Mortality and the Moment Without Time:



Mortality and the Moment Without Time:

Cezanne, Impressionism, and Cubism in Hemingway

In Portrait of Hemingway, Lillian Ross describes her trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Ernest Hemingway and his son, Patrick. After looking, for several minutes, at Paul Cezanne’s painting, Rocks-- Forest of Fontainebleau, Hemingway states, “This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over. Cezanne is my favorite painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter” (60). Cezanne had a significant influence on Hemingway and his writing. This influence has been acknowledged in Hemingway’s own work as well as in various interviews and articles. Hemingway was introduced to Cezanne’s work in the rue de Fleurus studio during his regular visits to Gertrude Stein when she served as a mentor to him. There were two of Cezanne’s paintings in the studio, and Stein had her own “indebtedness” to Cezanne involving her theories of structure in writing.1 Cezanne was practically a hero to Hemingway who wanted to “write stories as objective and real as the paintings of Cezanne, to do the country as Cezanne had done it.”2 Neither Hemingway nor Lillian Ross ever gives any explanation as to what “this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over” means. It is never explained what, in the painting, it is he is referring to. What is it, exactly, that we “try to do in writing?” What is it about Cezanne’s work that allows Hemingway to point at a canvas and, for all practical purposes, say, “this is the way I strive to write?”

Rocks-- Forest of Fontainebleau is a landscape. Many connections can be made between Hemingway’s and Cezanne’s treatment of landscape. Emily Stipes Watts, in Ernest Hemingway and the arts, names four main methods in Cezanne’s painting that Hemingway is able to transpose into words. The first is the “use of a series of planes for depth and structural development” (32). The second technique is that he never allowed the distant mountains in a landscape to become lost or “hazy” and was still able to clarify their position in space. The third technique of Cezanne’s was his “emphasis upon volumes of space with the use of simple geometrical forms as the basis of definition.” And, finally, Cezanne let color mold and define form rather than light and shade (34).

Watts applies each of these to Hemingway’s own description of landscape. She explains that Hemingway’s landscapes exist as a series of spatial planes. She points out that the while a writer may not be able to outline the distant ridge of mountain with a paintbrush, Hemingway’s “distant mountains” maintain their position in space due to his use of specific, contrasting color (34). Solidity and volume, likewise, are of primary importance in Hemingway’s landscapes. Lastly, Watts argues that Hemingway rarely describes his landscape in terms of light and shade, but utilizes color, just as Cezanne does (35).

Hemingway and Cezanne’s affinity, however, cannot lie solely in artfulness of landscape description. There must be something more significant underlying the careful craftsmanship of each artists’ landscape. Hemingway’s landscape, of course, is heavily nuanced with something else, a something more. According to Watts, the “something more” that they share within these four techniques, points to a permanence or an order or form outside of man --the absence of chaos.3 This link is important but, perhaps, it is limiting to only link these two masters by landscape.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes his visits to the Musee du Luxembourg:

I went there nearly every day for the Cezanne’s and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. (13)

Cezanne’s influence on Hemingway is profound; it is not as simple as the desire to imitate just a style. There is something in the paintings that, at the time he is describing it, Hemingway cannot exactly get at, himself. In a following chapter, entitled “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” Hemingway cures his physical hunger by viewing the paintings:

you could always go to the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way. (69)

Why would the paintings be more beautiful when one is hungry? What is it about hollowness that makes the idea more lucid and beautiful? What is the “different way” that Cezanne might have been hungry? It is doubtful that, in the first passage cited, Hemingway is being facetious or aloof in saying that he cannot articulate what it is he is learning from Cezanne and that it is a secret. It is more likely that, at the time, in viewing the paintings, he could not quite conceive of it, himself. It seems likely that, every day, returning to the museum, Hemingway is grasping for something. If he had Cezanne figured out completely, there would be no mystery and he would have no compulsion to return as religiously as he did. It could not have been mere distraction that postponed Hemingway’s hunger on those “belly-empty” days. There was something in Cezanne which was able to fill him-- to fulfill some kind of need. This is a clue into the magnitude of what moves him in Cezanne’s work-- the “this and this...;” and it has to be more than an affinity in resonance in landscape and nature. There is some quality in Cezanne’s work, not restricted to landscape, which would ultimately inform Hemingway’s work beyond his own landscape.

