Matthew Nickel

In reading and reviewing Matthew Nickel’s recent critical reconsideration, Hemingway’s Dark Night, I was reminded how malleable Ernest Hemingway’s persona has been to previous, overzealous critics. Hemingway’s minimalistic, declarative prose became the canvas for ideology and circumstance. In many ways, Nickel’s book saves Hemingway’s texts from being used for purposes other than originally intended.

We talked about discovering the need for this book, unpacking and righting the Hemingway myth, TS Eliot, GK Chesterton, rediscovering faith, and his new project, an attempt to bring more appreciation to the fascinating short fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Many thanks to Matthew for these insights and stories.

1. I was pleased to discover Hemingway's Dark Night: I think it's an essential read for fans of Hemingway, but also for readers hoping to understand preconciliar American Catholic literary culture.

Could you talk about what led you to writing this book?

I am pleased you were pleased. It was the kind of thing I was surprised at the whole time. The fact it became a book at all. I guess it all led up to that. I feel compelled to say that it all started somewhere like Roncevaux, or Paris, or Santiago de Compostela, or hell--even at a writing desk in some shotgun shack on a long lost bayou--but that would be too easy. It probably started the day I read H. R. Stoneback's line-by-line analysis Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (Kent State UP, 2007). That's when I realized a book like this could be possible. You probably know--it should be obvious from my work--that it was Stoneback who made the seminal discoveries about Hemingway and Catholicism. He was the only one throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s to stress the importance of Hemingway's devotions, sacramental and literary, throughout his lifetime. So, one way to answer your question--what led to the writing of this book--is to begin: none of it would have happened without H. R. Stoneback, his teaching, his work, all of it.

After reading his book, I decided I would try to write something that would pursue some of Stoneback's hunches and discoveries--and in the process, I would chart through new terrain and make discoveries myself. I had been Stoneback's student for several years already, and he had taught me an indispensable lesson about literary studies, a lesson that can be summed up in one of his poignant lines: "Everything--almost everything that matters--is Terroir." In other words: place matters: go there, see, then you will begin to understand. The same can be said about the Church, and it is one of the more important lessons the Catholic--or the student of Catholic and Christian matters--must understand: the Church is still, even in the twenty-first century, local. Hemingway's Church was local. Thus, the process of my own studies became two-fold: I learned about Hemingway by going to his places, living in landscapes, learning geography, cultural topography, and grasping something Stoneback calls theography. As a result, I learned about my own Church for the first time--perhaps in some ways like a young writer rebelling against his own heritage--and discovered the depths of faith somewhere along the way.

When I sought out the Pass of Roland and Roncevaux, I intended to go merely to record facts, study, and read aloud some lines from the Chanson. It had been important to Hemingway, the place and the legend, so I knew that was where I would begin. He carried a line from the Chanson de Roland with him long in life, Ah que ce cor a longe haleine (Ah that horn has a long breath), and I needed to breath the air high up where Roland's cry can still be heard. I got to Roncevaux just in time for Mass, and I remember thinking to myself that I had not sat through a Mass in years, almost a decade. I was overwhelmed by how beautiful the silver virgin was over the altar and framed by that broken blue glass, there in Roncevaux. The next day I intended to make my way, The Sun Also Rises in hand, to Pamplona by taxi. It was, of course, San Fermin. The last taxi had left an hour before I woke. So, that day I became a pilgrim. I walked the camino. What began as a mere scholarly trip quickly became a desperate attempt to find answers about more than merely Hemingway. I made it to Santiago--walked for a few weeks and caught the feast day of Saint James (a jubilee year) by a last minute bus; I made it back to Paris and stayed there on the Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine (the first street Hem lived on) almost two months; I lived for months then in the Camargue--site of the opening of The Garden of Eden. It wasn't about Hemingway anymore though. It became more about walking in processions behind the figures of Saint Mary Salome and Saint Mary Jacobe, singing with the Provencal, praying as the waves washed over our feet there on the beach in Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer; it was more about singing hymns and remembering the shape of voices as I lit candles in dark stone crypts.

