Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
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Since the advent of the feminist era, Ernest Hemingway's literary legacy has seemed to be on shaky ground. Hemingway has abruptly been held up as the American male at his worst. He delighted in the brutality of bullfights and the hunt. Not content with killing animals, he was also fascinated by warfare. His relationships with women were often either openly misogynist or embarrassingly infantile. By the 1970s the Hemingway myth was subject to increasing ridicule. As a final indignity, 1987 produced Kenneth S. Lynn's biography, Hemingway, which described its subject as a sad victim of gender confusion. But in his own writings, both in fiction and in non-fiction, Hemingway was remarkably consistent in his vision of maleness and sexuality. There is still a cult of American males who adulate the so-called "Hemingway Code." This code receives a detailed definition in the story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." On the surface, this is a simple adventure tale built around a sexual triangle. Macomber and his wife Margot are a wealthy society couple on an African safari. Their guide is a professional white hunter named Robert Wilson. Early in the story, Macomber shows himself to be a coward by running away from two lions. His wife, half humiliated at her husband's failure and half delighted at his emasculation, uses this as an excuse to sleep with the more virile Wilson. Enraged at both of them, Macomber distinguishes himself by bravely firing upon a her
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le sexism. If he did, it is ironic that this very neglect gives the story its mystery and its resilience.
Wilson, Macomber, and Margot have interesting counterparts in Hemingway's own life. Wilson resembles no one more than Hemingway himself or at least Hemingway's ideal vision of himself. Macomber, the brooding, spoiled, callow fellow unsure of his manhood, bears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald. And Margot, the emasculating virago, resembles Zelda Fitzgerald or at least Zelda as Hemingway perceived her. While it would be straining the issue to suggest that Hemingway was thinking of the three of them when he wrote his story, a brief look at their relationships as described in his non-fiction writings is informative.
It is worth noting that Hemingway applied a similar code to writing as to hunting. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 is rich with Hemingway's letters to Fitzgerald. In them, Hemingway constantly plays Wilson to Fitzgerald's Macomber, albeit in a literary vein. Perhaps the most revealing letter he wrote to Fitzgerald regarding writing was on May 28, 1934. This contains a savage critique of Tender is the Night.
With a stern, Wilson-like tone, Hemingway admonishes Fitzgerald that
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Approximate Word count = 2141
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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