Haunted by Hemingway

A half century ago on July 2, 1961, the day Ernest Hemingway’s body was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Idaho, I had just finished my first year at college and was attending summer school. I fancied myself a writer, publishing short stories in the college paper and literary magazine. I was walking across campus when in the newspaper rack I saw the headline that Ernest Hemingway had shot himself. I was reading his stories and novels during that summer, dreaming of living on the Left Bank in Paris and going to the bullfights in Madrid.

I did not get to Spain or Paris until much later. A few years ago, I was in Madrid. My wife, who loves all animals, told me not to go to the bullfight. But my youngest daughter who was with me, had read Hemingway recently, and said she wanted to see it. So we did, and it was brutal and cruel and not at all beautiful. I re-read Death in the Afternoon and understood that it could be beautiful only if one watched the pure pattern and form of it, elevating it above mere flesh and blood.

A few weeks ago, I walked the streets of the Left Bank in Paris and sat with my eldest daughter at the sidewalk café where Hemingway once sat. When I got home, I reread A Movable Feast and smiled at Hemingway’s efforts to write at the small round tables of the cafes.

Last week, my wife and I saw the new Woody Allen Movie Midnight in Paris, and laughed a lot, with the few others in the audience who knew the Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald in-jokes. Corey Stoll, who played Hemingway, spoke the lines Woody Allen could not resist giving him, as if Hemingway actually talked like the clipped, stylized voice of his fiction. Allen had Stoll play Hemingway well over the top, which, it seems, is the only way one can play Hemingway.

I got my new copy of the New Yorker yesterday, and there was a story by Julian Barnes entitled “Homage to Hemingway, which revolves around Hemingway’s story “Homage to Switzerland.” I couldn’t remember that story and could not find it in my library because I had given my Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway to that youngest daughter, who is now working on her Ph.D. in English (going into the family business, as it were). I looked for it online and was happy to find a Manchester Guardian podcast of British writers reading and commenting on their favorite short story (like the New Yorker podcast in America).

And sure enough, there was Julian Barnes reading “Homage to Switzerland.” It’s a relatively simple story in which Hemingway sets up three different versions of the same man waiting for a train. “Homage to Hemingway” sets up three different situations of the same man conducting a creative writing seminar on three different occasions. At one point, the teacher talks about “the myth of the writer and how it was not just the reader who became trapped in the myth but sometimes the writer as well.” He adds, that people thought Hemingway was “obsessed with male courage, with machismo and cojones. They didn’t see that often his real subject was failure and weakness.”

The Los Angeles Times ran an article on the anniversary of Hemingway’s death and a more personal article by reviewer David Ulin appeared the next day. Many critics and writers feel they have to apologize for liking Hemingway. Ulin’s article in the Sunday July 3 LA Times is headed, “Learning not to dislike Hemingway,” noting how questions about his legacy still linger, particularly his now discredited and politically incorrect stereotypes of masculinity. Although it has been getting some publicity, I am not tempted to read Marty Beckerman’s The Heming Way; the sub-title--“How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!”—puts me off, although I have no desire to apologize as many now feel they have to for reading Hemingway. I have always been more drawn to Hemingway’s magical style than his macho image and have always admired his short stories more than his novels.

A friend of mine sent me a copy of an article from the New York Times by A. E. Hotchner, friend of Hemingway and author of Papa Hemingway. He recounts those last years when Hemingway was haunted by a conviction that the FBI was tapping his phones and following him—paranoid fears that lead to shock treatments. As Hotchner points out, however, “Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file,” revealing that J. Edgar Hoover “had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones.”

Several years ago when I put together a textbook collection of short stories for use in the university classroom entitled Fiction’s Many Worlds, I chose a Hemingway story for the introduction—“Hills Like White Elephants”—trying to lead students gently into the close reading of a finely structured and complexly human short story.

Here is a brief excerpt from that Introduction:

One of the most powerful conventions of short fiction is the convention of selection of details. Every story is made up of two kinds of details--those realistically motivated details that exist merely to give the illusion of hard, concrete reality, and those that are mentioned because the teller has a rhetorical purpose for mentioning them, such as Kipling's repeated mention of the suspenders. Edgar Allan Poe suggested in the earliest discussion of the short story in American literature that the writer should not use a single word that was not carefully chosen to contribute to the overall purpose or effect that he had in writing the story. Anton Chekhov, the great Russian author, once advised a young writer that if he described a gun hanging on a wall on the first page of a story, then that gun should be fired before the end.