Discovering the depths of faith in places taught me more about Hemingway's devotion than anything else, but I had to go far away from Hemingway to understand the complexity of faith in a dark night and the degree of despair possible. That was all in 2004-2005. Then Stoneback's book came out in 2007, and at that time I was struggling to write a Masters Thesis on the topic of Hemingway and Pilgrimage. It was an ambitious yet failed study. I kept traveling, seeing, learning. Most of it with Stoneback then. We went everywhere with Hemingway: Spain, Paris, Brittany, Venice, New Orleans, Kansas City. Soon enough I was finishing my PhD exams and I had told him I was interested in writing a diss about Hemingway and Catholicism. "That, " I said, "or Hemingway Pound and Eliot." "Stick with Hemingway and Catholicism," he said. "I think they are ready for it." After the diss, New Street Communications thought it could be a book. So, I did the best I could to make it a book. It was quite a task and took longer than I imagined. I am glad you enjoyed it.

2. You articulate this in the book, but could you summarize why Hemingway's Catholicism has been untouched, or even misinterpreted, by so many scholars besides H. R. Stoneback? Does Eliot experience the same critical treatment of his Anglo-Catholicism?

Hemingway distanced himself from being considered a Catholic writer his whole life. It was probably a good move for several reasons: one, writers can alienate themselves with labels; two, it's dangerous to talk about what you truly live, feel, and know, especially a faith and especially when you feel some of your life choices (very public ones) have been amoral.

Eliot describing himself as an Anglo-Catholic in print might have alienated writers. Hemingway loved to poke at Eliot in print (in Death in the Afternoon for instance), and Eliot, likewise, took jabs at Hemingway (see: For Lancelot Andrewes). Hemingway respected Eliot's work though. I believe Eliot misread Hemingway, and I sense that Hemingway never forgave him of that. Same with Flannery O'Connor--who saw Hemingway as God haunted--but who ultimately grouped him with those who do not believe in the God of "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

The myth of Papa (the public persona) and the myth of his heroes as self-made individuals was another factor. Characters in Hemingway, according to many scholars and readers, did not need God anymore--each one had his wits, his will, and grace under pressure. The biographies helped perpetuate the myth. So, for decades, readers who wanted to use Hemingway to justify their own disbelief could do so easily.

There were those who saw through the myth though--and it is not very hard to do so; my students see through it every semester without any prodding or convincing. They are (as was I in college), somewhat free of the myth, so it becomes easier for them to read what is on the page. Of course, the key is always close-reading. In our theory-ridden academic world, close-reading is the only thing that will protect us from further misreadings, that will return us to first things.

In the 1950s and then 1970s and 1980s there were two Catholics who wrote specifically about Hemingway and religion: Robert Morgan Brown corresponded with Hemingway in the 1950s and wrote a dissertation (at Fordham) on Hemingway and religion. Robert D. Crozier S.J. published a handful of essays in the 1970s and 1980s analyzing Hemingway's writing through a Catholic perspective. The correspondence between Brown and Hemingway reveals an intellectual Hemingway discussing with ease theological concerns, blasphemy, the soul, etc (Harry Ransom Center at UT has the collection). Crozier's work was pretty good as well, but some of his analysis seems forced.

There were others here and there as I tried to sketch out in the introduction to my book, but they stopped short of considering the entire life and writing of Hemingway. The significant shift in Hemingway criticism and reception came with Stoneback's essay "In the Nominal Country of the Bogus: Hemingway's Catholicism and the Biographies" in 1991. He had published numerous essays before that one, but with his close reading of real biography--not myth--and with a no-nonsense approach, he set the stage for a new type of reading of Hemingway.

