Research Essay on "Indian Camp" by Ernest Hemingway (Due June 17th)

Hemingway's Primitivism and "Indian Camp" Author(s): Jeffrey Meyers Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 211-222 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441078 Accessed: 23/01/2009 11:03

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Hemingway's Primitivism and

"Indian Camp"

JEFFREY MEYERS

Hemingway's "Indian Camp" (1924)-the first story in his first trade book and always one of his favorites -has been subjected to a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from the obvious to the absurd, by critics who have recognized its power and struggled with its meaning. The story contains two shocking incidents: the doctor performs a Caesarean operation with a jackknife but without anesthetic, and the husband silently commits suicide. At least one critic has sensed that the suicide seems gratuitous-"in the context of the situation as given, it is too extreme an action"2-but did not attempt to explain the Indian's behavior. My own interpretation, based on Hemingway's attitude to

primitive people and on his knowledge of anthropology, explains the most difficult aspects of the story: why the husband remains in the bunk of the shanty during the two days his wife has been screaming, and why he does not leave the room if he cannot bear her agonizing pain and shrieks. Despite his badly cut foot, he could have limped or been carried out of range of the screams, if he had wished to, and joined the other men. "Indian Camp" reflects Hemingway's ambiguous attitude to

primitivism and shows his notable success in portraying the primitive. The interpretations of the story reveal the limitations of New

Critical readings and of Hemingway criticism during the last thirty-five years. The obvious explanation of the Indian's suicide is provided by the doctor in the story-"He couldn't stand things, I guess"3-and has been dutifully repeated by more than twenty critics from 1951 to 1983.4 Other students of the story, bored with the manifest simplicity of this

interpretation, have strained for variant readings but offered little more than subjective opinions. George Hemphill (1949) tersely blames the

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breech-birth: "The cause of his trouble is accidental."5 Thomas Tanselle (1962), whose short but influential note opened a can of worms by mentioning and then dismissing the theory that Uncle George is the father of the baby, stresses the guilt the Indian feels for engendering the child (men, paradoxically, get pleasure from sex; women, pain): "His small part in the plot is itself indicative of his plight as he finds himself superfluous.... The Indian father not only feels de trop but also

guilty for causing so much pain in one he loves. . . . [Hemingway is concerned with] a man's helplessness and feeling of guilt during his wife's labor."6

Kenneth Bernard (1965)-like Peter Hays (1971), Larry Grimes (1975), and Gerry Brenner (1983)-pounces on the theory rejected by Tanselle and claims the Indian kills himself because Uncle George is the real father of his putative son: "The new, bastard, way of life is not one that the Indian husband can tolerate; hence another reason [apart from the obvious one] for his suicide."7 A decade later, Grimes repeats the notion that Bernard got from Tanselle:

He has been unsuccessful as a husband and an Indian. His wife has made him a cuckold and he must witness the terrible breech-end birth.... The unnaturally born child could then be seen as the bastard product of the white man's "rape" of the Indian. The Indian, unable to bear either his cuckoldry or the challenge of the white man's ways (medical intervention in the patterns of birth and death, particularly) slits his throat.8

This passage contains several disturbing distortions. Grimes states, but does not show, that "he has been unsuccessful as . . . an Indian." He mistakenly asserts that the breech-birth is "unnatural." He transforms the theoretical paternity of Uncle George into a white man's "'rape.'" He erroneously states the white man intervenes "in the patterns of... death." And he does not explain why the Indian "must witness" the terrible birth.

None of the critics explains why the violent Indian-who, if cuckolded, would be more likely to kill George than himself-has waited all this time to act. In "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (also 1924), the next story in In Our Time, an Indian defies and humiliates Dr. Adams; and in "Indian Camp" there is nothing to prevent the Indian, if sufficiently motivated, to take his revenge. Indian girls are described as sexually promiscuous in "Ten Indians" (1927) and in "Fathers and Sons" (1933), where Nick sleeps with Trudy (while threatening to kill any Indian who even speaks to his sister) as Trudy's brother encourages and watches their sexual act. But married Indian women are quite a