Using the terms of the Russian Formalists, we can think of details in a story merely to give us a sense of actuality as being relatively "loose" and even dispensable, or at least changeable. Details in the story because they are relevant to its meaning or overall rhetorical effect we can think of as being relatively "bound" to the story, that is, intrinsic and not easily detachable or changeable. Trying to determine which details in a story are "loose" and which are "bound" is one of the most important skills for reading stories effectively. One basic way we can determine which details are bound and which are loose is by applying the principle of redundancy or repetition: If a certain detail or kind of detail is mentioned more than once or twice in a story, we might suspect that it is relevant in some way.

Let's first look at the time frame of "Hills Like White Elephants." The couple are on the way to Madrid, Spain. They have stopped at a junction and are awaiting an express connection from Barcelona, which, we are told, will arrive in forty minutes and stop there for only two minutes. Thus, we have a situation explicitly cut off from the ordinary flow of time; the couple are enclosed between the time they got off one train and the time they will get on another. On the first reading of this story, the fact that the train will arrive from Barcelona in forty minutes may seem merely a "loose" realistic detail. However, at the end of the story the time is mentioned again when the waitress comes out and says that the train will arrive in five minutes.

This means that the events of the story we have just read from beginning to end take place in a time span of thirty-five minutes. However, we know that it only took about ten to fifteen minutes to read the story. How do we account for this discrepancy? After all, if the author had not wanted us to be concerned with the time element, he didn't have to mention the time frame both at the beginning and end of the story. Moreover, if he had not wanted us to see the disparity between the time of the events of the story and the time of the reading of the story, then he could have made the time span of the events more closely match the time span of the reading; Either he could have made the train arriving in fifteen minutes instead of forty minutes or he could have made the story longer.

The fact that there is a fifteen to twenty minute discrepancy between the announced span of the events and the time of the reading should lead us to ask what happened to those extra twenty minutes. The only answer is that they must be in the blank spaces in between the lines of the story, that is, points in the story when the characters are not saying anything.

Our realization that there are more blank spaces in the time span of the story than spoken dialogue should make us more aware of the basic problem that we began with--that is, that the story is about something that is never explicitly mentioned, but only hinted at and referred to, if at all, by the neutral pronoun "it." These two elements--the reference to "it" and the many blank spaces or silences inherent in the story--seem to be related. What we must examine now is why the couple do not speak of their problem explicitly and why there are so many silences or blank spaces in the story.

Perhaps a look at how the story exists spatially may provide further understanding. The author makes the spatial reality of the story as explicit as he does the temporal reality. The first paragraph locates the couple at a station situated between two lines of rails. One line of rails is going the way the couple have come, whereas the other is going in the direction they are heading; they are at a junction. If we make the assumption that this spatial location is a "bound motif" or idea, since it is made so emphatic, then we might suspect that the spatial location is meant to communicate the psychological location of the couple as well as their physical one. The spatial situation of the rails suggest where they have been (much as the labels on their luggage suggests all the hotels where they have stayed), as well as where they are going, which, of course, is precisely what is at issue here. She wishes to go one way; he wishes to go another.

But there is a further indication of their physical location that also may be meaningful; they are in a valley. On this side there are hills that are long and white and the country is brown and dry with no trees. Later on in the story when the girl gets up and walks to the end of the station she looks toward the "other side" of the valley, were there are fields of grain and trees along the banks of the river. This is the scenery she looks at when she says "And we could have all this. . . . And we could have everything and everyday we make it more impossible."

Several years ago, I wrote an entry for the “Bad Hemingway" contest. I did not win. Forgive me for offering it to you now. I mean no disrespect to Hemingway, whose conscientious work I have always admired.

Going to the Devil in the City of the Angels

The Avenue of the Americas was made wet by el nino, the incontinent brat from the sea who brought the heavy rains and made the lives of the beautiful Angelenos a misery. Their small sporty cars flooded in the streets and their flat-roofed houses slid down the steep hills toward Hollywood. The man with the hat and the healthy girl sat at a table in Harry's Bar and American Grill and waited for a taxi that would take them away from the misery the rain made. It was warm and dry in Harry's, and the beer was cool, but they were not happy. They were not beautiful and could no longer look at each other.

"The streets of the city are clogged with the fetid feces of a child," she said.

"I wouldn't know," he said. "I quit my stupid thesis on the man called Papa, for he began to sound hollow to my ears."