At the heart of your question is the fact that Hemingway never wanted to be considered a Catholic writer. That was an unwavering decision he made, and he made it obvious in his correspondence and writing. He wanted to be a writer first. He wanted to write the truth. And he made the distinction--a curious one--between being a "believer" and a "follower" late in his life (see: Under Kilimanjaro). He had a certain measure of faith and called himself a "dumb" Catholic who followed the rituals and devotions. In some ways he resembled Santiago from The Old Man and the Sea an old man who said that he was not religious but then would say ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers and make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre. To admit his belief in public was in some ways to admit his surety about faith. And to be absolutely sure about anything, he felt, could be dangerous. There are many illusions, and Hemingway, like Eliot and Dante, almost admired, even attracted, the process of disillusion. Writing that process became a lifelong pursuit. Our culture so often mistakes the process of disillusion for the belief in disillusion. Students read only Inferno and are therefore stuck in a perpetual spiral, a postmodern nightmare, until the process of disillusion becomes the end in itself. But it was not the end for Dante nor Eliot nor Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea does not end with a dead marlin and sharks. It ends with the boy, Manolin, attending to Santiago like angels ministering Christ after forty days in the desert; it ends with Santiago telling the boy they must be more prepared next time; the novel ends with an old man dreaming of lions on the far beaches of his sea-distant memory.

3. Your critical reexamination spans Hemingway's entire canon. Was there a story, novel, or non-fiction piece that you felt (as a reader or a critic) was particularly rejuvenated or renewed by this consideration of the writer's Catholicism?

The first work that comes to mind is Across the River and into the Trees. It has confused readers for decades, but it really makes a lot of sense to me, and I believe with a thorough consideration of geography, allusion, and Hemingway's religious subtext, it wasn't difficult to see through the confusion. I know many readers are put off by the love story, but I have never had a problem with the love story. I've seen plenty of young women fall in love with much older men--seriously in love--and vice versa. I see nothing out of the ordinary. Neither did Dante. Neither do many with medieval sensibilities. Neither does anyone who believes in true love. Then there is the ambiguity about Cantwell and his bitterness, his confession to Renata, and his death. It is a process toward death. Does he repent? Is he saved? Does he remain bitter? I don't think that matters in the end. Ultimately, it is love story, a profane love reflective of that special and rare thing called sacred love. Whether Cantwell acknowledges that in the end or not is his own business, and if the reader understands the intersection between the sacred and profane, then the reader has gained quite a bit from the book. It is one of Hemingway's most interesting books, and I hope to revisit it for a long time, reading it and writing more about it.

There are also short stories I re-discovered through the writing of the book: "The Gambler, The Nun, and the Radio," "The Three-Day Blow," "Now I Lay Me." Each carried with it a particular resonance, but I enjoyed writing about "The Three-Day Blow" the best, probably because of G. K. Chesterton. I had been reading a lot of Chesterton before writing this book, and I've always imagined Chesterton walking through the Michigan wilderness with Nick and Bill trying to fish. The picture I have in mind is the one in which the very big Chesterton is reaching down to shake a little girl's hand--and that image always made me laugh. In all seriousness, reading Chesterton made me feel Hemingway had been reading Chesterton throughout the 1920s. We know he read him with Hadley in Chicago (and I suspect he may have heard of one Chesterton's famous lectures there as well), and everyone was reading him in Paris. Then I stumbled on Chesterton's introduction to a translation of The Song of Roland. It's one of my favorite pieces by Chesterton, and his homage to the war generation, to those soldiers who died fighting World War I, resonated strongly with The Sun Also Rises.

All of this was exciting. They don't always tell you, but writing is fun. The whole book was more fun than anything else.

I believe there is plenty more to discover--this book is certainly not the end of the conversation about Hemingway and Catholicism.

4. That was another element I enjoyed about your book: that you were comprehensive and thorough, but aware that you were leading a conversation rather than finishing it. It's a humble but impressive mode for a critic.

In addition to Hemingway's Dark Night, you also recently edited Kentucky: Poets of Place. Has reading and considering Hemingway affected your aesthetic inclinations as an editor and compiler of poetry, as well as a poet yourself?