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different matter; and there is no evidence in the story that George ever

slept with the squaw. George Monteiro (1973) offers a sociopathological explication: "It

is the combination of his debilitating (even embarrassing) injury and the

susceptibility (both physical and psychological) which always accompa- nies the sick role, I would submit, that causes his suicide."9 The feminists-who predictably impose rather than extract a meaning- present a farfetched variant of Tanselle's guilt theme. Linda Wagner (1975) mentions the "husband's outspoken act of contrition," and condemns the well-meaning and helpful doctor for both his callousness and his cleanliness.10 Judith Fetterley (1978) carries Wagner's views to an absurd extreme and twists the meaning into precisely the opposite of what Hemingway intended. Lady Fetterley's lover is also guilt-ridden: "The lesson [for feminists] reflected in the double mirror of the two fathers [the doctor and the Indian] is one of guilt-guilt for the attitudes men have toward women and guilt for the consequences to women of male sexuality."" Fetterley's exposition deliberately ignores female sexuality (the Indian did not mate with himself) and diminishes rather than enhances the significance of the story.

Joseph Flora (1982), who has the longest elucidation of the story, twice repeats the standard interpretation and adds (but does not explain) a vicarious element: "His suicide suggests that he was dying in his wife's place." Flora, vaguely aware of the primitive aspect, states Nick Adams discovers that "the life of the more primitive people can teach him a great deal, for the primitive contains values [which?] that the doctor's son needs [why?] to discover." Instead of pursuing this fruitful line of inquiry, Flora offers a sentimental "apologies to the Iroquois" explanation: "'Indian Camp' conveys a great sense of their humanity, of their suffering and ability to love, and of their solidarity."'2 We might expect to find these elements in the story, but in fact Hemingway disappoints our expectations by revealing the opposite-for there is no evidence of humanity, love, or solidarity. The Indians are strikingly affectless and isolated. The men moved out of range of the screams, the husband rolled over against the wall, and the only direct contact with the squaw is made by the three Indians who, with Uncle George, held her down.

Gerry Brenner (1983) adopts Bernard's George-as-father theory and exaggerates Flora's views into post-Wounded Knee cant. He maintains, against all reason, that the Indian's death is positive: "His suicide aims to inflict a strong sense of guilt on Uncle George, becomes a dignified act that affirms the need to live with dignity or not at all, and

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lays at the feet of another treacherous white man the death of yet one more of the countless, dispossessed native Americans."13

Kenneth Lynn's Freudian autobiographical interpretation (1987) relates the story to the circumstances surrounding the trouble-free birth of Hemingway's first son in 1923. He reiterates the Indian's demoralized apathy-"he cannot bring himself to help her in any way, or even to watch the birth of his son"-and unconvincingly concludes: "when the Indian slits his throat, he acts out the thoughts of suicide to which Hemingway made reference in his letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas after Hadley and the baby had come home from the

hospital."'4 Philip Young (1965), exasperated by the earlier bizarre

interpretations, wittily claimed that he (not Uncle George) was the father and concluded: "The reason the husband cut his throat was that George had passed out all the cigars he had on him before he got to the camp."15

Hemingway's attitude toward primitivism was ambiguous. In Torrents of Spring (1926), he satirized the naive primitivism of Sherwood Anderson but continued to write, with infinitely more sophistication and skill, in the Lawrencean mode. When Wyndham Lewis' Paleface (first published in his magazine The Enemy in September 1927) blasted the exaltation of Indian and Negro primitivism in Anderson's Dark

Laughter (1925), linked it with D. H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico (1927), and praised Hemingway's satiric parody, Hemingway re- sponded enthusiastically to Lewis' work:

I am very glad you liked The Torrents of Spring and thought you destroyed the Red and Black Enthusiasm very finely in Paleface. That terrible----about the nobility of any gent belonging to another race than our own (whatever it is) was worth checking. Lawrence you know was Anderson's God in the old days-and you can trace his effect all through [Anderson's] stuff.... In fact The Torrents of Spring was, in fiction form, performing the same purgative function as Paleface.16

At the time of Porgy, All God's Chillun, The Emperor Jones, Nigger Heaven, and the cult of jazz, Hemingway rejected the fashionable assumption that the emotional and sensual life of the dark races was superior to that of the white.