Before influencing Hemingway, Cezanne’s work became a key inspiration for Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque who would both father Cubism --a movement which would arise well before Hemingway would publish his first book. If we examine the way in which Cezanne inspired an entire art movement, it provides us with a key into how he may have inspired Hemingway. It is just as important to examine that movement that launched Cezanne’s art. Therefore, examining Impressionism and Cubism as well as Cezanne’s own work can provide for a greater understanding of the link between Cezanne and Hemingway and the “dimensionality” that is achieved in each.

In Impressionist painting, the accent is on the sensory experience. The painter’s desire was to seize the passing moment --the instantaneous impression, and his tool for achieving this was light.4 Some of the most famous examples are the paintings of Claude Monet. One such example is his Rouen Cathedral series-- “some thirty canvases of Rouen cathedral executed in 1894, are, though arduously retouched in the studio, breathtaking demonstrations of instantanaety, and images of memory and dream” (Benedetti, 324). Monet painted other similar series focused on different subjects that would capture the subject matter during different times of day, under different qualities of light. There is a sense that Monet was trying to grasp at something beyond tangible physical reality. The shift of emphasis from the physically concrete to something as intangible as light introduces the elements of perception and emotion in an entirely new way. A question of the limits of our perception is introduced. When the focus is removed from the solid, concrete, stone face of the church to the light, which is impermanent as it moves across it, the painting no longer assures the immortality of its subject, but recognizes its mortality. Another series of Monet’s paintings, Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, is based on the line of a riverbank in relation to vertical tree trunks. “As though Monet had been clutching at that ephemeral beauty-- the poplars were already doomed and felled soon afterward-- they are born of a meditation on nature so deep and personal that the actual world seems mysteriously shrouded from us by the painting” (Benedetti, 324).

The same urgency and need to make real the passing moment drives chapter twenty (the final chapter) of Death in the Afternoon. It can be considered both an aria and an “elegy.”5 The chapter begins with, “If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it” (270). In the chapter, he fervorently catalogues the experiences, people, and places of Spain. The following is a paragraph from the chapter:

If it were more of a book it would make the last night of feria when Maera fought Alfredo David in the Cafe Kutz; and it should show the bootblacks. My God, you could not get in all the bootblacks; nor all the fine girls passing; nor the whores; nor all of us ourselves as we were then. Pamplona now is changed; they have built new apartment buildings out over all the sweep of plain that ran to the edge of the plateau; so now you cannot see the mountains. They tore down the old Gayarre and spoiled the square to cut a wide thoroughfare to the ring and in the old days here was Chicuelo’s uncle sitting drunk in the upstairs dining room watching the dancing in the square; Chicuelo was in his room alone, and the cuadrilla in the cafe and around the town. I wrote a story about it called A Lack of Passion, but it was not good enough although when they threw the dead cats at the train and afterwards the wheels clicking and Chicuelo in the berth, alone; able to do it alone; it was fair enough. (272-273)

Here, we see the same desperateness to make concrete the passing moment, to encapsulate something which is instantaneous, that Monet expressed in the Rouin Cathedral series. The feeling is that everything of Spain is slipping by in a fast moving river and Hemingway is hoping to save all of it that he can. The punctuation and unusual use of syntax suggests this as well. There is an abundance of semi-colons and commas and very few periods. It is as if there is the fear that if the idea stops, it will stop completely. There is not time enough for ends of thoughts and new sentences and thought groups; there is too much to convey. This is much like the quick, broad, impressionistic brush strokes hoping to conserve the way the poplars look at a specific time in the afternoon before they have fallen.

In her article, “‘The Excellence of the Stuff Cut Out’: A Discarded Passage from Death in the Afternoon,” Susan F. Beegel describes the way in which Hemingway confronts mortality in this chapter. “Hemingway emphasizes his own mortality by listing unexplained personal experiences whose secrets will die with him”(62). He underscores our own mortality by using words such as “you” and “we” and only hinting at these events, he uses them to suggest the “richness and evanescence of the life that he, and every man, will carry into death’s permanent oblivion”(63). Hemingway recognizes his inability to preserve and solidify the passing moment at the very same time that he is attempting to do so. This is not ridiculous or meaningless to him, however. As Beegel points out, Hemingway, in an earlier chapter of Death in the Afternoon, praised Francisco Goya for the same effort (Beegel, 63):