Of course. Pound wrote: "Be influenced by as many great artists as you can." Hemingway has helped clean out a lot of unnecessary trash in my poetic mind. He's taught me a way of seeing right with my eyes. Reading Hemingway sharpens the image.

Hemingway is really a poet in many ways too. Read Hemingway aloud, especially "Indian Camp," "Big Two-Hearted River," the opening chapter of A Farewell to Arms, the Roncevaux section of The Sun Also Rises, the opening of The Garden of Eden, and all of The Old Man and the Sea.

Of course, there are other writers, and the Kentucky book was largely about Kentucky writers, especially Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Robert Penn Warren. Warren's poetry has meant a lot to me, maybe as much as Pound and Eliot, maybe more. Hemingway also liked and respected Warren very much when All the King's Men came out. And Elizabeth Madox Roberts--well, you've probably never heard her name but you must. She was a Modernist too, and her novel, The Time of Man, was a best seller in 1926--a huge novel for a long time. Without Roberts there would have been no Southern Renascence, no Faulkner for instance.

5. Will you revisit Hemingway again in book form, or are you interested in examining other writers through the lens of Catholicism? Are you working on any essays/manuscripts now?

I have enjoyed working with Hemingway's writing very much. I will continue to write about him, especially in the larger context of other Catholic/Christian writers. There is certainly more to say about Hemingway & Catholicism in conjunction with T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. There is also something striking about Hemingway's avoidance of labels; he shares a lot in common with writers not normally associated with Catholicism or Christianity, a topic that deserves analysis. I am thinking mainly of Robert Penn Warren, a writer who admitted he was more a yearner than believer. I also would include Elizabeth Madox Roberts, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Baudelaire, and others (even Tolkien). It is too easy to categorize a writer as Christian or Catholic or affiliated with any religion and call it a day. The writer who will not submit to an affiliation in writing and whose prose does not need to ooze piety is fascinating and perhaps a thing far older and more important than we realize. It is also more natural--a writer writes first. Unless he is political or a propagandist for an organization or an apologist--all of which may have a place in any society. But a writer of fiction or a poet--maybe it is just another result of the Modern Age, of the so-called Enlightenment, that we need to qualify ourselves. I do not know. But I find those who will not submit to a name or group, yet who--like Hemingway--are profoundly devout with as deep an affinity for faith as Graham Greene's whiskey priest, are worth our close attention in this twenty-first century.

I am working on two things now. One is a close-reading line-by-line analysis of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' short stories. Her short stories are fascinating, avant garde, almost ideogrammatic, like Pound's imagism in prose yet as readable as any narrative. There are numerous religious elements in her writing, and her fiction and poetry exhibits a profound and complex engagement with Catholicism--she was raised a Protestant in central Kentucky and was attracted to Catholicism very much like many Modernists. Flannery O'Connor certainly read Roberts--she was in all the major magazines--and there are striking similarities between the two writers: both employ mysticism, prophecy, terror, which leads to epiphany and conversion. The second major thing I am working on is a book of my own poems.

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Matthew C. Nickel is an Assistant Professor of English at Misericordia University. His first major book, Hemingway's Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway, was published in 2013 by New Street Communications. His writing on American and British literature has appeared in journals and scholarly volumes such as North Dakota Quarterly, Ernest Hemingway in Context (Cambridge UP, 2013), Reading Roberts: Prospect & Retrospect (The Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society & Des Hymnagistes Press, 2012), and Durrell and the City: Collected Essays on Place (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2012). He is also a poet and editor. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and books such as The Shawangunk Review, The Maple Leaf Rag III & IV, The Hudson River Valley Review, and Florida English. His most recent anthologies of poetry are Kentucky: Poets of Place (Des Hymnagistes Press & The Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society, 2012) and Des Hymnagistes: An Anthology (co-edited with H. R. Stoneback, Des Hymnagistes Press, 2010).