By Georgia Dougherty

In a letter to Gertrude Stein in August of 1924, Ernest Hemingway wrote that he had been ‘trying to do the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit,’ regarding ‘getting the words right’ in his short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” Hemingway greatly admired Paul Cézanne as a painter and often discussed how his artwork influenced Hemingway’s prose.

Cézanne’s artwork was radical for challenging modes of representation and informing avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. A rule breaker of academic art, Cézanne is often seen as the artistic bridge between Impressionism and Cubism for the ways he altered perspective, embraced objects from a geometric point of view, and employed more expressive brushstrokes in his oil paintings.

Cézanne’s influence on Hemingway’s writing is evident in Hemingway’s essentialism and omission in his simplified prosaic style, use of visual techniques within verbal landscapes, and manipulation of detail and instead using symbolism to create an intensified depth of feeling. While Hemingway often credited Modernists and Imagists like T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound for their literary eminence and effect on his writing style, exploring Cézanne’s pictorial influence on Hemingway’s prose makes for a mesmerizing intersection between the verbal and the visual.

Paul Cézanne, *Rocks at Fontainebleau*, 1890s, Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hemingway spent much time examining the painting above- Cezanne’s “Rocks at Fontainebleau” from 1890. About the painting, he said, ‘This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over. Cézanne is my painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter.’ The dark forest in the background, rocks infiltrating the foreground, and nature as an overall theme are aspects of Hemingway’s early short story, “Big Two-Hearted River.” The story follows soldier Nick returning to Michigan after fighting in WWI, hiking up a mountain to survey the burnt town, hiking down the mountain to set up camp, make dinner, drink coffee, sleep under his tent, and fish for trout in the morning.

The vague detail given to the surrounding swamp and town are fashioned as a textual background, the river acts as a midground, while the focus, or the foreground, is Nick’s fishing episode, which is described in extensive, though rather mundane, detail. Like a painting, Hemingway is interested in space and representing light and form. Like the subject of Cézanne’s painting, “Big Two-Hearted River” is interested in nature as a place of healing and rebirth for Nick’s personal post-war experience.

Nineteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway volunteering with the American Red Cross in Milan in 1918 as he recuperates from his wounds (Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, Kennedy Library)

War is a main theme of the short story, which might seem strange as it is never mentioned. This omission is another consistency between Cézanne and Hemingway’s representation. The driving force of the story is Nick’s emotional turmoil and the widespread physical devastation following his experience, but this is only hinted at by Hemingway, who instead opts for symbolism and vagueness to intensify feeling. Cézanne’s paintings, in their simplification of objects into geometric essentials, evident in Mont Sainte Victoire (1904) below, explore omission, symbolism, and simplification. Hemingway’s essentialist syntax and lack of explicit reference to the meaning of the story mimic Cézanne verbally.

Paul Cézanne, *Mont Sainte-Victoire*, 1902-6, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hemingway believed that a writer could describe one thing, while hinting at a completely different meaning that happens below the surface, and this is evident in Nick’s ritualistic movements throughout the story that never come to fruition into an explicit meaning. For example, ‘Nick's hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.’ This quote doesn’t give us much, but we can gather that Nick supresses emotional turmoil that threatens to bubble up. The detail also that inside the tent Nick ‘was happy’ because ‘nothing could touch him’ and ‘he was there, in the good place’ reinforces the safety that he feels outside of a warzone.

In the same viewing at the Met, Hemingway said “I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.” While I can’t comment on whether Cézanne would like Hemingway’s prose, there are sure similarities between the way Hemingway fashions his writing style and Cézanne’s visual representations of landscapes. The vague representation of a background with a more intense focus on the foreground, the use of omission for symbolic reasons, and the blending of realism and impressions make for a more emotive and powerful effect and alluring synthesis between the visual and the verbal.