Goya did not believe in costume but he did believe in blacks and in grays, in dust and in light, in high places rising from plains, in the country around Madrid, in movement, in his own cohones, in painting, in etching, and in what he had seen, felt, touched, handled, smelled, enjoyed, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain-with, suspected, observed, loved, hated, lusted, feared, detested, admired, loathed, and destroyed. Naturally no painter has been able to paint all that but he tried. (205)

Hemingway’s recognition and confrontation of mortality and the “evanescence or life” is not and end to itself, however. Neither are Monet’s falling poplars. The light in Monet’s paintings is a link to something more. And the celebration and yearning for the passing moment is such a link in Hemingway’s work. It is the something more that is tricky. In her article, Beegel suggests an existential pride that Hemingway must have taken in continuing to oppose death in his art, despite his inability to wholly conserve life:

The final chapter’s praeteritio is the ideal rhetorical emblem for what Albert Camus has called the fine sight of “the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it.” By writing down what he has not written down and will not be able to write down, Hemingway dramatizes the tragic irony of the artists confrontation with death. (64)

The idea of an “intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it” is key. Hemingway is aware of this “something more” and even more aware of the fact that it transcends his own understanding of it. We encounter the mystical and inexplicable and, here, Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” presented in Death in the Afternoon is relevant: “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”(192). While he applies this to techniques of writing, his execution of the technique gives us the sense that this iceberg theory is applicable to the world of the story and acknowledges that element in life and the world around us. For the one-eighth that we can see and touch and describe perfectly, there are seven-eighths that we can feel but cannot quite possess or grasp: “and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”6 By giving us the exact one-eighth which can make us feel and know the rest without completely understanding, we are incredibly empowered and engaged heavily in the work as we would never be with the lower part of the iceberg shown to us on the page.

This is something that Cezanne accomplished as well. Both Hemingway and Cezanne were wary of the use of excess. In “Hemingway and Cezanne: An Indebtedness,” Robert L. Lair describes how, with his “inner sense” always active, Cezanne utilizes similar omission techniques. He states, as an example, the painting Boy in the Red Vest:

we are denied the relatively uninteresting natural physique but are offered instead the dynamic essences of form and color relationships which make the experience far more rewarding. The figure is simplified not certainly beyond recognition but to the point that the subject’s “soul” is apparent in terms of awkward elongation and of physical malformation that is aesthetically right. The simplification in terms of elemental shapes presents for the alert viewer an experience of the essence which is far more provocative in terms of insight and emotion. (167)

Cezanne pointed to and then accentuated the one detail which was capable of creating the emotion in us that he wished for us to have. In the painting, the boy’s face is faint --the emotion there is vague. Cezanne could have told us through his face, which is a more familiar indicator of emotion, what emotion to have. We could look at the painting and say, “that boy is sad.” What Cezanne does, instead, is more powerful. An emotion is created in us that we can not encapsulate or immediately define. It is not explained for us. It is very similar to the “clean, clean, unbearably clean” whiteness of the thigh bone of matador contrasted with the dirtiness of his slit underwear that Hemingway describes seeing at a bullfight in Death in the Afternoon. In his recollection, it is the one thing he “really sees” and that which is “important”(20). Hemingway leads us to share in the experience of the inexplicable in this way. It is these flashes, these moments of raw truth and emotion in which we are not told how to feel, that give us a reaction that is most genuine and experiential.

One important way in which Hemingway helps us to grasp the inexplicable is in his portrayal of big animals and the way in which his protagonists interact with them. Take, for example, the giant elephant in David Bourne’s story in The Garden of Eden. In hunting large game, the hunter is pursuing and hoping to conquer something larger than him or herself, thus stepping, for a moment, outside of his own mortality. The elephant in David’s story is glorious and almost unimaginable in size to the young David. In his first encounter with the elephant, the animal is supernatural, like a ghost moving through the night. The elephant’s shadow envelopes David as he passes and David is compelled to follow him. The big animals in Hemingway’s work seem to represent something which is out of reach for the protagonist --something beyond their grasp. For David, the elephant eventually represents love which, throughout the novel, is what is inexplicable to him-- too big for him to grip with his mind. In being engaged with big animals, the protagonist does not transcend mortality when the animal is in its full glory but, rather, in the moments where the once glorious animal is brought to mortality. David makes this connection with the elephant just after it has been shot and before it is finally killed:

But he was not dead. He had been anchored and now he was down with his shoulder broken. He did not move but his eye was alive and looked at David. He had very long eyelashes and his eye was the most alive thing David had ever seen. (199)

The elephant’s eye is not only pointed in David’s direction; it is looking at him. Approaching his own death, the elephant acknowledges David. David, still at the beginning of his life, acknowledges the elephant, making a note of the animal’s eyelashes, thus giving him a human quality. A connection is achieved for just an instant --a moment. Right before the moment of death, the eyeball is the most “alive” thing that David has encountered (199). The feeling is that the connection that is made spans the entire earth and entire lifetimes --for a moment.