"I cannot see your ears," she said; "you wear your hat low, for where once there was hair, there is nada. It is your shame."

"I never said you were to blame," he said. "I can not stay in this city. It is the end of something."

"Yes," she said. "I know. We will go to another country."

"How will we know it is time?" the man said."

The bartender said he would tell us when the taxi passes the Schubert," she said.

"Your body does not need the sherbet," he said, and I do not understand why there would be taxes on it."

"I grow weary trying to talk the good talk to you," she shouted. "Will you please, please, please, please, please, please, please take off that hat."

The man took off the hat and laid it on the table. "I never said you had to take off fat. But the little man called Richard Simmons did say if you danced to the oldies, it would be perfectly simple."

"He would say that; he is without cajones, that one." The woman looked around the bar at the slim beautiful people and the men with much hair. "If I do it, will the earth move for us again?" she said.

"That is another reason we must leave," he said. "One never knows when the earth will move here."

"No, I mean, will we destroy each other in bed as we used to?"

"You destroy me too much now as it is. You need only to get some fat out," he said. She was indeed a very healthy girl. "It's perfectly simple," he said.

"Then I will do it," she said. "I will dance to the oldies and lose the fat. We will go to another country. We will find a place without so much water. You will write the thesis on the man called Papa, and he will not sound flat to your ears. We will again have the good destruction in bed, and the earth will move for us. We will talk the good talk as we did before, and you will like it."

She kept talking the good talk and she did not stop. He put the hat back on and pulled it over his ears. The rain from el nino continued to fall in the city of the Angels. He watched her lips move soundlessly and prayed that the taxi would come soon.

Authors on the Short Story--Paris Review Interviews: Part I

In preparing for my presentation at the April Angers conference, “The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English,” I have thought it well that I should consult short story writers who have spoken of their own experience with the short story: their love of the form, their theories about the difference between the short story and the novel, their notions about short story technique.

The Paris Review, which has been publishing interviews with writers under the title “The Art of Fiction,” since the late 1950s, has been generous enough to post these interviews in an archive online. The URL address is: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews

Although I have been collecting writers’ comments about the short story form for years, I have so far scanned the Paris Review interviews for the fifties, sixties, and seventies, looking for ideas that I might be able to develop and use in my presentation. I list below those writers’ remarks about the short story I think most helpful, followed by brief comments of my own. Next week, I will post a second set of citations, with my comments, of Paris Review interviews from the eighties, nineties, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

[Side note: I have read Alice Munro’s new story, “Axis,” in the January 31 issue of the New Yorker four times now and think I may be ready to talk about it soon. I have also read Steven Millhauser’s story, “Getting Closer,” in the January 3 issue of the New Yorker five times, and hope to be capable of making some remarks on it soon also. These things take time, you know.]

Truman Capote, 1957
When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium…. I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence— especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation…. Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners.

I like Capote’s take on the importance of getting training in writing fiction by first writing short stories—not that stories are mere finger exercises, but rather than they are more demanding, at least on the microcosmic level, than the novel is. I also like the idea that short stories depend on a certain rhythm. Some short story writers think that rhythm is as important as content. More on this later.

Ernest Hemingway, 1958
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

This, of course, is Hemingway’s most famous statement about leaving things out. He probably gets it from Chekhov; later Raymond Carver got it from him. More on “leaving things out” later, as I cite other writers who believe in the power of omission.

Frank O’Connor, 1957
[The short story] is the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry… A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has…[The greatest essential of a story] is you have to have a theme, a story to tell. You grab somebody and say, “Look, an extraordinary thing happened to me yesterday—I met a man—he said this to me—”and that, to me, is a theme. The moment you grab somebody by the lapels and you've got something to tell, that's a real story.

Frank O’Connor is certainly not the only writer who has said that the short story is the closest thing to lyric poetry, especially in its detachment from circumstances. And there is more to be said about O’Connor’s insistence on the importance of theme—i.e. that the writer has something to say—not just an event, but an event that “means” something.

Katherine Anne Porter, 1963
If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace.

The first self-conscious theorizer and practitioner of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe, was the first to emphasize the importance of beginning with the ending. There are many important implications of this notion, which I will talk more about later.

I.B. Singer, 1968
In each story, I try to say something, and what I try to say is more or less connected with my ideas that this world and this kind of life is not everything, that there is a soul and there is a God and there may be life after death. I always come back to these religious truths although I am not religious in the sense of dogma.