Lewis observed that The Torrents of Spring "amusingly pursues Mr. Sherwood Anderson through all the phases of his stupidity, especially stressing the 'he-man' foolishness, the 'bursting Spring' side of it."17 But when Hemingway continued to portray instinctive and inarticulate characters, his former acquaintance and ally unleashed the most damaging attack ever made on his work. In "The Dumb Ox," published

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HEMINGWAY'S "INDIAN CAMP"

in Men without Art (1934)-a title probably derived from Men without Women (1927)-Lewis shot barbs into Hemingway's most vulnerable spots. Lewis emphasized his debt to Gertrude Stein, his lack of political awareness and his mindlessness, and wittily insisted: "Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton ... [a] lethargic and stuttering dummy ... a super-innocent queerly-sensitive, village-idiot of a few words and fewer ideas."'8 Yet Lewis' reductive satire, which exalted reason over instinct, ignored Hemingway's conscious and complex use of primitivism. He had direct knowledge of the material in "Indian Camp"-it belonged to his childhood

experience and was a source of his art-and had made it his legitimate subject.

Rousseau's belief in man's natural goodness and in the inevitable corruptions of civilization as well as the modern concern "with the subconscious mind and anti-rational modes of understanding"'9 inspired a kind of writing that emphasizes nature and freedom, and feels that instinctive and intuitive consciousness is a key to the deepest emotions. Artists who concentrate on the most crucial situations in life, writes Robert Goldwater, the author of the classic study of Primitivism in Modern Art, assume that "the further one goes back-historically, psychologically, or aesthetically-the simpler things become; and that because they are simpler they are more profound, more important, and more valuable."20 Hemingway simplifies his early stories by presenting the events and omitting the explanation.

Hemingway expressed his lifelong attraction to primitive people- for the values of northern Michigan over those of Oak Park-in stories about Indians and Negroes, boxers and bullfighters, Africans and Spaniards, and about tough, stoical heroes like Harry Morgan and Santiago. This literary mode also influenced his speech and behavior, and found expression in his public as well as his fictional persona. He boasted of Indian blood, Indian mistresses, Indian daughters, and liked to imitate Indian speech. Though his youngest sister exclaimed: "Prudence Boulton was a most unattractive little girl. I knew her and that Indian camp there smelled terribly,"21 Hemingway, in a rapturous passage that expressed his yearning for pure experience with instinctive people, claimed "she did first what no one has ever done better."22 (In fact, his youthful sex life was severely restricted by his religious training, timidity, and fear of venereal disease; and it was the waitress, described in "Up in Michigan," who did first what other women did better-after he had acquired more sexual experience.)23

Hemingway had fifty-seven books on Indians in his library and was

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well read in anthropology. He owned Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890-1915) and Sigmund Freud's Basic Writings, which included Totem and Taboo (1913).24 We do not know precisely when Hemingway first read Frazer. But, as John Vickery explains in The Literary Impact of "The Golden Bough," "following its first edition [in 1890], Frazer's ideas made themselves felt in nearly every area of the humanities and social sciences, including literary history and criticism .... Even before the artist actually picked up Frazer's book, he could easily have had some idea of its basic concepts. . . . Throughout Frazer's career reviews, summaries, and critiques of his work occupied extended space in numerous periodicals" like the Athenaeum, the Dial, and the Nation.25 During Hemingway's teens, for example, the Chicago Evening Post printed a substantial essay on The Golden Bough.26 Eliot declared that The Golden Bough had influenced his generation profoundly;27 and Frazer's book became intellectually fashionable and familiar after the publica- tion of The Waste Land in 1922. Both Pound and MacLeish-whom Hemingway met in 1922 and 1924-read Frazer. And in The Cantos and "The Pot of Earth" (1925) they used his "anthropological vision of the primitive past to crystallize the enduring dilemmas of the cultural present."28

Hemingway was also receptive to Frazer's motifs and imagery, to his concepts of sex, superstition, and survival. Like Frazer, Hemingway believed that the primitive past influenced the psychology of the present; and Frazer confirmed what Hemingway already knew about Indians from observation and intuition. The anthropological material in "Indian Camp" is as well integrated and stylized as is Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne's "On Cannibals" in The Tempest.

