Evocation and allusion: Hemingway’s book titles

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The best titles of Hemingway’s novels and stories have biblical and literary sources, poetic evocations of the themes, and allusions to tragedy, trauma and death.  His fiction often returns to his teenage wound and narrow escape from death during World War I in Italy.  By suggesting the physical locales and using bitter irony to foreshadow fatal events, he enhances the meaning of his work, reminds readers of literary associations and draws them into the tales.

The title of The Garden of Eden (published posthumously in 1986) comes from Genesis 3:24, “So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword” to keep Adam and Eve out.  The title warns that the characters’ idyllic life in France and Spain will not last.

A Moveable Feast (1964), with its idiosyncratic spelling, comes from a heading in The Book of Common Prayer (1549): “Movable feasts, Tables and Rules.”  These holidays are not fixed dates like Christmas, but like Easter occur on a different day each year.  Hemingway uses the phrase literally to suggest the endless youthful pleasures of food, drink, sport, friendship, sex and love in Paris during the 1920s.  In Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) Colonel Cantwell says “Happiness, as you know, is a movable feast.”  In the posthumously published True at First Light (1999) Hemingway (himself often a movable beast) calls love a “moveable feast.”  But the melancholy mood beneath the festivities warns that these pleasures cannot last.

In In Our Time (1925) the sketches of life and death, which capture essential moments between 1914 and 1923, ironically echo the hope expressed and invocation denied in The Book of  Common Prayer, “Give peace in our time, O Lord.”  After World War I the soldier Nick Adams experiences bitter trauma rather than tranquil peace.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) comes from Ecclesiastes 1:4-5, quoted in the epigraph:  “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.  The sun also ariseth,  and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.”  The preacher declares the world is nothing more than “vanity of vanities.”  Men soon die, but the earth lasts forever.  The pristine fishing scenes in the Pyrenees mountains of Spain contrast with the characters’ decadent life in Paris.

In To Have and Have Not (1937), the 1930s Depression theme suggests the struggle for existence; the unequal conflict between the rich and the poor; between those who own and don’t work and those who work but don’t own.  Hemingway quotes Matthew 25:29 to express the economic conditions of the poor: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

For A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway drew up a list of 34 possible titles, mainly from the Bible and the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900).  He finally chose the name of a 1590 Renaissance poem by George Peele about what a soldier must do when the war is over and his youth is gone.  He now has to give up battle and devote himself to prayer:

His helmet now shall make a hive for bees;

And lovers’ sonnets turned to holy psalms,

A man at arms must now serve on his knees,

And feed on prayers, which are at age his alms.

Frederic Henry deserts from the army and bids farewell to arms.  The title also suggests a farewell to the arms of his lover, death followed by more death, when Catherine dies in childbirth at the end of the novel.

The epigraph of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) quotes the original spelling of John Donne’s “Meditation XVII” (1624): “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine. . . any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the [death] bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”  This brilliant passage, made even more famous by Hemingway, suggests the idealistic union and close comradeship of all humankind.  The long O sounds in know, whom, tolls and tolls foreshadows the doom of Robert Jordan.

The Old Man and the Sea (1952) alludes to The Old Man of the Sea, a mythical god in the Odyssey who could change his shape and elude his enemies.  In The Arabian Nights the Old Man fights Sinbad the Sailor, who gets him drunk with wine and kills him.  This novella portrays an unequal fight in which the ancient fisherman is defeated by the sea.  Hemingway’s titles suggest the recurrence of loss and defeat throughout his career.

In December 1925 Hemingway wrote, “Ivan Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was” and adopted Turgenev’s title for The Torrents of Spring (1926).  Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches (1832), about hunting in the Russian countryside, taught Hemingway how to make a foreign landscape come alive.  But apart from brief phrases—“Spring was coming.  Spring was in the air.  Spring would soon be here”—Hemingway’s satiric parody of the sentimental primitivism in Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter (1925) is very different from Turgenev’s love story in The Torrents of Spring (1872).  In 1949, when the hack journalist Lillian Ross recorded his drunken boast, Hemingway was no longer deferential to the Russian author, “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev.”

Islands in the Stream (posthumously published in 1970) sets the scene of the novel, fishing in the warm ocean current of the Gulf Stream.  The islands on the endpaper maps and chapter headings are Bimini and Cuba.  This title contradicts Donne’s “No man is an island” and suggests conflict rather than unity, since Hudson and his three young sons are like separate islands, hostile and separate.

Green Hills of Africa (1935) was influenced by the book of a favorite author, W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904).  This title is related to the healing power of nature suggested by The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises.  The hills were actually green after the rainy season when Hemingway hunted in East Africa in December 1933.

Men Without Women (1927) alludes to Hemingway’s self-sufficient and exclusively masculine society in gambling, fishing, boxing, bullfighting, hunting, politics, murder, war and death.  He believes that emotional involvement with women makes men less adventurous, interferes with their more violent and dangerous  pursuits, and prevents them from fulfilling their destiny.

Winner Take Nothing (1933), a gambling metaphor, suggests that you must eventually lose even if you seem to win.  The gloomy epigraph, written by Hemingway in archaic language, reads: “the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.”  The disaster-filled stories in this volume include a wounded patient, threat of suicide, marital breakdown and divorce as well as lesbianism, homosexuality, sickness, castration, shipwreck and a fatal explosion.