Singer is not the only writer of short stories who has felt that the form has something to do with the idea that “this world and this kind of life is not everything.” Probably the most famous is Flannery O’Connor, whose work I have reread in its entirely these past few months. Religious truths, in the broadest sense of that term, may have some inherent connection to the short storm form. I have explored this issue in many places and will talk more about it.

John Steinbeck, 1969

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.

This is that idea that Frank O’Connor talked about—the writer’s need to tell the story. It might be called “The Ancient Mariner” compulsion. I have written about this before and come back to it later.

Bernard Malamud, 1975
I like packing a self or two into a few pages, predicating lifetimes. The drama is terse, happens faster, and is often outlandish. A short story is a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time. There’s, among other things, a drama, a resonance, of the reconciliation of opposites: much to say, little time to say it, something like the effect of a poem.

Here is the poem/short story connection again. And Malamud is wise to remind us that the short story can convey the “complexity of life,” can have the effect revealing “profound knowledge” by reconciling opposites.

Eudora Welty, 1972
I don’t think we often see life resolving itself, not in any sort of perfect way, but I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly—to give it a form and try to embody it—to hold it and express it in a story’s terms... A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story—you can work more by suggestion—than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.

Welty emphasizes an aspect of the short story that others have discussed, and that I will return to: that whereas life does not have a resolution, there is something that might be defined as aesthetic resolution—something communicated not by content, but by form. Also important, I think, is Welty’s notion of “mood,” what other writers have called “tone”—a unifying rhythm or glow holding everything together in a meaningful way.

Artifice and Artificiality in the Short Story: A Defense

In this week’s post, I ask your patience while I try to provide something of a theoretical context for my argument against “realism,” and for “artifice” in the previous post about drama and the short story.

In my opinion, there is nothing negative about the short story's artificiality. Why, when discussing an aesthetic object, should we take "artificiality" to be a bad word, especially the artificiality of unity and endings—two of the most important conventions of the short story form? Henry James, in his preface to Roderick Hudson, reminds us that stopping places in fiction are always artificial. As James puts it, since universally relations stop nowhere, "the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." Similarly, critic J. Hillis Miller has noted that it is always impossible to tell whether a narrative is complete. If the ending is considered a tying up into a knot, the knot could always be united again; if the ending is considered an unraveling, a multitude of loose threads remain, all capable of being knotted again. This is why, Miller says, the best one can have is the "sense of an ending."

The coiner of that nicely-turned phrase, Frank Kermode, also reminds us, "We always underestimate the power of rhetorical and narrative gestures." Endings, says Kermode, "are always faked, as are all other parts of a narrative structure that impose metaphor on the metonymic sequence.” In other words, any time we arrange a narrative sequence to achieve a meaningful end we inevitably "fake" the ending. For this faking of an ending is the very act that makes meaning out of the "one-damned-thing-after-another" that meaningless events (as opposed to end-directed and meaningful discourse) always are; such faking thus constitutes the essence of narrative art.

Many critics have suggested that the faking of endings was primarily a negative characteristic of nineteenth-century short fiction; they are fond of citing such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Frank Stockton, and O. Henry as the chief culprits. Not until the work of Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson and Joyce, many critics like to claim, did the short story develop a "natural" structure that was "open-ended," reflecting a realistic "slice-of-life."

These critics ignore that at the very height of the so-called "artificial-ending" phase of the short story in America, writers were so aware of the formalized nature of short-story endings that they parodied this convention by making it the very subject of their stories. Moreover, in spite of all the praise for the realism of the modern short story, from the "slice-of-life" anecdotes of Anton Chekhov to the intense "hyperrealism" of Raymond Carver, the twentieth-century short story has remained highly formalized, artificial and metaphoric like its nineteenth-century antecedents. What has changed is that a new convention of the form developed to increase the illusion of everyday reality. From Chekhov to Sherwood Anderson to Bernard Malamud and finally to Raymond Carver, the short story has been bound to a highly artificial, rhetorically-determined unified structure, and therefore formalized ending, which depends upon the artificial devices of aesthetic reality.

One of the primary characteristics of the modern short story ala Chekhov is the expression of a complex inner state by the presentation of selected concrete details rather than by the creation of a projective parabolic form or by the depiction of the contents of the mind of the character. Significant reality for short-story writers beginning with Chekhov is inner rather than outer, but the problem they have tried to solve is how to create an illusion of inner reality by focusing on external details only. The result is not simple realism, but rather a story that even as it seems a purely surface account of everyday reality takes on the artificial aura of a dream.

