At once a veteran Ernest Hemingway scholar and something of a newbie, having entered the conversation after the 1999 birthday centennial, I find Laurence W. Mazzeno's The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014 to be a treat. Its ten chapters proceed chronologically, covering the immediate responses to Hemingway's works and tracing the developing scholarly consideration. The excellent distillations of contemporary reviews can be shamelessly cribbed for introducing Hemingway's works in class. The careful selection and presentation of the scholarship tell a story and provide an indispensable reference.

Mazzeno effectively layers the story, reminding us, for example, that significant postulations of the Hemingway hero by critics like Granville Hicks in 1930 and Ivan Kashkeen in 1935 preceded Philip Young's otherwise foundational 1952 assessment, Ernest Hemingway, just as Leslie Fiedler's charge of misogyny in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) anticipated the “feminist assault” on Hemingway of the 1970s.Footnote ¹ J. F. Kobler's taking note of Hemingway's matter-of-fact presentation of homosexuality in “The Sea Change” (1931) pre-dated the exploration of the same in The Garden of Eden (written in 1946, but published posthumously in 1986) by sixteen years, and Mary Allen's observations in Animals in American Literature (1983) presaged Hemingway's place in today's eco-criticism and animal studies.Footnote ²

The real joy, for me, is in the book's recovery of endangered voices and its discovery of substantive analyses of Hemingway's works in studies that don't have “Hemingway” in the title. I enjoyed tracking the conflicted Marxist responses and was intrigued by Mazzeno's description of how Otto Friedrich's 1957 article “Ernest Hemingway: Joy through Strength” in American Scholar “not so subtly links Hemingway with the Nazi regime” (65). I had no idea that the African American novelist and cultural critic Albert Murray “offered a sweeping panegyric to Hemingway's artistry” (175) in The Blue Devils of Nada (1996). Kate McLoughlin's insightful reading of the “lacunae, silences, and other ‘avoidance tropes’” in “On the Quai at Smyrna” (221) appears in a book that would not register on a database search, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011).

Unfortunately, McLoughlin's book would not appear in a search of either Mazzeno's bibliography or his index, both of which could have been constructed with more care. Mazzeno mentions Morse Peckham's 1971 “Ernest Hemingway: Sexual Themes in His Writing” in a section titled “Traditional Criticism of the Early 1970s,” and as the index lacks an entry for “sex” or “sexuality,” anyone relying on the index will miss it unless they think to look for the “love” entry. The index has an entry for “journalism” but not for “nonfiction,” even though the book surveys a number of important studies of the nonfiction. A study of the index also reveals a slight resistance to theoretical work beyond gender, psychoanalysis, and existentialism.

As the book moves along, we know which recent studies Mazzeno prefers, and by comparison we know those he values less. Debra Moddelmog's Reading Desire (1999), Hilary Justice's The Bones of the Others (2006), Robert Trogdon's The Lousy Racket (2007), Mark Ott's A Sea of Change, Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat (2012), and Mark Cirino's Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action (2012) are among those titles that receive special attention. While Mazzeno describes other studies without the same level of celebration, often in passing, I appreciate the times he provides a more complex review. While he finds the case for Hemingway's Catholicism in Matthew Nickel's Hemingway's Dark Night (2013) “forcefully” and “at times tendentiously” argued, with a “surprising” – he means unwarranted – claim about The Garden of Eden’s Christian sensibility, he also quotes Michael von Cannon's review that the book will prove “an immense aid” to those interested in the subject (227).

Minor faults aside, The Critics and Hemingway is a major resource for Hemingway studies, one that I will regularly reach for and send my students to. One book can't do it all, of course. Mazzeno acknowledges his attraction to studies by writers and scholars not necessarily in the Hemingway club, a predilection I like. He also acknowledges his privileging of books – including edited collections – over articles, including those in the Hemingway Review, a journal he clearly esteems. As he says, many of the contributors to the Review are represented elsewhere in his survey, either in their own books or in collections. (Partially for financial reasons, Linda Wagner-Martin's decennary Hemingway Criticism series draws largely from the Review).Footnote ³

One essay collection this fine survey does not mention, through no fault of Mazzeno's, is Carl Eby and Mark Cirino's Hemingway's Spain: Imagining the Spanish World. The chief fault of the book is its extreme tardiness, appearing ten years after the conference during which the assembled analyses debuted (although several of the essays have played catch-up with later research). The introduction notes that Hemingway's Spain was a place “almost as much … of the imagination” as “of earth, roots, and stone” (3). Appropriately, the first essay, by María DeGuzmán, takes up exactly this conundrum. Her fresh comparison of The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls unexpectedly features Robert Cohn, whose status as the “abjected wandering Jew” unrooted in Spain or anywhere else (17) earns him the hypocritical disdain of Jake Barnes. Moreover, Hemingway's “visionary colonialism” in using “Spain as raw material” echoes “the blood and soil myth of fascist ideologies developing throughout the 1920s and early 1930s,” regrettably dovetailing with the anti-Semitism of The Sun Also Rises (11). In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Maria embodies the Spanish earth for Robert Jordan's integration fantasy, and “the jaded expatriate Jake [is] as crucial to the redeemer/redeemed Jordan as Jordan is to fulfilling the longing for connection with Spain that Jake expresses” (23).