Captain James Cook first used the word taboo-which is concerned "with specific and restrictive behaviour in dangerous situations"29-in his account of the Polynesians. Frazer believes that taboos are "nothing but rules intended to ensure either the continued presence or the return of the soul. In short, they are life-preservers or life-guards."30 His ancient peoples, writes Vickery, "seek to endure by invoking myths of divine assistance and rites in which perfect performance assures divine conquest over enemies and hence human survival."3'

In the section on "Tabooed Places" in Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, the part of The Golden Bough that clarifies the significance of Hemingway's story, Frazer states that in primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by sacred kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by "girls at their first menstruation, women after childbirth, homicides, mourners, and all

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persons who have come into contact with the dead." During childbirth "women are supposed to be in a dangerous condition which would infect any person or thing they might touch; hence they are put into

quarantine until, with the recovery of their health and strength, the

imaginary danger has passed away." Frazer offers massive and

far-ranging documentation-from tribes in Australia, Tahiti and Manaluki in the South Pacific, as well as from the Sinaugolos of New Guinea, the Kodiak Eskimos of Alaska, and the Ba-Pedi and Ba-Thonga of South Africa-to illustrate the woman's uncleanliness, vulnerability, and danger during her ritual confinement at childbirth. Frazer also

explains that after their wives give birth, the warrior-husbands, who now have a greater reason for living, become more cautious and absorb the wives' weakness: "the men become cowardly [and] weapons lose their force."32

Later anthropologists have developed and refined (instead of

merely repeating, as literary critics tend to do) the ideas of Frazer. Lucien Levy-Bruhl relates that the husband's behavior is compounded of fear for his wife and desire to protect others "from the evil influence which will emanate from her, especially from her blood." He states that the husband associates the blood from his wife in childbed with the blood flowing from his own death-wound.33

Charles Winnick's explication of the concept of couvade-in which a man ritualistically imitates the symptoms of pregnancy and the moans

during delivery-is crucial to an understanding of "Indian Camp" and

explains why the husband joins his wife in ritualistic seclusion: "The imitation by the father of many of the concomitants of childbirth [takes place] around the time of the wife's parturition .... The father may retire to bed . . . and observe some taboos and restrictions in order to

help the child." The father practices couvade, Winnick explains, in order to affirm his fatherhood, protect the child, and deflect potential evil from his wife: "The father asserts his paternity through appearing to share in the delivery.... The father simulates the wife's activities in order to get all the evil spirits to focus on him rather than her."34

In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Mary Douglas follows Frazer and emphasizes the primitive belief in "horrible disasters which overtake those who inadvertently cross some forbidden line or develop some impure condition."35 In the anthropological literature, as in "Indian Camp," the pregnant wife is considered unclean, vulnerable, and in danger; the husband absorbs her weakness and associates her blood with his own death, practices

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couvade to protect his wife and child, and resents the intrusion of those who assist at the birth.

In one of the Nick Adams stories, Hemingway discusses the relation between imagination and reality; and suggests that he knew

enough about his father and the Indians to portray what he had never seen: "Everything good he's ever written he'd made up .... Of course he'd never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it

good. Nobody knew that."36 "Work in Progress," the original title of the

story that first appeared in Ford's Transatlantic Review, not only imitates Joyce's title for the serialization of Finnegans Wake but also ironically alludes to the woman's pregnancy and labor. The story is carefully structured. The white men move from the idyllic to the brutal-the two dominant characteristics of the primitive world. They are ferried through the darkness and mist by their Charon-like rowers, and conveyed to the smelly, secluded, and morbid world of the Indians. The Indian men and women are separated (with the exception of the husband and wife) before the intrusion of the white men. The three whites are balanced by the three Indians who help hold down the woman. The husband, who had cut himself with an ax three days earlier, is matched by the wife who is enduring her third day of labor. The husband's second mutilation intensifies his first, the gash on his throat repeats the one on her belly. His straight razor (which would have been useful in the Caesarean operation) corresponds to the doctor's jackknife. Neither George nor the husband has any real function, though both are implicated in the wife's pain by her bite and her screams. And both deflate the doctor-one by mockery, one by suicide-after his successful delivery has physically deflated the woman. The inarticulate screams, laughs, smiles, gestures, and mute acts of the nameless Indians (none of whom speaks) provide a contrast to the ironic words of the doctor ("the screams are not important") and of his son ("[It's] all right"). After the birth, Dr. Adams realizes it was a mistake to bring Nick, who had watched the delivery, but turned away from the afterbirth and the sutures.