I suggest that a basic difference between the novel and the short story has to do with their use of detail. The novel gains assent to the reality of the work by the creation of enough detail to give the reader the illusion that he "knows" the experience, although of course he cannot know it in the same way that he knows actual experience. In the short story, however, detail is transformed into metaphoric significance.

For example, the hard details in Robinson Crusoe exist as a resistance to be overcome in Crusoe's encounter with the external world. However, in a short story, such as Hemingway's "Big, Two-Hearted River," which is also filled with details, the physical realities exist only to embody Nick's psychic problem. As opposed to Crusoe, Nick is not concerned with surviving an external conflict but rather an internal one. In the short story the hard material outlines of the external world are inevitably transformed into the objectifications of psychic distress. Thus at the end of Hemingway's story, Nick's refusal to go into the swamp is purely a metaphoric refusal, having nothing to do with the "real" qualities of the swamp. Only aesthetic resolution of the story is possible.

When critics scorn the short story for the artificiality of its highly unified structure, when they take it to task for the falsity of its placing so much emphasis on its ending, they obviously forget in their demand that all narrative follow the conventions of realism that the essence of art is artificiality. Consequently, they forget that the short story is the most artificial and thus the most artistic of all narrative forms.

More on Short Fiction and Film: "Hills Like White Elephants "and "Brokeback Mountain"

In a “Comment” on my earlier post on fiction and film, Lee suggests that film adaptations of short stories may be more effective than I have argued, offering Brokeback Mountain as an example of an effective adaptation of Annie Proulx’s story.

I agree with Lee that Brokeback Mountain is a fine adaptation of a complex story. And indeed there have been several very fine adaptations of short stories in the past few years, for example the Julie Christie movie, Away From Her, adapted from Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”

However, the short story is less mimetic than film; stories often do not present individualized characters, nor do they always depend on the similitude of a real physical or social context. Moreover, some of the best short stories in literature do not depend on a linear plot in which character development takes place over time in an obvious way. Thus, for these reasons, film versions of short stories, especially full-length film versions, often flatten out the meaning of the story, add new material to supply more obvious character motivation, and fail to capture the often visionary and mythical significance of the original. The demands of the popular audience who view theatrical films, the economic necessities of those who make such films, and the intrinsic demands of the real time involved in a 90-to 120-minute film have resulted in some significant distortions when short stories have been made into full-length films.

A typical example of how full-length films use the original story as climax for which additional invented motivation and background must be supplied is the 1946 version of Hemingway’s compact and cryptic little story “The Killers.” The story of Nick Adams' initiation into inevitability becomes a detective tale in which Edmond O’Brien digs up the reasons for Burt Lancaster’s murder. True to Hollywood fashion, the reasons involve a woman, in this case, Ava Gardner.

One of the most basic characteristics of the short story is its lyrical quality, a subjectivism and impressionism that place it closer to the poem than to the novel. An adaptation that illustrates the difficulty of translating such quality to film is Gene Gearney’s 1966 short film based on Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” The point of view of the story suggests that the story is not a simple case history of schizophrenia, but rather a metaphoric story about the beauty of the imagination and the philosophic implications of the human preference for the world of self-creation over the world of brute reality. The filmmaker, Gene Kearney, capitulates to the visual immediateness of film by making the presentation simply about a boy retreating from reality. The young Paul is played as a rather slack-jawed child distracted by visions.

It has been my experience that film adaptations of short stories, whether they be short films or full-length films, often “simplify” or “psychologize” or “socialize” central character motivation, which in the original short story is often left inchoate and mysterious. Filmmakers, for a variety of reasons, ignore Chekhov’s famous advice that in the short story it is better to say too little than too much.

I offer below two brief discussions to try to illustrate my point:

“Hills Like White Elephants”

One of my favorite film adaptations of a short story is the short film version of Hemingway’s “Hill’s Like White Elephants.” It originally appeared on the cable channel HBO in 1990. It was directed by the well-known director Tony Richardson; the screenplay was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn, a husband and wife writing team of high renown; and it starred two of the most familiar and competent actors of the 1980s and 90s--Melanie Griffith and James Woods. The way the screenwriters and director dealt with some of the problems that we as readers may have had with the story is illustrative of the way that film often differs from written fiction.

