Essay Assignments (2)

The Critical Menagerie in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" Author(s): Theodore L. Gaillard, Jr. Source: The English Journal, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 31-35 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/813335 Accessed: 28-09-2019 14:56 UTC

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The Critical Menagerie in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"

Theodore L. Gaillard, Jr.

Department of English St. Mark's School

Southborough, Massachusetts

44HO'S Hemingway?" one senior recently asked me-partly in jest.

But his question in many ways epito- mizes the problem faced by the current secondary school student who is devour- ing the works of Updike, Cleaver, Bald- win, and Vonnegut-and who knows lit- tle more of Hemingway than that he was one of his parents' favorite authors. Too often he has heard Hemingway touted as a writer of good hunting and fishing stories rather than as one of the best short story craftsmen in the lan- guage. And yet today's students still come away from a study of Hemingway amazed at the skill and depth of this author they had initially approached with a somewhat quizzical "show me" attitude.

In approaching Hemingway, I have found that "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" particularly lends itself to the task of convincing students that Hemingway is still a writer of major literary significance. Superficially, the action and dialog are exciting and com- mand interest; beneath the surface lie a multitude of subtle techniques that, once uncovered, will convince even the neo-

phyte Hemingway reader of this author's stature in the genre of the short story. A technique that emerges as one of the most impressively effective is Hemingway's use of animals, for behind the scenes of the five-act tragedy' that constitutes "The Short Happy Life of Francis Ma- comber"2 stalks a troupe of inhuman supporting actors whose effect on our understanding of Hemingway's story is crucial. Some of these animals appear in rather nebulous meta'phoric and adjecti- val roles; others appear on-stage at key points in the story to provide the vital antagonistic thrust faced by the pro- tagonist, Francis Macomber. But whether in the form of a charging lion or, more subtly, in Margot Macomber's back- handed reference to those "big cowy things that jump like hares" (p. 9), Hemingway uses his animal menagerie

1I pp. 3-11: prologue-shameful present; II pp. 11-22: flashback-lion hunt; III pp. 22-29: the buffalo hunt; IV pp. 29-36: Macomber's "happy life" and death; V pp. 36-37: epilogue- Margot's surrender.

2All page references are to Ernest Heming- way, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953).

31

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32 ENGLISH JOURNAL

as a standard against which to measure and evaluate his human actors. Furthest

in the background lurk what can be called his social animals; in the middle distance loom the disparaging animals of direct criticism; in the foreground tower the personified foils with which the main characters are identified and compared.

Largely removed from the scene of the Macomber safari, social animals com- ment implicitly on Francis Macomber's background. As a crew-cut socialite, Francis knows about

duck shooting, about fishing, trout, sal- mon and big-sea, . . . about all court games, about dogs, not much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in (p. 21).

His world emerges as one of spending money and dabbling in the safer hunting and fishing pastimes that are all part of "the good life." His lack of knowledge of horses suggests that the danger of even such socially acceptable sports as polo is something Macomber has hitherto avoided. Hemingway implies that he has probably never seriously considered the possibility of there being any real danger to big-game hunting in Africa, and his lack of experience and preparedness stand out as conspicuously as his too- new safari clothes (p. 4). Placed next to Robert Wilson, the white hunter whom Mrs. Macomber examines with great sen- sual interest, Francis appears almost ri- diculous. The type of safari envisioned by the society columnist ultimately emerges as far from the truth as the El Heraldo critic's account of the bullfight in "The Undefeated," but his self-con- sciously witty, tongue-in-cheek descrip- tion of the Martin Johnsons' storybook safari is probably exactly the kind of sa- fari Macomber, ironically, had in mind- as is emphasized by Hemingway's close placement of the columnist's description of the Johnson safari to his comment on the Macombers'. Unfortunately, Francis

Macomber's safari turns out to be quite different from a romantic adventure out

of Babar the Elephant; Macomber's ad- versaries are a far cry from "Old Simba the lion, the buffalo, Tembo the ele- phant" (p. 22) and the Natural History Museum specimens that in the col- umnist's description seem almost pre- stuffed. Hemingway suggests here that Macomber has emerged from the fairy- tale world of high society into the real world of tooth and claw.

M ORE specific than this implicitly negative criticism of Macomber is

Hemingway's explicit use of animals as a verbal weapon in the mouths of his characters. "I bolted like a rabbit" (p. 7), Macomber chastizes himself. He sees the wounded lion, on the other hand, takes a last desperate stand and makes "him- self perfectly flat in cover you wouldn't think would hide a hare" (p. 17). The rabbit-hare similarity in the comparison between Macomber and the lion em-

phasizes the contrast between the lion's stand and Macomber's panic-stricken flight.

