Hemingway in Constantinople
2001; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoON SEPTEMBER 30, 1922, Ernest Hemingway arrived in to cover the Greco-Turkish War (1920-1922) for the Toronto Star. Beginning with Can Save Constantinople dated September 30, 1922, to his last article, Refugees from Thrace dated November 14, 1922, Hemingway twenty articles about the and its politics, which together constitute some of his best formative work. Hemingway's trip to left a deep impression on him that lasted at least until the writing of Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936) which memorably mentions the same war. Although passages in his articles for the Toronto Star elicit sympathy for the half-million Thracians who were dispossessed by the Greco-Turkish War, Hemingway dehistoricizes the culture and its people who suddenly find themselves powerless among the Western power brokers--Britain, France, and Italy, whose political and economic interests render them indifferent to the centuries-old enmity between the Greeks and the Turks. In the Greek vignettes from In Our Time (1924) and in some of the Toronto Star articles, such as Refugees from Thrace, Hemingway forges a new style that isolates and heightens the emotional impact of an experience by communicating small details, intimately preserved, which have the effect of indicating the whole (Plimpton, 236). The journalistic pieces Hemingway for the Toronto Star about the Greco-Turkish War anticipate the style and aesthetic purpose of the three Greek vignettes from In Our Time, On the Quai at (1930), passages in Death in the Afternoon (1932), and Snows of Kilimanjaro. These works essentially reject the complex, though recent, political history which precipitated the war. Furthermore, these particular works demonstrate a symbiotic relationship between Hemingway's discourse and the politics of the Western-backed hegemony. In these works Hemingway sacrifices the historical context through a highly selective presentation of material, appearing hostile toward the Greeks and their politics, as if he were holding them exclusively accountable for the events of 1920-1922. The emotions of the Greeks are overwhelmingly those of panic and fear in the face of certain death and annihilation. Hemingway suggests that the panic and fear are in some way deserved--the result of poor and cowardly leadership and emotional weakness on the part of the Greeks that is its own betrayal. Because King Constantine replaced highly competent officers of the army with cronies (Revolt, 245), Hemingway, adopting the attitude of the British foreign office and the American Consulate in Ankara, condemns the cause, its culture, and its political goals in a demonstration of realpolitik. The Greco-Turkish War's influence on Hemingway has received fairly little, if any, discussion until very recently because it has not seemed particularly important in Hemingway's artistic development. Other than the notable exception of Jeffrey Meyers, who raises questions about Hemingway's attitude toward the Greeks, Hemingway's treatment of them in his work has either been ignored or has been viewed as the inevitable by-product of his formalist and ahistorical aesthetic. But the contrary is closer to the truth. Aside from some of the reporting that he did for the Toronto Star, which shows him beginning to write in his style, the war inspired three superb vignettes from his first mature work, In Our Time (1924), which were as good, stylistically, as anything he ever wrote (Meyers, 26). The also inspired On the Quai at a short story about the dreadful events of 1922. The section of the city of Smyrna was burned by marauding Turkish soldiers and civilians as they killed 125,000 Greeks. Those who survived the onslaught sought escape on the quai at Smyrna on the Aegean Sea, where British warships hovered close by. Hemingway's narrative is accurate, but not nearly as grisly as the London Times reported: A stream of refugees is still leaving Smyrna, and my informant described the quay last night as packed with dense crowds herded together inside a cordon of Turkish regulars, while searchlights of foreign warships in the harbour played upon them. …
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