Abstract
The ubiquitous references to venereal disease in Hemingway's writings signal his commitment to literary modernism and the shock of the new. Syphilis, the life-long, potentially fatal illness for which there was no permanent remedy until 1943, became a trope for Hemingway. Again and again, he presents sexually transmitted diseases in general, and syphilis in particular, as the universal human condition. Hemingway sees syphilis as both a concrete medical reality of his time and an iconic form of human suffering, a metaphor for what all humans must eventually endure: suffering for which there is no remedy. He then explicitly links that suffering both to unreasonable and inherently dangerous societal expectations for masculine behavior and to the emotional pain of the depression he repeatedly experienced.
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Notes
- 1.
The only extended discussion of venereal disease in Hemingway’s work that I have been able to find is Yasushi Takano’s (n.d.) essay “Against the Victorian Normalization of Sexuality : A Study of Hemingway’s Representation of Syphilis,” although Debra A. Moddelmog briefly mentions the social hygiene movement and “Hemingway’s resistance to social hygiene morality” in her discussion “Sex, Sexuality , and Marriage ” in Ernest Hemingway in Context (2013, 360). Mark Spilka briefly discusses Hemingway’s angry response to James Jones , who in From Here to Eternity had publicly disputed Hemingway’s contention, in Death in the Afternoon, that venereal diseases are the occupational diseases of soldiers (1990, 114–16). Hemingway seems to have particularly resented Jones’s implication that Hemingway didn’t know what he was talking about: “From the time I was a kid I had to distinguish between soft and hard chancres and courageous Jones comes along and says he had had the clap and it was horrible” (1981, 724–25).
- 2.
See, for example, Fiorenzo Iuliano’s “Staging the Stigma: Syphilis and Its Metaphors in Claude McKay’s The Clinic,” Gerard M. Sweeney’s note “Wharton’s Bewitched,” Laurence M. Porter’s “Syphilis as Muse in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus,” and Thomas Rütten’s “Genius and Degenerate? Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and a Medical Discourse on Syphilis.” The sole exception is James Joyce ; scholars have discussed at length the significance of syphilis in Joyce’s life and work. Kathleen Ferris argues that Joyce had syphilis and that it heavily influenced his fiction: “The evidence, both biographical and literary, that Joyce himself suffered from syphilis is massive” (1995, 124). See also Deborah Hayden (2003, 239–50) and Kevin Birmingham: “James Joyce was going blind because he had syphilis” (2014, 289). For a strongly argued dissent (if not, in my view, on ultimately persuasive one), see J. B. Lyons (1998, especially the collection’s title essay, 20–39): “Was he syphilitic? The question, I suspect, is ill-mannered and because those who pose it seem determined to prove that Joyce suffered either from congenital or acquired syphilis, or preferably both, I am glad to say he had neither” (21, Lyons’s italics). Ferris notes that Lyons, a Dublin physician, was related to Joyce by marriage (1995, 5). For discussions of allusions to the disease in Joyce’s fiction, see Burton A. Waisbren and Florence L. Walzl, Martin Bock, Marian Eide, David Kadlec (90-121), and Michael Timins.
- 3.
Harold Loeb, generally acknowledged as the inspiration for the character of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, has said of Hemingway, “He made himself out to be a sort of bad boy; he certainly wasn’t. He was a bit of a Puritan, if anything” (Brian 1988, 48). Yasushi Takano makes a similar point with respect to Hemingway’s fiction, arguing that his works “are marked by an equivocalness oscillating between a repugnance for the Victorian moral standard, on the one hand, and an unintentional compliance with it, on the other” (n.d., 2); I believe, however, that Hemingway was more aware of his own ambivalence than Takano gives him credit for.
- 4.
Hemingway wasn’t alone in expressing this concern. In much the way that some twenty-first-century educators are reluctant to teach children about birth control, fearing it might inadvertently encourage promiscuity, public health officials in the first half of the twentieth century were sometimes reluctant to educate people about how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases because then the illnesses would no longer serve as a deterrent to promiscuity (Brandt 1987, 46, 113; Parascandola 2008, 130). Abstinence , then, was the recommended preventative. Hemingway later lightly satirized his father’s prudishness in “Fathers and Sons,” the final story in the collection Winner Take Nothing, when young Nick Adams asks his father what “mashing” is: “His father had summed up the whole matter by stating that masturbation produced blindness, insanity, and death, while a man who went with prostitutes would contract hideous venereal diseases and that the thing to do was to keep your hands off of people” (1987, 371).
- 5.
See Claude Caswell for a discussion of the significance of the prostitute in Hemingway’s writings:
The iconography of prostitution and the psychological idiosyncrasies of women working in the profession would also soon become a central trope in the young Hemingway’s growing body of fiction. The prostitute “consciousness,” as an ambivalent form of both social rebellion and “selling out”—establishment of a kind of courageous identity and yet at the same time a despairing loss of integrity—became in Hemingway’s texts a key symbol of modernist reality (1998, 77–78).
- 6.
If syphilis as a metaphor for evil seems overly melodramatic and Victorian for the modernist Hemingway, it’s important to remember that decades later he wrote, in A Moveable Feast, “Some people show evil as a great race horse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre ” (AMF 109). A chancre is the sore that forms on the body near the point at which the infection entered the system (Hayden 2003, 53). For many patients, it is the first telltale symptom of syphilis.
- 7.
Ironically, syphilis took the life of de Maupassant, whom Hemingway revered. The French writer was institutionalized after a suicide attempt and died when he was only 43 (Jobst and Williamson 1994, 53). See James J. Martine, Jack W. Jobst and W. J. Williamson, and Bryan Giemza (2010, especially 84–90) for discussions of de Maupassant’s influence on Hemingway.
- 8.
Interestingly, there was a historical precedent for this concept. Public health officials of the Progressive Era “appealed to enlightened capitalistic self-interest in their campaigns for extending public health facilities for venereal disease” (Brandt 1987, 134), citing the potential costs to employers: “The costs of venereally infected workers could often be hidden beyond the loss columns of the business ledger. Industrial accidents were often attributed to syphilis, with its dire impact on the neurological and cardiovascular systems. Public health officials frequently reminded businessmen of the costs of workmen’s compensation for injuries incurred by syphilitics. Even more ominous, however, were the dangers of accidents not only to workers but to the public. A number of major train wrecks during the 1920s, for example, were attributed to advanced syphilis in the engineer.” (134). Brandt notes, “Some corporations responded by creating anti-venereal programs for their workers” (134).
- 9.
Edmund Wilson was the first to compare Hemingway to Goya, writing in 1924, “His bull-fight sketches have the dry sharpness and elegance of the bull-fight lithographs of Goya. And, like Goya, he is concerned first of all with making a fine picture” (1924, 223). See Emily Stipes Watts (1971, passim, but especially 57–65), Rudolf Haas, Jeffrey Meyers (1985, “Hemingway and Goya”), and Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes (1994, 114–18) for expanded discussions of the artistic relationships between Hemingway and Goya. Haas suggests that Hemingway’s character El Sordo in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is an allusion to Goya, who owned a house named “Quinta del Sordo” (1987, 33). Haas contends that when El Sordo describes the hill on which he will die as “shaped like a chancre” (Hemingway 1940, 309), “Hemingway deliberately uses a clinical word” to express “the misery and hopelessness of the situation” and the “pessimistic attitude towards war and glory” that he and Goya shared (Haas 1987, 33).
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Tyler, L. (2018). “Everybody Has It”: Syphilis and the Human Condition in the Writings of Ernest Hemingway. In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Syphilis and Subjectivity . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66367-8_8
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