To Francis' self-punishment Margot adds criticism of her own. When Fran-

cis passes her some cooked eland he shot, she scoffs at his offering with the com- ment: "They're the big cowy things that jump like hares, aren't they?" (p. 9). Rubbing salt into his wounded ego, she facetiously asks, "They're not dangerous, are they?" (p. 9). In contrast to her later attempt at disparaging Francis' initial suc- cess with the buffalo ("It seemed very unfair to me," Margot said, "chasing those big helpless things in a motor car" [p. 30]), here she is essentially cor- rect. All Francis has been able to shoot

by this point in the safari are relatively harmless animals, and he has proved him- self a coward in the face of the only dangerous game he has encountered. In some ways Francis has not yet arrived in Africa-he seems almost to be at home

dining by candlelight, "cutting the eland

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"THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER" 33

steak and putting some mashed potato, gravy and carrot on the down-turned fork that tined through the piece of meat" (p. 10).

Perhaps the crowning insult comes the morning after Margot has spent the night with Wilson on his double-size cot. Macomber is well aware of his

wife's infidelity, but he is not man enough to mete out physical punishment to his wife or to Wilson. Verbal in-

nuendoes have to suffice. Not unexpect- edly, Wilson foils even this method of retaliation with a very quiet, "I'd pull yourself together, laddybuck" (p. 24). The fatherly, almost condescending, tone and the epithet's implications of imma- turity and/or femininity remind us of the ludicrous, rabbity eland, not to mention Macomber's own previous evaluation of himself. But the epithet also concisely foreshadows the end of the buffalo hunt, for Macomber does pull himself together and rises from "laddybuck" to true man- hood, equal in courage and virility to the bull buffalo he has killed.

H EMINGWAY is most effective, however, in his use of animals as foils for the human characters in the

story. It is in conjunction with the ani- mals they themselves hunt that we can best evaluate Robert Wilson, Francis Macomber, and his wife. Wilson emerges as "the professional"; he shows -little emotion, and lack of expression in his voice tells us more about him than would

another author's attempt at full descrip- tion. He is self-confident and almost de-

tached from the jungle world of his employers. From Margaret's point of view he seems a killer, but his "flat, blue, machine gunner's eyes" (p. 8) ironically seem to raise Robert Wilson into a posi- tion of dominance over the brutal strug- gle for supremacy that he witnesses.

Margot Macomber, on the other hand, is deeply enmeshed in this struggle. Her husband labels her "a bitch" (p. 22) after her return from Wilson's tent and refers

to her "bitchery" (p. 10) elsewhere in the story-but in his social epithet Francis has severely underestimated this woman who by the end of the story feels herself threatened by a husband with the cour- age to leave her. She is, she realizes, past her prime:

... She was not a great enough beauty any more at home to be able to leave him and better herself and she knew it and he knew it. She had missed the chance to leave him and he knew it

(p. 21).

In defending her interests, she is far more than just a "bitch." Although Hemingway links Margot with no spe- cific animal, she does materialize as the condensation of all the most dangerous qualities of female carnivores. To Robert Wilson she is a typical American woman, one of "the hardest in the world: the

hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive" (p. 8). Although deep within she still has vestiges of the softness and femininity that exist in all women ("She looked younger today [Wilson muses], more innocent and fresher and not so professionally beauti- ful" [p. 27]), externally she is so "enam- elled in that American female cruelty" (p. 9) that she seems even more insensitive than Robert Wilson with his "extremely cold blue eyes" (p. 4). She is smart ("But she wasn't stupid, Wilson thought, no, not stupid" [p. 8]), and Francis is still rather naive. "There are lots of things I don't know" (p. 7).3 While she is seen as cruel and predatory, her husband is compared with a rabbit and is at the end linked, appropriately, with the lion whose head is blown off by Wilson. It is almost as if Hemingway has put in Wilson's mind words that should have

3The pig-eyed quality (pp. 29, 35) of the buffalo with whom Macomber is ultimately linked mildly reinforces this idea of his lack of awareness. See also the other things he "did not know" about Wilson or his wife (p. 21, middle).

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34 ENGLISH JOURNAL

been uttered by Macomber in reference to his wife: "Hope the silly beggar doesn't take a notion to blow the back

of my head off" (p. 25). Wilson's fear is, obviously, never realized, but Hem-, ingway confirms our premonitions of Macomber's fate by using his animal foils to manipulate the roles of hunter and hunted: "You know in Africa no woman ever misses her lion," Wilson promises (p. 7). In Margaret Macomber's all too capable hands the 6.5 Mannlicher performs the function implicit in its name. Macomber is hit "two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his

skull" (p. 36) with, one feels, almost the same careful precision he himself used when he "aimed carefully at the center of the huge, jerking, rage-driven neck and shot" (p. 29).

