My high school English teacher had three names, and used them all nearly always. It was eccentric, perhaps. Sometimes she would exchange her first name for Ms., though she was married, and we all knew it. Once it crossed my mind that perhaps she didn’t, however. Seems doubtful that pertinent fact would have escaped her, but pertinent facts always escape us. It’s difficult to figure out why married people do what they do anyway. Perhaps she thought Ms. had a nice ring to it. I should drop it.

I took a novels class with her, and beyond achieving full mastery of the finite knowledge of her name, I would master little else in there. I did make a lot of introductions, however, and at some point I read a book of Ernest Hemingway’s, The Old Man and the Sea. Having bounced around from author to author prior, I quickly came to devour every last book of his on her shelves.

I had no clue what I was reading, but I liked it. Something similar to falling in love, I suppose.

Finally she said to me one day, “Dan, I appreciate and admire your appetite for Hemingway, but you really ought to try to read something else. There are lots of other great authors out there, and I would think the themes of Hemingway would be a little shallow for you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, Hemingway is so full of himself. He’s all about being macho and brave. It wears a little thin, don’t you think? Besides, he doesn’t write women very well.” And with that I dropped him, for the most part, until a college class with a Jewish Rabbi named Jay Holstein.

Holstein was the darling of the underclassmen. He was a professor of religion, and for him religion was about the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Hardly a semester went by which didn’t see an article or two in the school newspaper devoted to him. After my time someone even made a film about him. Over the years he had managed to weave together a few eccentricities of his own which had created quite a character for himself.

He had this distinct way of dropping his book bag, clipping on his mic, and jumping right into a lecture. He rarely stood still, and most of his time was spent pacing, strutting like a cock in the henhouse. When he did stop, he carried himself with the demeanor of a drill instructor, standing perfectly erect, on the balls of his feet, ready to spring at a moment’s notice. Instruction was delivered with an almost staccato method, each syllable annunciated to its fullest, and an occasional stutter or curse word added to help keep the beat. Beyond this he also possessed a keen wit.

I adored him too, and as a sophomore I had snuck my way onto the roll of one of his honor seminars. One day, across the grease board which spanned the room, he wrote, “How can you teach what can only be learned?” When he had placed the pen down, he turned and began to tell us of Ernest Hemingway.

“You know I was in class once, and I was right in the middle of telling everyone what a pompous ass Ernest Hemingway was. I was making my way to the front of the room, with my back turned to you all, when suddenly, some kid in the back blurted out, ‘You’re full of shit, and you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.’”

As he continued to describe the incident, I could see it in my mind completely. Holstein spun, pointed a dictatorial finger in the general direction from where the comment came, and demanded to know who said that in the short, annunciated style that would surely quell any rebellion in the ranks.

“I did,” came the response, “and it is true. You’re full of shit and you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” This had to have made an impression on Holstein, whom underneath the pomp and circumstance perhaps wondered whether or not he was full of shit and if he did know what the hell he was talking about. I think we wonder this of ourselves, anyway, and I would expect no less of him. He maintained a dramatic pause with a constant glare, which seemed as though it was anything but the hesitation it was.

“I think we need to talk about this after class,” came the terse response, giving the appearance of impending disciplinary action, while covertly giving him a less public opportunity to sort it all out. What this predecessor of ours had told him afterwards, I don’t know, nor ever will, but it was enough that Holstein began reading Hemingway again, and now, years later, we were going to as well.

I would hate to keep such an opportunity from you either.

It was an important time for me. At 20, I was finally going to read for the first time, and by that I mean Holstein was going to ask that we engage a story not from the perspective that whatever it meant to us was the important thing. We were going to engage it from the perspective of trying to figure out what the author had to say. As I got my first look of what he had to say and the skill in which he said it, it was going to dash any hope I had of being a writer.

“The Hemingway story I’ve selected for this class is ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’”

The story is about a husband and his wife, on a big game African Safari with a white, English guide. There’s shooting, and loving, and cursing, and drinking, which are all the makings of an autobiography for the man who penned it. It was written in 1936 and ran in Cosmopolitan Magazine. This was before Cosmo became concerned with the 50 Secrets to the Greatest Sex Ever, finding the G spot (which I would think would have been included in the 50), and all the innumerable ways to tell if he’s cheating.

Having published these secrets once, one would think the story would be out and there would be no demand for Cosmo to follow up. Evidently that is wrong, and all these secrets are required to be republished every two or three months. One might get the idea that these secrets have a secret themselves. This was not lost on Hemingway, pompous ass or not. We can get a glimpse of it too, if we choose.

You can find the text for free in the following places:

A PDF version here: http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/sword/Short%20Story/The%20Short%20Happy%20Life%20of%20Francis%20Macomber.pdf

A web based version here:  http://www15.uta.fi/FAST/US1/REF/macomber.html

And if your bookshelf sports a copy of the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, you’ll find it as story number one. I would guess it would take 45 minutes to read, and what follows would make little sense without it. If you do so, you will find the athletic and vibrant sentences which made the old man famous, and though he’s long since dead, you’ll find they still live as though they were born yesterday. In fact, if you do read it, you’ll find they were born sooner than yesterday, for they’ll be born again in you.

“If I’m a reader, beginning a story, the first thing I might ask is ‘Why did this author write?’ What good does it do Hemingway to write?” Thinking the question rhetorical, we offered no response other than blank stares, and so he continued, “Writing is a grasp at death. It is a grasp at death because it is a creative act.