First of all, the fact that the woman is pregnant (a fact that is left ambiguous in the story) is made clear in the film immediately in the following way: When she gets off the train, she says she is going to be sick and runs into the station to the restroom. The waitress smiles knowingly. When the woman comes out of the restroom, the waitress gives her something to drink to make her feel better and refuses to take payment for it, saying she has six children of her own.

The pregnancy as the source of the conflict (which is left vague in the story) is made emphatic when the man playfully talks about having several wives and children, and the woman responds bitterly, "You wouldn't have any children." Moreover, a bit later when he first mentions the operation as "letting the air in," she says: "Everything has another name. . . . It's not a baby, it's tissue."

However, the basic difference between the film and the story is that in the film the conflict between the couple is made explicit by dialogue in which she indicates she wants a home and he indicates that he is not domestic, that he is a writer and wants to remain on the move. For example, when she says that all we do is try new drinks and look at things, he insists that he does more than just look at things, that he writes it all down. In fact, his career as a writer becomes the most important cause of the conflict in the film.

He: As far as I know I only have one life to live, and by God, I'm going to live it where it interests me. I have no romantic feelings about home or family or any other baggage.

The fact that he is a writer, an invention for the film that does not exist in the original story, then becomes the basis for looking at the present event as the basis for a future story.

This brief description of the material created especially for the film should make clear that film often needs to make motivation more emphatic and conflict more explicit than it is in serious narrative fiction. The filmmakers make several changes to shift the conflict from the puzzling and ambiguous one suggested in the story to the more emphatic conflict of the writer's life versus the domestic life.

“Brokeback Mountain”

Conventional stories about sexual relations between men are either about men identified as homosexuals or men, such as prisoners, who have no other available partners. However, Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain” does not fit either one of these categories. Both Ennis and Jack insist that they are not homosexual, and neither of them have sex with other men. Moreover, although they first have sex while alone on the mountain, they continue to have sex over the years even though both get married. The two men seem to genuinely love each other, both craving that time on Brokeback Mountain when their embrace satisfied “some shared and sexless hunger.”

Annie Proulx takes a creative risk here because many readers may try to simplify the story by classifying Jack and Ennis as homosexuals, or else latent homosexuals (a term that experts are more and more classifying as meaningless), or even bisexual, another meaningless term. But such an easy classification will not serve here. When Jack and Ennis deny their homosexuality, they mean it. The fact of the matter is: Jack and Ennis love each other--with tenderness, passion, and concern--and people who love each other in this way--regardless of their gender--desire to be physically close.

One of the most poignant and revealing moments in the story occurs in May, 1983, when, out on the range, the two men hold each other, talk about their children, and have sex. The sexuality is no more important than their domestic conversation; it merely seems a natural part of their love for each other.

This is not to say that the story ignores the social taboos against the relationship the men have. Both of them are frightened, for they know--especially in the male-dominated cowboy area in which they live--that if their sexual relationship is discovered they could be killed. Ennis recalls when he was a boy an old man being beaten to death with a tire iron for his homosexuality. He wonders if the feeling they have for each other happens to other people, and Jack says “It don’t happen in Wyoming.”

However, this social barrier to their being open about their relationship serves less as a social issue of homosexual intolerance than as a typical literary impediment that gives famous love stories their tragic inevitability, such as the feud between families of Romeo and Juliet. Moreover, at the end of the story when Jack is killed, there is no real evidence that he was murdered by homophobes. Ennis only suspects this when he learns from Jack’s father that he had made plans with another man to come up and build a place and help run the ranch. The story ends not with a message about the social intolerance of homosexuality, but rather with a poignant image of Ennis creating a simple memorial to Jack with a postcard picture of Brokeback Mountain and two old shirts the men wore when they spent their first summer together.

I like Ang Lee’s adaptation of Annie Proulx’s story, and I was pleased when I first saw it that he stayed so faithful to Proulx’s focus on this as a love story in the classic tradition, rather than a social tragedy of homophobia and gay bashing. However, the film ends with more of a suggestion than the story does that Jack has always been gay and that he is killed by homophobes.

Whereas the story is about a universal human issue, the film leans more toward being about a social issue that, thankfully, may not be an issue much longer. Even though Proposition 8, restricting marriage to males and females, passed in California, if the courts do not throw it out this week, the people will probably reject it the next time they are allowed to vote on the issue.

Annie Proulx’s story is not about social issues, for falling in love is, by its very nature, the most antisocial and irrational thing one can do, and when people fall in love they do not fall in love with a social category or a type, but rather with an individual. The significance of Annie Proulx’s story is that when people love each other, gender is irrelevant.