Like Hemingway, Camus’s Caligula, in the play Caligula, blends nature and death into a plot designed to teach all of Rome that life is absurd and that he, Caligula, with his deadly imperial freedom, has usurped the power of the gods. I am not implying that Hemingway wanted to teach the animals or his readers lessons in the absurd. I am saying that he took pleasure in killing and that killing enhanced his sense of worth and well-being because he too was usurping the power of God (DA 233). The killing of animals in the bullring or in the wild appealed to Hemingway in ways that he sometimes trivializes, such as in the joke of killing birds and hyenas (GHA 36-37), or which, at other times, he prefers not to verbalize: “Killing is not a feeling that you share” (GHA 120). Nonetheless, both Hemingway and Camus reveal an awareness of death that heightens their feeling for life.
Near the end of Caligula, the Roman emperor and his patricians play a game of “exquisite corpse.” It is a group poem whose theme, assigned by Caligula, is death. A number of inept lines are interrupted by Caligula’s insults and whistle until it is Scipio’s turn to recite his lines: “A quest for happiness that purifies, / A sky where the sun is streaming, / Unusual and savage celebrations, my delirium / devoid of hope! …”[13] Caligula’s response is that Scipio is too young to understand the true lessons of death. But what are these true lessons if not the passion for life that flows from the absurd? Once we accept the inevitability of death and understand that we are free to invent ourselves, we are also authorized to partake of life’s pleasures. Once these lessons have been internalized we can experience pleasure whenever and wherever we are in touch with simple, physical, and elemental realities. The narrator of Camus’s essay Nuptials[14] derives as much joy from swimming in the sea as Hemingway’s narrators do when fishing and skiing. Mara, one of the characters in Camus’s play The Misunderstanding, will rob and kill in order to buy happiness on the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean where she imagines it can be found.[15] Death’s urgent lesson for Camus is that as long as man is alive he should enjoy his honeymoon on earth. Although The Plague demonstrates that there are other demands on man’s allegiance, such as commitment, the text also makes clear that the idea of commitment loses its purpose unless there is something worth fighting for. At the height of the plague and of his exhaustion, Dr. Rieux goes for a swim in the Mediterranean and it is this contact with the sea that revives him and makes it possible to continue the struggle.[16] The plague is a detour, sometimes a permanent one, in man’s quest for happiness, but men who are committed must endure in this never-ending confrontation.
Hemingway’s commitment to his writing was total but his involvement in sociopolitical causes, compared to Camus’s, was minor.[17] Indeed, Hemingway’s service on the Italian front during World War I seems to have contributed to a certain distancing: “If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written it that way” (GHA 148). Hemingway survived his wounds on the Italian front, but instead of nudging him toward social commitment, the way Camus’s early brush with tuberculosis had, Hemingway’s experience with death reinforced his commitment to himself and to writing. Whereas, in my judgment, Hemingway is the better fiction writer, Camus is a much more interesting thinker. The point in all this is that the confrontation with death leads Hemingway to commit himself to writing, and for Camus, to commit himself to writing and to the sociopolitical arena.
Camus’s death (an automobile accident) is as absurd as Hemingway’s, that is, both events underscore the absence of providential purpose, at least one we can discern. Camus, the nonbeliever, died at the height of his creative powers whereas Hemingway, a professed Catholic, died in a state of so-called mortal sin. How are we to resolve his alleged Catholicism and suicide as a deliberate choice that contravenes the teachings of the church? Jean-Paul Sartre maintains that choices define a person’s essence. If Hemingway’s suicide represents a deliberate choice, then that act contradicts earlier professions of faith. It is the final chapter and there is no turning back. In Sartre’s play No Exit, Garcin “suffers” because desertion, his final act before he dies, marks him as a coward. Estelle also “suffers” because she cannot undo her infanticide, and this act defines her essence as a murderess. This hell on earth, this death in life is the punishment for their bad faith.[18]
Hemingway’s suicide is an indelible act, and in retrospect it defines his entire life. His death is not an aberration, nor is it an act of bad faith. On the contrary, it is consistent with a life style that he chose to exercise up to the very end. Successive choices create an essence, and this essence, when lived authentically, is sufficient for any man. Hemingway chose to become a writer, he exercised his craft with consummate skill, he lived his life passionately and, when his body and mind could no longer live up to his expectations, he pulled the trigger. To commit suicide is to take matters of life and death into your own hands. If physical and intellectual debility destroy everything that makes life worth living, who is to say that the fateful shot early Sunday morning, July 2, 1961 (Baker 714), was not an assertion of courage, mastery, and control? Surely, Hemingway preferred death to the indignities and infirmities of old age, and it is this shot that still resonates with M’Cola’s laugh–M’Cola, the gun bearer in Green Hills of Africa–whenever Hemingway killed birds and hyenas. Whenever he killed, the joke was on the animal; whenever he missed, the joke was on Hemingway (36-37). But the tragedy of Hemingway’s death, whichever way we look at it (he is now the animal, and he does not miss), is that the joke, ultimately, is on him because M’Cola’s laughter invites speculations about Hemingway’s ego, his selfishness, callousness, and insensitivity. However, I leave this reverse scenario for others to explore. More interesting, I think, is the drama of life and death that Hemingway pursued against a backdrop of natural settings, a drama that allowed him to explore the full range of his physical prowess and writerly genius.
Before he died Hemingway was neither physically nor intellectually capable of doing what he had always done so well. Old age and his various accidents had caught up with him. His passion for life, his freedom to choose, and his revolt against death, attributes that had shaped his life and his work as long as his energies were intact, all were weighing him down. At the end, life had stopped being “a moveable feast.” Metaphorically speaking, a new ascent toward another summit was beyond him. Writing well, shooting big game, and killing large fish were no longer possible. This is perhaps a form of pride, but Hemingway had always been proud of his achievements. However, as with the leopard of Kilimanjaro, prey was now beyond his grasp. Baker phrases it aptly when he says that for years Hemingway’s maxim had been: “`il faut (d’abord) durer.’ Now it had been succeeded by another: `il faut (après tout) mourir'”