Let us return to the Musee du Luxembourg where Hemingway stands, hungry, in front of the Cezannes day after day. Cezanne had arranged the structure of his paintings in such a way that he was able to communicate some quality of the “moment” to Hemingway. It is not unreasonable to imagine that, to the perceptive eye, a painting can communicate something of time. What Cezanne accomplished with structure very heavily inspired the Cubists as well, and Cubism eventually would dabble in the “fourth element,” being time. Cezanne must have inspired Picasso, Braque and Hemingway in very much the same way.

At the beginning of the Cubist movement, there was the general opinion that single point perspective had become a hindrance to art; and there had, thus far, been no system of “internal organization” that could take its place.7 Painters looked, then, to Cezanne, who had introduced into his paintings a “delicate spatial ambiguity” by passage. John Russell defines passage as the “running together of planes which in the picture space are far apart so that the old notions of foreground and background are dissolved in a tautly constructed planar structure”8 In Cezanne’s paintings, particularly his landscapes, space expands and contracts. Distance is reached in the “mind’s eye” and yet it fuses with elements in the immediate foreground.9 The first Cubists followed these cues of spatial organization.

In certain passages and chapters, Hemingway takes these cues of structure as well. If we compare the organization of landscape with the organization of time and memory, the effect is very similar. Foreground (the actual present) and background (memory and the past) are brought together in such a way that there is a kind of “delicate ambiguity” and, thus, highlights an interconnectedness between the past present, memory, and “reality” in the “mind’s eye.” It defeats the purpose to think of it as a flattening of space and time. It is not a simplification or a reduction. It is an expansion; It should be thought of as an explosion or an infusion that stretches our notions of time and distance toward something more complex.

An early example of one such explosion is in Hemingway’s work is in A Farewell to Arms. It occurs when Frederick Henry is back at the front after his hospital leave and is evacuating a town. It begins with Frederick referring to two attractive girls who are with them:

If there were no war we would probably all be in bed. In bed I lay me down my head. Bed and board. Stiff as a board in bed. Catherine was in bed now between two sheets, over and under her.... It rained all night. You knew it rained down that rained. Look at it. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine might rain. Blow her again to me. Well, we were all in it. Every one was caught in it and the small rain would not quiet it. “Good-night, Catherine,” I said out loud. “I hope you sleep well. If it is too uncomfortable, darling, lie on the other side,” I said. “I’ll get you some cold water. In a little while it will be morning and then it won’t be so bad. I’m sorry he makes you so uncomfortable. Try and go to sleep, sweet.”

I was asleep all the time, she said. You’ve been talking in your sleep. Are you alright?

Are you really there?

Of course I’m here. I wouldn’t go away. This doesn’t make any difference between us. (197)

The conversation continues shortly, still without quotation marks, until it is interrupted immediately with, “‘_____,’ Piani said. ‘They’ve started again.’” (198) There is more that is happening here than stream-of-consciousness writing. A “stream” indicates a straight line or linear time: thought follows thought follows thought. Instead, there is a feeling that time is no longer operating linearly. Time has stopped and space, instead, is traveled in a mystical way --space between Frederick, Catherine, the girls, until “everyone is caught in the rain.” and for an instant, there is a profound transcendence and an interconnectedness.

The final chapter of Death in the Afternoon, in its entirety accomplishes such an effect. The following is a small example:

muleta sticks in the bottom drawer, suits hung in the trunk, cloth covered to protect the gold; my whiskey in the earthen crock; Mercedes, bring the glasses; she says he had a fever all night long and only went out an hour ago. So then he comes in. How do you feel? Great. She says you had a fever. But I feel great now. What do you say, Doctor, why not eat here? She can get something and make a salad. Mercedes oh Mercedes. (277)

At one moment, we are having various elements or objects of this scene described to us (the muleta sticks and the suits), all sealed in the past. A moment later we are thrown into that past as if it had been immediate the entire time with “Mercedes, bring the glasses;...” and we are unsure as to how we got there. The style of punctuation is crucial, again, as it aids in the “running together of planes.” Ideas are not allowed to stop and start again, clean, at a new idea --neither are planes of time. The planes bleed together and run over each other. We are not given the luxury of guidelines. We cannot always tell who is talking or who is being referred to. The feeling is created, spatially and temporally, of being everywhere at once.