The red men in the story are not idealized and the husband, who kills himself-ironically-after his wife has survived the ordeal and given birth to a son, does not exhibit the stoicism one expects from a young Indian. In A Farewell to Arms, by contrast, after the death of Frederic Henry's baby and his wife in childbirth (based on the actual, rather than the imagined, Caesarean birth of Hemingway's second son in 1928), Henry represses his feelings and shows no outward emotion. He orders the attendants out of Catherine's room, shuts the door and

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turns off the light. But "it was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain."37

Hemingway portrays, in the double climax of gory birth and savage death, in pure action without conscious thought, the husband's fatal reaction to his wife's agony, but not the wife's reaction to the husband's suicide. The passive tense of "His throat has been cut" suggests the

passivity of the Indian.38 And Nick's delusive intimations of immortality after his confrontation with death and return to the idyllic lake (the certainty and absolutism of "he felt quite sure that he would never die" reveal Nick's naivete) provide an ironic contrast to the soldier (an older Nick) in the bombarded trench at Fossalta, who fears and expects death, and prays: "If you'll only keep me from getting killed I'll do anything you say."39

The crossing of forbidden lines in dangerous situations exposes men and women to contamination and evil that cause sickness and death. The Indian husband has remained in the room to affirm his fatherhood, to share his wife's pain, and to protect his child. But the couvade (the hidden part of Hemingway's iceberg) is not effective and the wife remains vulnerable. The white men, summoned by the

desperate Indians but ignorant of their customs, not only violate the sacred confinement of the woman in childbed, but are forced to treat her brutally and to use a hook (as if she were a squirming fish) to sew up her stomach. The contrast between the squalid and the clinical shows that the Indians need the white man's skill, but are also destroyed by it. The husband cannot bear this defilement of his wife's purity, which is far worse than her screams. In an act of elemental nobility, he focuses the evil spirits on himself, associates his wife's blood with his own death-wound, and punishes himself for the violation of taboo. "Indian

Camp" reveals that Hemingway-far from being the Dumb Ox-did not simply glorify the Indians, but based his story on profound understanding, gained from experience and from books, of their behavior, customs, and religion.

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner's, 1981), p. 180.

2 Samuel Shaw, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Ungar, 1973), p. 29. 3"Indian Camp," The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York:

Scribner's, 1953), p. 95. 4 See Harry Levin, "Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway," Kenyon Review, 13 (Autumn 1951), 606; Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A

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Reconsideration (1952), rev. ed. (New York, 1966), p. 32; Delmore Schwartz, "The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway," Perspectives USA, 13 (Autumn 1955), 84; John Killinger, Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1960), (New York, 1965), p. 17; S. F. Sanderson, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 30; Joseph De Falco, The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), p. 30; Alan Holder, "The Other Hemingway," Twentieth Century Literature, 9 (Oct. 1963), 157; Julian MacLaren-Ross, review of A Moveable Feast, London Magazine, 4 (Aug. 1964), in Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 490; Constance Cappel Montgomery, Hemingway in Michigan (New York: Fleet, 1966), pp. 63-64; Richard Bennett Hovey, Hemingway: The Inward Terrain (Seattle, 1968), p. 15; Nicholas Joost, Ernest Hemingway and the Little Magazines: The Paris Years (Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers, 1968), p. 85; Tony Tanner, review of By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, London Magazine, 8 (May 1968), in Meyers, Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, p. 527; Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner's, 1969), p. 125; Peter Hays, The Limping Hero (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), p. 71; Arthur Waldhorn, A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Farrar, 1972), p. 54; Louis Rubin, review of The Nick Adams Stories, Washington Sunday Star, Apr. 23, 1972, in Meyers, Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, p. 586; Norman Grebstein, Hemingway's Craft (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1973), p. 17; Samuel Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, p. 29; Scott Donaldson, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Viking, 1977), (New York, 1978), p. 297; Wirt Williams, The Tragic Art of Hemingway (1977), (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981), p. 36; David Seed, "The Picture of the Whole: In Our Time," Ernest Hemingway: New Critical Essays, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Vision, 1983), p. 21. 5 George Hemphill, "Hemingway and James," Kenyon Review, 11 (Winter 1949), 56.