The other essays can generally be grouped around the two predictable, if essential, subjects: the corrida and the Civil War. Lisa Twomey documents Hemingway's acceptance by Spaniards upon his return to see the bullfights in the 1950s; Ian Grody provides a portrait of Hemingway's friendship with the American bullfighter Sidney Franklin. More pertinent to the literature, Ben Stoltzfus's “Bulls, Art, Mithras, and Montherlant” and David Richter's “‘At Five in the Afternoon’” enrich Hemingway's bullfighting texts – fiction and nonfiction – by way of other writers' texts on the subject. Stoltzfus introduces us to Henry de Montherplant's Les bestiaries (1926). Hemingway was familiar with The Bullfighters, which includes a great deal of information about Mithraism and its relation to Spanish Catholicism. More pointedly, Montherplant's descriptions of bullfighting sound a great deal like Hemingway's in their resemblance to art – “Even as a poet in the throes of inspiration, or a composer improvising, Alban shaped the bull” (109) – and to acts of sensuous union. Richter, by way of Federico García Lorca's poetry, brings to the conversation Georges Bataille's writing on bullfighting, including the novella The Story of the Eye (1928) and an essay nominally about For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). It's about “reflection and remembering” (116), about “pure emotion coupled with anguish” (117), about “death, ecstasy, and eroticism” (122), and about “what it means to live authentically and in a community” (125).

The essays by Suzanne del Gizzo and Beatriz Penas Ibáñez are great examples of how the same text can yield compelling yet mostly opposite conclusions. Del Gizzo sees the book as about Hemingway's aging and waning creative prowess “that attempts to deny this decay and decline” (143), resulting in a book escaping its writer's control. For Ibáñez, Hemingway's 1950s return successfully united past and present “in a movement of reappropriation and cleansing conducive to personal renewal and a surge of creativity” (77). This Hemingway is entirely in control of a book that functions, as did much of his oeuvre, through understatement, particularly on the consequences of the Civil War and life under Franco. Both essays comment on the ending; both essays comment on scenes in which the normal corrida protocols are suspended – for the Generalissimo's wife and for Hemingway himself. Del Gizzo sees Hemingway's attraction to the young Ordóñez and rejection of the middle-aged Dominguín as signifying personal denial; Ibáñez sees the summer's duel between brothers-in-law as an alternative allegory for the war.

James Meredith's contribution sketches Hemingway's initial involvement in the war, “a time of emerging personal growth and, most certainly, literary regeneration and reconfiguration” (146). For Mark Ott, this literary reconfiguration amounted to an “abandonment of the short story form” (152). Ott's “Tanks, Butterflies, Realists, Idealists: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Imperfect Ending in Spain of 1937–1938” conjoins Hemingway's collapsed friendship with John Dos Passos during the war with a reading of the “The Butterfly and the Tank” (1938). Ott's title reflects his sense of the story's imperfect ending: Not only did the short-story form fail the war experience, but Hemingway had also run out of resources for keeping the form vital. Ott's final paragraphs abruptly assert that in writing For Whom the Bell Tolls in Bimini, while fishing, Hemingway expands his vision of solitary integration with the natural world to “integration of mankind in an extended brotherhood” (160).

For some readers, the story's “imperfect” ending might more truly enact the “dilemma” of communicating “the horror and meaninglessness of war” (157). This conclusion accords with Scott Yarborough's analysis of how “the Spanish Civil War stories subtly subvert the very notion of political commitment” (162), joining For Whom the Bell Tolls and even To Have and Have Not (1937), and reaching back to A Farewell to Arms (1929), to constitute a lifelong remonstrance “against the twentieth century's grinding progression of causes, ideologies, and movements that churn individuals between their wheels” (166). For Yarborough, key moments in the stories indicate that Hemingway did not need time to grow away from political naïveté to write the novel. He was fully aware that circumstances prevented him from writing his true book just yet.

Michael Maiwald's brilliant study of “Night before Battle” (1939) and “Under the Ridge” (1939) similarly suggests a Hemingway more cognizant of his difficult wartime position than is realized by interpretations of the stories as unartful records of an ongoing struggle to purge himself of personal experience and ideological investment on the way to For Whom the Bell Tolls. For Maiwald, the stories' “autobiographical elements” are not “evidence of their relative weakness,” but a means by which Hemingway “question[s] the possibility of telling the truth” for a foreigner “embedded” in the military, and dramatizes the more general challenge for any representation “to produce a more complete understanding of the war” (181).

As a series, the stories share the strategy of For Whom the Bell Tolls of employing multiple perspectives to undermine any particular truth claim, a design that Lawrence Broer calls the novel's “epistemological uncertainty” (198). Broer's essay is a fitting conclusion to the volume. His validation of Ray Vince's argument that “the real hero of the novel is the Spanish earth itself, not only as a source of artistic inspiration but also as a moveable feast of the senses,” returns us to DeGuzmán's reading of the “consumption” and “edible incorporation” of the country by Jake Barnes and Robert Jordan (16–17). His invocation of a dying Robert Jordan imagining Madrid while his lover Maria rides away, perhaps carrying their child, brings me back to Russ Pottle's essay in the volume on “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story set in a train station in Spain's Ebro valley, in which that potential father refuses to commit – to fatherhood, to love, to place. Throughout Broer reflects on the journey from his monograph on the novel, Hemingway's Spanish Tragedy (1973), to the various reconsiderations of his ideas inspired by the work of colleagues like Ann Putnam, Allen Josephs, Carl Eby, Mike Reynolds, Thomas Strychacz, and Susan Beegel.

From among the many excellent papers from the 2006 Andalusia conference, Eby and Cirino rightly chose from only those about Spain, and they selected smartly among them. Hemingway's Spain even has something of a narrative arc, a feature often missing from such collections. Broer underscores the book's importance for all of Hemingway studies, agreeing with Josephs that “even the author's non-Spanish fiction is marked with the imprint of the matador and the corrida” (195) and with Putnam and Beegel “that Spain, the Spanish people, the battlefields of war, or Spain's bulls, and matadors … were not Hemingway's primary subject any more than the South was Faulkner's, but a landscape anyone can know” (203).