The Fifth Column (1938), a phrase originating in the Spanish Civil War, meant the group of dangerous and unseen soldiers who secretly accompany the main army.  At the start of the War in October 1936, the Nationalist General Emilio Mola declared he would capture Madrid with four columns outside the capital and a fifth column of secret allies who would undermine the city from within.

Death in the Afternoon (1932) echoes Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912).  The title refers to the death of six bulls and sometimes of the bullfighter, who risks his life for fame and glory.  When the matador connects to the bull through the thrust of his sword, they are joined by the third figure of death.  Federico García Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” (1935) mourns the death of a great matador: “Ignacio mounts the steps with his death on his back . . . The rest was death and only death at five o’clock.”

The Dangerous Summer (1985) was, like Death in the Afternoon, describes an increasingly dangerous series of corridas for both men and bulls.  In their mano a mano competition, Luis Miguel Dominguín and his brother-in-law Antonio Ordóñez fought three bulls each instead of the usual two.  (I interviewed both matadors for my life of Hemingway.)

Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) recalls the last words of the Confederate General and war hero, “Stonewall” Jackson, mortally wounded by friendly fire in 1863, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”  Death also awaits the hero, the retired Colonel Cantwell, at the end of the novel.  The title takes on a bold sexual meaning when, in a gondola and under a blanket, Cantwell explores Renata’s sexual parts: “his ruined hand searched for the island in the great river with the high steep banks.”  There is no river in this Venetian novel, but it may refer to the Tagliamento River in northeast Italy, close to where Hemingway was wounded in World War I.

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Turning to Hemingway’s short stories, “The Undefeated” (1925) comes from W.E. Henley’s famous poem “Invictus” (Unconquered, 1888):

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 “In Another Country” (1927) comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta (1590): “Thou hast committed fornication: but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead.”  The other country, with its shocking events and different values, is the postwar Italy of the wounded survivor.  This story foreshadows the theme of A Farewell to Arms and begins with one of Hemingway’s greatest sentences: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more”—though the characters don’t actually have a choice.

In “The Sea Change” (1931),  when a lesbian tells her lover that she’s leaving him for a woman, they “suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange,” like the shipwreck and drowning described by Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611).  (“Sea change” has now become a cliché to describe the most trivial alterations.)  “A Natural History of the Dead” (1932). This un-natural history of the wounded and dead in war ironically echoes Gilbert White’s gentle, rural Natural History of Selborne in Hampshire (1789).  This story originally appeared as a grisly chapter in Death in the Afternoon.

“The Light of the World” (1933) quotes John 8:12 when Jesus says “I am the light of the world.”  The Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt painted Christ with this title in 1854. Edwin Arnold alludes to this phrase in his popular book on Christ, The Light of the World (1891).  “Fathers and Sons” (1933), a title borrowed rom Turgenev’s major novel of 1862, suggests the conflict of values between the two generations, which Hemingway later described in Islands in the Stream.

The Two-Hearted River in northeastern Michigan runs through a forest wilderness for 24 miles and drains into Lake Superior.  Unlike the actual river, in “The Big Two-Hearted River (1925) Nick Adams has two different hearts or emotional cores, prewar and postwar, which don’t come harmoniously together.  The title evokes the wilderness setting and tragic theme.

“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) suggests how perception reveals moral values.  When Hamlet compares the shape of a cloud to three different animals, a camel, weasel and whale, Polonius assiduously agrees each time and says, “Very like a whale.”  In this story the woman, who resists the man’s pleas for her to have an abortion, poetically compares the hills in Spain to white elephants.  The selfish man, who lacks sympathy and vision, refuses to see the landscape or the prospect of a child from her point of  view.

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) recalls the famous snow-covered landmark in Tanzania, 19,340 feet tall and the highest in Africa, which means “mountain of whiteness” in Swahili.  Hemingway’s epigraph reads: “Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard.  No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”  The wild animal, far from his natural habitat, strives for the heights but, like the hero of the story, meets his lonely death.  This title was used again in his posthumously published memoir Under Kilimanjaro (2005).

“The Killers” (1927) suggests the gangsters of Al Capone’s Chicago.  The natty dress, wisecracking dialogue, sense of immediate experience and sharp cinematic scenes influenced the underworld stereotypes in the films of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.  Hemingway alludes to “The Killers” in “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” (1933) when a detective tells the wounded Mexican, “This isn’t Chicago.  You’re not a gangster.  You don’t have to act like a moving picture.”

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933) evokes Leviticus 13:45-46 which calls the leper “Unclean, Unclean.  He shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.”  Shunned by mankind, he must live in isolation.  Like the biblical leper, the old man in the story is solitary and lonely, and desperately clings to the society of the café.  Spanish cafés are sometimes dark and not always completely clean.  A frequently posted sign warns No tire nada al suelo (“Don’t throw anything on the floor”) though the floor is always littered with papers.  Like Vincent Van Gogh’s well-lit Night Café (1888), it is safe, congenial and protected against the dirty, dark, hostile outside world.

All these titles illuminate Hemingway’s three great fictional themes: stoicism, courage and victory in defeat.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Hemingway: A Biography, Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, Hemingway: Life into Art and 92 articles about him.   His latest book, 44 Ways of Looking at Hemingway, will appear with Louisiana State University Press in 2025.

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