“In terms of artistry, Hemingway was a key exemplar for Ellison; in terms of racial portraiture and social awareness, Hemingway was an anti-exemplar for Ellison.” Joseph Fruscione Georgetown University and George Washington University
Hemingway, of course. Who does not?” “What he liked about Hemingway was his focus on the theme of loneliness,” Scruggs says. “The critic Jerry Bryant has noted that loneliness is a Wright trait, but it’s also clearly a Hemingway trait.” Wright’s best-known novel, Native Son, also explores recurrent Hemingway themes. “Native Son echoes Hemingway’s themes of violence, isolation, and dread,” Scruggs points out. “The Native American husband who slits his throat in Hemingway’s story ‘Indian Camp’ would influence Wright’s description of Bigger severing Mary’s head to fit her into the furnace. Similar grim imagery exists in Hemingway’s story ‘Alpine Idyll’ in which the Alpine woodsman living alone puts his dead wife in a shed and uses the face of her frozen carcass to hang his lantern.”
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(Above) Writer Ralph Ellison embraced Hemingway’s influence, but also took issue with the portrayal of black characters in Hemingway’s work. (Right) James Baldwin admitted his obligation to writers such as Hemingway, but argued that younger writers needed to break new ground. (Opposite page) Richard Wright’s novel Native Son explores common Hemingway themes of violence, isolation, and dread.
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Images: (above left) Bettmann / Corbis; (above right) Sophie Bassouls / Sygma / Corbis
ess than six months after Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961, James Baldwin wrote an article for The New York Times that assessed his indebtedness to four writers of the previous generation: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Hemingway. He admitted his obligation to them, but believed that as their “descendants,” the younger writers had to “go further than their elders went. It is the only way to keep faith with them.” One way Baldwin kept the faith was by adopting and adapting a recurrent theme of Hemingway’s—the longing for refuge, especially a refuge for lovers. In the vignette in In Our Time, Hemingway describes a house in which a wall is blown away by a bomb and “an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street.” “This domestic detail is perhaps Hemingway’s most devastating comment on the war,” Scruggs says. “For what is destroyed is the very heart of the house itself. The war has murdered sleep, sex, and intimacy, themes that Hemingway returns to in A Farewell to Arms. In Baldwin’s fiction, Scruggs says, the theme of a longing for refuge appears in the story “The Outing,” Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Another Country. But Baldwin was also critical of Hemingway. In his later fiction, seen especially in For Whom the Bells Tolls, Hemingway abdicated “the effort to understand the many-sided evil that is in the world,” Baldwin stated in an essay. He ended the piece by speaking directly to Hemingway’s pastoral theme, his idealization of rural life and nature. It is “time,” Baldwin said, “to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river,” referring to Hemingway’s short story published in his first collection of stories, In Our Time. Baldwin felt that by the