I will always bring an assumption to the literature at hand, be it the Bible, or Hemingway, or anyone else. This assumption is what makes possible reading and understanding, and it is simply this: authors are people like you and me. They wrestled with the same questions as our ancient counterparts, one of them being whether we are capable of love, love being a mutual caring made possible by the notion that we are capable of some level of selflessness.

In life we have a hang up with selflessness.  It’s our own selfishness. We need other people. How would we know if an act were selfless?” This question was met with blank stares as well, and so he continued, “Intent. It is not what characters do in a story that’s important, but it is why they do it. What we are looking for is access to the intent of the character. Now who can tell me how Robert Wilson feels about the lion?”

Finally the stares gave way to murmurs, which eventually gave voice to terms like ‘respect,’ ‘trophy,’ and ‘honorable.” Holstein jotted the submissions down as they came, with his back to us, when finally, our own kid in the back said simply, “He loves it.”

At that statement, Holstein wheeled, extended his hand with his thumb folded across his palm and his other four fingers straight ahead, and said appraisingly, “You’re God damn right.  He loves it.  Did Hemingway need to say, ‘He loves it?’  No.  We can figure that out on our own.  So why is Wilson killing what he loves? That’s what this story is about, why the hell do we as humans kill what we love and is there a better way?

What about our author? Where is Hemingway in this story? Where is the author in any story? By that I mean what do we have that we know comes from them? We have the title and the names. This is all we can be sure the author is dealing with us directly in, and in them the author may or may not be dealing with us straight.

Is Hemingway with Wilson? Is Wilson our hero? Is Wilson beyond fault and always correct? Did Mrs. Macomber murder her own husband?”

“No,” I timidly said, taking my turn on the block.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“The narrator tells us she shot at the buffalo.”

This time the four fingers came in my direction. “That’s right. The narrator tells us she shot at the God damn buffalo. What else does this narrator give us and can we trust him or her to be straight with us?”

Now, nearly twenty years later, taking up the hunt of my own lion again, I find the narrator gives us an awful lot. Within the first couple of pages we get the progression of names for Macomber’s wife: Mrs. Macomber, Margaret, and Margot. These change for a reason. The narrator also describes her alone as being ‘handsome.’ In his or her description of all the other main characters, animal and human, eventually their eyes get mentioned. Hers our narrator makes no such note of. In the first few pages we also come across a series of unreturned smiles which will almost continue throughout the piece. Additionally, we get our first reference to a photograph, which we will return to in the middle and at the end of the story.

It’s the narrator which gives us the proverb that will come to challenge Wilson’s own motto. It’s the narrator whom lets us know that where the Macombers find themselves in their marriage is no one individual’s fault.  It’s the narrator that gives us the tribe of the gun bearers, a tribe which has a particular social custom concerning names. It’s the narrator that links the dirtiness of Wilson, whom Francis will call a swine, to the dirty, pig eyed buffs at the end. It’s the same narrator that let us know what Macomber is feeling at the end is a sort of drunkenness, which implies that were he to have lived, he’d sober.

What the narrator doesn’t give us is that Hemingway, wounded in World War I, laid in a hospital bed beside an injured British soldier whom pulled that Shakespeare quote out of his breast pocket to read it to our author. Nor do they give us that Hemingway thought him the biggest horse’s ass he’d ever met in his life.

Should you venture into reading the literary criticism of the story, in most of it you will find little of what the narrator gives us mentioned. Instead you will find the commentary that labels the white hunter, Wilson, as Hemingway’s hero, Macomber as the hero in training, and his wife as the feminine component that always kills masculinity as it asserts itself. It will not only be presented as the critic’s opinion, but as that of Hemingway himself, and so it is used to support an opinion of him similar to that which my English teacher and Holstein once shared. Evidently critics read no better than the rest of us, though they write commentary by the hundreds, most of which is indistinguishable from the next.

Hemingway’s famous quote about writing is, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” He took pride in the great deal he omitted, and the critic takes pride at thinking they know what it was.  If their feet aren’t wet, however, we are free to have our suspicions. We might know what he omitted, though, if we’re divers. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is at a depth that will take nothing less.

In the following I make no claims at having gotten a full glimpse. I will only say that young and in this class with Holstein I first got some sense of its immense bulk. When I did, I bolted like a rabbit.  Now I’m trying to do better.

Margaret’s husband’s most endearing human quality, once he was stripped of his confidence, was his vulnerability.  Both she and her husband hated it.  Wilson seems to find himself admiring at times, perhaps since it was a capacity he long ago lost. When Francis finally rids himself of it, there is a nearly remorseless quality that takes its place.  It is one that we seem to find in Wilson.  I think, in giving us the title, Ernest is indicating that were it not a short life, it wouldn’t have been a happy one for its namesake.  It certainly doesn’t look like it’s been a happy one for Wilson.  Francis is killed feeling all the elation of having got to someplace new, without suffering the consequences that come from its being someplace worse.

As I read it, it is with Margaret, whose name means pearl, that Hemingway’s sympathies lie.  She is the only one that seems to have truly engaged in the self-critical thinking Hemingway is writing and engaging in himself.  She seems to have contemplated how her own actions have pushed her husband to where he’s at, possibly about to get himself killed, and feels remorse.  Despite all the previous wounds and not knowing whether he will leave her or not, she shoots anyway to save him, for she loves him.  In doing so, she alone acts selflessly.

It so happened luck intervened, and the first effort any of our characters make to quit killing what they love, winds up doing just that. The truest heroism lies unrecognized by its biggest braggart in Wilson and by most critics, neither of whom have the courage to look critically at themselves.