This brings us back to the Cubists and where they took Cezanne’s “spatial ambiguity.” Picasso and Braque sought to penetrate objects and volumes. They wanted to offer as much information as possible, in the image to push our sense of space. In cubism, the picture frame is removed from the two dimensions and is “infused with the impulse of time.”10 Just as Hemingway reduced the use of periods, cubists followed Cezanne’s suggestions of breaking up outlines and “increasing the number of perspectival indications, all with the intention of also making visible the hidden planes of things.”11 Just as Hemingway places different planes of time on top of each other, background planes in Cubist paintings are wedged and woven into the figure planes. The desire, in both, is to express simultaneously the sequential moments of an experience.12

In the final passage of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” powers of perception are stretched in a similar manner. When determining how Harry has to be situated in the plane as he is being flown away, the view he describes seeing “underneath” him (the depths of the forests and mountains, the zebra herds, the pink cloud of locusts) does not quite add up to physical possibility. Of course, this is reconciled as we discover that the flight is a sort of out-of-body experience. In this case, he is allowed heightened powers of perception. He is freed from the constraints of mortality.13 He is allowed to be everywhere just as the viewer of a cubist painting is allowed to revolve around an object, to see hidden sides, while standing still.

All of these things --from the elephant’s eye in David’s story to the use of a semi-colon in place of a period; from Monet’s poplars to Braque’s ability to transform the sequential into the simultaneous and Cezanne’s use of passage --lead us to Hemingway’s “fifth dimension.”

In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway spoke of, “The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten”(26-27). F. I. Carpenter, in his article, “Hemingway Achieves the Fifth Dimension,” points out that the specific phrase, “the fifth dimension” was used in 1931 (four years before the publication of Green Hills of Africa) by P.D. Ouspensky, who defined it to mean “the perpetual now”(Carpenter, 193). Carpenter also points out that Ouspensky was an admirer of William James and that the “fifth dimension” connects to James’s theory of “radical empiricism” --of “immediate” or “pure” experience. Gertrude Stein was a pupil of James and had adapted this idea for literary purposes.14 It is more than likely that Hemingway was introduced to and, eventually, very familiar with these theories during his friendship with Stein. Yet another connection is made to Cezanne as she adopted both James’s work and Cezanne’s work to her style; and Hemingway learned very much from all of them.

Carpenter uses For Whom the Bell Tolls as his key example of Hemingway’s use of “the fifth dimension.” The idea of the “fifth dimension” is explicit through Robert Jordan’s own thoughts and philosophies. Robert Jordan knows that he is very near the end of his life. This gives time a particular weight, and he has a need to defeat or expand it. In light of this knowledge, he tells himself, “So, if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity”(168). Here, Robert’s love is at battle with time, and there are moments where love does defeat time, and the moment expands outside of time. Hemingway describes, in Green Hills of Africa, how it is that love can obliterate time:

I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long, sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slow in starting. But you are not alone,... if you have loved some woman and some country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards it makes no difference. (72-73)

Hemingway quite successfully infuses these ideas into his fiction when Robert and Maria encounter the very moment just described:

and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on the all time always to unknowing nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them. (159)

Without the weight of time, Robert “floats up” and the flash of the moment is “sudden” and “scalding.” The earth, whose rotation marks time as we know it, moves out from under them and they exist, for a moment, completely without it. The moment is, indeed, “perpetual”. The moment is absent of time. Robert travels and comes upon “nowhere” again and again. This is because there is no end; everything has expanded into oblivion and on into the infinite.

