Oeditorial Repression: The Case Histories of Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds

With the persistence of repetition compulsion, Modernists define their movement vis-à-vis the classic Freudian assumption that sexuality is the mainspring of virtually everything, including literary merit. The most libidinous of their aesthetic manifestos is Ezra Pound's characterization of creativity as a “phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos … driving a new idea into the great passive vulva of London.” Though C. G. Jung is far less enamored of the phallus, he endows masculinity with the “creative and procreative” power of Logos, which, echoing Pound, he calls the “spermatic word.” As if to fend off “scribbling women,” Jung warns that “mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome results,” most notably frigidity, homosexuality, and “a deadly boring kind of sophistry.” Gertrude Stein's iconoclasm notwithstanding, her paradoxical assertion that her genius is masculine simultaneously reifies and defies this theory that biology determines literary destiny. In the Modernist canon, the pen is a penis, even when a cigar is just a cigar. The most influential of the movement's manifestos, T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” codifies aesthetic essentialism, positing an Oedipal model of canonicity contingent on the authority of literary fathers. Even Virginia Woolf's rejection of gendered canonicity inA Room of One's Ownassumes its tenacity, as if she were protesting too much against the inevitable.Woolf is not alone in protesting too much. Modernism's swaggering canonicity masks a castration anxiety that debilitated F. Scott Fitzgerald and even bedeviled Papa Hemingway inThe Garden of Eden. One of Hemingway's most famous letters to Fitzgerald, written during the tortured composition ofTender Is the Night, provides a paradigmatic example of the Modernist crisis of masculinity:We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it – don't cheat with it…. You see, Bo, you're not a tragic character.