6 G. Thomas Tanselle, "Hemingway's 'Indian Camp,' " Explicator, 20 (Feb. 1962), item 53.

7 Kenneth Bernard, "Hemingway's 'Indian Camp,'" Studies in Short Fiction, 2 (Spring 1965), 291.

8 Larry Grimes, "Night Terror and Morning Calm: A Reading of Hemingway's 'Indian Camp' as Sequel to 'Three Shots,' " Studies in Short Fiction, 12 (1975), 414.

9George Monteiro, "The Limits of Professionalism: A Sociological Approach to Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway," Criticism, 15 (Spring 1973), 153-54.

10 Linda Wagner, "Juxtaposition in In Our Time," Studies in Short Fiction, 12 (Summer 1975), 245.

1 Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979), p. 46.

12Joseph Flora, Hemingway's Nick Adams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 31, 25, 30. 13 Gerry Brenner, Concealments in Hemingway's Works (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1983), p. 239, n15.

14 Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 229.

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15 Philip Young, reply to Kenneth Bernard, Studies in Short Fiction, 3 (Fall 1965), ii.

16 Quoted in Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (London, 1950), pp. 203-04.

17 Wyndham Lewis, Paleface (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), p. 202. 18 Wyndham Lewis, "The Dumb Ox," Men without Art (London: Cassell,

1934), p. 29. 19 Michael Bell, Primitivism (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 71. 20 Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage,

1966), p. 251. 21 Carol Gardner, quoted in Denis Brian, The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait

of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him Best (New York: Grove Press, 1987), p. 183.

22 Ernest Hemingway, "Fathers and Sons," The Short Stories of Hemingway, p. 497.

23 In his 1950 interview with Lillian Ross, he dropped his articles and spoke a kind of humorous Indian language. But after her malicious piece had

appeared, he insisted that he had not "talked like a half-breed chocktaw" (Letters, p. 744). On his second African safari in 1954, Hemingway moved from primitivism to primitive. Though going native was especially frowned upon during the Mau-Mau emergency, he shaved his head, hunted with a spear, dyed his clothes the rusty Masai color, and began an elaborate courtship of his African "fiancee." His white hunter described her as "an evil-smelling bit of camp trash," but Hemingway associated her with Prudy Boulton. See Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1985), p. 502.

24 See James Brasch and Joseph Sigman, Hemingway's Library: A Composite Record (New York: Garland, 1981).

25John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of "The Golden Bough" (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 81, 74-75.

26 Irving Howe, Sherwood Anderson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 57-58.

27 T. S. Eliot, "A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors," Vanity Fair, 21 (Feb. 1924), 29.

28 Vickery, The Literary Impact of "The Golden Bough," p. 149. 29 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Preface to Franz Steiner, Taboo (London, 1956), p.

20. 30James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. (London, 1911), III, 29. 31 Vickery, The Literary Impact of "The Golden Bough," pp. 72-73. 32 James Frazer, "Women Tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth," Taboo

and the Perils of the Soul, in The Golden Bough, III, 138, 147, 151. 33 Lucien Levy-Bruhl, "Taboos Relating to Confinements," Primitives and the Supernatural, trans. Lilian Clare (New York: Dutton, 1935), p. 331.

34 Charles Winnick, Dictionary of Anthropology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 137. 35 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 1.

36 Ernest Hemingway, "On Writing," The Nick Adams Stories (New York: Bantam, 1972), pp. 217-18.

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37 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner's 1969), p. 332.

38 The Indian's suicide provides a striking contrast to Leopold Bloom's sympathetic and humane response to Mrs. Purefoy's screaming three-day labor in "The Oxen of the Sun" chapter in Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1922).

39 Interchapter VII, The Short Stories of Hemingway, p. 143.

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