readings: Baudelaire’s Subtext in Hemingway’s African Narratives

Summary

THIS ESSAY DEVELOPS several interlocking arguments to explain the changes in Ernest Hemingway’s writing between the 1930s and the 1950s. It is my contention that Hemingway’s attention to the work of Charles Baudelaire — an attention practically neglected or unnoticed by Hemingway’s critics — can explain these changes. My second contention is that Ernest Hemingway was aware of the need for him as an artist to keep changing his style of writing according to new aesthetic needs. Third, I contend that from the 1930s onward, Hemingway explored new forms of writing in his African narratives, and that he did this in two phases, or two sets of African narratives, each phase following a safari (the two safaris were twenty years apart). The specific characteristic differentiating the writing after the second safari from the preceding one was Hemingway’s reframing of characters as allegories of styles of writing. The great poet Baudelaire used precisely this kind of allegory in his poetry, calling it a correspondence.

Hemingway’s connection to Baudelaire is clear. He was familiar with Les Fleurs du Mal and, in a letter to Archibald MacLeish dated 14 March 1931, he quotes a line from Poem 100 of the first edition (1857), “La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse”: “I hope youze know your Baudelaire: Les morts, les pauvres morts[,] ont de grandes douleurs, I wd like to be gt writer but same very difficult” (Selected Letters, 338). He playfully drops Baudelaire’s name to let MacLeish know the quality of his reading, and simultaneously — by placing the reference next to his statement that he would like to be a great writer — connects his desire to the master figure of Baudelaire as a model. Annotating this letter, Carlos Baker misattributes the line Hemingway quotes to Poem 98, “L’Amour du mensonge” (Selected Letters, 339), perhaps because these two poems, 98 and 100, stand in close spatial proximity within Les Fleurs du Mal and are strongly connected as regards their symbolic themes — the passing of time and its effect on art, which is basically reflected in the need for art to change in order to keep producing convincing illusions of reality.