H EMINGWAY'S subtle identification of Macomber with the lion he is hunting serves a far more important pur- pose than symbolically to foreshadow his death at the hands of his wife. Indeed, it is through Macomber's links with both the lion and the buffalo that we become

subliminally aware of his transition from emotional adolescence to manhood. Ini-

tially, the lion's bravery and determina-1 tion are used strictly as a contrast to Macomber's rabbit-like trembling (pp. 14, 15, 17, et al.). "Well, here's to the lion" (p. 4), is the toast Wilson gives the victim and not his supposed slayer, Fran- cis Macomber. In his struggle for survi- val the lion with half his head shot away kept "crawling on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed him" (p. 21). He stared defiantly with "yellow eyes, narrowed with hate" (p. 19); simi-, larly, "Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most" (p. 23). But Macomber can at this point do nothing with his hatred. Momentarily facing the challenge posed by the lion (and all that it symbolizes in the story), Macomber feels "sick at his stomach"

(p. 16) and cannot control his shaking. "The fear was still there like a cold, slimy hollow in all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it

made him feel sick" (p. 11). The quality of the difference between Macomber and

the lion is suggested by the nature of their respective wounds. Macomber's psychological "wound" can be traced ultimately to his constitutional weakness and, more recently, to the effects of his "huntress" wife; like other American men, Wilson thinks, Macomber has "softened or gone to pieces nervously as they [American women and, specifical- ly, Margaret Macomber] have hardened" (p. 8). But the lion's wound is more a "red badge of courage" incurred in com- bat with an almost mythical "super- rhino" (p. 15) and its passengers-a vision that should, Hemingway implies, inspire the lion with at least as much terror as

the "dangerous game" (p. 26) faced by Macomber. Instead of fear, a .30-06 220- grain solid bullet causes the "sudden hot scalding nausea" (p. 15) in the lion's stomach. In contrast, the nausea of fear experienced by Macomber is one of nothingness, a cold, slimy hollow exist- ing in emptiness; the lion's nausea is caused by a solid bullet and manifests itself as something hot, even scalding. The lion dies nobly, facing an external force he cannot master; "Wilson knew some- thing about it and only expressed it by saying, 'Damned fine lion' " (p. 21).

"Shoot for the bone. Break him

down," Wilson had said (p. 12). The lion is broken down and fights his fate to the end, whereas Macomber has col- lapsed internally, "gone to pieces ner- vously" (p. 8). Macomber bolts like a rabbit, where in the lion "all of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his re- maining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush" (p. 19) directly at his attackers. In death he becomes almost human: "the lion lay, with uplifted, white-muscled, tendon- marked naked forearms" (p. 21); Ma-

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"THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE,OF FRANCIS MACOMBER" 35

comber becomes, by his own admission, a rabbit.

BUT Macomber changes. His meta- morphosis from "rabbit" and "laddy-

buck" occurs after the second crossing of the stream that separates the camp from the hunting ground. Once again the lion is used as a foil-this time more

subtly. Just as we view the initial con- flict through the lion's stream-of-con-, sciousness as he watched Macomber dis-

mount from the car, so we now see Macomber observe "three huge, black animals looking almost cylindrical in their long heaviness, like big black tank cars" (p. 27). The situation has been inverted. Where the lion saw the car

and its passengers in animal terms, "bulk- ing like some super-rhino" (p. 15), Ma- comber sees the animal in car terms.

Hemingway's inversion of style implies the conversion of Macomber to a lion-

like figure and foreshadows his coura- geous birth into his all-too-short "happy life." Sparked by a rage in which "he had no fear, only hatred of Wilson" (p. 28) and buoyed by his instinctive skill and success at dispatching the first two buffaloes, Macomber becomes a man equal to Wilson. Hemingway draws our attention to Macomber's newly ac- quired self-confidence by equating his and Wilson's reaction to the news that

one of the buffaloes has disappeared, wounded, into the bush:

"He says the first bull got up and went into the bush," Wilson said with no expression in his voice. "Oh," said Ma- comber blankly (p. 30). (Italics mine)

In his excitement, Macomber becomes in Wilson's eyes "a ruddy fire-eater" (p. 31), which links Macomber more closely

both with the "red-faced Mr. Wilson"

(p. 8) and with the slain lion and his "hot scalding nausea" (p. 15). Ironically, we see in Wilson's comment a further

foreshadowing of Macomber's end in which a "sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode[s] inside his head" (p. 36). The lion himself had last been seen

crawling toward Wilson "with half his head seeming to be gone" (p. 20). The hunter becomes the hunted; the man with newly achieved lion-like qualities falls prey to the predatory wife who has seen the change in her husband (p. 33) and herself has become white and ill

with fear at what it portends (pp. 29, 31).

In his final hunt Macomber has been

implicitly connected with the previously slain lion; in his death at the hands of another "hunter" he is subtly linked with his own last victim, the buffalo: "Francis Macomber lay now, face down, not two yards from where the buffalo lay on his side..." (p. 36). Wilson's first conscious thought after spreading his handkerchief over Macomber's crew-cropped head is (as he stands and looks at the bull beside Macomber) "Hell of a good bull.... A good fifty inches or better. Better" (p. 36). Where Wilson's previous compli- ment to the lion was an insult to Ma-

comber, his remark here is a tribute to the man who became a man too late. Linked with the buffalo both in the man-

ner of death and by physical proximity, Macomber has, at the last, achieved the transition from "rabbit" and "laddybuck" to lion, to bull (with its implications of size and virile strength), and to manhood. Hemingway's subtle use of animals as an evaluative device has helped to turn what would have been a story of pathos into one that approaches tragedy.

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