“Nowhere” becomes everywhere. The “fifth dimension” is “passing through the eye of the moment into the eternal.”15 In these flashes, a cosmic interconnectedness is achieved. When someone passes through this “eye” they become, at once, part of everything. All previous notions of dimensions and perception are broken down and one becomes, him or herself, something larger. At once, one can touch and become interconnected with everything --immortal without time. There is a spirituality in this --not of the established religions we are familiar with but, rather, spirituality in its purest form --the spirituality of experience.16

Cezanne, Monet, Picasso, and Braque were all very much tuned into this. The success of their conveyance of the idea is up to the viewer, in the moment, standing in front of the painting. Light is the thing that hints at the fifth dimension for Monet and the impressionists. It is what pointed to the impermanence of the moment and, thus, created the hunger in the painters to capture it. The cubists achieved it in questioning and reordering space and time --by pushing our spatial orientation, giving us the ability of omnipresence.

For Hemingway, as well, this is not something fabricated only for fiction. It is very real and alive to him as that “something he can not yet define completely but the feeling...” he embraces in Green Hills of Africa. (148) The “Gulf Stream” passage in the book (148-149) as well as the first passage sighted here from the book, enable us to understand that this “fifth dimension” is a spiritual and crucial part of life which was, to Hemingway, one of the most important levels to reach in writing. The brilliance of his execution lies in the fact that, through all the techniques described here, the reader is given the opportunity to pass through the eye of the moment him or herself.

It is doubtful that anyone can ever paraphrase exactly what Hemingway was saying with “this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over.” But, there is an implied order or sequence in what he indicates. And to know Cezanne’s works, particularly his landscapes, we understand that this sequence (whatever it be) would not be linear, but expansive and blurred and that objects are organized in such a way that distance is closeness and the other way around.

So we return once again to Hemingway, still young as a writer, standing in front of the Cezannes in the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris. He is hollow-hungry and the landscapes would make more sense to him this way. His hunger is physical but he also possesses the sort of hunger that he describes a decade later in Green Hills of Africa when you can “never have it all” but there is that need, like a hunger, to possess all of everything. This is the “different kind” of hunger he decides Cezanne had while painting. It is the sort of hunger which is, for a split second, fulfilled in the “fifth dimension.” And Hemingway’s hunger was fed in such a way by Cezanne. The “unsound and illuminating” thoughts Hemingway describes have everything to do with this. Cezanne’s work presented the eye of the moment and, thus, lead Hemingway beyond mortality, into the same form of enlightenment he would later integrate into his own work.

Notes

1 James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1992. p. 150.

2 Mellow, p. 275.

3 See Emily Stipes Watts, Ernest Hemingway and the arts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971 pp. 37-50.

4 Maria Teresa Benedetti, et al, The History of Art. Ann Arbor: Borders Press, 1989. p. 319.

5 See Susan F. Beegel, “‘The Excellence of the Stuff Cut Out’: A Discarded Passage from Death in the Afternoon.” Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. pp. 51-67.

6 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast. New York: Ernest Hemingway Ltd., 1964. p. 75.

7 John Russell, The Meaning of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, Harper Collins Publishers, 1991. p. 103.

8 Russell, p. 103.

9 Benedetti, et al, p. 332.

10 Antonella Sbrilli, et al, The History of Art, Ann Arbor: Borders Press, 1989. p. 377.

11 Sbrilli, et al, pp. 372-373.

12 Sbrilli, et al, p. 375.

13 This idea was discussed during a class of “Hemingway Seminar, 2000” and mostly suggested by Professor Robin Metz.

14 F.I. Carpenter, “Hemingway Achieves the Fifth Dimension.” Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Hill and Wang, Inc, 1961. p. 193. Also, see note 1.

15 Professor Robin Metz, during “Hemingway Seminar, 2000.”

16 Professor Robin Metz, during “Hemingway Seminar, 2000.”

Works Cited

Beegel, Susan F. “‘The Excellence of the Stuff Cut Out’: A Discarded Passage from Death in the Afternoon.” Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. 51-67.

Benedetti, Maria Teresa, and Antonella Sbrilli, et al. The History of Art. Ann Arbor: Borders Press, 1989.

Carpenter, F. I. “Hemingway Achieves the Fifth Dimension.” Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. 192-201.

Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.

Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Garden of Eden. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Ernest Hemingway, Ltd., 1964.

Hemingway, Ernest. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 39-56.

Lair, Robert L. “Hemingway and Cezanne: An Indebtedness.” Modern Fiction Studies. Volume VI, Number 2. Summer 1960: 165-169.

Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Reading: Perseus Books, 1992.

Ross, Lillian. Portrait of Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

Russell, John. The Meanings of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1974.

Watts, Emily Stipes. Ernest Hemingway and the arts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.

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